Our dear old dog, Zero, took his final breath yesterday afternoon. We buried him this morning. He has been our trusty and beloved dog-kin for 15 years. He has always been fully in life, showing up everywhere; in the home food forest,
at the community garden,
on long haul bicycle adventures,
not missing any of the birthdays,
down on the coast,
when we went to catch some fish,
on our laps as we went through the many harvest seasons,
at Forest & Free on Mondays as we built more huts in the village,
by the fire recovering from dog attack,
with friends who lived with us,
and friends who dropped in,
on walks in the commons, checking on the Bill Mollison memorial oak tree,
with family at special moments in our lives,
with the goats in the old quarry,
in the outdoor kitchen teaching the youngster how to clean up during a slaughtering day,
on the outdoor couch, eldering youngster Lilly Pilly and passing on the household’s dog-kin culture,
in our arms growing old together,
and finally, this morning, the elder under the elder.
Farewell little dog. You have taught us so many things. Your spirit and your soul live on in us, and in the garden.
We have been asked a number of times in India what our religion is. We reply, we are animists. Then we are asked, but who is your god, your gods? We answer, Mother Country. Our response feels inadequate because our animism is not rooted in the past with developed belief systems or dependency on a story. Rather, it is an in-and-out-again presence with the living of the world.
At traditional Hindu weddings in India the groom leads the bride around a sacred fire. The couple take seven steps, each one representing a blessing – food, strength, wealth, happiness, progeny, cattle and devotion. Throughout our two weeks living in Dal Lake, near Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh in the north of India, these seven blessings travel with us. They travel with us, in us, through us, connecting us to everything here.
We arrived in Naddi above Dharamshala on dusk, and went exploring.
and out of the clouds came this friendly Gaddi goatherd.
We spent a night in a mouldy room with a stellar view, and only one double bed despite the advertisement stating three singles.
We have inflatable mattresses with us, it was cheap and cheerful, and the next day we left our packs in the room and went walking for the morning.
The temperature was cool and the tributaries flowing. This region has three main seasons: summer, monsoon, and winter. It is monsoon season now, and it rains every day from July to September.
On our walk we recognised old friends, uncensored and unrestrained, growing autonomously in the mountains,
and came to shrines where daily offerings are made.
We crossed Naddi River,
and took masala chai and omelette at a stone built café on the other side.
We began making connections here,
but we had a mouldy room to leave and the promise of a cricket park to get to.
Just down from Naddi is Dal Lake, which boasts a well loved public cricket pitch. Teams are chosen, Woody a little nervous at first, clouds cover the lake, cattle watch on.
Just up from the pitch, Bittu runs a chai stand he’s had for seven years. He’s thirty now, and ready to walk the seven steps with a goodly woman, arranged or otherwise. He played Patrick’s guitar and the two men had a yarn,
while Meg and Woody set out on foot to look for a room close to Dal Lake’s cricket pitch. They door knocked at guest houses, some of which were closed as this is the off season in Kangra district. They eventually found Pong Dam View, under renovations.
We hired two musty but not mouldy rooms, which meant Woody’s parents, who like to wake early could get up, do morning stretches, make tea, make love, make blog, without waking the growing boy, who is a 12-hour-a-night sleeper. There is also a little kitchenette. We opened all the windows and doors and let the fresh mountain air flow through.
The kind owner of the home stay, Kali Dass, a retired soldier, gave us a 2/3 discount for staying long-term, so room 1 at Pong View Dam Home Stay became our little sanctuary for a fortnight. No other guests stayed during this time. A quiet sanctuary from which we stepped out from each day to go exploring, and where, across the road, another guest house and café was situated, sporting this truism at the front door.
Back in Australia we heard the news that the Labor Party have set up their own disinformation reporting site urging their believers to dob in what they deem as ‘disinformation’. Yes, we should absolutely trust a government and their supporters to hold the measure of truth on behalf of everyone else – it’s always worked well in the past.
The past is very present in India. Gandhi, like Mao in China, is the only fella on the notes here,
and his glasses appear everywhere as a potent symbol for the man who led the country to independence.
While in Dharamshala, over two nights, we watched with Woody the 3-hour film, Gandhi (1982) for a historical insight into how India moved from British colonial control over many different tribal peoples, to the modern nation-state republic (annexed off from Pakistan in 1947), it is today. We’ve also been reading the court statement and associated literature of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse,
and listening to Tibetans in exile here in Dharamshala speak about the intransigence of the Chinese government towards Tibetan people, culture, language and sovereignty.
