A story by Blue Wren (15 mins; read and/or listen).
Not being able to find a suitable myth to share for winter solstice, given the emplacing context of our lives in Djaara Country, as the longest night approached Blue Wren listened and opened, and in came this story. This offering was just one of many stories, poems and songs shared on the night of our community solstice celebration. We hope you enjoy this insight into our ceremonial night in our deep winter forest commons, held by Mother Country & Father Fire.
Once within a fairly timeless land, Mother Country and Father Fire ruled the earth-well worlds of the world. Wedded in exquisite union they lived harmoniously for all of days. Father Fire only a subtle disruptor, a gentle gleam in the dark, wet primordial forests of the Mother, and brought to earth by Grandfather Sun to warm, to illuminate and cook, to potash, and help make ceremony in the luscious belly of Mother Country.
One day Mother Country and Father Fire brought to life a new child, who they named Brother Eucalyptus. He grew out of the light, dusty potash of his father and the rich dark humus of his mother. He began life on the margins of great wet, shade-lit forests. Born a needy, troubled soul he soon began fighting with his siblings, especially Sister Southern Beech who ranged across her Mother with great presence. He felt unseen by his accomplished sister, and would often be found moping about on the rare scab lands of his mother.
His siblings, on the whole, found him crass and quite acidic, and they increasingly turned their backs on him, and from this grave wound of rejection he developed poison in his roots that he began to use on his Brothers and Sisters, releasing it whenever they came close. At first this didn’t matter too much, his territories were small compared with Sister Southern Beech. So, initially, no one really noticed, but gradually Brother Eucalyptus took more and more of his mother’s nutrients and life force and land for himself, and everywhere he grew the ground dried and hardened. He discovered that his inflaming disposition was conducive to making wildfire, and so he conspired to steal fire-craft from his father so that he could both poison and burn his overbearing sister and populate himself in her ruins.
One Brother, however, he could not poison or burn very well. Brother Blackwood – an inspired peacemaker – learned how to play companion to his greedy brother. Because Brother Blackwood could see his Mother suffering and depleted, he taught himself to swallow surplus quantities of nitrogen out of the air, plant himself next to Brother Eucalyptus wherever he was, and release the precious goods into his brother’s roots. Brother Blackwood taught Sisters Silver and Black Wattles to do the same, and soon they took away some of the burden off their mother. While this gift helped their mother to keep the cycles of living and dying rolling, Brother Eucalyptus continued to expand his range, causing ever greater drying and unruly fires.
For the first time in their long union, Mother Country and Father Fire began to argue. “I am the dark, Father Fire,” said Mother Country, “all the shade-filled forests, rich humus, subterranean springs, night countries and underworlds of my body enable more life to be lived. That boy is destroying me, stealing all my earth-givings. You have given him fire and he is burning all my beautiful daughters and sons. Enough is enough!” But Father Fire hadn’t given his errant son the magic and responsibility of fire. It had been stolen, like it had been stolen from Hephaestus, the industry god, by Prometheus in another world. In frustration Father Fire retorted: “Do not accuse me woman, I would not do such a thing! That boy is disrespecting me too; he is out of control!” And so went the argument for an age, backwards and forwards went their unhappiness. All the plants and fungi, the lichens, mosses, and lillies, the kestrels, wedgetails, fantails, magpies, wrens, ravens and robins, the brown snakes and black, echidnas, ringtails and owls, and all of life suffered as the parents warred, and Brother Eucalyptus continued on with his wound-rage.
Mother Country became weaker and weaker, Sister Southern Beech almost entirely disappeared, and neither of the parents could bring Brother Eucalyptus into alignment with life.
It was around this point in the story, the First People arrived. Gradually they learned to live within some of the world’s most depleted soils, and they thrived along the coasts due to the abundance of Grandmother Gaia’s many saltwater countries. After some time of listening, languaging and making ceremony, the First People began to better understand the familial feud between the great mother and father and their narcissist son. So everywhere they lived the First People dreamed with Mother Country and Father Fire and co-created rituals for deep listening and subsistence lifeways to live well with the communities of life so as to heal the rift between dark and light, heat and damp, the sacred feminine and sacred masculine, and in doing, bringing the parents of the land back into relationship.
And through this three-way alliance they developed the wisdom of fire-country land stewardship, which had the result of arresting the main harms of Brother Eucalyptus. The way the First People harnessed, respected and applied Father Fire to Mother Country, understanding each region of her in relation to fuel loads, air currents and zephyrs, ground moisture, and the propensity for potash to grow more woody life, deepened over time, and depending on where it was applied, the First People modified their practice, which brought abundance back into the belly of Mother Country. There was to be no significant return of Sister Southern Beech, and old Uncle Holly and Aunty Ivy had long since gone, but despite the morbid depletion of Mother Country, the communities of life that make life worth living began to live again, and people and plants, birds, snakes and pollinators, reptiles and marsupials developed new ways to live a good life among the scant humus and acidic soils.
Sure, there were usual human skirmishes between First Peoples, between different tribes and clans, men and women, but the unhappy colonial story of Brother Eucalyptus now guided all comers. He operated as a precautionary tale across the land. No one wanted to go back to the suffering when such total recklessness and selfishness reigned. So, for many millennia a tapestry of cultures and customs, languages and ceremonies were traded with life, with one another, and First People developed sophisticated lores pertaining to the laws of the mother and father, and a deep and abiding peace spread out across this first great era of energy descent. Even Brother Eucalyptus found some peace. It did not stop his over-taking, burning and poisoning ways, but he felt more himself in the bosom of life, rather than the sole destroyer of it.
Then, half a million new moons later upon the now spongey and rain-absorbing perennial-bread grasslands of the Mother, like a wicked spell unleashed to once again test life, wretched and trammelled First Peoples from northern lands began to arrive. The First People here came to refer to these malnourished and decultured folk as Second Peoples, because they could see they’d lost connection with their great mother and father, and therefore with the dark and the light in dynamic union. Tragically, the Second People didn’t realise how fallen from this grace they had become. They believed they carried the light better than anyone and they swore against the dark, were frightened by it, wanted to kill it off in any way they could. Their transported ideologies feared dark consciousness, feared the secreted mysteries of the divine feminine. These light-obsessed poor souls brought with them technics and poisons that were godlike and dangerous for such misshapen peoples to be playing with, and they brought an attitude of superiority, despite their wretchedness.
Much like in the early years of Brother Eucalyptus, they set out to dominate Mother Country, rob from her, and deplatform the ceremonial illuminations of Father Fire and the rich mother-bonded cultures of the First Peoples. Instead of opening with curiosity to the wisdoms of the earthly parents, they brought only one skygod with them who seemed to diminish the great Mother and her daughters. The Second Peoples had received their unilateral story delivered by the messenger, War-Brother Wheat, who had first come into presence when there were many gods and goddesses in the north who tended life. His affect eventually led to the stripping of animist cosmologies and to the development of horse-mobile armies of scale. Some Second People came to here in chains, some desperate to overcome poverty, some were what some call ‘free’, and some were mercantiles civil-ready to coordinate a mass exploitation of what some still call ‘resources’ – that is the gifts of the Mother.
Second Peoples caused untold suffering far worse than in the heady days of Brother Eucalyptus’s fury. For two hundred years most Second People found it hard to listen to Mother Country and Father Fire, they didn’t even consider it. Though some found them a novelty, they also didn’t listen to First People, and either didn’t look or joined in when First People were persecuted, debased and massacred. However, slowly and quietly Mother Country seeped her wisdom into the Second Peoples who lived in her – the farmers and hunters, the gardeners and gleaners, the swimmers of her dark snakey waterholes and the underworlders of her caves, remnant forests and bones.
