Are you needing renewed motivation and focus in your transition to a more resilient lifeway? Are you curious about how our family lives at home with little reliance on civilisation’s industrial machine? Do you feel economically trapped? Do you sense economic and political troubles ahead and want to better future-proof your household? Are you wanting to live with less debt and more relationship with the living of the world? Are you wanting to say, Fuck off! to all the con men and women (the captains of industries) in the very way that you live, and do this positively? Do you want to embody your politics and values and thus dance your talk? Do you want to learn simple hacks for living with less money and more time? If one or more of these questions resonates, then our all-day house and garden tour might well be for you.
Over the day we will cover self and community care,
re-commoning,
annual vegetables cultivation,
annual vegetable food harvesting,
fermenting
and storing the harvests,
alchemising all manners of substances from one thing
Date: Sunday 17 November, 10am – 4pm, Djaara Mother Country, central Victoria (address will be supplied with booking).
Topics covered include: community-sufficiency, household economies, replacing fiat with compost, subsistence resilience, access to land, ecological economics, permacultural neopeasantry, fermentation for both thrift and health, organic food that low income households can afford, green gym (or active economics), children in the household biome, transitioning to a non-reliance on predatory capitalism, future proofing by skilling up, food-medicine and active disease prevention, trading fear for empowerment, self-care and unintentional communities and neighbourhoods, composting ideology with joyous pragmatism.
The tour includes: Sharings from Meg, Woody and Patrick; morning tea; a neopeasant lunch with special guests, permaculture elders Su Dennett and David Holmgren; afternoon tea; and plenty of time for questions.
Cost: $100 per person (this is the concession price; feel free to pay more if you would like to further contribute to our work).
Who is it for: The day is informationally dense so we request 16 year olds and up only, please. Participants will need to navigate uneven surfaces and at times rough terrain.
To book: Please message us to book or ask any questions – we@artistasfamily.is
We’re home. Well, nearly all of us are home. Woody and Patrick knitted their way back to Djaara Mother Country on a 12 hour train journey,
and were collected by dear friends who also helped us with the expenses of getting back from Kashmir, fast. Meg has stayed in NSW to assist Jan and Robert, Patrick’s mother and father, in their home. It was Patrick’s mum, Nana Jones, who became seriously ill after a medical procedure was botched. The doctors and nurses were incredibly caring, for the most part, and miraculously, despite the anti-sleep, anti-fresh air and anti-food the hospital mandates,
Nana has recovered and is back at home after a month escaping death.
There is nothing like a crisis in a family to bring everyone more closely together.
Patrick and Woody have celebrated the return of Zero, who has come home from staying with friends. His dementia and deafness have accelerated. Unsurprising for a 14 year old dog who has lived a kick-arse life. He spent the first day home searching high and low for his beloved Meg.
There is a special joy in the spring air here that only a close encounter with the death of a parent and the ageing of a dear dog can muster. Our presence to life is magnified at the moment, and it is the trace of our travels that is feeding into this. Adding to this joy, our chooks are back home, after also staying with friends, and we received our first egg on the afternoon of their return. Precious gold.
Before we left we told the bees we’d be gone for the winter, and on our return we announced to them our arrival home. Telling the bees about big events in a household is an ancestral tradition, especially for animist romantics like ourselves.
One of the many joys of being home has been to enter the cellar of our summer and autumn labours (mammals, plants, insects, microbes) and bring out a bottle of garden honey, which has creamed up over the winter. This is our bullion.
Woody and Patrick came home a little earlier to get more food in the ground. They first weeded row number one and planted it out with seed potatoes.
Then top-dressed the bed with the humanure compost from our household’s autumn ablutions, which has been quietly transforming itself into life-giving humus while we were travelling.
See our humanure compost workshop for more on producing this earth-giving force. The next row along in the annual garden area, row number two, has about 20 roundhead cabbages, hidden amongst the weeds, ready to kraut when Meg returns.
Sauerkraut is just one of our food-medicines that keeps us far away from the industrial medical system. Blood oranges in the garden, is another.