As we write, the Dalai Lama is returning to his home-in-exile here in Dharamshala, after surgery in New York. The Chinese government continue to call him a separatist, which is an odd label and demonstrates how they either don’t understand or care for the beliefs and wishes of HH or Tibetans. (It also gives us context for why it was made so difficult for us to travel to Tibet from China. Foreigners are granted a two-week visa to China, but then need a permit to get to Tibet, which ordinarily takes 20 days, and you have to be chaperoned for the entire time by an accredited travel agent).
Sympathy for Tibet in this region is pronounced,
which contributes to the ongoing beef between India and China. One afternoon, while we were playing cricket, we witnessed two Tibetan dancers perform on the banks of Dal Lake.
It was joyful to behold such culture making.
The continuous attack on indigenous peoples globally is global capitalism’s conversion process of lively, connected souls into moribund consumers. Some colonial-capitalist institutions are brutal and unashamed in how they treat first people, like the Chinese government in Tibet, the Israeli government in Palestine and US-NATO alliance all over the world. And some are more subtle in how they foster the conversion process, like the lesser nations of the Five-Eyes countries, who increasingly participate in what we call institutional fascism. That is a trust-us-we’re-experts-go-back-to-your-shopping kind of fascism. Because there is no boot stomping, few see this fascism by bureaucratic stealth, rolled out by sophisticated propaganda.
Tibet’s sovereignty was once an important issue for leftists in the rich countries, but seemingly not now for The New Normal Left, who seem to be engaging in purity politics, dividing people into correct and incorrect categories. Purity politics is dangerous ideology as it strips away nuance and diversity of approaches; it is projection warfare predicated on fear and desire. Rather than a turning towards an open relationship with life, with shadows, with underworlding and knowing oneself, the dark is feared,
and ideology takes over.
The two performers at Dal Lake dance their culture into presence and away from fear. Dancing, not war, represents for us the spiritual anarchism required for this era of growing censorship and government overreach. Incorporating both the light and dark occurs in mature cosmologies. The Christian influence in the west has in large part attempted to cancel the dark, and the cult of scientism has carried on this peculiarity into the present. By not being in relationship with darkness, the tendency to mythologise that one is only a force for good comes into play. (See Charles Eisenstein’s brilliant The Sith: A political allegory). This conceit – that the dark cannot inform, give to, or challenge our civilisational hubris – is dangerous. There is no reflection, no shadow world, no trickster to learn from. For us, Mother Country is both light and dark, and this is why we are mother country animists, and why we find kinship with animisms in India.
The assassination of a political opponent did not bring about the reunification of India, as Nathuram Godse had hoped. We have played cricket with Indian soldiers on holiday here in Dal Lake, who express to us that they’re spending their youth keeping “terrorists” out of Kashmir. The continual bloody legacy of the 1947 partitioning into two separate nation states, India and Pakistan, which Gandhi created (albeit with great reluctance), has never gone away. Similarly, the assassination of Trump will not free America from systemic corruption and stop Congress from effectively being a chamber of bought stooges acting for the military and pharma industries, and others. Likewise, violence against China will not bring about Tibetan liberty. The persistence of culture and eldership, however, will.
Tsundue, a mutual friend of friends back home, filled us in further on the Tibetan story here. Tsundue was born in Dharamshala, after his family fled Tibet in 1959, and he and his wife have raised a family here. He too spent some of his youth at Ladakh with a Tibetan unit of the Indian army, resisting Chinese government forces there. Today he is a father, artist and beautiful soul.
If Kamala Harris wins office there will probably be global nuclear war. The Democrats are a New Normal party; they are a war party, and since 2014, when Obama allowed Democrats to receive money from Pharma, they have become a Pandemic Industrial Complex party. American politics is not some fairytale of good guys and bad guys. Rather, it is a culture war between working class discontents on the right and the bourgeois institutional fascists on the left who have abandoned them. There are no good guys, though redneck anarchists like Oliver Anthony, come close.
Dancing is what is required in this present moment, and just as with the truism painted on the wall of the guesthouse above, the monks filming this joyous display of life to share the story of Tibet’s continual culture making, is creative-political dancing. It is joyous sedition. Counter propaganda. Art has always performed a role of subversion, and there is no time like now for artists, poets, writers, filmmakers, anarchists, permies, neopeasants and musicians to joyously and playfully counter the propaganda of the global machine conglomerate.
There is a buzz here, currently, for the return of the Dalai Lama. He has been based in Mcleodganj in Dharamshala since 1960, when he fled Chinese state aggression after the Tibet uprisings, and set up the independent Tibetan government in exile here.