Eventually the Second People felt the call to make rituals and ceremonies that honoured Mother Country and Father Fire, which derived from the gratitude they felt by living, and the sorrow they felt for the disrespect and war-mind their people had transported. They began quite naively by worshipping Brother Eucalyptus as pure and original and distinguished, despite the many new deserts he was making in other worlds at this point. And they, these well-intentioned folk, hated on the newcomer trees they’d brought with them such as fire-calming Brother Oak, who’d made immediate friends with Brother Blackwood and who brought alkalising, deciduous leaves to Mother Country to help her make humus and balance the acidic and depleting effects of Brother Eucalyptus. Likewise, another newcomer, Sister Hawthorn, brought the possibility of habitat for possums and rich medicine fruits for gang gangs and humans alike. Sister Willow was another brought to Mother Country, and who in their civil-centric guilt began to bulldoze and poison with impunity, as though they could cleanse the creeks and rivers of their forebears’ sins. This was before Second People realised the importance of Sister Willow as a nurse tree trying to restore gold- and livestock-ravaged waterways, and before remembering her gift as a basket tree when they began to walk back plastic bags.
As Second People started to turn away from Roundup-Ready War-Brother Wheat, and the other monocultures of the mind they’d transported, they began to walk with renewal and humility in their steps, alongside their First People friends and kin. One such ceremony they came together to perform was the winter solstice – the divine honouring of the feminine dark at Mother Country’s longest hour. At this ceremony they reflected upon the majesty of Mother Country – her givings, her wisdoms, her riches and her grace.
On the occasion of the winter solstice they, the people of the land, alongside Brothers Eucalyptus, Oak, Pine and Blackwood, and Sisters Cherry Ballart, Sweet Bursaria, New Holly and Hawthorn came together to sing, share story, behold the longest night and feast on the fruits and meats of Mother Country, while warmed and illuminated by the old glorious sunlight of Father Fire.
For this is a time for reculturing harmony and love between feminine and masculine, dark and light, both within ourselves and across the bodies and psyches of our kinship other. It is a time to make humus, make rituals of gratitude and return, and to honour Mother Country for all her gifts, and for teaching us how to heal from the wounds of war, and live and love alongside her within the many underworlding possibilities of her dark.
~
Thanks to Jordan Osmond for the cover photograph and Catie Payne for the use of her microphone.
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.
~
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.
A few weeks ago, three young women from For Crying Out Loud, a women’s circle based in southern Djaara country, returned home to a community ceremony after a three night and three day solo fasting vigil. Such a vigil we call Listening to Country. The three women, who were accompanied by Meg as guide, took only warm clothes, a sleeping bag, 10lt of water and a tarp. They left in fair sunlight early on Thursday morning, got rained on heavily on the middle day and night, and returned on Sunday morning to fine weather and a community hearth.
It’s difficult for the limits of writing to convey the beauty, vulnerability, love, respect and kinship at this event, for those us witnessing the returning women, and for the women themselves. So many tears, so much openness of heart, so little hubris and pretension, so much humus and humility, and deep inner knowing.
Nourishing food nourishes. Open-hearted people nourish. Mother Country perennially nourishes, and teaches while offering no judgement.
To behold such transformation in both individual and village – in the integration of solo vigil with the supporting, witnessing village – is powerful business. One of the fundamental problems of the machine-driven civilisation we were born into, at least to our gut-heart-minds, is that spirit rants and raves with big industrial energy inputs, while soul gets little time, little affection, and little quiet. A Listening to Country vigil is an opportunity to rewire our civilisational hubris in order to be humus enough to listen to our indigenous souls, as contiguous parts of the Mother.
A year earlier, five men headed out to also vigil for three days and three nights, with Patrick as guide. These men are from FireChoir, a men’s group that meets at the same fire circle as the women. While in Country for this vigil, Patrick wrote the following longform piece at the invitation of a special issue editor who was inviting papers on land management practices for an Italian conservation journal. The piece was rejected as it didn’t fit the materialist criteria of the current scientific orthodoxy. We present it here in a spirit and soul of neopeasant heterodoxy, and the necessary breaking down of colonial forms and function.
Listen to Patrick reading it (approx. 50 mins).
Forests make us human: the vigil and a ceremonial species approach
by Patrick Blue Wren Jones
Dedicated to the generosity and grace of Djaara Mother Country, the vision of White Serpent, the ceremonial hearths of Father Fire, and all the many returnings of Blue Wrens.
Glossary of terms Country – meaning sacred and/or ancestral land in Aboriginal English. i.e. on or in Mother Country Digi-industrial – portmanteau for digital and industrial relating to the fusion of these technics
Hypertechnocivility – extreme tech civilisations that are estranged from biological relationships
Life making – regenerative and holistic approaches to living as ecological participants
Mainstream – the collective consciousness of a culture manipulated by various forms of power
Mythopoetical – the production or regeneration of myths or mythos in a culture
Neopeasant – new peasant; reclaiming epistemologies of land-bonded recommoning
Newcomer – newly arrived, weed, feral, settler et al., especially related to species
Oldtimer – indigenous; long established, specifically related to species
Permaculture – permanent culture; perennial biome based cultures; applied ecology cultures
Permapoesis – permanent making, specifically in cultural, economic, social and ecological forms
Recommoning – reclaiming, re-making or regenerating biophysical commons
Reculturing – composting civilisational (anti-cultural) forms and practices while crafting cultural ones from the matured compost
Safetyism – an extreme belief that suffering, pain, discomfort, grief or death can be avoided; as per transhumanist ideology
An offering (in place of an Abstract)
What I offer here is a ceremonial approach to land, an alternative cultural and economic story in relationship to ecology, a story that is emerging and evolving, that is bringing forward and reculturing old/new lifeways in the face of collapsing industrial hypertechnocivility.
In this reculturing and reclaiming I am listening to my Indigenous friends and teachers, I am listening to the land, and I am listening to my ancestral land-bonded soul-body, already indigenous/peasant.
It is necessary, therefore, I depart from civil or city-centric academic convention to be able to offer this story.
My labours, here, reside within the ecological humanities, they are what I call a permapoesis – a permanent making – a bridging of arts, crafts and sciences that is not neoliberal, technocratic or materialist, but something other.
I request of the reader, therefore, a staying-with as this telling unfolds, a staying-with as I share with you the ecological, social, economic and cultural intricacies of this story, of this multi-pronged ceremonial approach to land.
For generations people and their tools, systems and animals have managed and shaped land in ways that either established long standing or permanent cultures of place or boom-and-bust civilisations where there was overshoot of the resources of the land. Over the past century, the scale of our tools used to transform land has escalated. In this technological ascent, our species has more than less lost an abiding kinship with land, and thus lost an intelligence in relation to land that can only be gleaned through a labouring with, and celebrating in ritual, art and ceremony, biological life.
Ceremony, I have found, grows gratitude for life. Gratitude is the foremost sensibility required to be in love with the world.
Whatever pejorative things can be said of our ancestors – the propaganda and policies promulgated first by feudal elites (early enclosures), monotheists (witch hunts) and later by the early political economists or capitalists (see writings such as, The Invention of Capitalism and Caliban and the Witch) – there can be no denial of a long human tradition of land-bonded animism in western culture, where ritual, reverence and ceremony played a significant part of human cultural life, especially in how we relate to land and are in relationship with its many communities.
My offering here is a telling of how I, my family, our immediate neighbourhood, our volunteer students at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, and some in our broader community are recrafting a land-bonded, ceremonial approach to ecological succession, bushfire mitigation and weed management, while at the same time tentatively, sensitively recommoning on unceded Aboriginal land, restoring a subsistence economy approach through these activities, encouraging the return of indigenous biota, while understanding the ecological gifts of newcomer species from a more diverse ecological perspective.
