Before You Enter

This wilderness was a wonderland for a 90s child with a particularly vivid imagination and a love of exploring. With the daylight hours left entirely unsupervised, my brother, cousins, and I would traverse every inch of bushland. In Spring, we’d climb through thick scrub and up onto sandstone cliffs to watch the humpback whales migrating. In the colder months, we’d build “homes” deep in the bush out of huge dead tree branches, sneaking colourful crocheted blankets from my grandparent’s home to drape over them. Then, one school holidays, cracks emerged in our childhood whimsy as our minds turned to commerce. We started to trade with one another, using gumnuts as currency, and devoted weeks to building and working in our own bush businesses.

I established my florist in a cavern made of branches, just off the main track. It was the perfect spot. There were plenty of places to hang my floral creations, and I could make and store things in my small sheltered area. I shudder now to think of the native flowers that ought to have remained untouched, my little hands yanking them from the soil. Unknowingly, I went about pillaging the prettiest flowers and filled my “business” with hot pink grevilleas, huge waratah stems, and bundles of flannel flowers.

I decorated my cave entrance with floral garlands made of pink dusky bells (correa) and lilac-coloured spotted sun orchids woven in between. If you don’t know what a spotted sun orchid (Thelymitra Ixioides) is, look it up. They embody the magic of that bush reserve like no other flower – closing at night and in overcast weather and only opening for the sunshine.

However, what I’ve been thinking of most this past week is not my first attempt at business, but rather, one of my cousin’s. His business was deeper in the bush and although I can’t remember exactly what he was selling (something made with rocks?), I know that at some point he convinced us he needed a really large table to make it work. After many unsuccessful attempts to persuade the adults to help us transport the table he wanted, we settled for one of the outdoor ones in the garage. It was plastic, but heavy, it looked like a trestle but we couldn’t get the legs to fold, and it took four of us to haul it along the narrow track, then through the bushes and in to his chosen spot.

If creating The Beautiful Bunch was akin to my first business, simple to set-up with easy and immediate access to the market, Rooftop Roses resembles my cousin’s attempt. It feels like I’m building something with boulders that then requires a whole group of people to drag a heavy table through dense bush before we can even sell anything.

The barriers to entry in this business are enormous. There is a reason that almost all of the commercial cut-flower growers in Australia are men who are running businesses inherited from their fathers. High start-up costs and regulatory barriers mean there has been very little disruption of floriculture’s business as usual, both in terms of who is growing Australian flowers and also how our flowers are grown. Rooftop Roses is a challenge to both of those things.

The flower farm will be owned by The Beautiful Bunch, our sister social enterprise and a registered not-for-profit providing paid training and employment to young women so as they can enter the Australian workforce for the first time. The work done to date has largely been focused on two things, firstly: how we are going to grow hydroponic roses with minimum environmental impact, and secondly, the business case – why these roses will be so special and sought after and what their sale will do for the women growing them.

It’s been almost two years since I wrote our first grant application for this project. Reflecting on this time, the volume of work we have done is staggering - the hundreds of pages of research undertaken, the numerous documents created, the hours spent reworking financial models - all before a single rose is planted, let alone sold.

Whilst I am probably too far from the finish line to indulge in looking back, I have been thinking about what motivates people to start their business in the first place, the models we choose, and who has the privilege of building ones that require large amounts of up-front capital.

I thought it might be helpful to someone and cathartic for me to share some of the unseen work it has taken to get here. I am very much still hauling the proverbial table through the dense bush, but am thankful to have carved out a clear path and to have found some people along the way to help with the heavy lifting.