A few weeks ago, three young women from For Crying Out Loud, a women’s circle based in southern Djaara country, returned home to a community ceremony after a three night and three day solo fasting vigil. Such a vigil we call Listening to Country. The three women, who were accompanied by Meg as guide, took only warm clothes, a sleeping bag, 10lt of water and a tarp. They left in fair sunlight early on Thursday morning, got rained on heavily on the middle day and night, and returned on Sunday morning to fine weather and a community hearth.

It’s difficult for the limits of writing to convey the beauty, vulnerability, love, respect and kinship at this event, for those us witnessing the returning women, and for the women themselves. So many tears, so much openness of heart, so little hubris and pretension, so much humus and humility, and deep inner knowing.

Nourishing food nourishes. Open-hearted people nourish. Mother Country perennially nourishes, and teaches while offering no judgement.

To behold such transformation in both individual and village – in the integration of solo vigil with the supporting, witnessing village – is powerful business. One of the fundamental problems of the machine-driven civilisation we were born into, at least to our gut-heart-minds, is that spirit rants and raves with big industrial energy inputs, while soul gets little time, little affection, and little quiet. A Listening to Country vigil is an opportunity to rewire our civilisational hubris in order to be humus enough to listen to our indigenous souls, as contiguous parts of the Mother.

A year earlier, five men headed out to also vigil for three days and three nights, with Patrick as guide. These men are from FireChoir, a men’s group that meets at the same fire circle as the women. While in Country for this vigil, Patrick wrote the following longform piece at the invitation of a special issue editor who was inviting papers on land management practices for an Italian conservation journal. The piece was rejected as it didn’t fit the materialist criteria of the current scientific orthodoxy. We present it here in a spirit and soul of neopeasant heterodoxy, and the necessary breaking down of colonial forms and function.

Listen to Patrick reading it (approx. 50 mins).

 

Forests make us human: the vigil and a ceremonial species approach

by Patrick Blue Wren Jones

Dedicated to the generosity and grace of Djaara Mother Country, the vision of White Serpent, the ceremonial hearths of Father Fire, and all the many returnings of Blue Wrens.

Glossary of terms
Country – meaning sacred and/or ancestral land in Aboriginal English. i.e. on or in Mother Country
Digi-industrial – portmanteau for digital and industrial relating to the fusion of these technics
Hypertechnocivility – extreme tech civilisations that are estranged from biological relationships
Life making – regenerative and holistic approaches to living as ecological participants
Mainstream – the collective consciousness of a culture manipulated by various forms of power
Mythopoetical – the production or regeneration of myths or mythos in a culture
Neopeasant – new peasant; reclaiming epistemologies of land-bonded recommoning
Newcomer – newly arrived, weed, feral, settler et al., especially related to species
Oldtimer – indigenous; long established, specifically related to species
Permaculture – permanent culture; perennial biome based cultures; applied ecology cultures
Permapoesis – permanent making, specifically in cultural, economic, social and ecological forms
Recommoning – reclaiming, re-making or regenerating biophysical commons
Reculturing – composting civilisational (anti-cultural) forms and practices while crafting cultural ones from the matured compost
Safetyism – an extreme belief that suffering, pain, discomfort, grief or death can be avoided; as per transhumanist ideology

An offering (in place of an Abstract)

What I offer here is a ceremonial approach to land, an alternative cultural and economic story in relationship to ecology, a story that is emerging and evolving, that is bringing forward and reculturing old/new lifeways in the face of collapsing industrial hypertechnocivility.

In this reculturing and reclaiming I am listening to my Indigenous friends and teachers, I am listening to the land, and I am listening to my ancestral land-bonded soul-body, already indigenous/peasant.

It is necessary, therefore, I depart from civil or city-centric academic convention to be able to offer this story.

My labours, here, reside within the ecological humanities, they are what I call a permapoesis – a permanent making – a bridging of arts, crafts and sciences that is not neoliberal, technocratic or materialist, but something other.

I request of the reader, therefore, a staying-with as this telling unfolds, a staying-with as I share with you the ecological, social, economic and cultural intricacies of this story, of this multi-pronged ceremonial approach to land.