The send-off
We gather for the send-off at the fire circle in the community-managed forest I helped instigate ten years ago. This forest is in southwest Daylesford, a small town in southern Djaara Country. Djaara Country is nearly the size of Wales and in colonial terms is part of the state of Victoria and thus part of the nation state of Australia, which was formed under the British colonial legal lie, terra nullius.
Much of the forest that encases the fire circle is a blend of an oldtimer and newcomer species. This forest is what some ecologists call a novel ecology, but more accurately it is a recovering forest.
We’re gathering on a sunny autumn morning for a ceremony. This fire circle holds the traces of many gatherings, celebrations, ceremonies and rituals.
Forest & Free is a bush school I facilitate with my life partner and fellow founder of the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Meg (Magpie) Ulman. Every Monday morning we gather here with around 20 non-industrially schooled children, and begin our day by listening to the forest and then to each other as we introduce ourselves by our forest names (names of flora, fungi and fauna, or other parts of the forest that have individually caught our attention or curiosity) and tell a little of the week that’s past and what we’re alive to right now.
Twice a month men gather at this circle to listen, to sing and to share what is occurring in our lives. When it is the men who gather it is called FireChoir. The songs we sing come from out of the fire, crafted by the men who sit in circle here.
Then, every month the women gather at this fire circle. Their group is called For Crying Out Loud.
When the men and women gather we start our respective processes by heading out into a part of the forest to listen, clear the road dust of the day, and connect with Mother Country. In the summer months this solo listening before a gathering occurs in the gloaming. In the winter we are all in relative darkness in the forest, lit only by the moon, and the fire.
The fire circle in this forest holds the many traces of a community of human souls reculturing a land-bonded epistemology for we mostly settlers in this part of Mother Country. Indigenous friends and elders have also gathered here with us to share story and language, and Djaara mother, culture holder and emerging elder, Bec Phillips, has passed on her respect for this new community vigil of deep listening and fasting we’re about to begin.
Six of we FireChoir men stand with bags packed on our shoulders. My bag holds slightly more things. The five men I’m taking into Mother Country have just four items each – a sleeping bag, a tarpaulin, warm clothes, and 10 litres of water. I am about to lead them deep into the Wombat Forest, past the last houses of the town, past the sheep and the goats, the roads and the busyness of digi-industrial modernity, for a three day and three night vigil. To deeply listen, to shed what needs to be shed, to welcome in what needs to be welcomed, to fast, to watch, to merge, to grieve, to be with what is.
Weeks earlier I’d invited each man to bring a question or an intention to this process. As we stand in silence inside the fire circle readying ourselves to leave, we observe the small send-off party walking down to join us.
They too come in silence. When they arrive Magpie speaks on behalf of the supporting kin who are seeing us off, witnessing this threshold moment. She praises our courage to go out and do this deep listening, to press pause on modern life, and to step into an unknown place. I call this place Fear Country.
“The body seeks comfort,” she says, “but it is from discomfort that we can grow,” and finishes with, “Thank you for going, thank you for taking this journey.”
Each man is then asked to stand shoulder to shoulder, facing in around the fire pit. There is no fire this morning, just the cold coals of previous rites.
Magpie then asks each of the supporters of each man to stand behind him, and invites each man to speak his name, a process we’ve learned from being participants of the Castlemaine Rites of Passage movement.
“I am Blue Wren,” I say, for this is my forest name given to me by Country on a solo vigil many years ago.
“We support you, Blue Wren,” says Magpie and my youngest son Blackwood, named after a long-living medicine wattle, Acacia melanoxylon, indigenous to this land.
Each of the men give their names and each of their supporters publicly declare their support for them while they are in Country. Silently we embrace our loved ones and I lead the men out of the circle and up the slope to the southwest. Tears fall as I pound the FireChoir goat drum three times with intention, announcing to our community and to the forest, our departure.
We will spend the next three days and three nights in silence.
The winged ones
After about half an hour of walking, as the cacophony of traffic coming from the A300 began to subside and the forest became mostly eucalyptus species of peppermint gum (Eucalyptus radiata), messmate (Eucalyptus obliqua), and yellow box (Eucalyptus melliodora), with an understory of thinly scattered young-lived wattles (Acacia sp.) and a forest floor of fallen wood, wallaby grasses (Rytidosperma sp.), various mosses (phylum Bryophyta), and wattle matrush (Lomandra filiformis), I receive a tap on my shoulder from Carillo, the man immediately behind me. He points up. We all stop and behold the majesty of two wedge-tailed eagles encircling us.
A few years ago while gathering on land just north of here to grieve the loss of a dear friend, the permaculturist and podcaster, Dan Palmer, about 60 of us stood in silence around a ceremonial fire and beheld Bunjil, the name in Dja Dja Wurrung for the wedgetail eagle, the creator of the world.
On that day, Bunjil circled over us several times, reading that a ritual of importance was taking place. Tears of grief and of belonging began to flow from we mourners gathered on that farm.
In the radiant sunlit forest, we men were now beholding another overhead circling. This time two Bunjils. I felt an acceptance for, a trust of, and a presiding over this process by the majesty of these powerful birds. It was clear the other men felt this too.
A few weeks earlier, Magpie and I had led the Forest & Free kids to this part of the forest. I had wanted to scope out places for the men to come and vigil, and set about initiating for the children a tracking exercise where I tied blue cord on saplings every hundred meters or so, and they had to find their way back.
The purpose of this was twofold: to teach children how to mark and follow a forest track, and for me to find my way back into this part of the forest so as I could lead the men to their vigil spots today.
Not long after the visitation from the two Bunjils, I found myself having led the men off track. I motioned to the five to stop where they were, and I went off to the north to investigate.
I walked for about five minutes in this vast part of the forest, not picking up the blue cord track. I kept hearing the word, trust, emerging in my mind and I stayed relaxed. As I came back close to the men, a scrub wren appeared before me on the forest floor. She was so confident in her demeanour, which arrested my attention. I came up close, only about a metre from her, and she was not frightened by me in the slightest.
I greeted the little bird and watched her hopping on the twigs and fallen leaves in front of me. I followed her, taking me south where I soon picked up the blue cord trail. I motioned for the men to follow and we carried on to the camp that would be my home for the next three days.
From my camp I led each man to his respective vigil spot. In the instructions earlier in the day before the send-off, before we went into our silence, the men were asked to remain there until I collected them on the fourth morning and on arriving were invited to share with Mother Country their intentions or questions they had brought with them.
Once all the men had their spots, I returned to my camp, undressed, sat on the forest floor, listened for a good while and spoke my own intentions for coming. They were twofold. Firstly, to watch over the men as they vigil, checking on them each day without disturbing their solo process, and secondly, to use this time to write this paper.
Unlike the men, I had a little food with me, a sleeping mat and small hiking tent. A few more comforts that would keep me rested and nourished so as I could spring into action in case something went wrong.
I have been on a number of these vigils by myself now, and know how the emptying out of food and the rewiring of one’s nervous system by the forest is a pathway to deeply beholding the intelligence, wildness and grace of more-than-human consciousness, but is not conducive to acting in a time of emergency. Hence, as I was called by the younger men to lead this process, I understood that I could not participate in the same way as them, as I was ultimately responsible for their well being. Because of this, I brought additional things in my pack. My journal and a pen coupled with the quietude, enabled this piece to be written outside the hubbub and busyness of the harvest season back home.
