We hosted our third July online session last Thursday night, Community Sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies. Over a hundred people signed up and many asked goodly questions that expanded the consciousness of the subject. We hope you enjoy this next offering.
Here is the audio-only version,
or you can watch it.
We hope you are enjoying these sessions, and that they are adding to your deliberations, plannings and responding to the predicaments of our times.
Our next session is Joyful resistance, an online tour of Tree Elbow, our 18 year old permaculture home. We look forward to explaining all the main hubs, hacks and behaviour changes that have enabled our transition to living well with little money.
On the weekend we held two online Q&A sessions, each for an hour and a half. Here we share an edited version of that three hours.
We hope you enjoy this offering as much as we did co-creating it. A big hearty thank you to all who participated, and especially to those who asked such timely, goodly questions.
Listen to the audio version (1:19mins),
or watch the video.
A reminder we will be travelling with The New Peasants to Stanley, Merimbula, Canberra and Sydney in Gadigal Country, where Gadigal born elder and dear friend, Uncle Charles Davison, will be welcoming us all at the Dendy Cinema in Newtown.
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.
Do you stand against safetyism, paternalism and nanny statism, which render people immobile and dependent on institutions and industries that are manipulative and controlling?
Do you stand against the NATO/Azov nazi/US invoked genocide of Ukrainian youth by a reactive and bullish Russia?
Do you stand against cultural or political groups who silence and smear others based on their beliefs and values?
Do you stand against large-scale industries including factory farms, agricultural chemicals, pharmaceuticals and sweat shops that mistreat humans, animals and complex biota?
Do you stand against a King (and others like him dripping in privilege) arrogantly calling for an end to ‘convenience’?
Do you stand with the people of villages, towns, cities and suburbs who in their own power and capacity claim for themselves an end to industrial-scale convenience and consumption?
Do you stand with the flowering, fruiting and singing of Mother Country and Grandmother Gaia and everything else that is sacred and not industrially conformed?
Do you stand with life that enables more delicious life to cross over into necessary death and decay, and back into more abundance?
Do you stand for a future society that doesn’t help raise sociopaths or psychopaths into positions of power and influence?
Do you stand with eldership, mentorship and rites of passage, which mark the accruing of wisdoms, and the witnessing of all in the village, regardless of their stage in life?
Do you stand for the flow of gifts across all species and within all species?
Do you stand for distributed wealth, access to land for all, and subsistence economies that are earth-honouring?
Do you stand with the rivers and creeks – the veins of the world that take life force to the largest biomes – the oceans?
Do you stand with mountains, caves, hills and rocks, and any undulation within the terrain of any Mother Country that enables the magic of surprise, and the shadow world from where wisdom springs?
Do you stand with the seeds that are our heritages, which have made our cultures of belonging, and will do so again?
Do you stand with the smallest biomes, bodily biomes and microbial communities, as extensions of Mother Country and Grandmother Gaia?
Do you stand with Mother Country and Grandmother Gaia, honour them in the way in which you live, and defend them from machine mind in whatever capacity you have to do so?
Do you stand with both individual freedoms and communitarian care, without one eroding the other?
Do you recognise that true consent is not possible when metered out by top-down authority?
Do you stand with pollinators, in all forms, recognising the monumental gifts they bring to lifemaking?
Do you stand with the fungal webs that rule the worlds of the world, including the unreal worlds of hubristic human Empires that will always collapse and turn back into the mycelial realm?
Do you stand with humus and humility, and recognise they have derived from the same root word?
Do you stand with your herbal and medicinal plant commons, the remnant traces of your indigenous liberty and soul, which continue to bring gifts to your health and to your meaning making?
Do you stand with ecological killing in order to take life that makes more life possible, outside of a ‘man-made mass death’ cosmology, where at arm’s length civilisational violence occurs on your behalf as an industrial-food-dependent vegan, vegetarian or omnivore?
Do you stand with empowering young people to obtain skills for the future, both pragmatic and sacred (such as deep listening and beholding, foraging, gardening, forestry and hunting)?
Do you stand with village rebuilding and grass roots, cultural, ecological and microbial diversity?
Here are the Forest & Free children after harvesting 1.5kg of narrow leaf plantain (Plantago lanceolata) seed heads for psyllium. This plantain is a common, ancestral (Eurasia) and abundant plant that brings healing food-medicine to our lives. The kids collected this amount in just twenty minutes. Each week they learn about a new food or medicine that is not under lock and key, so they can build the skills, knowledges and daily rituals to augment their own pathways to freedom, responsibility and wisdom. We run Forest & Free within a gift economy.