For generations people and their tools, systems and animals have managed and shaped land in ways that either established long standing or permanent cultures of place or boom-and-bust civilisations where there was overshoot of the resources of the land. Over the past century, the scale of our tools used to transform land has escalated. In this technological ascent, our species has more than less lost an abiding kinship with land, and thus lost an intelligence in relation to land that can only be gleaned through a labouring with, and celebrating in ritual, art and ceremony, biological life.

Ceremony, I have found, grows gratitude for life. Gratitude is the foremost sensibility required to be in love with the world.

Whatever pejorative things can be said of our ancestors – the propaganda and policies promulgated first by feudal elites (early enclosures), monotheists (witch hunts) and later by the early political economists or capitalists (see writings such as, The Invention of Capitalism and Caliban and the Witch) – there can be no denial of a long human tradition of land-bonded animism in western culture, where ritual, reverence and ceremony played a significant part of human cultural life, especially in how we relate to land and are in relationship with its many communities.

My offering here is a telling of how I, my family, our immediate neighbourhood, our volunteer students at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, and some in our broader community are recrafting a land-bonded, ceremonial approach to ecological succession, bushfire mitigation and weed management, while at the same time tentatively, sensitively recommoning on unceded Aboriginal land, restoring a subsistence economy approach through these activities, encouraging the return of indigenous biota, while understanding the ecological gifts of newcomer species from a more diverse ecological perspective.

The send-off

We gather for the send-off at the fire circle in the community-managed forest I helped instigate ten years ago. This forest is in southwest Daylesford, a small town in southern Djaara Country. Djaara Country is nearly the size of Wales and in colonial terms is part of the state of Victoria and thus part of the nation state of Australia, which was formed under the British colonial legal lie, terra nullius.

Much of the forest that encases the fire circle is a blend of an oldtimer and newcomer species. This forest is what some ecologists call a novel ecology, but more accurately it is a recovering forest.

We’re gathering on a sunny autumn morning for a ceremony. This fire circle holds the traces of many gatherings, celebrations, ceremonies and rituals.

Forest & Free is a bush school I facilitate with my life partner and fellow founder of the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Meg (Magpie) Ulman. Every Monday morning we gather here with around 20 non-industrially schooled children, and begin our day by listening to the forest and then to each other as we introduce ourselves by our forest names (names of flora, fungi and fauna, or other parts of the forest that have individually caught our attention or curiosity) and tell a little of the week that’s past and what we’re alive to right now.

Twice a month men gather at this circle to listen, to sing and to share what is occurring in our lives. When it is the men who gather it is called FireChoir. The songs we sing come from out of the fire, crafted by the men who sit in circle here.

Then, every month the women gather at this fire circle. Their group is called For Crying Out Loud.

When the men and women gather we start our respective processes by heading out into a part of the forest to listen, clear the road dust of the day, and connect with Mother Country. In the summer months this solo listening before a gathering occurs in the gloaming. In the winter we are all in relative darkness in the forest, lit only by the moon, and the fire.

The fire circle in this forest holds the many traces of a community of human souls reculturing a land-bonded epistemology for we mostly settlers in this part of Mother Country. Indigenous friends and elders have also gathered here with us to share story and language, and Djaara mother, culture holder and emerging elder, Bec Phillips, has passed on her respect for this new community vigil of deep listening and fasting we’re about to begin.

Six of we FireChoir men stand with bags packed on our shoulders. My bag holds slightly more things. The five men I’m taking into Mother Country have just four items each – a sleeping bag, a tarpaulin, warm clothes, and 10 litres of water. I am about to lead them deep into the Wombat Forest, past the last houses of the town, past the sheep and the goats, the roads and the busyness of digi-industrial modernity, for a three day and three night vigil. To deeply listen, to shed what needs to be shed, to welcome in what needs to be welcomed, to fast, to watch, to merge, to grieve, to be with what is.

Weeks earlier I’d invited each man to bring a question or an intention to this process. As we stand in silence inside the fire circle readying ourselves to leave, we observe the small send-off party walking down to join us.