Lighting the fire
While the five men are without fire for their respective vigils, as the holder of this process, I began to set a small fire, which over the course of the process, I tended.
I don’t prepare to light this fire until near dusk on the first day, and despite some autumn rain a few weeks earlier, the leaf fall on the ground is tinder dry to touch. With my fingers, I rake a small clearing and speak again to Mother Country, and I speak to the fire I am setting, which I call Father. Both are parents to me now.
“Father fire, parent tool of our species, you, like Mother Country, have given culture, ceremony, story, language, and technology, for which I am grateful and mindful. Witness our process, illuminate what it is that needs to be shown clearly. I light this fire as the holder of this vigil, and I feel already held by you both.”
These words are not a liturgy, they are not rehearsed, they come through a stepping away presence. However, as I was raised Christian, I detect there is, at times, that influence in my sacred-making speech, and I’m reminded of a key permaculture principle, ‘to integrate, not segregate.’
Once the fire is lit, which ignites quickly with dry leaves and fine twigs, and a goodly fuel load is collected to feed it, I come into presence with a fear of wildfire. A fear that looms large in this nation-state. A fear that is not often opened to in the dominant culture and thus a fear that often instructs an overtly fear-based mindset in relation to how land is managed in Australia.
I felt the first small pangs of this fear, acknowledged it carefully, and set about responding accordingly, extending the area I’d cleared of debris, bringing my 10 litres of water close by, but more importantly watching astutely how the fire was responding to the dry earth and browned-off mosses around it before adding any more fuel.
I began my forest practices as a forager of mushrooms. Around 18 years ago I met Magpie, and when we moved in together, forest walks were already important to us both. To move the stuffy airs of our domestication we’d walk to oxygenate our bodies, process the busyness in our minds, and return home with a greater integration of mind-body.
I have always found forests have this gift for people who dwell, labour, walk or forage in them. I think it was the English storyteller, Martin Shaw, who said something like, ‘homes, towns and cities are where our spirit lives, but a forest is where our soul resides.’ This is old knowing, regardless of who is saying it. It belongs to an epistemology of peasant wisdom akin to my grandmother’s sage advice: ‘Always let a healthy dog lick your wounds.’
Our souls and the remnant communities of a once diverse microbial consciousness in the forests of our guts keep us connected to our indigeneity, despite our minds being perpetually colonised by a materialist-science modernity, or what the ecologist-permaculturist, Vandana Shiva, calls ‘patriarchy’s project.’
About 10 years ago I was returning home from a foraging walk and came across about 30 country fire authority (CFA) volunteers prepping for a burn. The technical and attitudinal environment of these men I can only describe as militaristic in their approach. In the all but common language of colonial crusading, they were fighting the war on weeds to save the town from wildfire.
Fuel reduction burns in Australia are not the same thing as Indigenous or traditional burns. The former are generally hotter, overseen by clock time, a war-room approach, and they often char the forest.
Victor Steffensen, in his book Fire Country, speaks of Indigenous burning as a potash event, not a charring one. From my understanding it is the potash, the potassium, that gives to the renewal of the forest floor, whereas raw charcoal from the charring that occurs in hotter burns, can rob the plants of nitrogen as the char automatically draws it up.
Before we return both potash and charcoal to the forest as an offering, we first soak in urine the char, which has been sifted from the potash and then crushed. The urine thus pre-loading it so it acts as slow release nitrogen composite. A gift of return to the forest for the generosity of wood energy to power our home. This simple product that we make is a crude form of activated biochar and offers many gifts to an ecology besides slow-releasing nitrogen, including habitat for microbial soil species, sequestering carbon pretty much indefinitely, aerating compacted earth, and retaining water in soils.
Victor has been a part of the returning consciousness of traditional burning techniques in recent years. This knowledge was handed down to him by two senior Aboriginal men who had not lost the continuation of Aboriginal fire culture and knowledge because they were hidden from the colonisation process that devastated thousands of generations of Indigenous scientific expression, which still has little status today.
Victor, as an Aboriginal man himself, now moves around the country imparting to Aboriginal people and newcomers alike what he has learnt and recrafted. What the CFA volunteers did to the forest on that day was reduce the fuel load of fire enhancing blackberry (Rubus fructicosus) and gorse (Ulex europaeus) for about 18 months. A short term win for bushfire mitigation on the south west edge of the town, but it was disastrous for many of the forest’s communities.
It was at this time I made a private declaration, a pledge: that I would never give the CFA or any other government agency responsible for the forest, a reason to come back.
Immediately after their burn I noticed partially incinerated ringtail possum (Pseudocheirus peregrinus) dreys in the newcomer hawthorns (Crataegus monogyna) and later discovered all the small birds that nest in the blackberries that could have been burnt too, such as Superb fairywrens (Malurus cyaneus) and New Holland honeyeaters (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae), because the burn took place in the spring.
It was David Holmgren, friend, neighbour and co-originator of the permaculture concept who pointed out to me the prevalence of the apex thorny newcomer plant species – blackberry, hawthorn, gorse – in our area that have been adopted as habitat by a plethora of oldtimer species. David pointed out to me the ringtail possum dreys in hawthorns, which appear as scruffy, fully enclosed nests with two small holes for exiting and entry.
That hawthorns have been given no ecological status as habitat trees by state or academic institutions, means forest and fire managers on the ground can burn and poison them using heavy-handed industrial tools, completely disregarding this new guild relationship between newcomer tree and oldtimer mammal.
What I have observed as a creature who dwells and labours in the forest, is the relationship between tree and possum is mutual because the hawthorn provides protection to the possum from powerful owls who eat around 250 ringtail or brushtail (Trichosurus vulpecula) possums a year, while in exchange the possum returns its waste nutrients to the tree.
Thirty years previously, I was a forest activist. I would come home from blockades and other forms of protest, stopping in to a major supermarket for my food requirements, and when I passed an English oak (Quercus robur), European hawthorn, elm (Ulmus), elder (Sambucus nigra), birch (Betula sp.), apple or other ancestral sacred tree species growing in my town, I would either ignore or scorn them.
To my young ideological mind these species were ‘incorrect’, and the only ‘correct’ species were the ones that were here before colonisation. I remember carrying much shame in me at that time. Shame about being white skinned, shame about buying my food made in far away monocultures, and a shadowy shame for my hatred of newcomer species that were sacred to my ancestors.
All of this shame eventually became productive. It led me to permaculture and then to permapoesis. I couldn’t express it like this then, but in hindsight I was deeply longing to be an integrated creature of place, and slowly I came to understand what that looks like, what it feels like when the economy you make informs the ecology you tend, and the ecology you tend informs the cultural and social forms you produce.
This is how I ended up living and teaching subsistence permaculture and crafting a rich lifeway we came to call neopeasantry. We have become new peasants over the past two decades, living well below the poverty line, choosing to recommon farming and forestry as integrated things, choosing to leave the village, the town and loved ones, and begin this process of deep listening in the land, making ourselves students of Mother Country, of Father Fire, observers of all the animate and inanimate earth others we journey with, listening to our indigenous souls for how we proceed with life making.
The purpose of such a vigil is so when we return home we have deepened our understanding of how our life-making impacts others, and how our gratitude for all the life makers in our locasphere is the same warp and weft as the gratitude we have for our own lives. For life making and making a living are not the same thing.
Life making forestry
Beginning this process into life making rather than making a living, paralleled for myself and Magpie a leaving behind of many industrial technics. Car ownership, airplane trips and supermarket foods were among the first things we went without in order to free ourselves of the time we were spending working for money to pay for these technics.
So many things followed. With simple hand tools, pruners, loppers and slash hooks I began to chop and drop the returning woody, nitrogenous-rich weeds after they began to reappear in earnest 18 months after the CFA burn.
