Abstract
Dowsing can identify favourable locations for planting trees and companion plants that enhance growth.

A couple of years ago everybody reckoned I was absolutely crazy with the ideas I’m proposing. Now it is down to 100% who think I am crazy. I have come up with what I am absolutely convinced are incredible findings about getting trees to grow. If trees can be made to grow better, my feeling is that farmers will be much more likely to plant them, and this is the way we are going to combat salinity. Just this last week I have gone up and bought 440 acres at Dowerin, so I am putting my money where my mouth is to demonstrate to people that I really do have faith in what I am doing.

Originally I started off as a civil engineer; I studied civil engineering at London University. The engineering option for getting rid of salinity has always appealed to me. Various things led me to change my ideas, and I really feel that instead of pulling out the plug as David Williamson was talking about, we can turn off the tap. If we can get the right trees to turn the taps off with, they will make profit for farmers. As I say, once they start making profits, I am sure they will be falling over themselves to plant more trees.

One of the things I noticed first of all when I went around, is that often you see a landscape where the trees have been planted across the contour, and all of a sudden they would go up. My area of expertise is one that many people find a bit difficult to understand. I can't give an explanation for this. I use a dowsing rod, and I can find where underground streams are. I have found that wherever you get this appearance of trees that look superior, it is because they are over an underground stream. If they can get water, they are going to grow a whole lot better. My thoughts carried on from that. I thought, if I know where the underground streams are, instead of planting trees across the contours, we can plant trees that have a very high transpiration rate directly above the underground streams. That way, they will have a much better chance of harvesting the water. David Williamson said earlier on that they talk of figures such as 60% of the landscape has to be revegetated. Really and truly, if you are planting trees over an area like this where there is no underground stream, those trees will still grow properly, but they won't grow as well as trees over an underground stream.

As a development of that...somebody introduced me to Barry Oldfield. I met a guy who told me about the Curry grid. The Curry grid is a grid pattern of electromagnetic forces that covers the face of the planet. This was discovered by a Dr. Curry in Germany in the 1950s. He and his colleague, Dr. Whitman were studying weather. How this came up, I don't know. The Curry grid pattern covers the face of the planet and has an orientation from the southwest to the northeast, and the northwest to the southeast. It is an electromagnetic grid and you can pick it up with some sort of fancy electrical instruments. Remarkably, you can also pick it up with a dowsing rod. A lot of people ask why I can do it...I can't play the piano. Some people have some talents, and this is a part of diversity, isn't it. Some people make good carpenters, or butchers or bakers or candlestick makers. A percentage of us are blessed with an ability to dowse.

The grid goes everywhere, even inside this building. Depending on the locality, this grid varies in size. In Perth, it is approximately two and a half metres square. On the block of land I bought in Dowerin it is 5 metres square. Nature obviously put the grid pattern there for some purpose. No significance has been drawn with regard to trees as far as I am able to see. But, a couple of years ago, it dawned on me, having gone through a whole lot of different plantations, that in any plantation there is a small percentage of trees that are simply vastly better than the other ones, really quite significantly better. About 70% are just pretty average, and some are absolutely atrocious, about 15%.

I was on the internet one day, and I got something that said the US Forestry Department reckons that when they plant their pine plantations on clearfelled land, they only get a 15% real success rate: while others grow, only 15% do extraordinarily well. What I discovered as a result of this was that with a dowsing rod I have been able to determine lots of other energy lines running through this grid pattern. It is a matter of getting tuned in, I guess. Originally, I found about 20 of these lines running in each direction, and it has built up and built up. At the moment, I can detect 60 lines running in each direction. With 60 in each direction, you get 3,600 intersection points. You will probably find this incredibly bizarre, and I can't offer any explanation for it at all, but you will find that wherever you get a good tree of a particular species, growing in a plantation, it is consistently in the same place with respect to the grid. You will find that eucalypts, for argument's sake, are predisposed to a position up here, and pines are predisposed to a position down here, chestnuts over here, acacias over there, and it just comes up time and time again.