We booked in to hear him speak,
though his lecture was postponed, no doubt due to his health. It is not certain how many more Dalai Lamas will live in exile. China, via economic warfare, is probably set to become the world’s superpower as the US empire crumbles. Or, perhaps Artificial General Intelligence will devour the entirety of humanity in the next handful of years, who knows. But what is clear to us is that all rigid structures, all tightly controlled places, all inflexible dynamics, all static dogma, all government overreaches always signal fragility, sickness and inevitable collapse.
The antidote to all this is forever dancing at the propaganda, fear campaigns and inflexibility of wrong story authority,
and thieving when it brings liberation and laughter,
and daring to enter underworlds,
and connecting with earth others,
and practicing social and labouring solidarity,
and Himalayan thrifting,
and sharing joy through the shared love of a game,
and beholding the majesty of mothering mountains,
and giving where possible to people in need, while not being suckered by a well crafted racket,
and staying with the contradiction of beauty and barbarity mixed in the same moment,
and helping strangers without need of reward or flattery,
and learning from those more accomplished at being relaxed and oneself in private or public places,
and following, for a while, the flags of others with open curiosity, despite fomenting for ourselves our own processes and prayers unshackled from another’s authority,
and singing and playing more delicious life into abundant life, as guests in another world,
and occasionally grooming oneself, on the event of a shared birthday, and honouring the Dharamshala artisan (thanks Suninder!) who helped perform the operations,
and passing on our knowledges to youngtimers,
regardless of our species.
While there is much to learn from the world’s religions and spiritual movements here in Dal Lake, Naddi, Dharamkot, Dharamshala, McLeodganj, et al, we are finding more kinship with the wisdom and lifeways of monkeys,
and bulls,
and raptors,
and russula eating slugs,
and sow thistles,
and mountain clouds,
and street dogs,
and goats and their goatherds.
Pankaj is the son of Gaddi shepherds, and has, along with his kin, taken the family’s goats and sheep up into the higher country for summer browsing. The family normally has a flerd (a flock-herd) of around 50 animals, but a few seasons ago a snow slide took out half of this number. In the evenings we have walked up the mountain to Naddi, and Pankaj and other family members have cooked us some of the best curries we’ve had in this region.
Pankaj makes the paneer cheese that goes into the Kadai Paneer curry dish from his own cow and buffalo milk, and on one occasion the family offered us a goat curry, not normally on the menu. The Gaddi are people of dear interest to us. They are Indo-Aryan, semi-pastoral peoples living mainly in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. They are made up of many different cultural groups, and for generations they have been herding their animals through the high countries of northern India. According to locals, and the god Shiva himself who, it is told, has a special affection for them, the Gaddis are a graced and gentle lot. In the mid-twentieth century, they inspired the Punjabi romantic painter, Sobha Singh, to create his famous, Her Grace the Gaddan, which is hung in many guesthouses in the district.
We asked Pankaj whether our tracking senses were right to call this a tiger print, which we came across on one of our forest walks.
He confirmed our suspicions and spoke of how the tigers come into the villages after the snow melts each year, hungry after the winter, but they are around at any time. The way he spoke about this most revered animal without fear and with respect was beautiful to hear. On a number of nights, we walked home from his restaurant through the dark, awake and alert to the presence of tigers, but not fearful.
Monkey business here in Dharamshala is not always welcome. Apart from taking banana offerings from a shrine, we watched monkeys stealing corn cobs from a sleeping street food vendor, and use power lines as jungle vines to swing from tree to tree, sometimes bringing them down.
This particular cheekiness is another learning from India, which we can apply when necessary. If governments use communication lines to control us further and silence dissent, as is already happening around the world, then we will dance those lines down. Maybe our monkey dance in this instance will be reverting to dumb phones, and going off line. Monkeys ridicule the slingshot stones projected at them by house and store owners. Back home, since Covid, we have been slung labels such as conspiracists, selfish, right-wing and stupid, and even likened to colonists who intentionally brought small pox to Aboriginal communities.
A new study, a metadata analysis, published a few days ago claims that 3% of people who took Covid vaccines died suddenly. This adds up to millions worldwide. You may want to read the study before it is censored, cancelled, smeared or taken down. Remarkably, we were in a grass roots community group with the person who wrote the above opinion about the unvaccinated being intentional super spreaders. We were fighting institutional fascism in the form of overreaching local laws with her, before Covid entered the room.
We are reflecting here that we are still in the wound of Covid, and perhaps monkey business is another way to help heal that wound when dialogue or deep listening circles are not possible. Perhaps this is why we are so drawn to monkey trickster energy here in Dal Lake and the little villages nearby,
and not just one kind of monkey business.