While on the subject of health, we travelled across ten countries, eating street food, interacting with other animals, soils and innumerable biomes and waters that our bodies had never encountered before, and yet we took no industrial medicines beforehand, no prior travel jabs, and took out no travel insurance. We got sick from pollution, and rested when we were run down. We steered clear of processed and acidic foods, and ate a tonne of chillies, well at least we adults did. Blackwood has never had a vaccine. Irresponsible or intelligent? You be the judge. From this vantage point, especially after being in the bizarrely self-congratulatory industrial medical system with Nana,
and beholding how that system is a mix of constructive and ruinous processes that often cancel each other out, our pro-active, non-participation in it is good for everyone. We don’t drain precious resources from those who have no other choice but to risk their health in an Australian hospital today. Good food, sleep, air, love, ecology, water, community and meaning are our pillars of health, as we unpack in greater detail in our Life beyond the Industrial Medical Complexvideo. Broad beans, planted just before we left, are just one more aspect that helps grow these pillars.
As are alliums. Meg’s leek kraut is about the best thing you’ll taste.
As is our roast goat that has been fed on a cornucopia of medicinal herbs, weeds and leaves from the forest we tend, love and learn from. Rubbing garlic kraut into the flesh before roasting is yet more gold from the gift of the sun. Mmmm, garlic kraut.
While we were away, some of you might recall, we had to give away our flerd. Our sheep and goats kept getting out, causing neighbours and friends a fair deal of hassle. After travelling through southeast Asia, China, Nepal and India, we have done some further thinking about farming on commons, and how to improve our herbivory processes. We have learned a lot from subsistence lifeways in many of these countries.
One of our biggest takeaways is the simplest thing: to spend the spring and summer harvesting and drying grass, and storing it for the winter. 10 minutes a day on a morning walk, can cut a wheelbarrow of fodder. Buying bales of feed in the winter is expensive, may hold residual pesticides and doesn’t help with managing local grass and mitigating bushfires in our neighbourhood. So cutting, drying and storing grass, as we saw in Nepal, Himachal Predesh, Ladakh and Kashmir, is for us subsistence-resilience, a term we coined while we were away. Here is the new herd we have just brought in.
There is so much spring growth here at the moment and few animals to convert this life-force into health-giving protein. A dear friend has loaned us money to buy this starter herd so we can continue to manage the local forest, (as Happen Films documented us doing a few years back), and supply our home and local gift economy with meat with no industrial inputs, while offering a bushfire mitigation and dominant weed reduction service to the neighbourhood. We are so grateful for the meat, organs and fat, which are transformed gifts from the leaves, fruits and sunlight (and much more) in the forest.
In Patrick and Woody’s first week home, hitchhiking to Castlemaine to get to a rites of passage event was a joyous father and son moment.
After hitchhiking from our home in southern Australia to Darwin at the beginning of our journey, thumbing our way to Castlemaine was a breeze. Patrick is about to volunteer again with 10 other uncle figures to guide a teen boy and their dads rites of passage. Our whole family is involved in this precious village rebuilding movement, which brings great joy into peoples’ lives, including our own.
Well, that’s about it for an update. We so look forward to all being home together and to start back up the many processes that make possible our living with little reliance on the machine of the Capitalocene.
Unexpectedly, Patrick’s mum became critically ill while we were India. We have been bedside with her for a week since our return, gathering with family. Her recovery is slow but progressing.
There has been so much love expressed within the family, with cousins, aunties, uncles, grandchildren, parents all reconnecting, and as the hospital is full of Nepali and Indian nurses so we haven’t experienced reverse culture shock. The Manali wool in ICU has also been our long thread back to India.
In brighter news – news about a world that we know is possible – our friends at Happen Films published this short portrait of Woody yesterday.
Our favourite line in the film is, “I don’t decide what to learn, I just discover things.” Good onya, Woody!
In further helping create a world that we know is possible, where beautiful things are discovered, we’re teaching on two upcoming permaculture courses. This in-person course, and this online one. Come join us!
