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A selection of our writings from 2009 to the present. If you'd like to keep up to date with our latest posts, please subscribe below.

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Month: August 2025

Q&A (on collapse, gifts, gender, ritual, neoliberalism, fire, revillaging, death and more)

Aug 11, 2025 | Artist as Family online event, belonging economies, bush school, capitalism, ceremonial species approach, children, Collective preparedness, colonisation, community sufficiency, conflict, corporatism, degrowth, Djaara mother country, earth stewardship, ecological crises, ecological economy making, edible weeds, eldership, energy descent, family, farming, fatherhood, fear, fermenting, film, fire, flow of gifts, food, food culture, food sovereignty, foraging, fossil fuels, gift economy, Grief, Happen Films, health, herbs, home economies, human rights, Hypertechnocivility, interspecies relating, lifemaking, locavorism, love, media, medicinal plants, mushrooms, neoliberalism, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, post-industrial thought, reculturing, relationships, relocalisation, revillaging, storytelling, subsistence permaculture, transitional communities, walked-for food, wisdom, wood energy | 12 comments

 

On the weekend we held two online Q&A sessions, each for an hour and a half. Here we share an edited version of that three hours.

We hope you enjoy this offering as much as we did co-creating it. A big hearty thank you to all who participated, and especially to those who asked such timely, goodly questions.

Listen to the audio version (1:19mins),

 

or watch the video.

A reminder we will be travelling with The New Peasants to Stanley, Merimbula, Canberra and Sydney in Gadigal Country, where Gadigal born elder and dear friend, Uncle Charles Davison, will be welcoming us all at the Dendy Cinema in Newtown.

Resistance Agriculture in Palestine (with Yara Dowani)

Aug 7, 2025 | agriculture, belonging economies, colonialism, culture, direct action, earth stewardship, farming, First People, food culture, food sovereignty, genocide, human rights, militarism, neopeasant, permaculture, radical homemakers, reculturing, regenerative farming, relocalisation, segregation, state violence, storytelling, transitional communities, water, young farmers | 8 comments

 

Meg speaks with Yara Dowani, a CSA farmer and permaculturist from the West Bank of Palestine. Yara tells of her journey from city girl to managing Om Sleiman farm, the continual challenges of producing nourishing food under occupation, and her hopes for Palestine.

Listen to the audio-only version (50mins),

 

or watch the video.

 

In their conversation Yara mentions the film Five Broken Cameras, which is set in the village near where Om Sleiman farm is situated. The farm is under constant threat of Israeli settler expansion, which you can see on the horizon in the below image.

 

Artist as Family is holding a solidarity raffle at each of The New Peasants screenings we attend to raise money for a water filter system for Om Sleiman farm. If you can’t make a screening but would like to donate, click here, then click One Time Gift, and in the field that says Name, please write down your name with Om Sleiman beside it. We’ll add this to the funds we are raising from raffle tickets sales. The raffle prize is two nights accommodation in our Permie Loveshack in southern Djaara country.

As a part Jewish household, we stand alongside innumerable Jewish investigative journalists and public speakers around the world (including, Antony Loewenstein, Aaron Maté, Charles Eisenstein, Gabor Maté, Max Blumenthal, and Katie Halper), who stand in solidarity with Palestinians and against the colonial and genocidal regime in Israel.

Enough is enough!

Big thanks to Yara and the other farmers at Om Sleiman farm for doing this work and so bravely sharing your story of resistance agriculture.

Neopeasant revillaging (a game for life making)

Aug 3, 2025 | degrowth, ecological economy making, play | 8 comments

 

One of our family’s homemade games, Neopeasant Revillaging, is featured in The New Peasants documentary.

Some who have seen the film have been asking about how they can also play it, so we thought we’d post this invitation to make your own version.

First, you take a Monopoly board – you know that infamous game that grooms children to become good little hoarding capitalists – then you hack it with images (scissors and glue required) that represent the world you want to lean further into, the world you want to more fully inhabit one day.

Here is our board hack, as just one example.

There are no rules, just one principle:

Everyone works together to defund the bank and redistribute the money to regrow the village in such a way that money becomes less and less central to our economic reality. What replaces money are our relationships with the living, sensing, giving worlds of the world. In other words, the more we regrow subsistence local resistance, the more our confidence develops to degrow big Finance dependancy.

This is in-effect the meta story of our bridging, transitioning lifeway, and is central to the story of The New Peasants.

Please share with us any games, hacks or life processes that you are currently excited by that you embody, or would like to embody more of in your life, which helps you change the narrative from scarcity-driven competition and greed to abundance, relationships and gratitude.