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.

Mandate refusal and custodial practices as decolonisation with Jen Ridley and Uncle Charles Davison

We had the pleasure of hosting Uncle Charles Davison, Jen Ridley and their youngest children, Minya and Yindi at the School of Applied Neopeasantry last week. Patrick, Jen and Charles made some room for a kitchen table chat for our podcast.
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School of Applied Neopeasantry podcast with Meg Ulman – on mothering, lovering, schooling and eldership

In this podcast, recorded a month ago on her birthday, Meg reflects on the intimate, the big picture, and everything that stitches them together. We hope you enjoy this hour with Meg Ulman, chief executive witch at the School of Applied Neopeasantry.
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Neoliberalism or neopeasantry? Patrick is guest on Sacred Lab podcast

How do we transition from neoliberalism to something more beautiful, even as the Empire falls apart and takes so much life with it? Here we share an excerpt from Ryan Dickerson's interview with Patrick on Ryan's podcast, 'Sacred Lab'.
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Forest & Free: rebuilding the village from the forest in – our 2023 programs for kids

Forest & Free is a place of fun, adventure, challenge, and a place of risk for 8-12 year olds in Djaara Mother Country. The kind of activities the kids will experience are fire making and cooking, bush walking and foraging, fishing and wild swimming, safe knife use and simple tool making, regenerative farming and animal husbandry, deep listening and storytelling, tree climbing and shelter building, embodying ancestral lifeways and learning ecological knowledges and awareness, listening to one another and listening to Country.
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| We live, love and labour in Djaara Mother Country, on unceded sacred land |

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