They too come in silence. When they arrive Magpie speaks on behalf of the supporting kin who are seeing us off, witnessing this threshold moment. She praises our courage to go out and do this deep listening, to press pause on modern life, and to step into an unknown place. I call this place Fear Country.

“The body seeks comfort,” she says, “but it is from discomfort that we can grow,” and finishes with, “Thank you for going, thank you for taking this journey.”

Each man is then asked to stand shoulder to shoulder, facing in around the fire pit. There is no fire this morning, just the cold coals of previous rites.

Magpie then asks each of the supporters of each man to stand behind him, and invites each man to speak his name, a process we’ve learned from being participants of the Castlemaine Rites of Passage movement.

“I am Blue Wren,” I say, for this is my forest name given to me by Country on a solo vigil many years ago.

“We support you, Blue Wren,” says Magpie and my youngest son Blackwood, named after a long-living medicine wattle, Acacia melanoxylon, indigenous to this land.

Each of the men give their names and each of their supporters publicly declare their support for them while they are in Country. Silently we embrace our loved ones and I lead the men out of the circle and up the slope to the southwest. Tears fall as I pound the FireChoir goat drum three times with intention, announcing to our community and to the forest, our departure.

We will spend the next three days and three nights in silence.

The winged ones

After about half an hour of walking, as the cacophony of traffic coming from the A300 began to subside and the forest became mostly eucalyptus species of peppermint gum (Eucalyptus radiata), messmate (Eucalyptus obliqua), and yellow box (Eucalyptus melliodora), with an understory of thinly scattered young-lived wattles (Acacia sp.) and a forest floor of fallen wood, wallaby grasses (Rytidosperma sp.), various mosses (phylum Bryophyta), and wattle matrush (Lomandra filiformis), I receive a tap on my shoulder from Carillo, the man immediately behind me. He points up. We all stop and behold the majesty of two wedge-tailed eagles encircling us.

A few years ago while gathering on land just north of here to grieve the loss of a dear friend, the permaculturist and podcaster, Dan Palmer, about 60 of us stood in silence around a ceremonial fire and beheld Bunjil, the name in Dja Dja Wurrung for the wedgetail eagle, the creator of the world.

On that day, Bunjil circled over us several times, reading that a ritual of importance was taking place. Tears of grief and of belonging began to flow from we mourners gathered on that farm.

In the radiant sunlit forest, we men were now beholding another overhead circling. This time two Bunjils. I felt an acceptance for, a trust of, and a presiding over this process by the majesty of these powerful birds. It was clear the other men felt this too.

A few weeks earlier, Magpie and I had led the Forest & Free kids to this part of the forest. I had wanted to scope out places for the men to come and vigil, and set about initiating for the children a tracking exercise where I tied blue cord on saplings every hundred meters or so, and they had to find their way back.

The purpose of this was twofold: to teach children how to mark and follow a forest track, and for me to find my way back into this part of the forest so as I could lead the men to their vigil spots today.

Not long after the visitation from the two Bunjils, I found myself having led the men off track. I motioned to the five to stop where they were, and I went off to the north to investigate.

I walked for about five minutes in this vast part of the forest, not picking up the blue cord track. I kept hearing the word, trust, emerging in my mind and I stayed relaxed. As I came back close to the men, a scrub wren appeared before me on the forest floor. She was so confident in her demeanour, which arrested my attention. I came up close, only about a metre from her, and she was not frightened by me in the slightest.

I greeted the little bird and watched her hopping on the twigs and fallen leaves in front of me. I followed her, taking me south where I soon picked up the blue cord trail. I motioned for the men to follow and we carried on to the camp that would be my home for the next three days.

From my camp I led each man to his respective vigil spot. In the instructions earlier in the day before the send-off, before we went into our silence, the men were asked to remain there until I collected them on the fourth morning and on arriving were invited to share with Mother Country their intentions or questions they had brought with them.

Once all the men had their spots, I returned to my camp, undressed, sat on the forest floor, listened for a good while and spoke my own intentions for coming. They were twofold. Firstly, to watch over the men as they vigil, checking on them each day without disturbing their solo process, and secondly, to use this time to write this paper.

