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.
As many of you already know about us, it’s the everyday local labours of living an earth-honouring economy alongside a wide-ranging understanding of geopolitics that informs our makings, our permapoesis, and our wellbeing.
To acknowledge this next phase of rupture in the unfolding collapse of the global village, we present two offerings for the week. First, by Meg, on some of the food medicine that fuels our poesis, and the second a prose piece by Patrick offering a powerful response to the immorality of western hegemony, ruled by the Epstein class.
In this piece, Meg invites you into our kitchen to share a typical seasonal lunch.
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And, in the following piece, Patrick calls on the possibilities of active peace-making and resistance. (Audio 2:40mins)
A message of Peace and Resistance (from a family in transition)
As moral peoples of the world, let us all stand against the genocidal psychopathy of western leaders. Let us not be divided and distracted by the corporate-billionaire class establishment media and the empire’s state broadcaster puppets. Let’s stand against evil men who start wars and escalate mass suffering with bullshit justifications. This is an opportunity for the west to reconnect with Homer – compassion for ‘the other’ – that built western culture 2700 years ago. Let’s reconnect with an earth-honouring cosmology – the sacred feminine, which human cultures of place have lived within for most of human life. Let’s stand together to rid the world of war mongers, their lobbyists and businesses across the industrial, collapsing global village, not with violence, but by recreating local economies which take back sovereignty of our basic needs, serve our local biomes, and give the Financial Industrial Complex, who profits from mass suffering, nothing. Take away their destructive dollars by boycotting industrial food, medicine and energy productions, earn only a little so as not to be taxed and have your tax dollars support the war machine, and reap the rewards of relocalisation by becoming more connected to our home places, more healthy and more aligned in our souls. The future is radical localism. Defund the bankers that fund the missiles. Let’s work and be together. Create community sufficiency, and start breaking the machines that incarcerate us. We may not be able to bring justice to the aggressors of war and the perpetrators (or bystanders) of rape, but we can choose to give them nothing. We are the majority. Let’s only give our money and time to small local cottage industries, get out of debt, downscale to do it, find others to establish non-monetary exchanges with, relearn the skills our ancestors knew, and live again without conveniences the machine has hooked us up to. Conveniences keep us enslaved to the bankers realm, and therefore enslaved to the war machine. Liberate our hearts and our lives! Let’s no longer be complicit subjects of empire.
As always, we welcome your responses, feedback and shares.
Oh, and we still have some places on our April 4 tour. Come join us!
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.
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.
Desert rock became finer,
and more intriguing.
We stopped for lunch. Woody stayed on the bus and slept, while his parents entered a little Ladakhi café with fellow travellers.
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.
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.
Neopeasantry is our way of describing permaculture subsistence, a reaching into a glorious poverty – an abundant, anarchical economy that enables rich culture to spring forth; an earth-first, bankers last economy-culture. That’s neopeasantry. Not capitalism, not communism, more akin to a fair-share distributism, only not a theory but lived.
Today’s post specifically focuses on the abundance that is feral carp and rabbit, here in Djaara Mother Country. You can switch these two species for any weedy or ferally plant, mushroom or animal that is abundant in your region. While the information is specific, the spirit of incorporating unwanted abundance (abundance that capitalism is blind to), can be translated across endless species, riches and relationships, that is if we change our attitudes to things we’ve been told aren’t very good. Here, we intend to explain our techniques of procurement and processing, and share a recipe or two, including Magpie Meg’s famous carp mousse (or feral fish paste).
In this post we will cover how we come by this food, honour it and every part, be the biological controls of these tenacious critters, and generally participate in the flow of gifts that is life inside the thrum and wild grace of Mother Country.
Mother Country herself – the giving-taking earth who enables so much life to be made and unmade – is a sophisticated ecologist. Not an ideological one who sits smugly in the neoliberal academy. Her wisdom goes beyond correct and incorrect species and industry imperatives, and although she is perennially wounded and polluted by the narcissism of a now globalised kidult economic force, this Mother is more interested in those who are ecological participants, those who see her, those who listen, and those who sing divine gratitude into her ground for everything she gives. This is when she ceases to be dead matter, ever ready to be exploited, and instead becomes the Mother of all things.
