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.
Patrick yarned with environmental writer Derrick Jensen this morning and we present their conversation here, in its entirety. We hope you enjoy this weaving, wefting, circling, listening and sharing.
Here is the audio (1hr, 11mins),
And here is the vision.
Produced by Meg with assistance from Beck Lowe and Derrick’s friend Heather.
We left the sleepy, mahjong town of Lujing, outside Chengdu city in China early in the morning.
We had a plane to catch.
We could not find another way of getting to India overland from China due to border disputes, politics and bureaucracy, so we spent a little time among the clouds,
got forcibly fumigated by the air hostesses before landing, and arrived in Kathmandu three hours later. After going through immigration and customs, changing currencies and setting up a Nepali sim card, we hired a Tootle.
A friendly Nepali man took us to the lodge where we were to stay on our first night.
We walked some of the intense streets of Kathmandu,
and some of the gentle ones,
witnessed people gathered at the butchers,
and at the stupas and pagodas.
We came across personal struggles,
transportive skills,
and bigger challenges affecting people day to day,
Kathmandu is the first city we’ve visited on this journey, since we left Darwin, where drugs and alcohol are causing misery in peoples’ lives. Woody was grabbed by a man in the street. The man was inebriated, by substance and grief. He tried to cuddle Woody, forcibly, which set we parents off. We are all learning how our vulnerabilities as travellers conjure up fear, and reactivity, especially when just arriving in a new country. In reading J Krishnamurti again,
he reminds us how fear is often a precursor to violence, to a lack of freedom.
We parents were upset by the inebriated man. He required our compassion, our witnessing of his grief, our openness. Woody required protection and surety. Krishnamurti makes much sense to us, especially his thoughts about religion, however inside books, sense can be very clear-eyed, while on the streets such papery clarity can soon dissipate.
On another occasion on the edges of the tourist district of Thamel in Kathmandu,
Meg was pushed aggressively by a street vendor because we’d stopped in front of his stall to talk with another man who wanted to know about our travel plans. The push had the desired effect as we quickly left that unhappy place, after Meg offered back her views about his behaviour. We must have been an unwitting block for his livelihood.
The man who wanted to know of our plans, like many older street businessmen in this tourist district, wanted to yarn with us so as he could better weave our needs as travellers to his financial needs. Initially we were irritated and put off by this in Kathmandu, but later after speaking with Nepalis and understanding how business works here, we realised this perceived pushiness comes from an indigenous trait of connection through gossip and story sharing mixed with colonisation’s imported scarcity anxiety and lust for material riches. Nepal is currently in conversion from an indigenous culture into an imperialist one, guided by the west, China and India. This is the process from human-ecology interactive violence (eating, farming, hunting, gathering) to what Deborah Bird Rose calls, ‘man-made mass death’.
It’s easy for us to refuse what’s on offer in Kathmandu, in most cases. We are on a shoestring budget. But we also enjoy speaking with people and sharing story, even if we know there is financial intention behind the interest. It is part of the local/foreigner dance, here.
On our first night in this city, we went looking for and bought a khukuri from Ramesh, a former Gurkha soldier.
Gurkhas are a Nepali fighting unit who have a reputation for fearless military prowess. The word itself derives from Go-Raksha – protector of cows. This again reveals the conversion – cowherds become militia, famously employed by the British empire to their dirty work. No, we didn’t buy the big knife or khukuri, Patrick was given that by Ramesh to bring drama to our shared photo. Rather, we bought the little one that now travels on Patrick’s belt. It cost AU$30.
Happily, we’re back in the business of sliced mangoes for breakfast. Yes, this local green variety is ripe!
Wearing a knife again brings things up for us. We’re not going to pretend it is only for mangoes. While we are big fans of Krishnamurti’s ‘freedom from fear’ invitation, and for wisdom like this,
we also think there is a right time and place for what we call appropriate, conscious, or ecological violence, such as hunting, subsistence farming and slaughtering, and self defence. We say this without fear in Nepal. It is wild and unruly here, but quite safe in most places.