Our neighbours Bob and Per saw me out working and we got talking about what I was doing and my pledge to not have the CFA return. They joined me from time to time, and as a family, when we hosted permaculture students, we’d all go into the forest and board down the blackberries with discarded plyboard from the local tip or waste station.
When we started the Forest & Free bush school, I would often lead children into the forest to do what I eventually called ‘blackberry surfing’. Each child would have a ‘surf’ board and they’d go down a steep, blackberry crowded gully stomping their way down the enormous rough surf of bramble waves, trying to stay onboard.
On one occasion I recorded half dozen kids from our Feral & Free program – an earlier iteration of Forest & Free – flattening the size of a tennis court in twenty minutes. The kids’ ages ranged from 6-12 years old. I would return these lively, fun-seeking kids to their parents of an evening with bramble cuts and scratches, exhausted. But the kids kept coming back each week, and their parents would reflect to me it was the best part of their child’s week.
Children, when not stunted by an ideology of safetyism or a fear of harm, know better than most adults today the transformative power, energy and aliveness discomfort brings to them.
Blackberry surfing does not kill the plant or disturb the soil. No poisons are used in this management through mammalian play. Surfing never occurs in the nesting seasons and because both dry and living canes are put on the ground it means that sunlight can once again reach the forest floor. On these steep valley slopes, the blackberry canes have been holding up erosion since as early as the1860s, when ecologies were uprooted and often denuded in the pursuit of gold.
What I, my family, neighbours, the Forest & Free children, and volunteer students at our School of Applied Neopeasantry began working on was to help speed up ecological succession, which was already in process. By not disturbing this process industrially, we were allowing the seed bank from diverse species in the area to drift in across the flattened blackberries, catch the energy of the sun, and sprout.
This human cohort of children, young adults and adults that constituted the biological power of this community-managed forest of around ten hectares, often found the remains of little bird nests and possum dreys in these brambles as we worked to get them onto the ground. It was not about obliterating this important habitat, but managing small areas at a time, giving every entity in this forest ecology time to adjust. It was necessarily a slow and steady approach.
As a result of our labours providing greater access, more of us would enter the forest and interact with it, until eventually a fire circle was constructed and community gatherings began to take place there.
In effect, we built our own ceremonial nest, which has become a place of communitarian nurture and people care, a place to listen to Country and be witnessed and listened to back.
Bringing in the goats
On the other side of the town, I was aware of a permaculturist and natural earth builder, Vasko, using boer goats to mitigate weeds beside another mined out ecology, Cornish Hill. Vasko was born in Macedonia and living in his birthplace village until he was seven years old. He and other children would take the goats and cows out on the common land each day to browse and graze. His parents brought him to Australia after this time, but slowly he found his way back to herding goats and entering a similar process as ours of recommoning on unceded Aboriginal land.
Vasko became aware of my work across the hill, and with another new goatherder with eastern European ancestry, Brad, we formed a goat cooperative we called Goathand.
To this partnership I brought my hand tool techniques and my boyhood experience of handling goats, and Brad and Vasko brought in a shared herd of Boer goats (Capra aegagrus hircus). Without permission from government agencies, we began work on combining hand tools with goat browsing to reduce the dominance of the apex pioneer species – English broom (Cytisus scoparius), gorse and blackberry.
To our more political left-leaning environmentalist friends we were reducing the weed load. To our more right- or centre-leaning friends, we were developing a dynamic bushfire mitigation practice, although as mentioned in the Happen Films video about our forest work, not everyone was onboard initially.
However, what we were doing was much more than political or ideological team sports. We were advancing the possibility of non-industrial community-led custodianship of commons, while our respective households in the cooperate were paid for our efforts in highly nutritious goat meat, a subsistence economy made simply by reducing weed and fuel loads.
Before tending these meat goats, my family had mostly lived off the animal proteins we could grow on our quarter-acre permaculture plot – poultry meat, eggs and honeycomb – because we’d given up eating bought abattoir meats and industrially processed animal proteins several years earlier. The only red meat we consumed up until this time was either road-killed kangaroo and possum or meat slaughtered respectfully by permaculture farmer friends who tended their own animals.
In this conversion of woody weeds into highly prized meat with no industrial and little monetary inputs, these beautiful creatures and we people were slowly transforming this weedy forest into a grassy woodland, as biological agents.
After two years of combining goat grazing and hand tools in the forest near to our home, I did a survey of oldtimer species that were returning to Mother Country courtesy of the returned sunlight on the forest floor, and the blackberry canes providing a rich humus for renewal. I counted 35 oldtimer species returning where once only blackberry grew (see our Djaara flora count after managed Boer goat herbivoryvideo).
Before our shared goat-people labours, blackberry and gorse dominated the understory of this particular part of the forest. The blackberry would use mid-canopy newcomer trees such as hawthorns and wild apples (Malus pumila) and oldtimer trees such as sweet bursaria (Bursaria spinosa) to climb upon. In some areas the canes would climb four or so meters in height before dying off and leaving a dry tinder wick to ignite potential crown fires in the upper canopies of eucalypts should a bush fire come through.
Working beside goats that were pulling down these wicking canes with a slash hook, disposing of the green parts and stomping down the remaining canes, is when I fell in love with these intelligent and sensitive ungulates.
Blue Wren and Woodison, 2018.
More like dogs than sheep, goats will bond with humans after trust is established. It was soon a part of the organisation of Goathand Co-op to eat the goats who we didn’t establish bonds with, for they were often the ones who went under or over temporary electric fencing we were erecting and moving around the forest, and headed for neighbour’s gardens.
As we had no legal tender to be in this forest, and only a social license from both neighbours and Aboriginal elders, we did not want to jeopardise this arrangement. We knew the local council could cease this work with just one complaint from a neighbour. Keeping goodly neighbourly relations has been a large part of keeping this model of neighbourhood-based ecological participatory farming-forestry alive.
The point of keeping it alive, apart from the gifts it brings us personally, is to offer it as an example of forestry-farming or farming-forestry to inspire young people who would otherwise not be able to purchase land to become subsistence ecological participants while at the same time performing a social and ecological good.
With the boarding of the blackberries and with the goats slowly devouring large bramble patches and crushing the canes underfoot, it has, as mentioned, enabled the dry fuel load to reach the forest floor and as a result this lignin-rich material of the dry canes can break down and create a beautiful rich humus.
We have witnessed empirically that if blackberries are on the ground, either put there by people or goats, ecological succession can progress. When forests are poisoned, bulldozed or burnt in non-traditional ways, ecological succession – the healing process of ecologies – begins back at stage one. This is our exception to industrial forms and policies around forest management.
In a completely different ecological, rainfall and climatic setting in Te Waipounamu – the south island of New Zealand – botanist Hugh Wilson found that gorse plants were acting as nurseries for the regeneration of native forests. His botany is not founded on domination and warfare against weeds, but rather deeply understanding ecological succession by observing what the land was saying. The Happen Films video about his work called Fools and Dreamers, is a companion video to our work, and companion work to David Holmgren’s Spring Creek community project near to us in Djaara Djandak, and Vandana Shiva’s permaculture, goat and seed-saving farm, Aranya in northern India.
While these modest examples are mostly ignored by academia and government, who are seemingly tithed to the growing monetary demands of large globalised industries, we are nonetheless crafting these examples in the wake of the American-European empire collapse.
The necessary composting of dominance and greed as the central cultural mythos of what I have come to call hypertechnocivility requires an earth-first, Mother Country epistemological pitchfork. Reinstating the fore place of the Mother and the sacredness of all life in the face and thrust of neoliberal transhumanism, is what we and many others are working towards.