So, does binary thinking have a place? In the absence of binaries how do we form our values? Is it possible to live without binaries?
We’d love to hear from you. When is binary thinking problematic? When is it useful? Would you answer yes to any the above questions? All? We hope this post generates some goodly discussion, and serves the contemporary dialectic for what mythos, what world story, we want to serve.
Fire! It’s wild, feared, harnessed and praised. Our first tool. Like the Greek story of Prometheus stealing fire to give to mortals, Djaara people – on whose land we have made home – also have their stolen fire story. Waa, the raven, was originally white and in stealing fire got himself burnt. We heard this told at Yapenya in Bendigo recently. All comers were invited to come witness this new Djaara ceremony.
Djaara women performing Yapenya, before the ceremonial fire is lit.
Performing new ceremony is soulful, much needed work. Former SWAPs Connor and Marta – who met at Tree Elbow, got hitched, travelled far and wide and moved back to the area – are expecting a child. Patrick lit a fire for Connor and a number of men gathered in the forest to warm Connor into fatherhood with stories about being dads, sons and men. The night was transformative, a kind of medicine.
Meg concurrently held a women’s circle for Marta and again the night revealed many insights and gentle sharings, and this group also realised ceremony was missing in their lives as women.
The cultural absence of gathering around fire, in forests and in other more-than-human environments, led us to establish Make & Play a few years ago. Patrick has recently begun a second weekly group for older kids called Feral & Free – a radical form of scouts (drawing on both the ecological masculinities and ecofeminisms of our day). The following quote from Patrick’s book re:)Fermenting culture, which excavates the fire stealing creation myth of western culture, has been cited as the epigraph in the recently published, Ecological Masculinities: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Guidance:
A culture that has lost its beginning story is a culture adrift, destructive and self-harming. While the West can be seen as synonymous with imperialism, this is not our old people, this is not our true culture, gender-lopsidedness is not our only heritage.
Feral & Free crew
The Celts reportedly said that a woman’s soul is male and a man’s soul is female. How’s that for oldskool gender fluidity? The father fire (technics) and the matering earth (ecology) are within us together, regardless of how we identify. They are not opposing stories, they are intertwined. We are technical animals; storytellers. Story derives from fire.
Story features at all these gatherings in the forest. It is stories – what we tell out and to ourselves – that make us who we are. When we gather and speak together across a fire a raw heartfeltness springs forth. Courage to do this is more than required. Woody spoke his first public story recently, at the local community Cicada storytelling night. He mustered all his pluck to raise himself from his seat and make the slow walk up onto the podium at the Senior Citizens’ Room behind the Daylesford Town Hall. His story was called Spring Blossom, and he quietly spoke of beholding the blossom of a wild apple, trying with his 6-year old language to conjure that earlier moment of praise and delight for the tree, for all of us to share.
Pic: Juanita Broderick
Stories heard from across the crackling foci of the fire speak to our ancient selves in our present bodies. The podium or stage can adversely change this intent, but that’s another story for another time.
Woody is growing up within a general household narrative where a commons (of any form) is never to be capitalised, where an economy (of any form) never enslaves us or makes ruin terra mater. On working out how he is to save up for a new guitar he said: “If I get the sticks from the tip to make my kindling bundles, then I’m not selling them from the floor of the forest but only selling waste.” This ethic he did not learn at school but by learning to think with a forest’s thoughts. What if the dominant value system shifted from unrestrained growth at all costs to the sanctity of humus and earth others at all costs? What transformations of culture would we see?
If we know that the tumorous Internet of Things is just the next sales pitch in a long line of greed and intransigence, how do we garner the courage to turn away from such seduction and face and embrace humus, and all the quiet things of earth not screaming for attention? How do we perform other stories that don’t just passively go along with the dominant, egotistical ideology?
Pic: Laurel Freeland
Woody has been setting up his fire-starting stall beside his dad’s edible weed ID stand at the Daylesford Sunday Farmer’s Market. Like the mushroom ID stand Patrick offers in autumn, spring is weed time, and there are many beneficial autonomous plants to eat, make medicine from, preserve and ferment. None of these gems beneath our feet require climate altering transportation, weeds move around without industrial distribution systems.
Weed knowledges are just some of the things we’ve been sharing on our Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs) this spring. Foraging for weeds is a powerful way back to sensing what ecological economies might be performed in the near future. Weeds constitute about 5% of our diet, but because of their many health-filled properties this constitutes about 40% of our preventative medicines.
On the third and final 2018 PLC we hosted Ryan, Lucille and Clare for two weeks, and reperforming commons of all forms was central to the curriculum. As was making leek kraut, another arsenal in our preventative medicine chest as it is both a pre- and probiotic.