We are now feeling a little time pinched. We need to pack up our bags again, including our latest knitting projects,
and start moving west. We only have a few weeks left of our travels to journey across to Kashmir, down to Jammu and Amritsar, then across to Navdanya (Vandana Shiva’s farm), back to Jashan’s family farm in Punjab, before leaving India and heading for home to reconnect with friends, neighbours, family and Zero, who has been staying with this dear unschooling family.
Meet Preethipal, whose first family comes from Jammu, and Natasha, Daya (aka Black Cockatoo), and older brother Jasper. Zero has been living with this loving lot since we left nearly four months back. We hold so much gratitude for them all.
So, we went to buy tickets for the government bus from Leh to Srinagar. It leaves at 2pm each afternoon to travel 420kms. Because the road is closed from 10pm every night until dawn, it means the bus has to stop in the middle of the night and that would mean we’d be travelling across two days without sleep. (We marvel at those who can sleep on these wild buses). At the ticketing office, Patrick enquired a number of times trying to understand why this bus, (unlike the Manali to Leh bus, which covers roughly the same distance and leaves at dawn), doesn’t leave at first light and get in on dusk. He really wanted to understand, and our government ticketing mate really wanted to explain.
Almost everything that has to be done through a government office in India is, to our logic, upside down thinking. To send a package home, for example, took us over an hour in a GPO, where we were the only customers. It required several trips to various offices in the building to get a slip signed, something else scanned, an item approved up the chain of bureaucratic command, and even a trip to another office around outside the building to print off some more forms. We were frisked before entering the GPO by armed guards, so Patrick, wearing his Ghurkha khukuri knife, quickly opted to stay outside the gates, hanging around, waiting and waiting, with the lads and their automatic rifles in the street.
At the Leh bus station, after about five attempts at an explanation – “Listen here Mister Australia” – Patrick was none the wiser. After all the diagrams, mud maps of the journey, and justifications for leaving at 2pm, the only thing Patrick could ascertain was the leaving time has been this way for 16 years, and therefore cannot be changed. The ticket officer had impeccable English, Patrick had shit Hindi and Ladakhi, and the two fellas finished off with a good laugh. After 30 minutes we left without purchasing tickets.
Later in the day we met a young couple from Punjab, Ritika and Ritesh, and got yarning. They were planning to hire a share-taxi to Kargil, half way to Srinagar, the next day and invited us to join them. The cost each was little more than the price of a bus ticket. We left at first light,
not knowing how we would get from Kargil to Srinagar but mother country willing we would arrive in Kargil with time to either find another mode of transport or book a room. We once again found ourselves moving in divine lands,
which held divine and simple culture.
After a few hours we came across a solo yak on the roadside. Yak, sheep and goats have been herded by Ladakh shepherds for generations.
We stopped to say g’day to this curious and gentle beast, stretch our legs, take a photo,
and play some cricket.
We travelled on, taking it pretty slowly as Woody and Ritika had developed motion sickness. The dogs in a little village we stopped in had the benefit of Woody’s omelette breakfast, after he brought it up. They first took a sniff,
then dived right in. Ritika and Ritesh are on their first road trip as a couple, having met at work. Their parents don’t know they are together and these youngtimers said that they are going to have to break it to their folks, at some point, that they want to be together, and not have their marriages arranged.
Breaking from traditional culture is big for many people we met in India, especially as culture is so rich here, with so many diverse ethnic and religious groups and lifeways. And for some, staying with the traditional ways is all they know, as with these Ladakhis. We felt such kinship for their ways and colour and textile.
Because, like Tibetans, Ladakh folk are not aggressive but relational and contextual, and because their customs and traditions are lived into presence, they shine as a people. And they stand up to bullies, like the Chinese army, who earlier this year tried to stop herders performing their cultural and economic lifeways. Ladakh culture is a whole culture, and seeing a wholly in-tact culture gives us a better sense of our own reculturing with community-kin back home, as infant and entirely different as it is.