There is no fear nor favour, no moralising goddess beyond the little walled city of neoliberal materialism, Mother Country is endlessly more vast than this tragic reduction of life. While ferocious and terrifying at times, she doesn’t wreak skygod fear and war-like terror into souls that ignore or exploit her. The mining industry carries on apace unharmed by her, is materially enriched by her, but miners die in their souls independent of her will. It is their souls who become forever unsettled ghosts in Country. Her consciousness extends beyond a childish right and wrong story. She deserves no cult, no pagan worshipping, no church built. She is already church. If she requires anything from us it is just a returned animist culturering, to be in sync with her and thus be a people in participation, wide-eyed appreciators, embodied in her patterns and gifts, which she gives in exchange for language, culture, food, medicine, fuel and magic.
Ferals are some of these gifts. The way we honour all her gifts is directly related to the gratitude we feel for Mother Country, which in turn informs the culture and rituals we perform as community. There is no appropriation here, the culturing is direct, felt, inspired, microbial. It is an exchange of presence.
Our economy as subsistence permaculturists or neopeasants is not based on scarcity. We don’t have anxiety about not having enough money like we once did, although we are still dependent on the monetary economy for about 20% of our needs. This is mainly for foods and resources we cannot grow, husband, witch, procure, wild harvest, or hunt ourselves. As many of you already know, we do not call this self-sufficiency but rather ‘community sufficiency’ – a term we’ve been advancing for a decade now to give power to the relationships that help us transition from narcissism to accountability, from wage-slave consumerism to radical homemaking, from soul-dead materialism to singers in the church of Mother Country. Relationships in this new/old economy are key to the unshackling from the banker’s realm. Trust, acceptance, skills and resilience are our focus.
If we keep developing language to describe our actions as we deepen them, then we can perform new/old forms of economy and culture making. For the language we use either incarcerates or liberates us. If we talk about economy as one thing – a thing in which the bankers alone puppeteer – then we are already ensnared. But step-by-step, season by season, relationship by relationship, word by word we can transform our worlds of the world into economic cultures that are dynamic, giving, in-service-to and receiving. We do not have to be anybody’s slave, and we don’t have to rely on unseen slaves from far away to augment our economic and cultural reality. Believing that we must conform to the universal wanking bankers is swallowing the bourgeois propaganda we’ve been force fed since birth.
We say, Enough! to that. Let’s grow up!
No more Taylor Swift narcissism or gratuitous alcoholic romps that never did fill the great hole in our souls that never needed filling. Rather, here’s the uncle figure at the end of the street who teaches the teenager his drumming, the grandmother who hands down her Polish pickle recipe, the brother who demonstrates his method for field gutting rabbits, the neighbour who shows the child the art of catching carp with compost worms, the story telling adventures of elders. Expensive, bourgeois workshops are not necessary, going into debt to buy land to farm is not required, tooling up can be done in a sleeves-rolled-up spirit of salvaging and repairing. An open-heart, a passion for not being enslaved, and making space to learn and share new skills, is liberty.
Rabbit
Big thanks to Jordan Osmond for the next two pics.
Some of the loveliest moments Patrick has experienced as a dad these past years, is when he’s been out hunting with Blackwood. As day recedes into night, the nocturnal world transforms their psyches in a myriad of ways. Father and son have lain on their backs beholding the stars, waiting for rabbits to return to the fields from their burrows, after gunshots had spooked them. A few rabbits before dusk are always a gift,
but the underworlding of night brings many more treasures. Any opportunity for Patrick to pass on what he’s learnt is the action of the gift in flow. In this picture Patrick demonstrates the field gut, which is the removal of the intestines not long after shooting to save the meat from spoiling.
The rabbits, with pelts still on, go into the fridge overnight, making skinning easier the next day.
It’s not entirely true rabbit meat is devoid of goodly fats and therefore of little nutritional value. The older the rabbit, the more pockets of fat it will have stored. Countless blessings rabbits! We honour and praise you as appropriate food. No industrial inputs grew you up.
In such honouring, all parts have meaning: The intestines left in the field for scavenger animals and soil communities to process, the heart, liver and kidneys used to make pâté, the bodies wrapped and frozen for winter roasts and stews, and the skins stretched and salted,
then sun dried,
to be later tanned and turned into useful textiles.