Just three students at a time is small enough to engage intimately with the many interrelationships and layered learnings within a permacultural neopeasant household. We began the course with a big list to get through, that grew and grew from this picture on…
Wood was collected on bikes from areas of forest where fuel reduction burns take place. We talked about the importance of reducing fuel load going into the fire season while at the same time leaving more than enough for habitat, mycelium and humus production.
We also scavenged useful materials from the tip such as chicken wire and fire wood. (If you’re reading this in your inbox you’ll need to click through to our blog to watch the video below).
We gathered elderflowers for brewing tonics and ciders in ready for the festive solstice period.
We planted pumpkins at the community garden, yet another goodly place for reclaiming and expanding the commons.
We prepped beds (double dug and humanured) in the Tree Elbow annual garden. By the time a PLC participant leaves The School of Applied Neopeasantry they would have been introduced to the imperatives of origin-known food. They are also introduced to our economic form: subsistence first (nourishment of household), surplus second (gifts in and out to community), money third (paying the rent and bills). If money by its very nature must grow as an economic form, and knowing what this means to terra mater, it must be sent into degrowth. Money constitutes just 30% of our economy now. We are active degrowth-ers.
Each day of the PLC, when we broke for refreshments, we engaged in discussions on the philosophy, poetics and politics of neopeasant economy, permaculture garden-farming, or regenerative culture making (take your pick of language). Oh, and the subject of Zero was a high priority…
While philosophy, poetics and politics are important, they are nothing without a sleeves-rolled-up pragmatism and a goodly interspecies back scratch.
While Ryan, Lucille and Clare were with us we updated our fire plan, a three page document featuring various codes and scenarios, and what our actions will be with each. We’re sure this doc will be put to use a number of times this season.
We carried out a dress rehearsal on the first Very High day in early December. The PLC participants will no doubt call on such prep work well into their climate changed futures.
Bush fires are, of course, going to be more and more frequent, and more or less a direct feedback to neoliberal economics. Thanks Jordan Peterson environmentalism! Thanks neoliberals everywhere! Thanks belligerent Baby Boomers and your mainstay Ayn Rand ideology! Go get ’em Hercules, Superman, indulgence tourism! Plugging and filling our gutters with water is really such a quaint response to the climate leviathan so indelibly ready to pounce. But plug we will.
As a car-free family, we (ironically) need to be even more prepared on fire risky days than those with cars. Which days we stay home and defend and which days we leave early (on the bus out of town after hopefully persuading the driver to let Zero and his PTV rail approved dog carrier on board because we are, pleadingly, climate refugees) will be critical to call. Packing special items and required documents to have on hand throughout the season is just one of the many tasks listed on our plan.
Ryan, Lucille and Clare carried out fire mitigating work on public land nearby to Tree Elbow. This labour also has the benefit of ensuring a weedy commons is not sprayed with pesticides, burnt or bulldozed by one of the various land managers, and thus the weed cycle returned to phase one, again. Using chop and drop techniques and an old peasant trick of laying down a sheet of iron or a large board onto the brambles, we reduce fire risk while using the crushed material to make more humus for other (fire retarding) plants to grow within.
We made this video to highlight holistic, post-pesticide methods of fire and weed mitigation, which is not the same as traditional Djarra land management practices, due to the fact the A1 soil horizon, and thus the ecology, has changed so radically. However, like both contemporary and traditional Aboriginal principles of land care, our methods aim to incorporate fire-risk mitigation with ecological enhancement. Watch on our Youtube channel or below.
Fire is something we handle every day. For us it is a local, renewable energy. Our outdoor kitchen stove (repurposed from the tip) to fuel our 8-slice toaster made up of a wire rack (again from the tip), powered by wood (also from the tip) collected on foot or by bicycle. No grid is necessary. Being of the mindset that nothing needs replacing, things just need repurposing, remaking or mending, we move our household’s economy further into a degrowth of money and debt, growing an abundance of relationships with people, forests, soil communities, knowledges, nourishment and skills.
And when the day’s labours are done, and the heat is upon us, we descend to the lake with our big post-carbon rig. Just about everything we need comes from the tip, skip bins, op-shops, garage sales or from terra mater herself. A blow-up dinghy is only ever a reclaimed waste product, lovingly patched. It never comes new off the shelf. When the tip runs out of such things, then we’ll learn to make our own canoes from scratch. This is powerdown in action.
Picnicking by the lake is a great chance to unwind, especially after the stresses of a day prepping for potential fire. Although it only turned out to be a dress rehearsal, it was a great opportunity to see where the weaknesses in our fire plan lie. Swimming in untreated lake water is so restorative after such a long, hot and windy day, especially after we’d been so pragmatically staying with the reality of climate chaos, trying not to lose our senses.