The work that Krishnamurti perennially invites us to partake in is understanding our inner violence – impatience, irritation, superiority, lack of curiosity, absence of compassion, preciousness, and so forth – and he offers meditation (post-thought peace), breath work (being in a state of wholeness with the world), and a daily mental practice of recognising early when we enter states of fear or anger, which when not faced, can lead to wounding. More common is psychological wounding than knife or physical wounding. This goes a little way to understanding the high suicide rates of men in Australia. While there is much necessary media about physical violence to women, few want to see more subtle and more common forms of psychological violence in our communities, especially perpetrated against men. The societal acceptance of Clementine Ford’s extremist misandry, especially in the so-called liberal media, is testament to this.
Before we left the city we scoured the streets of Kathmandu for somewhere to buy a cricket bat for Woody, and after much searching we eventually succeeded, here.
We found Kathmandu boys are mostly into football (soccer), though cricket is more of a thing here than in any other country we’ve visited since leaving Australia. We didn’t see Nepali girls playing either sports until Pokhara. Woody has been longing for a game, and we didn’t have an opportunity until we reached Bhaktapur, about an hour east of the city by car, through thick traffic.
We arrived and were instructed to pay AU$60 to enter historic Durbar Square, where we were to stay. It was too much dosh for we neopeasants, so we declined, cancelled our booking at a cheap hotel inside the square, and booked into this little sweat box with stellar views, just outside it.
A kind Nepali fella back at the gates told as that after 7.30pm the guards go home and people can freely walk into Durbar Square.
It was beautiful inside,
and fragile. In 2015 an earthquake ruptured many of the buildings.
We enjoyed this place for its dedication to the sacred, pissing street dogs, absence of motor vehicles and night time quietude and cool, though we also felt a sadness here – an old Nepal walled off from the rest of the country, which has been superseded by global imperialism and national political corruption.
We are seeing in the culture how technological ascent and the global machine conglomerate disturbs everything immensely, everyday. In Krishnamurti (1973) we read this:
“…we see that education, science, organised religion, propaganda, politics, have failed. They have not brought about peace, though technologically man has advanced incredibly.”
Five decades later we are observing that technological advances have led to the psychological derangement of people, making life faster, more furious, more interrupted, more anxious, polluted and permanently unsettled. It is perpetually draining to behold the continuous propaganda and promises of US-style empire capitalism, while living the actual realities of it.
The following day, to oxygenate our rather sedated bodies in play, Woody and Patrick started a game of cricket on the brick pavement that framed a water feature and temple outside our hotel.
They soon noticed a young boy watching and they invited him to play. He was shy and declined, at first. But after a while he started helping to retrieve the ball from the water. Woody got carried away with the bat on one occasion, which found him stripping down to his undies and swimming out to retrieve the ball. Sushil, the young Bhaktapur boy, who joined our game while school kids and teachers looked on from above in their classrooms, soon lost his shyness, and we all took turns to bowl and bat, often fielding the ball out of the pond. Sushil is a natural sportsman and he loves both batting and bowling.
Once the shade disappeared from the pitch, we all got mightily hot and so we invited Sushil to join us for a drink. Patrick and Woody found out, with limited language, his family business is peddling fruit, or should we say, pedalling fruit?
We offered him a banana lassi but he wanted a Coke,
that slow release poison in a bottle, killing the microbiomes of Nepali everywhere courtesy of the psychological warfare conducted by US empire admen and women.
We observed again in Bhaktapur that Mother Country has a way of slowly eating up that which is not required,
and like all hubristic civilisations over the last 5000 years, the US empire will be eaten up too.
The following day, when we came back into the traffic jams of Kathmandu city, we glimpsed a goatherd and his animals travelling by foot.
What are we doing in this city? We want to behold subsistence-resilience, not traffic! We stayed one more night in this little cosy, mozzie-filled room,
laughed at the phenomena of us only tripping in the streets in China’s cities, which are flat, expensive and new, yet never in the countries that keep our street senses switched on,
once again marvelled at the mind-fuck that is the electrical experience in southeast and subcontinent Asia,
and headed out to find a Nepali restaurant mostly catering to locals.
We all loved the food at the Himalayan Yak, especially Woody,
and the family who ran this modest restaurant were a big part of the love we consumed in their fare. We also liked and noted the lack of advertising outside the restaurant, just a lovely gold and red drape that suggested some form of business.
The next morning we left Kathmandu, we walked to the bus stop in the rain.
