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

Highlights from the blog.

I am frightened by the culture I was born into (a list poem)

This week we examine our fear, Patrick writes a poem on the subject, and we listen to an elder from the past on the nature of fear, which we offer as critical listening for this present moment and immanent future.
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Artists and the Practice of Agriculture: Politics and Aesthetics of Food Sovereignty in Art Since 1960

Our offering today is a reading from our contribution to the newly released, 'Artists and the Practice of Agriculture: Politics and Aesthetics of Food Sovereignty in Art Since 1960' (Routledge 2023). Authored by Silvia Bottinelli, the book surveys artists working with the materiality, politics and aesthetics of food sovereignty over the past 60 years.
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Does the truth about GMOs in food and pharmaceuticals lie in the funding behind the messaging?

Dr Patrick Jones examines the current messaging promoting GMOs and reveals that decades of careful legal work concerning GMO use has been undermined over the past three years, green-lighting a potential surfeit of novel GMOs in both food and pharmaceutical products. This research is dedicated to those who journey beyond the safety of their algorithmic […]
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Mother cake, love and relationship (with Brigitte Kupfer)

Patrick had the great pleasure of speaking with Brigitte Kupfer on the day after our local winter solstice celebration, which Brigitte attended with her family. Meg says after listening to this podcast, "I feel like I've been in a warm bath." We hope you'll make some space for this beautiful yarn with mother-elder, post-academic sage, Brigitte Kupfer.
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| We live, love and labour in Djaara Mother Country, on unceded sacred land |

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