Unlike the men, I had a little food with me, a sleeping mat and small hiking tent. A few more comforts that would keep me rested and nourished so as I could spring into action in case something went wrong.

I have been on a number of these vigils by myself now, and know how the emptying out of food and the rewiring of one’s nervous system by the forest is a pathway to deeply beholding the intelligence, wildness and grace of more-than-human consciousness, but is not conducive to acting in a time of emergency. Hence, as I was called by the younger men to lead this process, I understood that I could not participate in the same way as them, as I was ultimately responsible for their well being. Because of this, I brought additional things in my pack. My journal and a pen coupled with the quietude, enabled this piece to be written outside the hubbub and busyness of the harvest season back home.

Lighting the fire

While the five men are without fire for their respective vigils, as the holder of this process, I began to set a small fire, which over the course of the process, I tended.

I don’t prepare to light this fire until near dusk on the first day, and despite some autumn rain a few weeks earlier, the leaf fall on the ground is tinder dry to touch. With my fingers, I rake a small clearing and speak again to Mother Country, and I speak to the fire I am setting, which I call Father. Both are parents to me now.

“Father fire, parent tool of our species, you, like Mother Country, have given culture, ceremony, story, language, and technology, for which I am grateful and mindful. Witness our process, illuminate what it is that needs to be shown clearly. I light this fire as the holder of this vigil, and I feel already held by you both.”

These words are not a liturgy, they are not rehearsed, they come through a stepping away presence. However, as I was raised Christian, I detect there is, at times, that influence in my sacred-making speech, and I’m reminded of a key permaculture principle, ‘to integrate, not segregate.’

Once the fire is lit, which ignites quickly with dry leaves and fine twigs, and a goodly fuel load is collected to feed it, I come into presence with a fear of wildfire. A fear that looms large in this nation-state. A fear that is not often opened to in the dominant culture and thus a fear that often instructs an overtly fear-based mindset in relation to how land is managed in Australia.

I felt the first small pangs of this fear, acknowledged it carefully, and set about responding accordingly, extending the area I’d cleared of debris, bringing my 10 litres of water close by, but more importantly watching astutely how the fire was responding to the dry earth and browned-off mosses around it before adding any more fuel.

I began my forest practices as a forager of mushrooms. Around 18 years ago I met Magpie, and when we moved in together, forest walks were already important to us both. To move the stuffy airs of our domestication we’d walk to oxygenate our bodies, process the busyness in our minds, and return home with a greater integration of mind-body.

I have always found forests have this gift for people who dwell, labour, walk or forage in them. I think it was the English storyteller, Martin Shaw, who said something like, ‘homes, towns and cities are where our spirit lives, but a forest is where our soul resides.’ This is old knowing, regardless of who is saying it. It belongs to an epistemology of peasant wisdom akin to my grandmother’s sage advice: ‘Always let a healthy dog lick your wounds.’

Our souls and the remnant communities of a once diverse microbial consciousness in the forests of our guts keep us connected to our indigeneity, despite our minds being perpetually colonised by a materialist-science modernity, or what the ecologist-permaculturist, Vandana Shiva, calls ‘patriarchy’s project.’

About 10 years ago I was returning home from a foraging walk and came across about 30 country fire authority (CFA) volunteers prepping for a burn. The technical and attitudinal environment of these men I can only describe as militaristic in their approach. In the all but common language of colonial crusading, they were fighting the war on weeds to save the town from wildfire.

Fuel reduction burns in Australia are not the same thing as Indigenous or traditional burns. The former are generally hotter, overseen by clock time, a war-room approach, and they often char the forest.

Victor Steffensen, in his book Fire Country, speaks of Indigenous burning as a potash event, not a charring one. From my understanding it is the potash, the potassium, that gives to the renewal of the forest floor, whereas raw charcoal from the charring that occurs in hotter burns, can rob the plants of nitrogen as the char automatically draws it up.

