In this offering, permaculture elder David Holmgren is our guest in discussion with Patrick speaking about this next phase of global energy transition, and thus societal transformation in the local context.
Here’s the audio version (1hr 52mins).
David and Patrick’s hour-long conversation is followed by a compost of goodly questions from community participants who gathered and shared food together for this event. We hope that this long-form drop will aid in your preparations for the coming months.
This event recently took place at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Tree Elbow University in Djaara Mother Country.
Huge, hug-filled thanks to Jordan Osmond from Folklore Pictures (formally Happen Films) for both the sound and vision.
We’d love to hear from you about your preparations, priorities and musings at this time.
Listen to the audio version of this post (18mins), or read below.
Industrial progress is our civilisational spell. It is the spell of the modern, of comfort, of innovation-anxiety, of hyper-domestication, of estrangement and separation, of unashamed pollution. The collective name we call this spell is hypertechnocivility.
From birth we are conditioned to conform to this story. Early on daycare separates us from our most significant protectors, leaving us vulnerable and often emotionally wounded. As wounded fledglings industrial schooling grooms us to become compliant cogs in the narrative of progress. Technical colleges or universities finish the hardening process, equipping us with trades or degrees to serve industrial capital, rewarding us materially, as long as we are compliant, dutiful and stay under the spell, or in our lanes. By our mid twenties we become modern serfs in service to the Financial Industrial Complex. The key to success is to do as you are told, become upwardly mobile, and not look at what’s really going on around you.
Every industry larger than cottage is subordinate to the Financial Industrial Complex, which controls all the other global raiding parties – Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Military, Big Ag, et al. Big Finance is the apex predator of this greater mob of morally depraved elites because it controls the capital for all other industries, including government.
It was the Luddites (1811-1812) who mounted the first and only serious rebellion against the spell casters of industrial progress. This happened in the midlands and north of England, where a number of our family’s ancestors hail. Initially the resistance focussed on ‘machine breaking’, smashing the frames of early industrial textile machines that were reducing the capacity of cottage weavers and hosiers to earn a proper income through their fine crafts.
A new power class was emerging in England at this time. The early industrial manufacturers established the first chapter of mass production. They had in turn derived from a revolutionary political theology designed by Adam Smith and others who gave spark to modern predatory capitalism, and lobbied parliament to bring in draconian laws that further prevented common folk from self-provisioning. The classical political economists knew that capitalism could only work if The Common – land that could once be used for people to produce or gather food – was enclosed, and townsfolk, artisans and peasants could no longer easily create non-monetary economies of community-sufficiency.
The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelman is a comprehensive resource for examining the dark and mostly untold story of Classical Political Economy.
While the enclosures began in feudal England centuries earlier, Smith and co conspired with the church and state to make sure people were economically fragile and thus exploit-ready for manufacturers and other industrialists. This in turn created unbound poverty and suffering, which would eventually force people to move into the growing manufacturing centres to look for work, kickstarting a de-ruralisation process that continues today:
Displaced populations leave the land and make their way, uselessly, to the cities; urban ghettos swell and fester; families without skills recognisable in the cities compete for the few available jobs or go on the public dole, using food stamps to buy what they once knew how to grow. –– Kirkpatrick Sale (1995)
The wretchedness caused by enclosure and through dispossession of ancestral commons led to mass poverty. This created widespread crime that in turn led to the advent of populations being policed for the first time, as well as the establishment of faraway colonial jails like Australia. Industrial progress is also the story of made-man mass suffering, exported from England to across the world.
The history of the Luddites’ powerful though short lived uprising to save their autonomous economic-technological-cultural relations is told in Kirkpatrick Sale’s detailed Rebels against the Future: Lessons for the Computer Age. Sale’s social history brings greater awareness of the mass exploitation of labour that occurred at this time, which was required to catapult industrial capitalism into existence.
Through the many stages and processes of industrial progress we have more or less become an estranged species of anthropocentric urbanites who no longer yearn to be in relationship with earth-honouring technologies, or living within processes of regeneration. We fabricate stories of progress such as efficient electric homes powered by lithium-ion batteries, without reporting on the millions of fires these batteries start each year and the horrific costs to environments and people that the mining of this one particular metal creates.
