We hosted our third July online session last Thursday night, Community Sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies. Over a hundred people signed up and many asked goodly questions that expanded the consciousness of the subject. We hope you enjoy this next offering.
Here is the audio-only version,
or you can watch it.
We hope you are enjoying these sessions, and that they are adding to your deliberations, plannings and responding to the predicaments of our times.
Our next session is Joyful resistance, an online tour of Tree Elbow, our 18 year old permaculture home. We look forward to explaining all the main hubs, hacks and behaviour changes that have enabled our transition to living well with little money.
We hosted the first of our four weekly online sessions, on Thursday. Thank you to all those who joined the call, asked goodly questions and brought along your warming presence.
Please find a clearing and enjoy our latest offering, A ceremonial approach.
Here is the audio only version (1hr presentation + 30mins question time),
and here is the video.
We have three more sessions in July, so if you haven’t yet booked a spot here are the links.
Hello Dear Readers, we are excited to offer our first online course and to share with you an invitation we’ve received to travel to the UK in August.
The University of Edinburgh has invited Patrick to examine a doctoral thesis and for Artist as Family to present The New Peasants and host a Q&A for students. While we ordinarily do such gigs via the internet, an opportunity to return to our ancestral places of origin to meet audiences and share story and food will be a joy we haven’t in the past permitted ourselves, due to the environmental and monetary costs. However, we are hearing the call and responding with intention.
Some of our ancestors come from the Luddite Triangle in the mid-north of England as well as from Scotland and Ireland, and Meg was conceived in a caravan in Wales.
While travelling we would like to screen and Q&A The New Peasants at community gatherings in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland, and in order to fund such a story-sharing adventure we are offering the following online mini course.
Here are the four sessions on offer, which you can either join without paying or by donation. To register, please click on the links below. You are most welcome to book all four sessions or just the ones that speak to you.
Session 1. A ceremonial approach – guiding men’s, women’s and grief circles, vigils and other community ceremonies. July 2 (7pm – 8.30pm AEST) Join Patrick and Meg as they offer their experiences and processes for hosting community gatherings centred on deep listening, soul communing and connecting with the sacred.
Session 2. Ecological participation – guiding community forest education and wild play groups for children. July 9 (7pm – 8.30pm AEST) Join Patrick, Meg and Woody as they offer their experiences and processes for stewarding a bush school.
Session 3. Community sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies. July 16 (7pm – 8.30pm AEST) Join Patrick and Meg as they share all the ways they have unchained themselves from monetary incarceration and co-crafted local gift economies, starting with a few households and growing it to over 80 households over two decades.
Session 4. Joyful resistance – online house and garden tour (the nuts and bolts of our systems). July 23 (3pm – 5pm AEST) Join Patrick and Meg as they walk you through their home and garden, explaining all the main hubs that have enabled their transition.
If you can’t make any of these sessions, not to worry, as they will all be recorded and made available online. And if you can’t make the sessions but you’d like to donate to our August travels, or to our work more generally, you can do so here.
If you are in the UK or Ireland and would like to host a screening/Q&A or another type of speaking event with us in August, please feel free to get in touch.
Over the years people have enjoyed our travel writings, so yes we will be blogging our adventure again this time.
Whether you are fast approaching winter or summer solstice, we wish you warmth, the possibility of connection and we trust you are filing you baskets.
Hello! We are very happy to share the news that The New Peasants is now available worldwide to watch. Last night we attended a Q&A screening in Hepburn, the 15th screening in Australia, which was MC’d by our friend and elder, David Holmgren. Now the film can be watched anywhere at anytime.
On Kinema, the movie platform where The New Peasants is hosted, you can privately watch the film ($5) or host a community screening. We are very happy to attend online Q&A sessions after community screenings of the film, so please get in contact with us if you’d like to host to such an event.
We are also open to groups getting in touch with us to organise house, garden and forest tours, so again, please let us know and we can discuss it further. A reminder we have two public house and garden tours coming up. There are still a handful of places left. Go here for more details.
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.
Jordan Osmond from Happen Films lived and laboured with us for six months while he worked on The New Peasants.
Film tour and Q&A sessions
We are joining Jordan from Happen Films (and Catie Payne from Reskillience podcast) on a road trip in August to help present, The New Peasants. After the film is screened at each of the following locations, we will join Jordan for a Q&A session. Come say g’day!
Sunday 27 July, (world premiere) Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, Cinema Nova, Carlton, Victoria (bookings)
Friday 1 August, Theatre Royal, Castlemaine, Victoria (bookings)
Saturday 2 August, Palace Regent Cinemas, Ballarat Victoria (bookings)
Friday 8 August, The Pivotonian Cinema, Geelong, Victoria (bookings)
Thursday 14 August, Soldiers Memorial Hall, Stanley, Victoria (bookings)
Saturday 16 August, Far South Film Festival, Merimbula, NSW (bookings)
Thursday 21 August, Palace Electric Cinemas, Canberra, ACT (bookings)
Jordan and Catie will continue touring the film up the east coast with screenings in Sydney, Narara, Dungog, Bellingen, Lismore, and Brisbane. Head here for the event details of these screenings, to watch the trailer and also to organise a screening for your community.
Artist as Family would welcome being billeted in Stanley, Merimbula and Canberra, or anywhere between these locations. Please get in touch if you have a spare room or a patch of earth for us to pitch our tent in or near these locations.
Here are some reviews from those who have previewed the film.
A resplendent open window into the lived experiences of conscious simplification, connection to land and an intentional community compass.
– Uncle Charles Davison, Jen Ridley and family, Indigenous knowledge keepers
With this documentary Happen Films are revealed as masters of their craft honed over the years through an ethos of DIY minimalism to create a powerful and loving portrait of life lived to the full in the relationship to place, kin and community.
– David Holmgren, permaculture co-originator
The New Peasants offers an engaging and inspiring insight into one family’s local response to the predicament of our times.
– Helena Norberg-Hodge, writer and filmmaker
Beautiful portrayal of lives lived with purpose, beauty and courage in all its rawness, pain and worthiness.
– Su Dennett, permaculture teacher and elder
~
Online Q&A with Artist as Family
Before we go on the road in mid August, we are looking forward to meeting you online for our inaugural,Come ask us anything events. Please send us a message if you’d like to join either or both of these two sessions, and we’ll send you a link. Both dates are filling up with a goodly assortment of folk from all over.
Saturday 9 August 7pm – 8.30pm (AEST; online)
Sunday 10 August 9am – 10.30am (AEST; online)
Jordan Osmond from Happen Films lived and laboured with us for six months while he worked on The New Peasants.