We had just received a message from our friend, Trace, who asked us to look out for cyclists carrying all manner of things in Nepal. Trace is an inspiring children’s book writer and illustrator, and she told us she is considering doing a children’s book on the subject, after years of noting and documenting the beauty of such low-tech transportation and the everyday miracles of what can be sometimes carried on a bike.
We only published one bike of this husband and wife gleaning duo, in our previous Laos-China post. So, for Trace, and anyone else who is into appropriate technology, here are the wonderful cycling twosome we spoke with in Chengdu. The husband is carrying cardboard recycling; the wife is carrying plastic.
Our bus left Kathmandu at 7am, and there was talk on the bus about the potential of landslides because of the heavy rain overnight. We travelled with great alertness,
witnessing at one point a local bus on the other side of the road marooned in road-edge mud, seriously close to tipping over.
We followed the powerful Trishuli River for some time, and when the driver pulled over for punters to buy food and use the public toilets, we soaked up the energy of the river.
On and off over this several hour bus passage, the rain belted down,
and we saw locals or government employees out in it, trying to elevate the force of the water causing the land to slide.
There were innumerable examples of the concrete walls, attempting to arrest the pressure, failing.
At Dumre we got off the bus and hopped in a taxi for a ten minute drive up to the high country of Bandipur. Oh, how our senses relaxed as we moved towards this misty,
sane,
magical,
place.
We booked into this room for AU$20 per night,
looked out onto the town from the hotel,
went for a walk,
beheld sweetness and beauty everywhere,
and felt our nervous systems calm. In the main street of the town, no motors were permitted, and we witnessed first hand what a pre-industrial village would have felt like, and the greater peace that would have resulted. We asked if this man would be happy for us to photograph him and his craft.
Instead of delivery trucks, people carried things along the street with traditional baskets.
What we witnessed here is an easy work ethic, a green gym epistemology – a time for yarning and gossip, and a time to carry and labour.
No one seemed overly consumed by their work here, although the man sewing (above) did seem to be the exception. Every time we passed his doors he was working, and we felt a sadness in him that perhaps his continual labouring helps ease. We saw in Bandipur a beautiful village, only accessible from the rest of the country by motor transport since 1998, and that despite being part-supported by tourism, is still in tact socially, spiritually and ecologically.
Quite by chance we arrived in the low tourist season. Now is the coolest and quietest time of year. We booked one night, as we do with any new place, but immediately knew we were going to stay awhile. We just didn’t want to leave, and the goats were a big part of this.
Back home in Djaara Country, our flerd ran out of food while we’ve been away, and as a result kept getting out, causing generous neighbours and friends a lot of stress. Back in Thailand we made the painful decision to give our animals away. Being in Bandipur we witnessed peasant-sized small goats browsing on common land, as ours did, and the huge breeding-programme goats at the National Goat Research Centre, where we were welcomed in and shown the bucks, young and old,
and the does.
We tried hitchhiking back up the hill, the three kilometre hike from the research centre,
but there was little traffic. As as we walked we talked about saving our pennies when we get home to invest in some bigger animals.
Goats here in Nepal are a big part of daily life, and so too is play. Each day in the afternoon we went to Thulihill, the village park, to play cricket with anyone who wanted to join in. We fashioned stumps out of fallen sticks.
Playing both cricket and football here has helped dismantle the local/tourist, us/them barrier. When we come across others in Nepal we like to acknowledge them in the customary, local way, Nameste, which so elegantly translates as ‘the light in me sees the light in you.’ The more we stayed, played games and met people in Bandipur, the deeper our relations grew with the people of the village. Having worked in hospitality in our own tourist town of Daylesford for a number of years, we have a sensitivity to being ‘the locals’ too, and how tourists are often in extraction rather than connection mode.
We love the casual drying of corn between rain showers in the streets,
the Sishnu (nettle) and Bandipur (fermented vegetable) soups, served with local Tumba (millet) wine, which is clear in colour and tastes more like a spirit,
and we love Nepali money, which celebrates six indigenous Nepalese animals. The largest note, 1000 npr, is worth just over AU$10.
In the evenings we played cricket until the light faded,
and the local boys said to us, you need to get home because the tiger might be out. We were thrilled more than fearful, however, we took their advice and didn’t dawdle in the dark, more forested parts of the village.