The return of the grasses
What we have seen after ten years of tooled people and 5 years of managed herbivory is the return of grasses, lilies and other more delicate oldtimer species. While not all the returning species are oldtimers, the diversity of species has grown significantly.
The attempt of transitioning fire-prone woody weeds in the forest to a grassy woodland ecology is our intention. My pledge that I will never give the CFA or any other government agency the reason to return to this part of the forest has now been maintained for over a decade.
Local actors from government agencies thankfully respect our work and leave this community project alone despite them having legal powers to remove us. We have gratitude for this.
All the while zero dollars are spent on this work, with the exception of some electric netting, solar packs to run this fencing, and the occasional purchase of an animal.
I’ve heard in the drier parts of Europe, especially in Spain and Portugal, where villages have been deserted and traditional peasant activities such as goat herding to eat down the fuel load no longer occurs, the fire seasons are getting worse. When this is reported, I have noticed, it seems as though it is always climate change alone that is the culprit, rather than urbanisation and an elitist urbane ideology that believes industrial schooling is the only form of education and the only path that can possibly produce happiness and fulfilment in young people.
Such an uncontested attitude has contributed to these villages being abandoned and the ecologies that surround these villages becoming no longer managed. Over the last several decades of aggregating hypertechnocivility, young people have been told it is shameful to live simply with the land and those doing this propagandist telling have lost sense of their own ecological education and thus connection.
The film Schooling the World examines this civilisational hubris and gives context for why the West cannot adequately understand or respond to ecological and climate crises.
As new peasants we are returning home, not home in ancestral Europe but home in a peasant-indigenous soul sense where family and food, biomes and ceremony make us people of the land. Make us land bonded.
Over the years we have kept informed Djaara leader Bec Phillips and elder Uncle Rick Nelson, who both live further north in Djaara Djandak, about our forest labours and engagements. Bec has spoken to us about a potential burn in this forest by Djaara women who are bringing back traditional burning to Mother Country. These cool burns favour indigenous biota, whereas the hotter burns favour gorse and blackberry regeneration.
Uncle Rick Nelson speaking at the fire circle, 2020. Photo by Stewart Carter.
Making sure the goats don’t graze down emerging oldtimer flowers and seeds or overgraze and compact the land, we move the animals regularly to avoid this. As the grasses have returned, we now have a flock of sheep to assist the herd. We have added a flock of Persian and Dorper (Dorset-Persian crossbreeds) sheep and they too both browse and graze, although in a different ratio to Boer goats.
As mentioned, our flock herd or flerd, never stay in one place too long to over-impact the land. As we are not a business we don’t need to keep growing the numbers of ruminants. Because these animals have four stomach chambers their digestive biomes ferment the weed seed load in Country from as much as 100% down to about sixty percent depending on the species of plant.
Indigenous browsers such as swamp wallabies and eastern kangaroos are seen now in greater numbers in the forest as more grass returns.
A length of ponds
The forest is still recovering from the trauma of gold mining and other forms of settler misuse in this area. Gold mining brought European farming practices without understanding the nature of the terra.
The little nameless creek that runs along the eastern side of this forest, not far from the community fire circle, was gutted out in the 1860s and has been functioning as a meandering drain ever since. In heavy rains, the southwestern part of the town deposits all its fast-running stormwater there. Blackberries and willows and oldtimer fishbone ferns do much to slow this water down, so when it runs into the Wombat Creek it doesn’t dump too much sediment in it.
This creek, after emptying into the Wombat, then runs into numerous larger creeks and rivers until it empties into the mighty Murray River (Dhungala, Murundi, Millewa/Milawa), which then empties into the ocean in South Australia, hundreds of kilometres downstream. Hence this little recovering creek drain is a very upper tributary of a large and complex river system delivering cool mountain water to the lower reaches.
It is my wish, before I die, that platypus and native perch return to this stream ecology.
A number of years ago we had a unique student volunteer come to the School of Applied Neopeasantry to stay. Ed had recently been at the Mulloon Institute in Canberra, an education centre based on the work of farmer-ecologist Peter Andrews. Andrews had observed over his long practice of ecological agriculture he called ‘natural sequence farming’ that by creating leaky weirs across degraded and eroded creeks people could slow and spread big rain events, and could therefore rehydrate the land significantly by holding up the water long enough so it could absorb deeply in the land and eventually return a chain of ponds effect that held water permanently. Effectively, he too was speeding up the ecological succession stages for stream recovery, which the Mulloon Institute advances well after his death.
Ed had brought with him Andrews’ craft of building a leaky weir that wouldn’t cause further erosion, and in that week we had together built the first one. Our family, with neighbours and our student volunteers, went on to build another five over that year. There is still another ten or so to build down to the Wombat Creek, but I have stopped this work for a period in order to observe how these first six are operating in Country.
Within a short time, perhaps six months, frogs began chirping down among the ponds. Wood ducks and mountain ducks took up residence fairly quickly, and the fishbone fern population doubled in numbers in the first year.
Now, four years later, the diversity of flora, fungi and fauna species have grown, responding to the more permanent water availability, especially through the dry summer months, and with the suppression of the apex newcomer species while maintaining enough bramble to be used as habitat.
Uncle Rick beside one of the community made weirs, 2020.
In closing
David Holmgren, Bec Phillips, Uncle Rick Nelson, Peter Andrews, and Vandana Shiva, and many more have been the wise human elders and brains trust that have informed what has happened in this Djaara Djandak forest. But it is the forest Mother herself that has been my most significant teacher.
Learning to listen to Mother Country and to put away my civilisational hubris, European sky-god judgments, and scientific ideological categories of correct and incorrect species, has put me on a path of curiosity, relationship and reculturing since my pledge to stop the domination war approach of conventional forest management coming back to this little place now loved and frequented by many.
So far this path has brought great riches, neighbourhood bonding, nutritious food, a deepening, emplacing sense of being home, and all the little griefs along the way that have grown me up.
Being out here with these men for these for three days and nights has offered me the time to both hold what needs to be held and share what needs to be shared. This is my offering to this journal focussed on Conservation. But rather than conservation, which potentially speaks to a museum-ing idea of the biological worlds of the world, I offer a new peasant approach as a first generational base on the way back home to deep indigeneity.
Without belonging to a loved patch of earth we cannot possibly know how to act as conservationists, ecologists, farmers, musicians, poets, teachers, builders, medicine people or lovers. Ritual and ceremony in small everyday and large community forms is, I believe, our way home to wisdom. Without these things the microscope, data modelling, expert class hubris and AI will continue to destroy the forests of the world. If we are not returning deep listening and ceremony to the practices of our respective forestries, we will continue to abuse them, call them externalities, commodities and resources, and remain blind to what they have to teach us.
The welcome home ceremony (a postscript)
After three days and nights alone without food, I collected the five men and brought them back to where I’d been camping. I had all my things packed up, and I invited the men to put their packs beside mine just outside a ring of fallen, curved branches I’d assembled the night before, and to wait at the little entrance way.
Inside the ring I’d lit a ceremonial fire and arranged six squarish granite rocks I’d hand selected in the forest, which were positioned symmetrically around the fire. At the threshold of the ring, I asked each man if he was ready to leave behind what he needed to let go of and whether he was ready to begin the long walk home and into what he wants to welcome in on his return.
I then invited each man to sit down on the rock that was closest to their place of vigil and asked them to share what was alive in them right now.
This process went for about an hour, and as the men shared, I handed out a ceremonial bowl of rabbit and kangaroo jerky broth that I’d made for them earlier in the morning. To see their bodies come alive with this gentle, oldtimer-newcomer nourishing broth from Mother Country and their excitement for heading home to their loved ones was a joy.