We stopped for a pee break and came across this welcome party for a Ladakh leader.
Today, Ladakh shepherds are loosing territory, but not just to the Chinese authorities. They are also being barred from ranging with their sheep, goats and yaks by the Indian military, (the 8th largest army in the world), who have ever greater control in the Indian Himalayas.
There is growing militarisation across the frontier between China and India.
Our journey with the Punjabi love birds ended at Kargil. They went north to find India’s most northern town, Thang, with Ritesh’s brother, an army officer. We couldn’t find a local bus for the afternoon or the next day, so we booked another share taxi for the following day, and checked into this hotel for the night,
in this room,
drifted the second largest human centre in Ladakh through the afternoon,
and left for Srinagar the next morning with four other passengers and a driver. We three inhabited the backety back.
Winter is coming, and Ladakh folk are drying fodder, building their firewood supplies, and no doubt preserving their foods.
As we inched towards Srinagar and the altitude dropped, more grazing land appeared.
We arrived in Drass, a town that boasts it is ‘the second coldest inhabited place in the world’.
which is largely a global tourist caper. These highlands are made increasing available to tourists, that is the global bourgeoisie,
but less and less for local, earth-bonded, indigenous peoples. There seems to be a perception that enclosures and clearances ended in the nineteenth century, but it’s been a continual progression since the 12th century, at least in contemporary colonial terms.
The land began changing again more radically after Drass.
Poplars, deodars, chinars, firs, mulberries and walnuts grow in the Kashmir Valley, and pines began cropping up too,
and acute rocks that held the road from sliding. Yes, we travelled along those precarious road shelves,
on and down to the flood plains below, which became more generous and giving of grass and fodder.
Then, from browsing and grazing culture country, came more intensive agrarianism, with small holding cropping,
which eventually merged into outlying suburbs and roadside stalls,
before we arrived at Srinagar’s Dal Lake, and to a floating offer for chai.
We were dropped at the southern end. We had booked a cheap houseboat that looked lovely online. We stepped into a shikara,
and went off to discover a barely floating shit box that stank of mould. We rang the manager and asked him why the online spruik was so completely different to the reality. It was a stupid question, which Instagram had already answered for us years before. Patrick told him we’d look for something else, but the man, Hashim, kindly offered an upgrade to another boat for the same price. We moved onto the old, creaking and better smelling Teal Heritage houseboat,
and met Tariq, the caretaker, who got fishing with Woody.
We fell asleep that night bunkered down on the elderly boat, wondering whether the beds would fall through the hull, listening to the Indian army and Pakistani insurgents firing good night missiles at each other.
The morning brought another reality. A dreaminess, perhaps even a tiredness that duckboarded through our days here.
It’s hot down south. In a few days it will be 36 degrees in Jammu. We need to press on, but something is stopping us.
Srinagar had a distinctly different feel to it from everywhere else we have visited in India. We walked the streets,
coming across an old friend we hadn’t seen since last summer back at home.
There are pushy hawkers on the streets and on visiting shikaras, here,
trying to sell anything they can. Sometimes we said yes and bought tea or fruit, but when we said no, it was often ignored. The mood here is predatory, cynical, gender-lopsided and utterly picturesque.
Within 24 hours of each other, two very public fights broke out just across the water from us, on the street. Everywhere we went, armed police and soldiers stood by, on alert.
Perhaps the heightened aggression and intensity in the air was due to Indian prime minister Modi coming to Srinagar, for the forthcoming elections, which explains the heavy militarisation on the streets.
We’d noticed a political fervour back in the Kashmir Valley.
On our fourth morning, we adults woke and ran a bath, a thing we hadn’t had access to for the entire trip. As the bath filled we joked about it falling through the floorboards into the lake, and how we missed our cold water plunging. Patrick had strangely taken ill the previous day and had spent the whole of it in bed, completely drained of all life. After our bath, where we had used the quiet of the morning to check in with each other, we dressed and sat outside beholding the morning before the hawkers started their rounds,
Woody kept sleeping and after a while we turned on the phone to reply to comments and other correspondence. There was a message from Patrick’s sister, Hen, asking Patrick to call her.