Nor can we get enough of cricket with the local fellas.
We played cricket with many local kids when school let them out, and many men and women.
These Punjabi tourists, who played ball with us, got out their boom box and created a spontaneous dance party. Having written about dancing through the morning in this blog, the dance was invited in the afternoon, and Patrick jumped in, while Woody declined but picked up the camera.
The dance went a little like this:
There has been much joy in these hills. Many steps of learning and living. One teenager turned to Patrick behind the stumps and said after facing a delivery, “Bowling is a beautiful art”.
Another cricketer we played with said, “In India cricket is cultural.” On Patrick and Woody’s birthday, we went to Dharamshala Stadium.
Meg took this photo of the birthday lads with their new annual haircuts.
Many Indian tourists also visit this northern temple of the game. As well as being cultural, it is often said cricket is a religion in India. Players like Tendulkar and Kohli are considered gods here, though the game is not parochial and other countries’ cricketers, especially Australian, are also revered and enthusiastically spoken of. Harmission, Jashan’s cousin in Punjab, was named after Steve Harmison, an English cricketer.
Integrating this game and other chance encounters with dance and cheekiness, with permacultural neopeasantry, with mother country animism, with subsistence-resilience, with spiritual anarchism, and with observation, connection and curiosity are our seven steps in Dharamshala.
Before we left Dal Lake we made a little offering to the local cricket shrine.
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.
Currently there are less than 1% of us living carbon-positive lifeways in the rich countries. While taking to the streets is of course important,
it is the day-to-day relationships of the home and community economies that will ultimately replace the old paradigm of extractive-consumptive economics driving so much woe. And even as our gardens lie dormant –
and it’s time to rest, make music, fool around and play,
celebrate various rites of passage,
give out responsibilities and roles (such as tending wild apples on common land after being shown how to prune for abundance and against disease),
share celebratory cake, in gathered and op-shopped winter colour,
and begin again the prepping and planting for another growing season (while living off the fruits from the last sun-gifted season) – there are many things to do and many to give to.
We have begun to take volunteers again. Our first for the new season the delightful, gutsy 16 year-old self-schooler Ishaa,
who came to us after spending a few weeks protecting sacred trees near Ararat. This is where we met her and where earlier we’d made a few videos to help grow awareness of that struggle.
Because the dominant culture still puts roads before trees we must stand with local mobs. Here is the story explained by Djab Wurrung warrior, Zellenach Djab Mara.
While it’s important to rally and blockade, if we only make demands of governments and don’t change within ourselves we are just fiddling while Rome burns.
In Melbourne Woody was captured by news media responding to the question of why he was at the largest climate rally in Australia’s history:
He knows life is much more-than-human.
Walk for degrowth, indeed. And bicycle and bike-trailer for degrowth too.
This is what degrowth looks like in action after nearly 10 years of being a carless household:
While having the right tools is important for transition, it’s the behavioural and biological changes we can make in our daily lives that are key to real transformation. If political power resides in industrial forms of food, energy, education and medicine etc., then our daily divesting from these things is far more powerful than voting once every few years and more empowering than taking to the street.
Teaching kids to use appropriate tools that can be fixed, sharpened and repurposed is just one example of changing behaviour. Keeping kids out of school is another, either for two days a week like Tom or permanently like Woody.
Woody has spent much of the year saving up for a violin by selling foraged kindling. The pre-loved violin he bought came from the Swap Shop in Melbourne where he traded in his walked-for sticks for musical strings.
He is involved in the household’s sifting of potash from the char of our home-fire and he routinely returns such wood-promoting fertiliser back to the forest floor from where he gathers the kindling and we carefully handpick our fuel source – a fuel source that requires no grid, is regenerative and requires ecological thinning. This complete approach to economy, including the making of making returns, is at the heart of neopeasant relocalisation.
Woody is also one of a growing community of shepherds farming without farmland on public land to mitigate increasing bushfire risk and reduce weed dominance.
Goathand co-op, which several households contribute to now, has recently got a gig at the local high school where the goats are eating down blackberries, broom, grass and annual weeds ahead of a large-scale carbon sequestration planting project.
As a co-op committed to new and old forms of land custodianship practices we’ve run into some hurdles, which we explain here in our second Goathand video:
Is Zero related to our Boer goats? He certainly has their agility.
Life in the home and community economies enables us to drop everything when a child is ready to learn something new, and this means learning is magnified and relational. Forced learning may suit institutional life but it doesn’t serve children or their futures. Climate change will radically strip our wealth so we’ll need to know how to repair things again, like a favourite torn flanny.
