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A selection of our writings from 2009 to the present. If you'd like to keep up to date with our latest posts, please subscribe below.

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Category: film

The New Peasants (now available to watch worldwide)

Nov 24, 2025 | Artist as Family online event, Artist as Family tour, belonging economies, community, David Holmgren, film, Happen Films, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, reculturing, storytelling, village rebuilding | 4 comments

 

Hello! We are very happy to share the news that The New Peasants is now available worldwide to watch. Last night we attended a Q&A screening in Hepburn, the 15th screening in Australia, which was MC’d by our friend and elder, David Holmgren. Now the film can be watched anywhere at anytime.

On Kinema, the movie platform where The New Peasants is hosted, you can privately watch the film ($5) or host a community screening. We are very happy to attend online Q&A sessions after community screenings of the film, so please get in contact with us if you’d like to host to such an event.

We are also open to groups getting in touch with us to organise house, garden and forest tours, so again, please let us know and we can discuss it further. A reminder we have two public house and garden tours coming up. There are still a handful of places left. Go here for more details.

With spring warmth, from our patch to yours,

Artist as Family

The news and high views from Tree Elbow (this week)

Oct 29, 2025 | animals in subsistence permaculture, Artist as Family tour, biological control, capitalism, central Victoria, commons, conflict, cricket, culture, David Holmgren, Djaara mother country, drones, earth stewardship, energy descent, family, farming, film, goats, healing, home, land management, lifemaking, lifetaking, permaculture, radical homemakers, war | 14 comments

 

Hello dear Subscribers and laissez-faire readers,

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.

Forthcoming house & garden tour, screenings in NZ & NY, solidarity raffle for Palestine, & a side project involving cricket and men’s health

Oct 15, 2025 | Artist as Family tour, belonging economies, cricket, farming and colonisation, film, Happen Films, men's health, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, regenerative farming, storytelling | 6 comments

Hello dear subscribers,

It’s been a while, and spring is finally springing here at Tree Elbow University in southern Djaara country.

We have a few things to share with you. Firstly, we are opening our home and garden again on Sunday January 18 and Saturday April 4 2026, and if you’d like to book a place on either tour, please message us or leave a comment and we’ll get in touch. Each tour (10am – 4pm) costs $75 per person, and includes a neopeasant morning and afternoon tea. We are just beginning to plant out our summer garden, which will be in full swing by mid January and which we’ll be harvesting from in April. Come and say g’day!

Secondly, we have now sent Yara Dowani at Om Sleiman farm – a permaculture, teaching and agroecology farm in the West Bank of Palestine – the fruits of the raffle money we raised from the film screenings of The New Peasants that we personally attended. We raised just under $1200, and were able to send the irrigation part that the farm needed and transfer the remaining money into their account. If you missed it a few months back, here is Meg speaking with Yara from Om Sleiman. Thank you to everyone who bought tickets at the screenings, and who donated via our website.

Thirdly. Speaking of The New Peasants, the latest news is that this feature documentary by Happen Films about our family’s lifeway is about to be premiered in New Zealand and in New York, at the Ceres Food Film Festival. If you feel called, please share with friends in Nelson, Aotearoa and in NYC.

And finally, we’ve been involved in supporting Blue Wren and our friend Black Cockatoo launch their new podcast, The Pretty Good Cricket Podcast on Substack. The Pretty Good Podcast is where men’s care meets regional cricket in Djaara country. We share with you the first episode here, as a taster for what is to come as the season progresses.

If you’d like to listen throughout the summer, be sure to subscribe.

Well, that’s it for now. If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch.

With spring warmth,
Artist as Family

Q&A (on collapse, gifts, gender, ritual, neoliberalism, fire, revillaging, death and more)

Aug 11, 2025 | Artist as Family online event, belonging economies, bush school, capitalism, ceremonial species approach, children, Collective preparedness, colonisation, community sufficiency, conflict, corporatism, degrowth, Djaara mother country, earth stewardship, ecological crises, ecological economy making, edible weeds, eldership, energy descent, family, farming, fatherhood, fear, fermenting, film, fire, flow of gifts, food, food culture, food sovereignty, foraging, fossil fuels, gift economy, Grief, Happen Films, health, herbs, home economies, human rights, Hypertechnocivility, interspecies relating, lifemaking, locavorism, love, media, medicinal plants, mushrooms, neoliberalism, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, post-industrial thought, reculturing, relationships, relocalisation, revillaging, storytelling, subsistence permaculture, transitional communities, walked-for food, wisdom, wood energy | 12 comments

 

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.

An update (medical, misinformational and a day in the life of Woody)

Sep 29, 2024 | by Dr Patrick Jones, democracy, film, Free to learn, government, Happen Films, home, human rights, politics, raising boys, Unschool, village rebuilding | 32 comments

 

Unexpectedly, Patrick’s mum became critically ill while we were India. We have been bedside with her for a week since our return, gathering with family. Her recovery is slow but progressing.

There has been so much love expressed within the family, with cousins, aunties, uncles, grandchildren, parents all reconnecting, and as the hospital is full of Nepali and Indian nurses so we haven’t experienced reverse culture shock. The Manali wool in ICU has also been our long thread back to India.

During this week we have also been aware of a looming deadline; September 30, for submissions to the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024. In the quiet times sitting bedside in the ICU, Patrick has been penning a submission. We present his main points here.

In brighter news – news about a world that we know is possible – our friends at Happen Films published this short portrait of Woody yesterday.

Our favourite line in the film is, “I don’t decide what to learn, I just discover things.” Good onya, Woody!

In further helping create a world that we know is possible, where beautiful things are discovered, we’re teaching on two upcoming permaculture courses. This in-person course, and this online one. Come join us!

Replacing growth with belonging economies

Mar 29, 2020 | belonging economies, culture, degrowth, economics, film, First People, neopeasant, permaculture, story, storytelling | 8 comments
Last year we were invited to contribute a chapter to the forthcoming book, Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices, to be published by Routledge later this year. Although, let’s not count on anything like that occurring.

We called our chapter, ‘Replacing growth with belonging economies: a neopeasant response’. We completed it in November.

Due to the times we’re living we offer it here as a film. It’s our most significant collaborative writing project since our book, The Art of Free Travel. (If you’re a subscriber and reading this in your inbox, you won’t see the below video, so here’s a link to it).


Replacing growth with belonging economies 
 
Lived, written and spoken by Patrick Jones and Meg Ulman
 
Text editing by Anitra Nelson and Ferne Edwards
Sound by Patrick Jones and Meg Ulman (assisted by Jordan Osmond)
Video editing and seven drawings by Patrick Jones (the second, third and fourth are in collaboration with David Holmgren)
Photographs and footage by Artist as Family, David Jablonka, Nina Sahraoui, Mara Ripani, Michelle Dunn, Thomas Dorleans, Michal Krawczyk, Giulia Lepori, Nicholas Walton-Healey, Ponch Hawkes, Gab Connole, Zac Imhoof, Anthony Petrucci, Jordan Osmond, Jason Workman, Ian Robertson and David Holmgren
Soundtrack: A place of simple feeding – a poem-recipe by Patrick Jones, arranged and performed by Anthony Petrucci
Gift Ecology Films
Shared under a creative commons license/non-commercial
an Artist as Family home production
Please let us know about your own transition from hypertechnocivility