Other ferals, such as European wasps, help clean off the excess meat from the pelts making the scraping process later on, less work. While we are not engaged in colonially-constructed perverse incentives, meaning that we don’t intentionally help to grow these ecologically domineering, albeit undervalued species, we also don’t hate on them, nor any other more-than-human ferals who have settled as feral kin in Djaara Mother Country. We also eat European wasps.
Blackwood and Patrick went wood collecting yesterday and were set upon by angry wasps for the inconceivable crime of splitting logs too close to their nest. Blackwood received a sting on his leg and Patrick had wasps attempting to sting his neck but fortunately they couldn’t penetrate his beard.
In the past week, Blackwood took the life of a rabbit. His first. He stretched the pelt using a frame on a stand we found on the metal pile at the local tip.
We people, our species, can both love and kill animals. The two expressions are not mutually exclusive. Supermarkets have fed us the hubris and estrangement that they are. On the day after his first rabbit kill, Blackwood accompanied his mum to a neighbour’s home to put away their chooks and pet rabbits. He cuddled so much love into those dopey rabbits. That same night we watched Watership Down for our weekly movie night, and a few days later Blackwood was out again on a hunt with his dad. We, of our species, can hold many paradoxes, stories, ways of relating in the world, and this is a beautiful craft.
After stretching his first rabbit pelt, Blackwood then followed his mum’s recipe to convert the raw wild rabbit meat into jerky – a light, preserved and portable food to take on walking or cycling adventures – a food which can easily be rehydrated in the billy.
Meg’s rabbit jerky recipe: Cut the lean meat into thin slices and place in a bowl. Add spices such as cayenne pepper, cinnamon, cumin, sumac and minced garlic. Splosh in a whole lot of tamari and mix it all together. Cover with a plate and place somewhere cool for 12 – 24 hours. A fridge or cellar is fine. Then place the strips on racks and dehydrate until the meat is fully dry. A low oven (50 degrees C) or dehydrator will do the trick. When dry, place the jerky pieces in a jar, label and store.
Carp
Between the storing of wood and preserving of summer’s abundance in the cellar, we have also found time to go fishing. Here is Patrick’s simple set up for catching carp with compost worms and a hand line. Notice, in the image below, the line between the two stakes is being held down by the weight of leaves still attached to a very light branch. When these leaves rise up it indicates a fish is on, or at least taking the bait.
Carp is often devalued in Australia. If carp isn’t put onto ice packs in an esky or cooked on coals straight away it releases histamines throughout the body which gives it an unappealing flavour. Dealing with this is the first hurdle for enjoying this bountiful critter.
The second is the cooking process. Carp, like barracuda, has many small ‘y’ bones that make it, again, unappealing to eat. So we have developed a strategy to process every part, including the scales, head, tail and bones, only excluding the guts. First up, we cut the fish into chunks, add tallow (or any goodly cooking fat; not harmful vegetable cooking oils which we examined in a recent post), garlic and onion, and bake for an hour in a warm to hot oven,
then we put the parts into a pressure cooker, add a few cups of water, and put on the stove for a number of hours, intermittently checking the water level
Over this time, all of the parts of the fish and alliums melt, and Meg then weaves her magic…
Meg’s carp mousse recipe: Place the pressure cooked fish and allium mix in a food processor and add herbs such as parsley or oregano (fresh is best, but dried is good too), then salt and pepper. Sometimes Meg adds some olive oil if the mix is a bit dry. Process until it forms a cake batter consistency. Best spread on bread or crackers, but also yummy straight from a spoon. Store in a jar in the fridge, or freeze for when abundance wanes.
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So many skills of economic resilience inform others. When we learn to make chicken liver pâté, we know how to make bunny liver pâté. When we know how to make goat bone broth, we know how to make bunny bone broth. When we know how to make chick pea hummus, we are well on the way to making carp mousse.
What undervalued riches of life do you value, Dear Reader? How are they part of your transition away from economic incarceration? We need not pay for much, but we need skills and knowledges to live this way. What are those skills you value so highly? We’d love you to share your alternative economic lifeways with us, even if you’re only just beginning down this magical, defiant and liberating path.
