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.
In this offering, permaculture elder David Holmgren is our guest in discussion with Patrick speaking about this next phase of global energy transition, and thus societal transformation in the local context.
Here’s the audio version (1hr 52mins).
David and Patrick’s hour-long conversation is followed by a compost of goodly questions from community participants who gathered and shared food together for this event. We hope that this long-form drop will aid in your preparations for the coming months.
This event recently took place at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Tree Elbow University in Djaara Mother Country.
Huge, hug-filled thanks to Jordan Osmond from Folklore Pictures (formally Happen Films) for both the sound and vision.
We’d love to hear from you about your preparations, priorities and musings at this time.
We seem to be in a pattern of weekly blog missives. We’re going along with it as there is energy for that. Here, on the southern ridge bone of the Great Connecting Range in Djaara Mother Country, winter has momentarily returned with overnight temperatures plummeting to 1 degree celsius. This chilly weather system has coincided with our water heater springing a leak, the tank of which we drained and which, in turn, has meant we can’t light our wood stove so as not to damage its water jacket chamber. So we have been rugging up and sitting with the gratitude of what this hearth means in our life, when all is well with it.
In other news, Zephyr has stepped back into a creators role for Artist as Family. Zephyr experienced the full horror of modern drone warfare in Ukraine earlier this year, and escaped with his life, while he lost a number of comrades who had also joined the Ukrainian army. First Person View (FPV) attack drones have become an ugly part of modern warfare, meaning that soldiers – people – can be tracked and attacked with flying ordnance by a remote controller. Another cowardly gift from late industrial capitalism. As part of his recovery from the trauma, Zephyr has taken up using a FPV drone for peaceful operations, and gifted us this footage he took of Tree Elbow’s spring garden this week, to help promote our forthcoming house and garden tours. Thanks Zeph!
Zephyr is setting up a small business with his drone, so please get in touch if you’d like to employ his services in central Victoria. And, please get in touch if you’d like to attend one of our full-day house and garden tours (January 18 & April 4), which also includes time in the nearby commons that we co-steward with our neighbours and our goats. Meet Pav, the newest member of the blackberry munching herd.
This week we’ve been listening to Tommy Castles’ music. Tommy composed the exquisite soundtrack for The New Peasants. One of our favourite compositions from the soundtrack is called Bike Scavenger (ft. Carl Dickens). This music enters the film as Patrick fixes the wheel of his bike trailer to ride up to the local tip – our hardware store – to collect materials. The New Peasants will shortly be available to view online, and for peeps in this neck of the woods, Radius Gallery is holding a screening and Q&A on November 23, MC’d by David Holmgren.
In other news, The Pretty Good Cricket Podcast has just dropped Episode three. This week Blue Wren and Black Cockatoo dive into a sodden pitch and welcome in their first guest.
Well, that’s our neopeasant round up for the week. For those of you who have requested a video from us about hosting men’s and women’s circles, stay tuned. We are on to it. We love hearing from you in this quiet cul-de-sac of the web, so let flow in the comments section for a little more connection.
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.
Meg speaks with Yara Dowani, a CSA farmer and permaculturist from the West Bank of Palestine. Yara tells of her journey from city girl to managing Om Sleiman farm, the continual challenges of producing nourishing food under occupation, and her hopes for Palestine.
Listen to the audio-only version (50mins),
or watch the video.
In their conversation Yara mentions the film Five Broken Cameras, which is set in the village near where Om Sleiman farm is situated. The farm is under constant threat of Israeli settler expansion, which you can see on the horizon in the below image.
Artist as Family is holding a solidarity raffle at each of The New Peasants screenings we attend to raise money for a water filter system for Om Sleiman farm. If you can’t make a screening but would like to donate, click here, then click One Time Gift, and in the field that says Name, please write down your name with Om Sleiman beside it. We’ll add this to the funds we are raising from raffle tickets sales. The raffle prize is two nights accommodation in our Permie Loveshack in southern Djaara country.
As a part Jewish household, we stand alongside innumerable Jewish investigative journalists and public speakers around the world (including, Antony Loewenstein, Aaron Maté, Charles Eisenstein, Gabor Maté, Max Blumenthal, and Katie Halper), who stand in solidarity with Palestinians and against the colonial and genocidal regime in Israel.
Enough is enough!
Big thanks to Yara and the other farmers at Om Sleiman farm for doing this work and so bravely sharing your story of resistance agriculture.
MAKE YOURSELF A CUPPA and come and have a chat with us. Over the years we have received messages from people in many countries asking us about various parts of our life and practice, and we have not always had the time to reply to everyone. So, we thought we’d offer a chance for people to come meet us virtually, ask us questions and participate in a generative discussion centred upon what we do and why.
We are making available two specific event times to try to suit as many timezones as possible; to come say g’day, ask questions, listen to other people‘s goodly questions, listen to our responses and clarifications, and feel the magic of connection that can often unfold by such a gathering of common interest.
Two online events in early August: AEST: Saturday 9 August 7pm – 8.30pm and Sunday 10 August 9am – 10.30am
Topics we are often asked about involve home-education, subsistence economies, roles in the household, how did we begin, making decisions, ceremony and ritual, feeling demoralised, health fundamentals outside the industrial medical complex, involving children in labour, meaning and learning, dispute resolution, creativity in the home, and a plethora of other topics. We are very happy to answer your questions from very small details to the bigger picture stuff. We are also happy for you to come along and listen, and not necessarily feel the need to ask anything.
Please send us an email to register and receive the link to be part of the live Q&A sessions. Please put in the subject line which date you’d like to attend. Alternatively, feel free to write your question as a comment on this post, and we’ll take it to the live sessions. These sessions will be recorded and we will make an edited version available online.