It took an hour to walk back down through the forest, at one point crawling on our bellies through a mine tunnel underworld, which we had entered on the way there three days earlier. It was a threshold moment crawling through the Mother, coming to the other side with our gifts of vigil and silent contemplation, crossing Sailor’s Creek, going under the bridge below the A300, up an embankment, along a verdant forest goat track, and all the way towards home until we came to goat shelter number three, where I had instructions from Magpie once we got to there to start beating the goat drum. As soon as I started beating the drum, the other men beat their empty water containers, and we made joyous drummings for the next few minutes. Our drumming was the trigger for my young son Blackwood and his friend Syd to go running and telling the community that we were close by, and as we approached the top of the little descent that runs down to the fire circle we stopped our drumming because we could hear the singing of our community. As we approached we could see about 45 people there to greet us and witness our return.
We each stepped through a threshold made of community bunting with tears welling in our eyes, greeted by one of the brothers from FireChoir, Jean-Marc and Magpie, who was directing proceedings. She asked us whether we were ready to step back into community. There were no complaints.
When all of us six men sat down on the log stumps around the fire, Blackwood brought us a cup of goat bone broth and miso Magpie had fermented. This nourishment was exquisite. We drank while beholding the radiating love of kin and community. Magpie welcomed us home, spoke of the enrichment such listening brings home into family and community life, and invited me to speak first.
On the second day of the vigil I’d come across a polypore mushroom, a bracket fungus called white punk (Laetiporus portentosus) while checking on Mick, whose vigil spot was furthest to the west in the forest. That morning at the ceremonial fire with the men near my camp I scarred this semi-dried fruiting body as it caught fire for a time. It didn’t matter it went out before we returned from our walk home. I knew my European indigenous connection to walking fire with dry punks like this, and I knew of local Aboriginal uses in the same way. This was my starting place. I offered the scorched punk to the Father Fire and spoke of the connection this forest punk was making between the two fires and between Aboriginal people in this land and the indigenous ways we all possess in our souls, our microbes and in our culture before it was trampled by colonisation.
“This is a first gift we bring back into this forest hearth of community,” I said.
Each of the men then spoke a little of their respective learnings and gifts from the vigil and after each had spoken, their support person came forth and handed them a simple necklace made from string and a polished disc of hawthorn wood. For most of us in attendance, with ancestry from Europe, Asia, North Africa and North America, hawthorn is a significant heart medicine tree from our indigenous medicine commons, and a tree that has been regarded a sacred tree of fertility and young love in Celtic lore.
Mick was the last man to speak, and when his partner, Sophie came to adorn him with his hawthorn necklace they stood under a young hawthorn on the edge of the fire circle and announced to the community the coming of their first child.
~
Postpic to the postscript
Here is permaculture elder, Su Dennett, holding Mick and Sophie’s first child, Bailey Acacia, at the welcome home ceremony for the women, April 2025, with young Florian looking on.
We understand this post is an hour-long, and thus quite a commitment to read it or to listen. If you have been able to make tie for it, we’d love to hear what’s moving through you now. Comments on this blog are a gift, and we thank you in advance if you’re called to comment.
Are you needing renewed motivation and focus in your transition to a more resilient lifeway? Are you curious about how our family lives at home with little reliance on civilisation’s industrial machine? Do you feel economically trapped? Do you sense economic and political troubles ahead and want to better future-proof your household? Are you wanting to live with less debt and more relationship with the living of the world? Are you wanting to say, Fuck off! to all the con men and women (the captains of industries) in the very way that you live, and do this positively? Do you want to embody your politics and values and thus dance your talk? Do you want to learn simple hacks for living with less money and more time? If one or more of these questions resonates, then our all-day house and garden tour might well be for you.
Over the day we will cover self and community care,
re-commoning,
annual vegetables cultivation,
annual vegetable food harvesting,
fermenting
and storing the harvests,
alchemising all manners of substances from one thing
Date: Sunday 17 November, 10am – 4pm, Djaara Mother Country, central Victoria (address will be supplied with booking).
Topics covered include: community-sufficiency, household economies, replacing fiat with compost, subsistence resilience, access to land, ecological economics, permacultural neopeasantry, fermentation for both thrift and health, organic food that low income households can afford, green gym (or active economics), children in the household biome, transitioning to a non-reliance on predatory capitalism, future proofing by skilling up, food-medicine and active disease prevention, trading fear for empowerment, self-care and unintentional communities and neighbourhoods, composting ideology with joyous pragmatism.
The tour includes: Sharings from Meg, Woody and Patrick; morning tea; a neopeasant lunch with special guests, permaculture elders Su Dennett and David Holmgren; afternoon tea; and plenty of time for questions.
Cost: $100 per person (this is the concession price; feel free to pay more if you would like to further contribute to our work).
Who is it for: The day is informationally dense so we request 16 year olds and up only, please. Participants will need to navigate uneven surfaces and at times rough terrain.
We’ve been pollution-sick again, which has been inhibiting our enjoyment of this rich and colourful country.
Patrick and Woody have had it worse than Meg, but each of us have have struggled in our own way. Blackwood is also experiencing homesickness: “I miss our food, I miss my ball on a string, and I miss my friends at Forest & Free.”
When booking transport over the past 12 days in Thailand, we have found it best to stick with people on the ground and avoid the national railway or bus websites. While digital, cross-language communications might improve over time, it currently doesn’t match pointing, grunting, nodding, shaking, laughing or any combination of body gesturing to get on the right train, ending with a khawp khun kha/p!
What we’ve also found difficult about being in this beautiful country, apart from our own participation in what we dislike most about global tourism, is the homogenisation process that is creeping in everywhere there is development. An example of this is the Safety First signage that proliferates through the country.
We think the ‘Safety third’ ethos of the early Burning Man festivals is wiser. Without a little daily danger or risk, our bodies switch off, they lose an alertness, which we think pre-disposes people to becoming accident-prone and even compliant. We’d prefer to live in a world where sharp metal lugs stick out below bus seats,
and rusty metal blades come out of the footpaths,
and a billion or so unleashed dogs inherit the streets by day and night, than live under the cult of safetyism. We’ve loved beholding the autonomous culturing of dogs in Thailand. No one fears them here. When we think of life back home, walking with Zero around Lake Daylesford, there is always one, if not five people who recoil with horror that our little scruffy is off a lead. Oh, Zero! you would love it here!
How western imperialism appears to work as a global-machine-conglomerate is to covet all the major issues of ‘the global village’ into a set of preordained arguments. These arguments are never framed by independent, bioregional, democratic, or indigenous thought – although there’s a fair bit of theatre in places like the UN and in universities that purport heterodox or alternative voices are heard – instead, they are created to serve large global markets, which always have a homogenising effect. That’s why this Thai motorway looks like it could be in South Melbourne, sans the signage.
Because the human world is now so advanced in preordained, market thinking, solving problems is difficult. Climate change has been a theory in the orbit of scientists since the 1930s and yet the machinations that reportedly drive climate change have only steadily worsened over 85 years. To make things worse there’s now a very large industry that’s grown out of ‘Climate’, a kind of Jevon’s Effect industry, making those who are financially welded to it hard to trust. Big money has a way with decision making that the empire is perennially blind to. This is why it is so hard to trust the expert class.
By contrast Monks here live with little and ask for their food, which encourages acts of generosity in the culture. They are trusted and loved.
When we crossed the border into Thailand in this weird little space shuttle of a van,
we came to realise that our fellow passengers were Malay dopenauts who’d come to the only country marijuana is legalised in southeast Asia. When they alighted, we too got out of the van and stepped into light rain falling in the little city of Hat Yai.