In every new technology manufactured by the story of industrial progress, harm proliferates. Look behind the curtains of any new product, any new drug, every new digital tool or means of production, and someone or something is sick or dying. Electric technologies requiring rare earth minerals or metals won’t save us, but these technologies just might:
So, given what we now know about industrial progress, is there anything we can learn from the original Luddites? Is there anything to learn from their gallant failure, which took an English army, larger than any that fought against Napoleon, to crush their resistance?
The first lesson for us from the Luddites is violence only begets more violence, and the state is designed to ultimately protect capital before workers. As we have seen for decades, governments will use excessive force against any uprising, and Big Tech is almost fully capable now of silencing any form of dissent or using dissenting subgroups to create ideological silos in a bid to continue the colonial practice of divide and rule.
Before they resorted to violence, however, the Luddite’s political strategy was to petition the political class.
Lord Byron made his maiden parliamentary speech speaking up for subjugated artisans who were being rapidly turned into impoverished subjects of capital. But shortly afterwards Byron became famous for his writings, and his attention in support of the Luddites disappeared. And then no one in the political class championed the traditional textile artisans whose industry was the first to be subject to the moral depravity of early industrial capitalists. Such powerlessness, especially felt by weavers, led to greater acts of violence against textile manufacturers’ machine parts (thousands of weaving frames were smashed), then against the factories (some were burnt to the ground), then manufacturers themselves (some were murdered).
Secondly, Luddite resistance didn’t pivot towards alternative self-organising economies. Luddites wanted to maintain life as it was, where cottagers would raise their children to take on the craft or trade of the household with their future generations engaged in meaningful, self-organising labour that was rewarded by money. Luddites and their kin perhaps could not imagine alternative economic lifeways as some of us are crafting now. Rapid onset poverty has a way of destroying creativity and thus diminishing the scope to problem solve because the sole concern of destitution is sheltering and feeding oneself and family.
Today, time-poverty, including among the wealthy, similarly destroys the ability to problem solve because responding to a predicament intelligently requires a mind not over-filled with stresses and distraction. To respond to the predicaments of our time, however we are reading them and which ever ones jump out at us and call for our attention, our minds need to be connected to the universal creativity of the living of the world.
The lack of pivot of the Luddites was probably also due to the demotion of subsistence (or non-monetary) economies, again due to prior enclosure laws. While Luddite cottagers, at night, focussed on organising secret militia attacks in numbers that are astounding to consider right across the industrialising midlands and north of England, they could have alternatively spent this time covertly growing crops on marginal or hidden lands, keeping pigs and chickens in simple enclosures, poaching the game and stock of the landed gentry, and generally setting up underground food networks, which also distributed other basic needs to people. This form of covert economic resistance may have resulted in the manufacturers having much less of a population to draw on for labour, and therefore lessening their ability to exploit workers with wages that barely enabled people to survive.
Thirdly, life is not worth living when we are enslaved or owned by others and we cannot augment our own economic forms with kindred souls. Many Luddites had nothing to lose but to gather, swear oaths (a crime considered worthy of hanging or transporting to Australia), and form secret militia groups that would conspire to attack the new masters.
The political classes learned from the political violence the Luddites escalated between 1811 and 1812. After the Luddites were eventually smashed, the new rich manufacturers, the established political elites and the financial class gradually conspired to produce more subtle ways to placate and incarcerate working peoples and turn them into docile factory slaves. Industrial schooling, drugs, alcohol and mass entertainment became important tools of capital that worked on placating and making soporific the rebellious spirit the Luddites possessed. As we know, these are still some of the tools used for compliance today.
Adaptation before panic has been a message we and countless others have been singing for some time now. Collapse now and avoid the rush, as John Michael Greer famously wrote in 2012, precisely two hundred years after the last Luddite was publicly hanged.
The Luddites had no such prior story to inform them. No story of pivoting or reclaiming. Nothing before them had so utterly transformed human life and economy, as rapidly. Today, it’s hard to see anything that the three industrial revolutions haven’t already shat on, so an argument for economic alternatives, village rebuilding and reclaiming a ceremonial species approach should, you would think, have greater agency. So what are the road blocks?
Fear is central to killing off the creative agency needed to spell a new story of economy and culture making. The spell of Industrial progress is bound by fear. What will my parents think? What will my partner think? What will my peers think, if I take off the chains and leave the cave of industrial progress?