On our third day, after writing a bunch of postcards,
we jumped on the cable car from the top of Bandipur,
and descended through the clouds to Dumre to send them. The Dumre post office, which we found online, didn’t actually exist in physical reality, despite the internet stating it did – the map is not the territory, just as data modelling is not our complex immune biomes. So, instead of sending slow mail to love ones we stopped in at the Dumre markets, brought some bananas and mangoes,
the latter of which we couldn’t get in Bandipur, and headed back up the hill, praising the craft of Baya Weavers (or, Tope Chara, in Nepali),
yellow-breasted sparrows Indigenous to Nepal and other parts of Asia.
Bandipur is just over a 1000m above sea level. On our fourth day the clouds revealed to us the Himalayas. While difficult to see in this photo, this first sighting of the majesty of these mountains enchanted us. Hint: Not all the white above the tree line is cloud.
There is an undeniable power in this country, and beautiful people. Dilap, who pointed out the mountains to us when we descended the staircase at his family hotel on that morning, is one of them.
We moved hotels to his, after the black mould became too overwhelming in our room in the first.
On the journey down from Bandipur to Dumre to catch the bus, we asked Dilap how his family survived Covid without tourism: “We didn’t have much money then, but Nepali all know how to grow food. We are an agricultural country. We help our friends when they struggle, and the food we grow at home is fresh and is healthier than from the store.”
In Bandipur we witnessed widespread home-grown food production and herbal medicine plants we use at home,
We helped heal Woody’s knee injury with our own peoples’ medicine kit – soaking this typical boyhood scuff of the knee injury in eucalyptus oil and warm water to clean it,
and later applying narrow-leaf plantain salve. He limped around for a day or two,
but soon forgot about it when it was cricket time. Woody’s immune system, of course, did most of the healing particularly with good food in his belly. We ate healthy Nepali food in this lovely town, much of it grown close by, (rice, lentil dahl, buffalo curd, veg curry and a weed saag),
and we sat and yarned in the clouds.
Bandipur bore many gifts, including the community of village cricket and a dreamy peaceful respite from the intensity of travel. We left with tremendous gratitude.
We caught another bus on to Pokhara, which was slow going (can you see the goat on the van’s roof?),
mostly because of the monsoonal rains causing landslides that narrowed the road,
but also other challenges.
It took five hours to travel 80 kms. It is currently wet in this region, and the next season’s rice crops have been planted.
We saw from the bus endless examples of subsistence agriculture. We love the fenceless nature of farming here, where cows and goats graze right up to rice paddies, and where the ‘fences’ are the human herders who stay with the animals to prevent them from eating the crops.
This being with the herd, being with the land, instead of constructing fences suits a less manic, less alienated culture. For the cow- or goatherd to observe their animal’s intelligent senses in what they graze and when and where, gives the farmer knowledges about deep and diverse nutrition. These knowledges slowly accrue in the being with, and often cannot be measured. In Nepal, we’ve witnessed how animals are often stabled for part of the day with rice straw or freshly cut weed fodder, after bouts of free-ranging.
This allows people to do other things throughout the day.
When we arrived in Pokhara, and went down to the lake, we found cows free-ranging among the tourists and locals.
The Pokhara farmer whose cows they were was on always on hand.
The very first image (thanks to Jordan and Happen Films) we published in the very first blog post of this journey, was of us moving our animals across town.
We miss our flerd and find comfort in the ways people are with their animals here, and also the way they are with each other. Like in the two-cows-by-the-lake image above, we witness daily the unashamed public affection Nepali friends have for each other here.
On the way to Pokhara we passed gravel mines on the fertile flood plains. This gravel is being used to make concrete to build roads,
and modern Nepali buildings.
We stayed in one of these buildings in Pokhara.
It was an oven inside because of the concrete acting as a heat bank.
Due to the monsoonal rains there are great numbers of mozzies so we needed the fan in the room all night to both repel the mozzies and try to distribute the radiating heat from the room so we could sleep. Here is the rooftop room we spent the first two nights in in Pokhara. When thermal mass is not a good thing, and not just because of the ruined fertile flood plains…
We spent the afternoon walking the streets of Pokhara to seek out various things. We looked for a shoe repairer to fix the holes in the soles of Patrick’s shoes. A skilled man in his street workshop stopped them from leaking,
and also brushed the mud off and polished them, all for the equivalent of AU$10. Locals told us he over charged us, but it’s all relative.
