Welcome to the School of Applied Neopeasantry
at Tree Elbow University.

Hello! We are Artist as Family – Zero, Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr.

We live in Daylesford, Australia in Djaara Mother Country on a quarter-acre permaculture plot, home to our School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University. We practice a unique form of performance art, comprising how we live, get our food and medicine, and move around; performing modes of life making we call permacultural neopeasantry.

We teach a unique skill set of radical homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers called SWAPs (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists) and online through our various videos, talks and blog posts.

We are bloggers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, goatherders, gardeners and video makers who also make music, but mostly we’re a family who belong to a bloody great community and a beautiful small patch of sacred forest, and therefore we’re much more than the sum of our parts.

Understanding the importance of relationships throughout our transition has been essential. Relationships with soil communities, with individual trees, with messenger birds, with clouds, with dog kin, goats, bees, microbes, with one another and with ourselves.

Our Latest Video

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Highlights from the blog.

For the luck of Éire! Terry Alts, The Happy Pig, Atlantic fish, Book of Kells, & the spoils and spores of ancestry

Ireland. We arrived early in the morning by the ferry from west Scotland, figured we needed to get to the outskirts of Belfast to hitchhike, passed flagrant support for the old empire, and hightailed it south to a hitching point on the verge of a slip road, that went both south and west – our […]
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Dún Aonghasa (a poem from the old fort)

  Can I recount my genealogy? Does it matter? Can I trust the samples, the documents, the pigments? The culture I was born to, is it a culture? Are we people? Is the severance from the past understandable? Does it matter? What matters? What ties me to my ancestors? My old people are buried widely. […]
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Alba the brave (our week of screenings, meetups and foragings in Scotland)

We crossed unceremoniously into the rolling borders of Alba – the Scots Gaelic word for Scotland. We headed to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills, to test out the right to roam principle in Scotland. We drove up the laneway and got as far as here (Little Sparta is just beyond the […]
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A hot, dry week of rich, fast and giddy travel (from Dorset to Cumbria)

We wanted to hitchhike out of London, though the sheer volume of people and roads without shoulders turned us off. We then turned to British Rail, gasped at the costs and struggled to see how we’d get around that way. We settled on a cheap hire car, which scuttled us out of the metropolis, south […]
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| We live, love and labour in Djaara Mother Country, on unceded sacred land |

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