We changed currencies,
and found a family-run establishment to buy lunch.
Across the road from where we were to stay that night was a friendly little family-run garage.
By day they service motors. By night they serve beer and pork, and punters cook a ‘set’ or two on little drop-in table BBQs.
As we’ve travelled we’ve tuned our eyes to seek out local tree crop fruits that come with their own thick-skinned packaging,
and have sought out local snacks such as grilled banana,
which are sold wrapped in banana leaves.
And, as everywhere, we like to buy direct from growers’ markets.
In Thailand we delighted not just in the dogs that are left to dance on their own accord, but the plants too;
and in the technologies that quieten the streets and produce no exhaust;
and in the vegetables cultivated locally and sold proudly by growers;
and in the overhead lanterns that mark such a street a night market;
and in all the little,
and big places of ritual, offering and worship;
and in all the kind gestures we’ve witnessed, such as this lady bus conductor eyeing an elderly man who had no hope of reaching the bus stop in time, request to the driver to stop, then urge him to back up, before helping the oldtimer up the steps and into a seat.
The driver was not in the least bit annoyed by this delay in his proceedings.
It took us a few goes to leave Hat Yai. We’d booked our tickets online, and so we thought this was our train,
but it was two days early according to the computations of our tickets. We managed to get on one later that night,
which took us to Surat Thani. We arrived just after midnight in a bit of a blur,
and were thankful for another kind lady, who waited up and let us into our tiny room.
While in Surat Thani we did some day tripping,
We took a local bus, then a truck,
to a market, where we ate Shrimp Pad Thai,
which came in this beautiful little leaf bowl,
and bought bananas with sticky rice.
Later in the day we went in search of a nearby agricultural cooperative, only to find the gates shut and no one around.
We reacquainted ourselves with an interesting weed on the walk there. Mimosa pudica, which we were first shown back in Timor Leste by Sebas, who called it, Shy Maria, is a herb that responds dramatically to being touched, going from upright to prostrate at the slightest feel.
Mimosa pudica is not the broad cut-leaf creeping plant that dominates around Meg’s feet in the photo above, but the small little fern-like leaf plant she is gently caressing. You might have to zoom in to see. We found this paper on the benefits of this sensitive medicinal plant, which states, “[i]t majorly possesses antibacterial, antivenom, antifertility, anticonvulsant, antidepressant, aphrodisiac, and various other pharmacological activities. The herb has been used traditionally for ages, in the treatment of urogenital disorders, piles, dysentery, sinus, and also applied on wounds.”
Plants offer us the possibility of rewiring our nervous systems,
and appropriate technologies offer the possibility of maintaining or recovering our health,
and humourous exchanges offer up the possibility of living with lightness.
Prachuap Khiri Khan is a town by the sea. We stopped there for a night, walked from the station via the food market,
dropped our bags, where we took this photo,
and walked down to the ocean.
Subsistence and local market fishing at the scale of these little boats will never dismantle biodiversity in the world’s oceans.
Only ‘feeding the world’ via the global-machine-conglomerate will do that, as Patrick’s teenage love, Karina, unpacked in her film Blue.
The next day we were back on the rails. An old rattler, hot, noisy and fumesy. We all started off well,
looking out to the rice fields and lyrical wirings,
but as the day continued, and it got hotter, and the dirty squalls coming into the carriage refused to bring comfort, we all started to fade.
By the time we reached the outskirts of Bangkok,
a city of 17 million people, we were fairly wasted.
Although, Meg still had a little spirit, and so we awarded her this watermelon for being the most resilient member of the band.
We’d booked online a little cheap room near the station,
but didn’t know it was right in the middle of a western tourist zone. You know: beer, pizza, cocktails, dope, all night revelling, maybe a dash of Pad Thai and Houellebecqian sleaze. The only picture we took here doesn’t really capture it, rather we were once again collecting photos of vines growing over powerlines.
Woody and Patrick pretty much slept for two days and nights. It was a low key anniversary of Patrick and Meg’s, and Zero’s 14th birthday. Happy birthday little fella! We miss you Zero. Thanks for loving him in your home Black Cockatoo!
The pollution in Bangkok was next level, and after we’d slept through it for a few days, we hightailed it out on another hot, old rattler.
This six hour ride was gruelling, especially for Patrick. It is the combination of heat and pollution that is so harsh for this fella who has spent most of his life in cool mountain fields and forests. Patrick hadn’t had asthma since he was in Hong Kong, 27 years earlier. In Bangkok and on this train he struggled to breathe,
and if he didn’t go to bed when we arrived at our hotel in Nakhon Ratchasima and do 4 rounds of Wim Hof breathing, he would have required a hospital ventilator. The breathing method opened up his air passages, which brought a few hours of peace and rest, before he started burning up. He then spent the next two nights and days in and out of fever. He fasted, drank water, dried his sheets over the oven-like balcony rail outside our room, and collapsed back into bed.
When we all surfaced from this time, which included having to change hotels for another night of convalescing, we walked straight out into a street festival the locals had put on to raise money for the monks.
In leaving Nakhon Ratchasima, we thought we’d mix up the transportation a little,
and jumped on a bus,
to Khon Kaen.
We loved the stick food on offer here, though trying to buy food naked has been a challenge in Thailand. Shopkeepers seem to need to close the deal by wrapping your purchase in plastic. It takes a watchfulness to arrest this urge.
The following day we headed to the Khon Kaen train station,
where we were met by this little remnant life force.
We waited to catch the last train we were going to board in Thailand,
and that afternoon travelled to Nong Khai on the border with Laos. Feeling better than we have for days, we had dinner with the locals who have a penchant for green chairs,
and red shrines.
To get into Laos the visa process is a little complicated. So we have had some days here to wait, and to look across the river to the path we have chosen to get to India. Myanmar is too dangerous to cross at this time, and there is no longer a ferry or boat option across the Bay of Bengal. Hence why we’re here, in the north of Thailand.
We’ve been on the road seven weeks now and we’ve just hit another sweet spot here in Nong Khai.
Wherever you are in the world, Dear Reader, we hope you too are experiencing a sweet spot in your life. Sending much love to you from us here, and thanks so much for following along on our journey.
Hello dear Subscribers and other curious visitors,
Over the past week we’ve hosted three new volunteers at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, who have been learning-helping with the harvesting and storing of this warm season’s abundance. We’ve been harvesting and preserving summer crops and also prepping soils to plant winter crops while there’s still heat in the giving earth, here in Djaara Mother Country.
While we’ve been working hard – doing-saying, lifemaking, neopeasanting, demonstrating the possibilities of living a low-impact ecological-economy – Tully, Anisa, Gemma, and we mob have also engaged in many conversations.
On Gemma’s last day, she asked whether she could record Patrick for a university assignment. Gemma is studying environmental science and has, true to her openness and curiosity, organised two radically different placements for her summer work experience – with Artist as Family and with Parks Victoria. Go Gemma!
We have edited this little interview, recorded on Gemma’s phone in the garden at Tree Elbow, into a twelve minute excerpt, and we’re sharing it as a way of giving an insight into some of the subjects/conversations we have with volunteer-students at the school, this time occurring at the end of a neopeasant lunch, just before we all headed off for siesta.
We hope you enjoy this little moment (12min listen) with Gemma, pictured here with Meg and Patrick.
As always, your input, questions and comments are valuable to our readers and to us, so please feel free to offer up what’s living in you after listening in. Also, we have a place available next month if you’re interested in volunteering and learning with us. Head here for more details and please get in touch if you’re keen to join us.