On the last night of the third PLC we invited the first 6 participants to join us. Nearly everyone was available. We walked with Liam, Cara, Ryan, Lucille, Clare, Moe and Marty up to the forest so each could see what the other had done in the commons to allay fire threat and continue the work of moving ecological succession into the next phase.
The PLC alumni came together for dinner and swapped notes and sang some sweet tunes. A tradition we’ll keep going.
Marty and Cara, from The Rattlers, and the first PLC, gave a wee after dinner performance. (Again, you’ll need to click through to our blog or Youtube channel to watch if you’re reading this in your inbox).
Aren’t they great! We’re continually inspired by the love, labours and intent of young people on their respective regenerative culture making journeys.
Connor, Marta and Jeremy – the three Tree Elbow musketeers of 2017 – have all moved back to the area permanently, and are all brewing up special things of their own. Jeremy will be taking interns at his place in 2019, especially for those interested in learning all things curing animal skins, blacksmithing and other lost arts. Here he is with newcomer to town Tony, harvesting broad beans at the most recent community garden working bee.
Community garden working bees really get the love juices going. Through activities like gardening, the soil releases nonpathogenic Mycobacterium vaccae, which increases levels of serotonin and decreases levels of anxiety in mammals. Do it communally and you get oxytocin as a top up. Oxytocin is the bonding chemical found naturally in the body and exchanged between loved ones (including between dogs and humans). Though be aware, it also heightens awareness of enemies and potential threats. This smiling assassin will rake apart any mug who threatens terra mater.
And this mama, Lovely Duck, is also a fearsome warrioress when it comes to keeping her brood safe. It has been a pleasure to get to know her over the years. Her truly giving demeanour instructs us and lets us know what love is possible as radical homemakers.
There are many in our community who are actively engaging in a flow of gifts economy. These lil beauties were brought to us by Fiona and Edward from Adsum Farm. Kohlrabi kraut is the best! Knowing where the great majority of our food, medicine and energy comes from means we can better live accountably to our local land’s logic and processes, and know what we need to give back to keep such abundance flowing.
Thank you Fiona and Edward for your generosity and nurture, and thank you Sari for your flame red morello cherries that you didn’t want to see go to waste. They have lit our days; a wild morello cider is on the brew, and a bottle or two will boomerang back to you.
Flame red morello cider will be appreciatively consumed this summer as more and more fires will burn in the nation-state of Australia, never ceded. Bill Mollison famously wrote that, “Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.”
Fire is a wild force that could more than displace us and our community one day. Creation stories across the world speak of how humans tamed or procured fire as our first tool, and how we got burnt in the process. With climate change fire will be wilder and far less tameable. Djaara people haven’t forgotten that Waa got burnt stealing the first tool and they are retelling that old story today. We would be wise to heed such a story.
Merry solstice everyone! May you continue to trust the fire in your bellies in 2019, and stoke your guts with goodly microbe-generating fibres and ferments from your homeplace hearths. If you would like to come and visit our homeplace we have three more house + garden tours coming up in 2019: Sunday 24 February, Sunday 31 March and Sunday 28 April.
Pic: Jennifer Polixenni Brankin
Sending our very best wishes for the solstice and new year, much love from Artist as Family.
It has been a very social time of late, guests from many places visiting with much sharing, learning and sleeves-rolled-up labouring. A lovely French couple, Ariane and Thomas, stopped in. They are making a film of transitioning peoples from around the world, and they provided us a very privileged bird’s eye view of Tree Elbow University’s School of Applied Neopeasantry, AKA our quarter-acre home ecology.
Thomas Dorleans even made this little mash up of the footage he took, which we layered with our mate Charlie‘s songful magic to make this little vid of the spring garden. (If you are reading this as an email subscription you’ll need to click through to our blog to see it).
Thomas also took this lovely pic of us with our second Permaculture Living Course (PLC) participants, the delightful Christy, Moe and Liam.
A PLC involves many differing skills and knowledges and any given day will include various songs of fermentation, cellaring, composting, sowing, harvesting, soil prepping, building, cooking, repairing tools, community gardening, community forest stewardship and fire prevention work, to list just a few things. Woody has been making a series of videos of late of such labours and learnings and this one shows the work Christy, Moe and Liam carried out to continue the fire prevention and ecology enhancing programme we’ve initiated on the south-west edge of the town, based on David Holmgren’s and the Spring Creek community’s volunteer work over the past 25 years in Hepburn.