The Luddites wanted to preserve pre-industrial life where handmade tools aided cottage productions of beautiful and useful things, and contributed to a village logic that was not centred on extraction and pyramidal hierarchy, but rather was rooted in relationship with local, bioregional, land-accountable practices of life making. Yes, manorial lords stood over village folk to lesser and greater degrees, however, this powering-over was relatively benign by comparison with the misery of early factory servitude. As the spell of industrial progress spread like a plague throughout the world, the word Luddite naturally became a pejorative term employed by hypertechnocivility to shame-label critics.
Although all three of our wheelbarrows have derived from industrial mines, factories and markets – two salvaged from the local tip shop and one purchased new and given to us as a gift – they represent technology that can be replicated by materials walked for and harvested respectfully in nearby common land, which we help care for. Our wheelbarrows are low-impact transportation technologies that enable us to take large amounts of fodder to our goats and collect our winter fuel. We do not take for granted their simplicity or their meaning in recrafting ecological economies of place.
While we currently have access to a car, and we hold a small title of land that belongs to the great industrial legal lie terra nullius, we give no money to Big Finance, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Military or any other industrial complex. We have crafted a cottager, community sufficient lifeway based on ancestral relations to local economy making, brought forward into the context of today and the Mother Country we live within. We don’t dress in period costumes or romanticise what was. Instead we find kinship with our ancestors and community in reclaiming and re-skilling, while recognising the greatest threat to life is the romanticisation of industrial progress.
Rather than violence as our response to the sickly spell of industrial progress, we choose defunding its power. This, for us, is the most rich and rewarding form of resistance, which is steeped in relationships that the Financial Industrial Complex or its challenger, Big Tech, can never have jurisdiction over. Sharing our story, linking with like minds, revillaging, and teaching our lifeways and learnings at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, is all we can do alongside the primary concern of actually crafting economy that refuses to participate in industrial progress. This scale is human and local, and soon to come back offline. Living the change. Living life outside the chains of the cave. Sharing our learnings with others. Dancing in the face of industrial progress without fear. This is our power.
Our wealth is time and relationships and knowledges and skills almost entirely found outside the vast drag net of the Financial Industrial Complex. We generate so little money that we don’t pay tax, therefore we don’t support the war machine or participate in government welfare given to corporates to promote earth- and health-wrecking technologies, such as gain-of-function synthetic medicines or drone warfare or more toxic biotech farming practices.
Yes, we are neoluddites. Yes, we are conspiracists. Yes, we are anti-vaxxers. Yes, dirty hippies. Yes, witches. Yes, op-shoppers. Yes, radical homemakers. Yes, neopeasants. Yes, some of us are quite toothless, repair things and practice self-suturing.
Last week Patrick spoke with Ann Stanley from Food Connect on 3CR radio on a range of topics, from big picture to small. We hope you enjoy their conversation. (25 mins)
How does mother goddess cosmology live through your household? How are you restoring the abundance of Pandora?
Hello from our nestings by the fire, preparing for our community’s winter solstice.
We have some news! Happen Films has just released a trailer of their about-to-be premiered feature documentary, The New Peasants, based on our family and community. To some extent we feel a little exposed right now, as this film shares our life, including a very painful family story, to a much bigger audience. However, we are abundantly grateful to Jordan and Antionette at Happen Films, the composer Tommy Castles, and all the crew who worked on it, and we hope it inspires people in their journeys back to being land-bonded peoples in diverse, gallant, soft-hearted, hard-bodied ways.
Before we embed the trailer we’d like to share with you some of the key films that have inspired us along the way. Each film has a unique theme for us, and each has informed and helped us to journey on this path we call neopeasantry, or subsistence permaculture.
Reclaiming The Babushkas of Chernobyl (2015) speaks to the resilience, meaning-making and determination of Ukrainian peasant women who stole back into their ancestral villages in the exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to live out their lives freely. Despite the toxicity of the land, many have been out-living their fellow villagers who have been existing in the sorrow of disconnection from their Mother Country, while the babushkas have their land-bondedness intact.
Making The Nettle Dress (2023) is a story that integrates grief, beauty, craft and connection to the land. It shows what is possible by unplugging, living simply, and returning to a rooted, earth-conscious making. It gifts us an insight into how our ancestors laboured in hand crafts and how this ancestral technology is complimentary to living with pain and processing grief. This film exemplifies for us a permapoesis approach to life and culture; that is, a permanent meaning-making approach.