Before we return both potash and charcoal to the forest as an offering, we first soak in urine the char, which has been sifted from the potash and then crushed. The urine thus pre-loading it so it acts as slow release nitrogen composite. A gift of return to the forest for the generosity of wood energy to power our home. This simple product that we make is a crude form of activated biochar and offers many gifts to an ecology besides slow-releasing nitrogen, including habitat for microbial soil species, sequestering carbon pretty much indefinitely, aerating compacted earth, and retaining water in soils.

Victor has been a part of the returning consciousness of traditional burning techniques in recent years. This knowledge was handed down to him by two senior Aboriginal men who had not lost the continuation of Aboriginal fire culture and knowledge because they were hidden from the colonisation process that devastated thousands of generations of Indigenous scientific expression, which still has little status today.

Victor, as an Aboriginal man himself, now moves around the country imparting to Aboriginal people and newcomers alike what he has learnt and recrafted. What the CFA volunteers did to the forest on that day was reduce the fuel load of fire enhancing blackberry (Rubus fructicosus) and gorse (Ulex europaeus) for about 18 months. A short term win for bushfire mitigation on the south west edge of the town, but it was disastrous for many of the forest’s communities.

It was at this time I made a private declaration, a pledge: that I would never give the CFA or any other government agency responsible for the forest, a reason to come back.

Immediately after their burn I noticed partially incinerated ringtail possum (Pseudocheirus peregrinus) dreys in the newcomer hawthorns (Crataegus monogyna) and later discovered all the small birds that nest in the blackberries that could have been burnt too, such as Superb fairywrens (Malurus cyaneus) and New Holland honeyeaters (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae), because the burn took place in the spring.

It was David Holmgren, friend, neighbour and co-originator of the permaculture concept who pointed out to me the prevalence of the apex thorny newcomer plant species – blackberry, hawthorn, gorse – in our area that have been adopted as habitat by a plethora of oldtimer species. David pointed out to me the ringtail possum dreys in hawthorns, which appear as scruffy, fully enclosed nests with two small holes for exiting and entry.

That hawthorns have been given no ecological status as habitat trees by state or academic institutions, means forest and fire managers on the ground can burn and poison them using heavy-handed industrial tools, completely disregarding this new guild relationship between newcomer tree and oldtimer mammal.

What I have observed as a creature who dwells and labours in the forest, is the relationship between tree and possum is mutual because the hawthorn provides protection to the possum from powerful owls who eat around 250 ringtail or brushtail (Trichosurus vulpecula) possums a year, while in exchange the possum returns its waste nutrients to the tree.

Thirty years previously, I was a forest activist. I would come home from blockades and other forms of protest, stopping in to a major supermarket for my food requirements, and when I passed an English oak (Quercus robur), European hawthorn, elm (Ulmus), elder (Sambucus nigra), birch (Betula sp.), apple or other ancestral sacred tree species growing in my town, I would either ignore or scorn them.

To my young ideological mind these species were ‘incorrect’, and the only ‘correct’ species were the ones that were here before colonisation. I remember carrying much shame in me at that time. Shame about being white skinned, shame about buying my food made in far away monocultures, and a shadowy shame for my hatred of newcomer species that were sacred to my ancestors.

All of this shame eventually became productive. It led me to permaculture and then to permapoesis. I couldn’t express it like this then, but in hindsight I was deeply longing to be an integrated creature of place, and slowly I came to understand what that looks like, what it feels like when the economy you make informs the ecology you tend, and the ecology you tend informs the cultural and social forms you produce.

This is how I ended up living and teaching subsistence permaculture and crafting a rich lifeway we came to call neopeasantry. We have become new peasants over the past two decades, living well below the poverty line, choosing to recommon farming and forestry as integrated things, choosing to leave the village, the town and loved ones, and begin this process of deep listening in the land, making ourselves students of Mother Country, of Father Fire, observers of all the animate and inanimate earth others we journey with, listening to our indigenous souls for how we proceed with life making.

The purpose of such a vigil is so when we return home we have deepened our understanding of how our life-making impacts others, and how our gratitude for all the life makers in our locasphere is the same warp and weft as the gratitude we have for our own lives. For life making and making a living are not the same thing.