We also sought out more postcards, and a secondhand bookshop. There are several in Pokhara, with books in many languages. Patrick found Bikas-Binas (Development-Destruction): The change in life and environment of the Himalaya, a radical text from the mid 1980s featuring both Nepali and foreigner contributions, discussing through a development-critical lens what was happening to this beautiful region at that time. When Patrick opened this book it fell to this page,
In one of the book’s essays, Deadly Development, the author, Claude Alvares, reads the development of this region as a con-game:
“…for it seems now that the idea of economic development has been used by the ruling classes to induce people to accept not only enormous sacrifices, but the destruction or mutilation of older cultural patterns and physical and moral environments, and debilitating forms of dependence.”
There is a romantic, pre-development painting of a Pokhara village scene hung in the office of the hot hotel we were staying in. It depicts traditional stone, slate, clay brick and thatch buildings, which are only one or two storeys high and presumably cooler and ventilated. Villagers are engaged in ecologically-embedded labours,
That was a scene of Pokhara, according to the artist. This is a scene of Pokhara now, according to Artist as Family.
The irony of being dependent on some of the patterns of colonialism is not lost on us, though we baulk at most things on offer here.
Radical texts like Bikas-Binas don’t appear to exist anymore, or they are labelled conspiracy texts, and disappeared from view in the search engines. When you do a Google search for something today, it is always filtered according to the empire’s narrative. This is why
On our first evening in Pokhara we stopped to ask a man where we might eat where the locals go. John, a jovial Irishman, led us to such a place and joined us for dinner.
John, who is currently living in Pokhara, is a great source of local knowledge. We told him of our plans to bus from Pokhara to Sonauli on the Indian-Nepali border and go through immigration there. He told us that with our Indian e-visas – the most over-complicated and annoying piece of bureaucracy we’ve ever had to endure, and which Meg spent several hours filling in back in Kathmandu – we won’t be able to cross at Sonauli, and worse, John told us, “you’ll need to return to Kathmandu and fly to Delhi; there is no other way.”
We were gutted.
What we are witnessing on this journey is the more a country ‘develops’ the more ridiculous the rules become, and the less freedoms people hold. Development isn’t only about eliminating old cultural patterns and customs and transforming ecologies into construction sites,
it is also about controlling people, and herding them into sad little, hard spaces as workers or consumers, and both.
And this control stems from a desperate economic system based on a the fabrication of scarcity. Capitalists and Marxists alike perpetuate this system, which is always city-centric and debasing to people and life forces.
We are on this journey, having not gone overseas for twenty years for social, economic and ecological reasons, to give Blackwood a glimpse of other cultures and lifeways before health-fascism – biometrics linked to Digital IDs passports – become the norm, and people like us won’t be able to travel at all.
As those of you who have been following this journey from the beginning know, Woody’s love of cricket and our meeting ‘cultural others’ through a shared love of the game, combined with our more adult focus on subsistence-resilience are the main intentions for this travel. We know we need to be ever mindful of the restrictives, negatives and our expectations, acknowledge them and let them go through to the keeper.
The feralty of street dog life in Pokhara helps with this. The way they dance through the streets with their souls in tact gives us courage and guidance.
We walked for a while with these two,
up to the park, where cows graze on soccer fields and players kick around them and cricketers play until dark.
That magnificent steer (in the photo above) certainly had his eyes on the ball. How genius for a large park that enables festivals,
track running, football, volleyball, badminton, cricket and many other social gatherings, for the cows and buffalos to be the ecological lawn mowers of it,
eating down the grass while returning manure to feed the park, and being part of the social life of this beautiful commons.
Having cow pats scattered around the park certainly adds another level of coordination and awareness as a player, when chasing down the ball.
On our fourth and final afternoon of cricket in Pokhara, a two meter long, grey-brownish snake revealed itself, just near where this fella fielded a ball.
A few stones were thrown to encourage it away from the game. It was very respectful. We are impressed with so much in Nepal, especially the interspecies connections and reverence for life.
Last cricket season in Hepburn, we watched a Muckleford player bash to death a two metre long tiger snake with a cricket bat. It just wanted to cross the field to get to the creek. We players could have waited five minutes for the snake to pass. Almost everyone on the field cheered when it was dead and hurled across the boundary fence. There is deep trauma in a culture that thinks this is OK.