Salvaging The Gleaners and I (2000) made by Agnès Varda reveals many forms of salvaging from the wastes of industrialisation, from food to other materials for life making. The filmmaker is not a passive voyeur extracting story from peoples usually unseen in capital-modernity, but a sleeves-rolled-up, camera as witness poet-anthropologist.
Communing Honeyland (2019) is a film of interspecies relating and daughterly tending, detailing what pragmatic and earth-bonded love can be, in a depleted village biome. It is an example of slow cinema, of letting the story unfold, and empowering the subjects – Hatidze Muratova, her elderly mother, and the bees – to speak mostly by their doings. In the shadow of economic and personal hardships, and ecological ruination, Hatidze’s joy for the bees and the true gold and gift of honey, shines through in her eldership, and exposes the vulnerabilities of a desperate, smash ‘n’ grab mentality, a madness that incurs upon her life, which she attempts to understand.
Sovereignty The Seeds of Vandana Shiva (2021) is an honouring of one of the most fierce warriors for the rights of peasants and food sovereignty, that is the agro-ecologist and permaculturist, Vandana Shiva. Not only a public speaker and advocate for a de-corporatised food system, Vandana walks her talk, setting up seed-saving initiatives that directly challenge the privatisation of the world’s food by the US agri-business hegemony and others who perform economic and environmental terrorism on indigenous, peasant and wage-slaved peoples of the world.
Healing The Work (2017) is the radical story of compassion, healing and post-traumatic growth inside a US prison. A group of experienced community volunteers, experienced in men’s work, gather with a group of incarcerated men, who step inside a held circle of masculine vulnerability to discover their inner power, souls, and connection with one another. This film shows what is possible and reveals the necessary processes of deep listening, for the rocky future ahead.
Coercion Schooling the World (2010) is an important critique of western education colonisation being rolled out by NGOs and other missionaries of empire. It reveals the continual patterns of colonial shaming tactics, which the west brings to land-bonded, peasant communities and shows how these missionaries disregard traditional, ecological and place-based knowledges. It examines how western schools are merely industrial-capitalist compliance factories, aimed at destroying diverse cultures in the name of ‘doing good’ and bringing so-called ‘backward’ peoples into the 21st century. In this intelligent telling and reframing of the global educational crusade, the film makers allow we western subjects of capital to reflect on the propaganda that has driven our civilisation, and in the process de-cultured and homogenised us.
Energy The Power of Community (2006) is a seminal film for us. It marks both the beginning of our relationship (Meg’s and Patrick’s) and the start of our permaculture transition. When one of the film’s stars, Roberto Perez, came to our town hall to show it and to speak and field questions, we recall him saying on that night, ‘Grow your own food, catch your own water, say hello to your neighbour.’ We heeded his advice. The film details how Cuba responded to their oil taps being turned off due to the collapse of the USSR. From starvation to permaculture abundance, the film tracks the struggles and exposes the reality of life for all of us in an energy declining future. Although this film is nearly 20 years old, it still exposes the current energy blindness of the west, and allows us to step through it into life after cheap oil, as we descend further into that reality.
Stewardship Fools and Dreamers (2019) follows the life of botanist Hugh Wilson, who with a small cohort of people and a patron, practices radical, low-impact land restoration in New Zealand. This is one of our favourite Happen Films, and Hugh is a true elder – clear-eyed, humble, caring, unfazed, resolute and determined. It is a film that shows how working with and listening to, instead of imposing ideology and big technics, can bring you into right relationship with Mother Country. Hugh’s method of healing trammelled country is largely about getting out of the way and observing what Country is saying by her doing. It also requires seeing out the critics and the judgements. This is a film for those interested in land management and land care in a post-industrial reality.
Medicine Juliette of the Herbs (1998) is a film that gives deep insight into the medicinal wisdoms of author, mother and herbalist, Juliette de Bairacli Levy. It shows how herbalism is powerful medicine for land-bonded peoples and animals, and how this type of medicine belongs to a commons, shared mostly via feminine power. This inspiring film shines a light on our current era of extreme chronic disease, and how masculine-privatised medicine is seemingly ruining our health. Juliette’s book, Nature’s Children, is our first go-to text whenever there is a health issue in our household. Our family stopped seeing doctors 8 years ago, and Juliette’s life work has in part enabled this.