Because there’s always loads to do, we have to be well in ourselves in order to keep performing the new-old economies. Preventing disease and staying well will be key as the global economy collapses and the climate gives increasingly louder feedback to its toxic culture of hypertechnocivility. Non-monetised community immunity and wellbeing is central to our transition.
Meg makes garlic kraut at Culture Club. Photo by Mara Ripani
After nearly three and half years Meg is still facilitating Daylesford Culture Club, our region’s free monthly fermenting group. She is now also convening Wild Fennel, a free monthly herbal group, facilitated by local herbalist, Rosie Cooper. And she is also helping fellow plant lover Brenna Fletcher organise Hepburn Seed Savers, which will operate out of our town’s library. You can read more about these and other projects we are involved with here. Two weeks ago Meg addressed our councillors at an ordinary meeting asking them to declare a climate emergency in our shire. All seven councillors unanimously agreed, and our local shire officially joined over a thousand local councils across the globe in committing to put climate action front and centre of all their decisions.
And this one is a talk we organised late last year to promote indigenous, permacultural and post-capital cross pollinations, which we only released recently.
We hope you enjoyed this little offering, Dear Reader. Spending increasingly less time online means our posts are more infrequent. But sharing a little of what we’re up to continues to link us into the global spirit of change for people seeking alternatives well beyond taking to the streets.
before really finding out how the Hume Highway was going to shape us.
We were surprised. Despite the noise and the speed of the traffic, the wide shoulders really helped us ride in relative peace. It was a cruisy ride from Gundagai to Jugiong (helped along by our first tail wind of the trip) where we parked our bikes in the shade beside a green grocers run by the very frinedly Gino. We (dumpster) dived into his compost boxes and produced some lovely stone fruit.
While buying some local veg from Gino he asked if we needed a good camping and swimming spot.
Thanks Gino! A perfect free camping ground. The next morning we harvested some stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) beside the Murrumbidgee River.
Nettle is high in iron and great for relieving painful muscles and joints. Just the thing for weary bike tourers. Lightly blanching the nettles takes away the sting, produces a healthy tonic to treat urinary and prostate complications and leaves a perfect fodder material for making an excellent pesto with almonds.
After our free medicinal hit we cycled up the road to the very bourgeois The Long Track Pantry for a breakfast cup of tea and a loaf of yummy bread,
before easing our way into the heartland of wool country.
Since leaving Daylesford over a month ago our nostrils have flared wildly and our hearts have sunk deeply with the roadkill we have passed.
We counted 81 killed animals between the left verge and left lane of the north bound Hume Highway between Jugiong and Yass, a distance of 60 kms.
This massacre included a myriad of birds, three tortoises, a dozen wallabies, several blue tongues, countless kangaroos, flattened foxes, rabbits, a wild pig, two echidnas and numerous snakes including this young copperhead.
Given there are four lanes and four verges on this dual highway one could surmise as many as 324 roadkilled critters for every 60 kms of highway. That’s a staggering 5.4 deaths per kilometre. The Hume, according to Wikipedia, is 838 kms in length which means, if you average it, there are quite possibly 4,525 corpses along this highway at any one time.
But it wasn’t just the sickening aspects of this road – the senseless massacres, the climate changing and packaging pollution that proliferated – we found worth observing,
the Hume offered up sweet moments of beauty and surprise, especially when we got off it (in this case in Bowning) and found some roadside fruit to forage and help restore our battered senses.
Then when we arrived in Yass we were welcomed by an avenue of not-quite-ripe publicly accessible almonds (Prunus spp.),
some heavenly ripe plumcots (Prunus spp.) overhanging a fence,
and were given some Leeton grown oranges by a God’s Squad bikie. Thanks Glen!
We camped, fished and slept under a balmy summer’s night sky before facing the Hume again.
Imagine this road as a sea of bicycles…
After riding about 40 km we arrived in Gunning, a town that boasts a free caravan-camping ground with hot showers at Barbour Park, and found we were just in time for the monthly Sunday market.
We bought some regional produce,
picked some free herbs (gave them a drink),
took a swim and lunched on some delicious bush tucker at Barbour Park.
The starchy bulb of cumbungi or bullrush (Typha spp.) offers an excellent raw or cooked vegetable at this time of year. Cumbungi is ecologically beneficial for capturing silt, creating habitat for diverse species and stabilising banks. It can also become ‘weedy’ so it makes a great food where we are the biological control or, as Russell Edwards would say, ‘ecological participants‘.
Stay tuned for more free food and other low-impact resources as we inch towards the Christmas lunch table in Moss Vale,
keep safe on the roads and if you’re driving, please think bike and think critter!