You have a tree plantation like that...and the o's represent where you plant your trees. You have a grid pattern, which I have marked out with x's where the tree is particularly disposed to grow in each of those grid squares. You will find that you only ever get about 15% of the trees you plant in the right position. However, if you manipulate this around, you will still only get about 15% that correspond. It really is quite astounding. You can go into any plantation, and the best trees are always in the position to which they are predisposed.

The significance of this is absolutely enormous. If you can plant trees in such a fashion that they are going to grow a whole lot better, obviously, the better the tree, the more profit. I have combined the two together and ringed the individual ones. I have even ringed some which are substantially away from each other. Here is one that is spot-on. There are very few that are exactly spot-on. You will probably ask what other confirmation I have that this is right. I have been on different properties where people have dug up trees that were not performing well because they were in the wrong position, and moved them 5 or 6 feet, and suddenly, they just take off for no apparent reason.

What is the reason for this grid being put there? I think nature put this grid pattern in place purely and simply because nature abhors vacuums, and I think it abhors monocultures. I think nature set up this system so that even with a eucalypt that spreads millions of seeds around the environment, you don't get millions of seeds germinating and growing. Only a very isolated few grow. It is only if the seed falls in exactly the position to which it is predisposed is it going to do really well. If there is a situation where the climatic conditions are really superb and you get a high germination rate, obviously they are going to germinate, but as soon as the going gets a bit tough, the ones that are in the wrong position are the ones that fade away. The ones that are in their predisposed position carry on growing.

How it all started off was with the underground streams. My theory is that if a person has a great big paddock and there is an underground stream, if we plant our trees above here, we are only hoping to revegetate a very small area of the property. If we can also plant the trees in their predisposed positions, the trees will be very much more effective as pumps, and this is the critical thing. As was said earlier, farmers have to make profits. It is a bit upsetting if you plant hundreds or thousands of trees and they don't grow particularly well.

As I said earlier, nature really doesn't like monocultures. What I have also discovered is the significance of companion planting. You go out and see an apple orchard, and all there is is apples, or a paulownia plantation, or a blue gum plantation. People have talked about companion plants in relation to vegetables, but there is very little talk about companion plants in relation to trees. OK, we know that certain trees are parasites like the Christmas tree, and people know that sandalwood needs a host plant. It is generally accepted that legumes introduce nitrogen to the soil. With a dowsing rod, what you are able to do is determine what other plants have symbiotic relationships with each other.

I have shown, say, the position of a eucalyptus up here. If I assume there is nothing else planted in the same area, where does an acacia grow? It will give me a position somewhere down here. If I then say, assume I have already planted the eucalyptus, where do I plant the acacia? The acacia position to which it is predisposed moves from there to there. It is quite remarkable, on a size of the block here in Perth, two and a half metres, that is 80 cm to the southeast. And it is consistent. Equally well, assume that I plant the acacia first, where is the position the eucalyptus is predisposed? You get a terrific amount of randomness in nature, as well. A lot of people think that if there is a grid there, you don't see straight lines of trees growing out in the bush. The other reason for that is that we have all the different grid squares through the bush. You are not going to get a eucalyptus growing in every one. But they just look random, and it is only when you put the grid pattern around it, that you realise that they are, indeed, in a grid pattern. Although most of us tend to have pretty closed minds to something that is a bit different and a bit bizarre, I can understand people being a bit sceptical and having difficulty accepting this. Trust me, I'm putting my money where my mouth is, and I am going to plant 440 acres of trees to prove this point.

Diversity is absolutely everything. A lot of these plantation schemes that have been set up, people have been promised great returns on their investments, and they just don't seem to have come about. The reason is that the trees just haven't been performing as well as people expected them to perform. This is sad, because once something is given a bit of a bad reputation, it tends to stick for a long time and it is very difficult to get people to change their ideas.