Subsistence Pig Earth (1979) is a film by John Berger, based on his book of the same name. Berger lived with alpine French peasants in the 1970s and wrote about their lives, their culture and how modernisation was decimating their subsistence livelihoods by seducing peasants into debt to buy modern farm equipment. This debt was often the death knell for peasant economy, which was largely free from wage-slavery and bankers dictating the terms for life making. Berger’s critical examination of the hubris of modernity as experienced through the humility and humanity of land-bonded peoples of place, is an important story for the west, additionally because peasant agriculture still exists in Europe. While Berger is reporting the end of these lifeways in the 1970s, he probably underestimated the longevity of the energy bubble that has created what we call hypertechnocivility. Many of us will return to subsistence lifeways before too long, and Pig Earth is a nearby reach back to how most Europeans lived only a handful of generations ago. It certainly doesn’t perpetrate the myth that ‘peasants are only wretched, poor, diseased and stupid people’, and other such propaganda spread by capitalists and Marxists alike.
Emplacing Reading Landscape (2023) is a film that documents the life practice of ecological thinker, permaculture co-originator, friend and mentor, David Holmgren. David’s unique way of seeing brings us back into appreciation for how our most skilled ancestors looked and understood the Mother. David sees with many overlaying lenses – geological, hydrological, technological, cultural and energetic, to name a few. He brings these lenses together into an integrated whole way of looking. He has taught his method for decades, helping others to skill up and be present to what is, in order to know how to work with, and be in relationship with, Mother Country.
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Without further ado, here is the trailer to Happen Films’, The New Peasants (2025).
We would love you share the top films that have most sung to you as you have prepared for a world with far less energy and wealth, but steeped in beauty and abundance.
but we were about to enter a temporary insanity zone. It was 8.25am at the Dharamshala local bus station and the Manali-destined bus driver was saying his prayers to an electric blue Shiva.
We left at 8.30am and drove into the mayhem of the morning.
We hung on,
and our bones rattled to every thrust and jerk, pothole and near miss. Elbows were uncontrolled and often connected with heads,
We had had such a charmed and magical fortnight in Dal Lake. It was time we fucked things up. The bus only slowed up a tad when things got really close,
otherwise it was an 11 hour near-death adventure, the driver maximising the g-forces of the black-cloud-generating-metal-box we were travelling in, racing at gaps in the traffic, breaking hard to avoid road craters or cows or people or trucks, and often driving on the oncoming traffic’s side of the road.
We copped dust and petroleum fumes as they streamed in the open windows.
This rites of passage into the belly of daily experience on a local bus in India gave us further insight into just how mortality-fearing society is in Australia. We felt this in ourselves. It was for us another process of giving up on what we thought was common and logical, and accepting what is.
We arrived late to a hotel that boasted online rooms in the centre of town. It’s true, it was in the centre of town, but not the town we had searched for and thought we’d booked. The room was filthy and didn’t in the slightest way fit the online description, but we didn’t care. We crashed and awoke to a bright new day.
We auto’d several kilometres to Manali and then onto Old Manali,
where we found this lovely, sunlit room.
While in India and other countries in Asia, we have combated the all night dog barking parties by turning the ceiling fan on a low settling and drowning them out with this white noise. While this room didn’t have a fan, it was situated beside the Beas River, which offered a more perfect muffling from a quite different electrical source.
In cooler Old Manali we came across old friends and didn’t realise how much we’d missed them. Old friends like dandelion and clover,
mallow
and apples,
and nasturtium, which we found growing beside cannabis, which doesn’t grow wild back home.
As we walked the streets and hills, we adults foraged a small amount of seeds and took a micro-dose for three consecutive mornings, once again confirming this medicinal flora isn’t for us. But this plant is for some, and Patrick wrote a poem about a notable cultural group who have made Old Manali a transitory home, and who like to partake.
Beside writing poems, Patrick likes to make things with his hands. We came across Tisha in her shop and we enquired about local Manali wool. She told us to come back in two days, and when we did she had just finished the spinning of a 1kg ball, which we bought from her.
Patrick cut some local willow,
stripped the bark and dried the branches in the window,
cut them to size,
put a rounded point on each one, and got knitting.
He was shown how to knit as a kid by his mum, and has passed this skill onto his boys. Throughout our time in Manali, the ball of wool and the willow needles accompanied us everywhere.
Like Woody’s cricket bat being a calling card for a game or a yarn, Patrick’s fibres of both wool and beard have introduced us to many, including Jimmy,
We were never too far from the source here, of everything. Of water,
of the valley of the gods,
of the givers of apples (thanks Raj!),
of Deodara cricket forests,
of pack anarchy,
and pack horses,
of snake charmers
(who turn trickster at the point of the money shot),
and of Gaddi people and their flerds (flock of sheep and herd of goats combined).