Life making forestry

Beginning this process into life making rather than making a living, paralleled for myself and Magpie a leaving behind of many industrial technics. Car ownership, airplane trips and supermarket foods were among the first things we went without in order to free ourselves of the time we were spending working for money to pay for these technics.

So many things followed. With simple hand tools, pruners, loppers and slash hooks I began to chop and drop the returning woody, nitrogenous-rich weeds after they began to reappear in earnest 18 months after the CFA burn.

Our neighbours Bob and Per saw me out working and we got talking about what I was doing and my pledge to not have the CFA return. They joined me from time to time, and as a family, when we hosted permaculture students, we’d all go into the forest and board down the blackberries with discarded plyboard from the local tip or waste station.

When we started the Forest & Free bush school, I would often lead children into the forest to do what I eventually called ‘blackberry surfing’. Each child would have a ‘surf’ board and they’d go down a steep, blackberry crowded gully stomping their way down the enormous rough surf of bramble waves, trying to stay onboard.

On one occasion I recorded half dozen kids from our Feral & Free program – an earlier iteration of Forest & Free – flattening the size of a tennis court in twenty minutes. The kids’ ages ranged from 6-12 years old. I would return these lively, fun-seeking kids to their parents of an evening with bramble cuts and scratches, exhausted. But the kids kept coming back each week, and their parents would reflect to me it was the best part of their child’s week.

Children, when not stunted by an ideology of safetyism or a fear of harm, know better than most adults today the transformative power, energy and aliveness discomfort brings to them.

Blackberry surfing does not kill the plant or disturb the soil. No poisons are used in this management through mammalian play. Surfing never occurs in the nesting seasons and because both dry and living canes are put on the ground it means that sunlight can once again reach the forest floor. On these steep valley slopes, the blackberry canes have been holding up erosion since as early as the1860s, when ecologies were uprooted and often denuded in the pursuit of gold.

What I, my family, neighbours, the Forest & Free children, and volunteer students at our School of Applied Neopeasantry began working on was to help speed up ecological succession, which was already in process. By not disturbing this process industrially, we were allowing the seed bank from diverse species in the area to drift in across the flattened blackberries, catch the energy of the sun, and sprout.

This human cohort of children, young adults and adults that constituted the biological power of this community-managed forest of around ten hectares, often found the remains of little bird nests and possum dreys in these brambles as we worked to get them onto the ground. It was not about obliterating this important habitat, but managing small areas at a time, giving every entity in this forest ecology time to adjust. It was necessarily a slow and steady approach.

As a result of our labours providing greater access, more of us would enter the forest and interact with it, until eventually a fire circle was constructed and community gatherings began to take place there.

In effect, we built our own ceremonial nest, which has become a place of communitarian nurture and people care, a place to listen to Country and be witnessed and listened to back.

Bringing in the goats

On the other side of the town, I was aware of a permaculturist and natural earth builder, Vasko, using boer goats to mitigate weeds beside another mined out ecology, Cornish Hill. Vasko was born in Macedonia and living in his birthplace village until he was seven years old. He and other children would take the goats and cows out on the common land each day to browse and graze. His parents brought him to Australia after this time, but slowly he found his way back to herding goats and entering a similar process as ours of recommoning on unceded Aboriginal land.

Vasko became aware of my work across the hill, and with another new goatherder with eastern European ancestry, Brad, we formed a goat cooperative we called Goathand.

To this partnership I brought my hand tool techniques and my boyhood experience of handling goats, and Brad and Vasko brought in a shared herd of Boer goats (Capra aegagrus hircus). Without permission from government agencies, we began work on combining hand tools with goat browsing to reduce the dominance of the apex pioneer species – English broom (Cytisus scoparius), gorse and blackberry.

To our more political left-leaning environmentalist friends we were reducing the weed load. To our more right- or centre-leaning friends, we were developing a dynamic bushfire mitigation practice, although as mentioned in the Happen Films video about our forest work, not everyone was onboard initially.