This work complements and extends the beautiful labours that Cara, Marty and Teeka were doing in the previous PLC. Make and Play bush school kids, Woody, Luna, Fab and Leah, hang out while gently absorbing the volunteer service work of adults taking responsibility for their futures.
Make and Play has been going for two years now and we have been learning so much about forest biomes, edible weeds and wild foods, and how to make magic, simple tools and build collaborative skills.
Patrick is about to start Feral and Free, a group for older kids, which will be a radical, less formal form of Scouts. If you would like more info please email him. Patrick has also been offering his weedy and feral knowledges at the Daylesford Sunday Farmers’ Market, collecting donations for the community gardens in exchange for proclaiming the edible and medicinal properties of numerous weed species. His next weedy appearance will be on Sunday 2 December between 10-12 noon.
While Meg has been sharing her fermenting knowledges at the monthly Daylesford Culture Club meet-ups. In December she will be facilitating a miso-making workshop. Make sure you follow the Hepburn Relocalisation Network for details to come.
Photo: Mara Ripani
Other guests we have hosted recently include Eva Perroni and Eric Holt-Giménez, who came to stay with us on their tour of Australia for the Food for Thought and Action series. With Eva we put together the Land for Life event as part of this series, and it will soon be available as a video on our Youtube channel. Community elder and permie activator, Su Dennett, joined us for a post Land for Life breakfast.
The Land for Life event, featuring Bec Phillips, David Holmgren and Eric, was a remarkable moment in our community, drawing on indigenous, permacultural and post-capital relationships concerning food, land, culture and economy. The night transcended typical heady discussions to become more about trust building and healing the traumas of our imperialist pasts, each as capital subjects and actors of varying degree.
It is always sobering after such a powerful event to return to the stuff of the everyday, using the body for what we call productive yoga – lifting, hauling, cutting, stirring, holding, shaking, walking, mixing, harvesting, digging, sitting, throwing, forking, running, thrusting, hurling, bending, squatting, etc. All these things constitute the biophysical rhythms of the day from stretching the gluten of the spelt dough, to mixing the weed or poultry teas, or sifting the dry potash from the char to make a range of home-brewed fertilisers required for the garden. In combination they call us home to a certain presence of mind, through the body,
like hanging out the family cloth, for example. Each cloth, after being washed, is ‘ironed’ by the palm of our hand as we prepare them for the drying rack. They dry by the solar of the sun (outside) or by the solar of our hand axed and walked-for wood (inside). Many small, repetitive tasks throughout the day mosaic into a rich order of productions, which together constitute as low an impact life as we can currently achieve. We were once fecaphobes, now we are fecaphiles, as our brightly singing family cloths and humanure soils attest.
And it is this that we aim to impart during each of our PLCs. Below Christy, Moe and Liam plant out our home-raised tomato and basil seedlings into our newly prepped humanure compost annual beds. Closing the poop loop and saving seeds are two very powerful processes that enable us to live off the industrial food grid and therefore divest from that sector of capitalism.
Running these courses has been extremely rewarding and heartwarmingly positive. Building relationships are everything within regenerative-gifting economies, and the social warming that takes place in a PLC is certainly the sympoetic honey on the cake.
Many thanks for reading. We look forward to responding to your comments and questions. If you are inspired by what we do please subscribe to this blog or Youtube page, and tell a friend or two about the things we’re up to. It’s your social network that will help to share and expand a culture of households who are in transition from damaging forms of economy to a culture that includes a plethora of regenerative and life-giving household responses to the predicament of our times.
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Before we go we’d like to tell you about a number of forthcoming events:
A talk
Patrick is giving a talk in Melbourne on Wednesday November 14 at Hawthorn Library (584 Glenferrie Rd). The talk, entitled Here come the neo-peasants, is about how and why we live like we do and what are the social, environmental and climate imperatives of transitioning to low carbon lifeways. Entry is free. More info here.
A tour
We have one more house and garden tour for the year on Sunday November 25 from 1.30pm – 4.30pm. Tickets are $32.74 (incl. booking fee) and includes afternoon tea. You can buy tickets here.
More PLCs
Would you like to do a Permaculture Living Course? Do you understand the permaculture ethics and principles but are not sure what it means to embody them in your everyday life? Are you already on the path away from a pervasive pollution-consumption ideology but want to take it much further? Our next round of applications to do a PLC at Tree Elbow University’s School of Applied Neopeasantry are open. Head here for more info about what’s involved. And please email us if you’d like an application form. Applications close Friday November 23. The three autumn 2019 PLC dates are:
Feb 25 – March 10
April 1 – 14
April 29 – May 12
PLCs are 100% non-monetary and 100% non-accredited.