The source of our greatest love in Manali where for these humble, present people and their mythological animals.
We watched the Gaddi herd their sheep and goats through the towns,
and set up camp for the night.
We feel such kinship with Gaddi folk and the oldtimer orchardists in Manali.
When we tell people here we grow apples and tend sheep and goats their eyes light up, as did the lady gardening outside her house when we stopped to admire her magnificent creativity.
While much of India is going down to development dogs like Adani and his corrupted political mates, the soul of India remains in the land and the people who tend it. And while trickster energy is present again in Manali, in people and other mammals,
we met many who have not covered their eyes, blocked their ears or masked their mouths to what is going on. Road development, according to Sohan, who ran Dream River guesthouse we stayed at, is the main cause for the increase of flooding and landslides in the north of India, yet it is always reported climate change is the sole culprit in the news. He said, “the road workers are told to dump tonnes of boulders and rock from the cuttings into the rivers, raising the water levels, and the cuttings themselves into the sides of mountains bring about more landslides. The combination of the two in monsoonal rain times are wreaking havoc.”
Tourism and mining are big business here, and better roads mean more money for ‘development’. The social and ecological impacts of such capitalist enterprise in India are palpable. A local Manali man told us that since the 1960s the forest tribal people, the Baiga, have been victims of forced evictions by Indian authorities, often in the name of conservation. The Baiga also live where Adani and co want to mine for coal. With similar intransigence, concrete in India is the answer to all construction today, yet the intensity of rain, the steepness of mountains, and the cost-cutting by business means that concrete structures are forever falling apart. Great chunks of new road or retaining walls are regularly washed away or collapse. The more cuttings into a mountain, the more problems it causes.
It is the old ways being lived in the contemporary moment that charmed us most about Old Manali and this region. Not because we are romantics, but because we are also pragmatic performers of ancestral lifeways in the contemporary moment. Our methods are different back home, and our tools sometimes too, but we also make compost to grow more life,
store and dry wood for the winter,
ferment things,
carry fodder to our animals,
collect apples,
and store them,
and build in ways that don’t cost the earth.
For in our ancestral bodies and minds we are the us in them. There is no and. There are only lives embedded in the processes of lifemaking, in the continuum of living and dying. All the craft beer joints, wifi accessibility, bourgeois coffee houses, demanding tourists and major roads leading to lithium or coal mines will not improve India, as with everywhere else, these things will only impoverish it.
Life in Old Manali and its region is rich because of the attributes of mother country here,
and dangerous, offering a tender closeness with death.
Life here has stung us,
and soothed our bodies in hot healing spring water direct from the source.
We didn’t get to play much cricket with others, although a spontaneous game popped up in the town square on one occasion,
however, we did get to spend most days among giants.
Hoping you too have spent time this week among giants, dear reader. And among friends. Thank you for joining us on this leg.
For those of you following this journey from the beginning, you’ll know this moment has been a long time coming. We are delighted to announce we have arrived in India, and we have several weeks here to immerse, listen, observe, engage and play. So we have more sharing to come. But first, let us go back a little, and unpack how we got here from Nepal.
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We bumped and bounced and crazy’d all the way from Pokhara back to Kathmandu,
passing many intersections of wild, cultivated and industrial Nepal.
We didn’t want to arrive to India by air, we wanted to cross the terra,
but we were given no choice. The Indian government disallows overland travel as first time E-visa applicants. So we reluctantly caught a flight to New Delhi,
spent nearly two hours at the airport going through immigration, enduring invasive biometrics and interrogation, attempting without success to withdraw some rupees, and setting up an Indian SIM card with a US$10 note we had stuffed away in a bag for just such a moment like this. After all the airport hubbub and alienating processing we soft landed into a car
with Manjit, who was sent for us by Jashan’s family. For those who haven’t listened to our podcast with Jashan and Bei, it will give you some context for why we have come here, and where we are going now.
We began this journey hitch hiking, now we have our own driver. Mixed feelings ranging from gratitude to defeat sit with us in the car, as we are transported through the streets of Delhi.