Here I have talked about one tree and one companion plant, but it is not restricted to that. You go out and see diversity in nature; you have dozens and dozens of plants growing around in the bush. As I said, there is actually 3,600 intersection points within each of these squares. If you can ascertain which plants are really good companion plants for a tree, and if you can ascertain also that they have good commercial value, you can see that there is terrific potential there. So instead of having to wait 8, 10, 15 years for your tree crop to give you a return on your investment, you can be harvesting other crops in the meantime on a yearly basis. From my findings, the plants I have concentrated on...I really want to get more involved with local species because there is so much known about European species. Interestingly, all the different herbs seem to be excellent companion plants.

A lot of you are probably familiar with the term 'transmutation of elements.' It has been proven scientifically that transmutation of elements does exist and can happen. For years people have said that certain plants mine for different elements. I don't quite know just how this happens, but to give you an idea...I am growing a couple of mango trees on an area in my garden where previous owners had a sand pit with white sand which is totally gutless, no nutrient in it whatsoever. I planted a mango there on the position to which it is predisposed. So I wanted to figure out where to plant lavender. Lavender fixes boron, which I am told is important for making strong, healthy growth in a tree. When you do this, you will find that lavender always wants to go over in this righthand direction. You will find that other plants are predisposed to positions all over the place. So I put lavender there. Interestingly enough, I thought about nasturtiums. I read some books about companion plants and had an open mind on the subject. If a plant is not a companion plant, the rod will just not respond. But the rod gave me a response and I planted 5 nasturtiums, because it gave me 5 reactions in a line running up to the northeast. I subsequently asked about basil, which was considered to be a good companion plant. These nasturtiums have been doing fantastically well, even though the ground was absolutely horrendous. I asked where basil should go in relation to the mango. It said here, so I planted the basil there. Straightaway, the nasturtiums died. They were doing really well up until then. As I said, it was growing on sand that was absolutely white, no nutrition, but this basil is tall and so beautiful. The lavender is fantastic, the mango is growing well. I have pennyroyal up here as well, all in predisposed positions. Everything is just harmony, with absolutely no fertilisers at all. This is important as well, because if you can grow things organically, it is highly desirable.

You can easily ascertain exactly what is suitable for every tree on every piece of land. On my block of land in Dowerin, for argument's sake, there are different trace elements there which are suitable for some plants but not suitable for other plants. The rod will tell me. I will just go through my list of companion plants. I have different trees and different companions for them, all in the marked positions, as to which are suitable. You can get about 30 or 40 companion plants for most eucalypts that all have commercial value. I think that is so important.

I mentioned earlier about the acacia moving close. Melaleuca, tea tree, is interesting. The position to which it is predisposed to grow is down here in relation to the eucalyptus. As I say, the dowsing rod...I just have to keep saying that I do not know how this works...it really does give very distinct answers. You can see the proof when you put it into practice. If you have a eucalyptus and an acacia, and you dowse across here to find out where a melaleuca will go, you don't get any response. If it is just a eucalyptus on its own, the melaleuca will go here. And so, it is either one or the other. This is going to be part of my trial. I will plant some of the eucalyptus with melaleuca and some eucalyptus with acacia. This is why I need a substantial area. There are so many combinations and permutations that have to be planted to prove this.

Once you have the ground covered with your companion plants, you find you don't get any weeds growing. Weeds have obviously been put in by nature to be companion plants. Wherever you go in any plantation, most people have been trying to destroy the weeds because they see them as competition for the trees. In reality, nature is putting them there; everything takes from the environment and everything puts back to the environment. Legumes take nitrogen from the air and give it to the soil. Lavender makes boron available to other plants. There are a myriad of other plants which offer similar benefits. It is a whole different approach, but it has been borne out in the small trials I have done myself. I am certainly going to implement them, and there are other people who have come to feel there is more to it than they realised. How does a compass work? There are no wires attached to it, but it points north. Because we have been educated and told there is a magnetic field that causes this effect, we accept it. People have been told that dowsing is witchcraft so you mustn't touch it, but, believe you me, it is a very important talent that some of us are blessed with. It should be used, because it is an excellent tool in restoring rural prosperity and fighting salinity.

I wanted my property in Dowerin because 72,000 people visited the Dowerin Field Day last year. If you can get a few people to come across and look at it, they may find it difficult to understand, but there is the proof. If I can get all my trees going really well, people will want to copy it.