Last weekend Castlemaine Free University (CFU) hosted an event featuring two new books: Terry Leahy’s The Politics of Permaculture and Pam Nilan’s Young People and the Far Right. The day before the event we had spoken to the organiser to ask if CFU would be willing to host the event in a way where it was possible for everyone to attend. After our request was declined a small group of us, including permaculture elders David Holmgren and Su Dennett, decided to hold a peaceful protest outside the venue.
There were a dozen or so of us who brought deck chairs and sat outside on the footpath, and another small cohort of people who could have gone inside but chose to show solidarity by staying outside with us.
A huge thank you to Maggie from The Northern Arts Hotel who installed a speaker on the street so we could listen in, and who arranged for jugs of water to be brought out in the heat of the afternoon. Thank you for your compassion, Maggie, and thank you to community elder Nikki Marshall for always lighting a path of love, for helping to bring people together and stating the case for our inclusion.
Many thanks to Miles from Ideas Agency for filming on the day, and to Ian Lillington for the additional photos and footage.
We hope your week has been full of compassionate and generative conversations, and that you find this video useful for your current thinking.
Signing off for now from us here,
Artist as Family x
We have noticed that while the numbers of subscribers have been growing on our YouTube channel our video’s views have been going down each week, as we continue to dive deeper into the story the official gatekeepers don’t want us to know. YouTube, like other Big Tech platforms, shadow ban undesirable content – hiding it from being seen – as well as outright censoring and de-platforming channels. They are effectively squeezing us out from having a voice, which is giving us even more focus to contribute to a bully-free internet that understands science and culture are debate-able things and the health of these things depends on such debate. In response we opened 