We moved from the top floor of the hot box hotel after two nights to another multi-levelled hotel closer to the park. The trees in the garden of the Trekkers Lodge significantly help keep the building cooler, despite it too using much concrete.
It also helped we were on the first floor. Outside our window to the south was another hot-box-for-empire building going up, but much more interestingly, corn and millet were planted together where in Australia people plant lawn seed. This backyard also housed stooked rice straw for the buffalo stabled nearby, with taro and bitter gourd on the edges of the patch for human consumption.
The sweet family who ran the lodge had other family members growing this food, and collecting fodder in the park across the road for the buffalo.
The owner of the hotel told us the buffalo lives in this shed, near were we are sleeping,
and sometimes free-ranges in the park. All of this is done in small suburban, often shared areas, and it is giving us so many ideas about the scale of a farm, especially if daily human ‘green gym’ practices of foraging fodder are incorporated. Buffalo, at least on menus in Nepal, is called buff. Instead of beef, buff sits beside chicken, pork and goat dishes. While we spent three nights at this lodge we kept checking from where we could, waiting for the buff to come out of her shed to get a goodly photo. But she liked her little cow cave, and all we got is a glimpse of her lovely rump.
Coming to Nepal is like doing a RetroSuburban masterclass. Not just in the growing of food, but in the way people transport things,
wrap things,
and feed themselves in a way that doesn’t require many resources and is accessible to most. We loved eating masala omelettes and drinking mint tea for lunch. The cost was around AU$2, not just because we are in Nepal, but because such a meal can be hobbled together without a middleman, without a supermarket.
Cafe owners share, borrow or buy ingredients from one another, so no food is wasted. Often, when we’ve ordered something we’ll see the cook go across the road to another cafe get an ingredient or two. This is another example of working together – another indigenous trait that hasn’t been destroyed here.
On our first day in Pokhara we spotted these lovely boats on Lake Fewa.
On our fourth day in Nepal’s second largest city, we hired one.
and rowed across to the other side of the lake to trek up to the stupa. On the way we beheld more rural food production and preparations, such as future crop patches mulched and left to go fallow,
and in other patches, manure brought from the stables and animal sheds to return to the soil, akin to any organic food production that doesn’t require the mining of phosphate rock.
More intelligent indigenous-peasant lifeways we witnessed on our walk, and which we have seen all over Nepal, are the ecological air conditioning systems that invite rest, yarning and cooling. They are often about 3 degrees C cooler underneath them.
Here, the technics required to build this air conditioning/recuperation/social system incorporates local materials. Large mossy benches made from brick or stone are built around (often pre-existing) giant ficus trees, and they operate as temples of relief and shrines to the long history of people and ecologies being in union here. We walked on, up the many steps,
past the ‘tree elbow’ love tree,
leaving lying dogs to sleep,
passing fading proverbs adorned with wild flower,
until we reached the stupa.
We looked out across the lake to Pokhara, at a city of 600,000,
and rested and meditated on the shady side of Shanti Stupa,
which was built by Japanese buddhists belonging to the Nipponzan-Myōhōji order, and local Nepali devotees and artisans.
Our response to Pokhara at first was a repulsion for the tourism and imperialism that’s so clearly fucking over the culture here. But having meet with the locals on boats, such as Santos who grew up on the streets,
and over breakfast with Surentra who worked in Australia for five years as a chef,
and each evening playing cricket with a bunch of generous young men,
who generously included us in their afternoon games, we felt ourselves shift from sadness into relationship.
We witnessed sophisticated subsistence-resilience here, showing the way forward for the rich countries that are speedily coming down the affluence bell curve,
and we beheld the growth and learnings within ourselves.
so, after two weeks, we leave this spirited country full of possibility and with much post-hope positivity.
On our last morning in Pokhara, we woke to unseasonably clear skies, and thus to the majestic Annapurna Ranges of the Himalayas.
This rare glimpse (at this time of year) of the power and magic of this Mother Country somehow changed us. Perhaps it changed us in how we relate as humans, now knowing this grand scale of range is possible. Or is it that Annapurna is a mythological site, and we were briefly drawn into her mythos as we silently stared. We held no expectations to behold her because this is ‘off’ season and the Himalayas are usually covered by clouds, but behold her we did.