Delhi, where cows freely wander the streets and no one moves or harms them,
where egotistical architecture
punctuates the streets,
where, in the intensity of the heat and traffic, beauty appears in many forms,
and where, on the outskirts of this city, which holds the same population of humans as the entire human population of Australia, a mountain of anthropogenic waste grows day by day.
After a few hours of travelling we stopped at a fast masala dosa joint for lunch. Woody has struggled on this trip with hot spicy food, despite his parent’s encouragement to push through to the pleasure and health side of such gastronomy. After we get the guarantee from the staff that the dish he has ordered is not spicy, it almost always is.
This lunch occurred at 5pm, and we drove on into the early evening, sitting on about 50km/hr due to the roads, which were full of people, animals and machines,
crossing into Punjab state around 7pm, and arriving at Jashan’s family’s farm at 9pm, exhausted and ready for bed. Our friend Jashan, who lives in Melbourne was not there. With little shared language we were embraced by his family and immediately treated to a beautiful meal that we sedentary travellers did not need. We found it difficult to refuse. Patrick struggled the most as the late lunch dosa went to war with his microbiome, but the meal had been lovingly prepared by Jashan’s mother, Paramjeet (left), and aunties (another) Paramjeet and Rajinder (right).
We felt awkward we couldn’t fully honour the love and care that had gone into it.
In the morning before the heat of the day we were taken on a farm tour, stopping first at the produce garden, which feeds the six families who live here.
Jashan’s cousin, who we call girl-Jashan, led the tour. The chilli patch was abundant.
The family is vegetarian; their main source of animal protein is from cow and buffalo milk, from which they make curd (yoghurt) and paneer (semi hard cheese). The cows and buffaloes are given fresh cut fodder twice a day. The fodder iys jowar, a relative of corn grown for cow feed. It is grown in small stands throughout the farms (see right of below photo)
Throughout the district farmers cut jowar and transport it on shoulders or by bicycle,
by bullock cart,
or by tractor.
The jowar is brought to the dairy to be threshed,
to turn it into fresh feed,
and given it to the cows and buffaloes, who have fans above them to keep them cool and keep mosquitoes and flies off them.
Mosquito nets are drawn across the dairy from before dusk to after dawn, and the buffaloes bathe for an hour every morning and afternoon.
We found the husbandry of the cows and buffaloes immensely respectful, providing cool and protective shelter, nutritious food, and herd companionship,
in exchange for milk,
for both the family and the local market,
manure for fertiliser, cooking,
and for methane gas production.
The main crops that support the family both in the monetary and subsistence economies are rice and wheat. The grain that makes the chapati bread is dried the traditional way,
and accompanies each delicious meal.
But it is currently rice growing season.
On this 15 acre farm, some of the rice fields are bordered by medicine plants such as turmeric.
Cannabis grows wild on the road verges,
as do medicine trees such as neem and various fruit trees. Many of the activities during the day are manual. Bodies are used often, not just machines, and as a result of this and the fresh farmed food, people are well here.
With Patrick’s unhappy gut, Karamjeet, Jashan’s father, pictured here with Woody in nearby Patiala,
put him on a strict diet of pomegranate from the garden,
and peeled apple for a few days. The apples come from cooler Manali, north of Punjab. The diet worked a treat and we were all then able to enjoy the wonderful dishes that we were served each day.
Jashan’s boy cousins, Harsh and Harmission, played endless hours of cricket with Woody,
from 6-9am in the morning and from 4pm until dark in the evenings.
Friends of Harsh’s came to join in, and the ball sometimes took some time to find when it was hooked or ramped over the wall into the rice fields.
Finally in India, Woody just couldn’t get enough cricket.
This game that came to the subcontinent with the elite of British colonialism has been hacked, enjoyed and claimed by Indians across the economic spectrum. It is a game that brings people together, and is a language itself.
On our last evening Jashan’s uncle, Hakam, took us to other farms in the district. At this farm a clutch of puppies had been born,
and although feral, the farmer (below left) had been feeding and looking out for the mother.
We are enjoying the reverence for life here, and the connections we are making with Jashan’s beautiful family and neighbourhood,
We have had so many sweet moments in Nanansu, Punjab.
We were treated with such respect and care. While change is in the air with the young generation – meet the delightful Jaskirat –
there is beauty in the old ways that is solid and noble in the culture.
We are sad to be leaving this family farm community. We’ve had a wonderful first week of landing in India in such a supported way.
We are now well nourished, landed, rested and ready for the next leg of our adventure.