……
The long and the short of it is we are signing off from this journey now, a little prematurely. We have someone very dear to us who is very unwell, and we need to head back to Australia immediately. Dear friends have made this possible, with three flights booked from Srinagar to Delhi to KL to Sydney in 24 hours, almost the complete opposite journey to how we got here.
So, we need to pack up this little room, this life on the road,
and get moving, quickly.
Thank you, Dearest Reader, for the love and support we’ve received from you throughout our journey. We are so grateful you have joined us along the way from the sidelines to share our highs and lows. We are going to spend some time offline now, and gather with family.
Signing off from India, from this failed hitchhiking, but so much more journey. With love, and big emotions, Artist as Family.
We don’t like to find out too much before we venture to a new place, and we’re glad we didn’t know what was ahead of us when we woke at 4am to leave Manali at 5 in a 16 seat bus.
We climbed and winded through the dark for a few hours and as the sun broke we became aware we were moving into completely new terrain; a terra of glaciers connected to the Himalayas.
This is a dry-cold Mother Country,
inhabited by sheep, goats,
and shepherds.
India is a country of almost two billion people; most of whom do not live here, in the remote parts of Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh.
The scale of the mountains astonished us,
and as we climbed we began to feel cold for the first time since leaving central Australia months earlier.
The intensity of the climb, the winding and bumpy roads began to unsettle Woody. He had his first vomit
before our first road stop. He declined breakfast, but us adults had roadside chai and omelettes. None of us had jumpers to put on. Our wind and rain jackets were in our bags roped to the top of the van. Woody was grateful for the scarf his dad knitted him to keep him warm, and for his mum’s hugs.
This road from Manali to Leh will be closed in the coming months, due to snow.
We each had on all the layers we had,
and carried on climbing into the clouds,
and ice.
This high country desert is like no other environment we’ve experienced.
It was no smooth ride. Like the bus trip from Dharamshala to Manali, the driver threw us from side to side, racing at the hairpin bends, then braking suddenly. We don’t know whether it was motion or altitude sickness, but Woody threw up everything his body had, including his stomach bile, until he was just dry retching.
The physical intensity inside the bus was accompanied by the immense physical beauty of these lands.
The road was unforgiving in places,
and again, it was a journey encompassing a string of near-deaths.
What a magnificent place to die!
Much of the road didn’t have any barriers to stop vehicles going over the edge.
The vomit bag needed emptying regularly out the window.
Retaining walls, holding sections of the road in place, had given way.
As passengers, our attention flickered between oncoming challenges,
and spectacular beauty and life force.
As picture makers our beginner eyes marvelled as our stomachs churned.
It was joy and discomfort riffing each other, with fellow mammal Asiatic ibex coming into the mix at places,
and little settlements offering sustenance and motion relief.
We did not take the recommended pharmaceutical (Diamox, made by Pfizer), not just because of the long list of adverse effects these junk science tablets contain, but because we know we are hardier than the industrial medical complex gives our bodies credit for, and we trust the old ways – ginger, water, chewing and belching as one climbs, exerting little as one adjusts. Woody couldn’t stomach any of these things, except for sitting, exerting little.
As the hours passed, the road became wilder, and roadworks brought we traffic-species to a halt.
We were all in a trance as we ate dhal and rice, and drank lemon, ginger and honey tea. The air was thin,
and our urine flowed more quickly than usual from our bodies. After lunch we visited the most beautiful dunny in the world.
Ladakh borders Pakistan controlled land, the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh, Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir, and China. Until 1960, when the Chinese government blocked access, it was a centre of trade along the Indus Valley between Tibet, Kashmir, India and China.
As the day aged the temperature warmed, and for a while we felt the comfort of the sun.
We had travelled only 300kms in the first several hours when we reached a plain with momentary sealed and straight roads.
Such comforts were short lived. We climbed again, and twisted and vomited up into snow country,
reaching the dizzying altitude of 5,329m at the very climax of the journey.
We met frozen rock,
and overturned vehicles,
mountain ponies,
and Changthangi goats and herders as we descended into the Leh district of Ladakh.
As we approached Leh, the largest human centre in Ladakh, small-scale agrarian settlements popped up through the rock. Many of the roofs of the houses supported cut hay, drying for the coming winter.
The annual rainfall in Leh is 35mm. Farmers and growers rely on melted glacial waters, which despite the land’s desert appearance,
is in abundance in the rivers and irrigation networks that feed into the homes, farms and settlements.
After 11 hours of travelling, we arrived in Leh in the late afternoon. Modern, touristy Leh, we noticed, is being transformed by cold concrete,
while old Leh is built with thermal-friendly clay and rock.
In a clay, rock and manure version of shelter culture, Mr Adani and his mines are not required.
We walked from the bus station to a cheap hotel room that offered beds but no running water, dumped our bags and headed out to explore. It was at this point, Woody, who had vomited 14 times throughout the day, turned to his parents and said, “The beauty of that journey was so worth the discomfort.”
We found ourselves in a remarkable town,
with much history and prayer,
a town of 260,000 people,
built into rock and cloud,
with stupas on every corner.
and dogs, cattle and donkeys wandering the streets.
Leh is a town of cultural life force and of unmediated death,
of celebration and festival,
and, like much of northern India, it is yet another place of radically untuned traffic.
Local growers sell their vegetables,
their fruits,
and their saved seeds in the streets.
These farmers delighted us with their joy and wisdom,
and with their passion for their food.
We cannot get enough of the beautiful acceptance for earth-others inhabiting human-centric settlements in India.
Woody was particularly drawn to the local ass.
At times, we could not get enough air in Leh, at an altitude of 3,524m and with only 65% oxygen in every breath, we often had to stop and slow. Right. Down.
So much life attracted our senses in Leh. Old bulls scavenge the detritus on the streets,
and at the markets,
and little back alleys led us to quieter accommodations.
At Ree-Yul guesthouse, where we moved to after our first night, we met four Kashmiri motorbike travellers. We yarned in the sunny courtyard, they offered advice for our next leg, and invited us to take a pic with Woody on one of their bikes.
Each day we wandered the streets, seeking to lose ourselves in daily life here.
We beheld the preparations for winter, and the many local poplars (Populus nigra ‘Afghanica‘).
The stark qualities between human and more-than-human made forms.
The modern and makeshift.
and got among the forage-worthy plants,
such as the fruit-medicine sea-buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides).
These fruits, also known as Leh berries or Ladakhi Gold, are rich in antioxidants and essential minerals including potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron and phosphorous. Fresh off the bush they taste lemony and slightly astringent. On our last afternoon, we ordered a juice of this berry from a local restaurant.
For $15 we hired a motor scooter for a day and headed out of town a little.
The three of us on one little scooter slowly meandered up high above the town,
arriving at the 15th century Victory Fort on Tsemo Hill.
We paused for a while, looking out
and up
and through
remnant cultural structures of the past, as they stand in the present. We descended back into Leh and took chai,
before heading off to find one of the main sources of life in this little city, the Indus River. This took some time as the main road travelled alongside this mighty water serpent, but never within reach, with few side roads to take. We stopped for a lunch of Tibetan thukpa (noodle soup),
and with goodly nourishment in our bellies, eventually found a road to the river.
We spent time by the Indus, washing our feet,
yarning and knitting,
and it was here Woody learnt to ride a motor scooter.
Leh will remain in our hearts as the apex of this journey. Much like Hope Vale was on our 400 day bicycle adventure to Cape York, Leh is our most northern stop. As we ready to leave here, and descend south we feel a returning spirit enter us. Excitement for home, for reconnecting with friends, family and community. This air, albeit thin, is feeding us with new possibilities and projects ahead. We still have time in India ahead of us, and we remain present to what is in the now, but there is a turning at this juncture. There is both sadness and excitement.