However, what we were doing was much more than political or ideological team sports. We were advancing the possibility of non-industrial community-led custodianship of commons, while our respective households in the cooperate were paid for our efforts in highly nutritious goat meat, a subsistence economy made simply by reducing weed and fuel loads.

Before tending these meat goats, my family had mostly lived off the animal proteins we could grow on our quarter-acre permaculture plot – poultry meat, eggs and honeycomb – because we’d given up eating bought abattoir meats and industrially processed animal proteins several years earlier. The only red meat we consumed up until this time was either road-killed kangaroo and possum or meat slaughtered respectfully by permaculture farmer friends who tended their own animals.

In this conversion of woody weeds into highly prized meat with no industrial and little monetary inputs, these beautiful creatures and we people were slowly transforming this weedy forest into a grassy woodland, as biological agents.

After two years of combining goat grazing and hand tools in the forest near to our home, I did a survey of oldtimer species that were returning to Mother Country courtesy of the returned sunlight on the forest floor, and the blackberry canes providing a rich humus for renewal. I counted 35 oldtimer species returning where once only blackberry grew (see our Djaara flora count after managed Boer goat herbivory video).

Before our shared goat-people labours, blackberry and gorse dominated the understory of this particular part of the forest. The blackberry would use mid-canopy newcomer trees such as hawthorns and wild apples (Malus pumila) and oldtimer trees such as sweet bursaria (Bursaria spinosa) to climb upon. In some areas the canes would climb four or so meters in height before dying off and leaving a dry tinder wick to ignite potential crown fires in the upper canopies of eucalypts should a bush fire come through.

Working beside goats that were pulling down these wicking canes with a slash hook, disposing of the green parts and stomping down the remaining canes, is when I fell in love with these intelligent and sensitive ungulates.

Blue Wren and Woodison, 2018.

More like dogs than sheep, goats will bond with humans after trust is established. It was soon a part of the organisation of Goathand Co-op to eat the goats who we didn’t establish bonds with, for they were often the ones who went under or over temporary electric fencing we were erecting and moving around the forest, and headed for neighbour’s gardens.

As we had no legal tender to be in this forest, and only a social license from both neighbours and Aboriginal elders, we did not want to jeopardise this arrangement. We knew the local council could cease this work with just one complaint from a neighbour. Keeping goodly neighbourly relations has been a large part of keeping this model of neighbourhood-based ecological participatory farming-forestry alive.

The point of keeping it alive, apart from the gifts it brings us personally, is to offer it as an example of forestry-farming or farming-forestry to inspire young people who would otherwise not be able to purchase land to become subsistence ecological participants while at the same time performing a social and ecological good.

With the boarding of the blackberries and with the goats slowly devouring large bramble patches and crushing the canes underfoot, it has, as mentioned, enabled the dry fuel load to reach the forest floor and as a result this lignin-rich material of the dry canes can break down and create a beautiful rich humus.

We have witnessed empirically that if blackberries are on the ground, either put there by people or goats, ecological succession can progress. When forests are poisoned, bulldozed or burnt in non-traditional ways, ecological succession – the healing process of ecologies – begins back at stage one. This is our exception to industrial forms and policies around forest management.

In a completely different ecological, rainfall and climatic setting in Te Waipounamu – the south island of New Zealand – botanist Hugh Wilson found that gorse plants were acting as nurseries for the regeneration of native forests. His botany is not founded on domination and warfare against weeds, but rather deeply understanding ecological succession by observing what the land was saying. The Happen Films video about his work called Fools and Dreamers, is a companion video to our work, and companion work to David Holmgren’s Spring Creek community project near to us in Djaara Djandak, and Vandana Shiva’s permaculture, goat and seed-saving farm, Aranya in northern India.

While these modest examples are mostly ignored by academia and government, who are seemingly tithed to the growing monetary demands of large globalised industries, we are nonetheless crafting these examples in the wake of the American-European empire collapse.

The necessary composting of dominance and greed as the central cultural mythos of what I have come to call hypertechnocivility requires an earth-first, Mother Country epistemological pitchfork. Reinstating the fore place of the Mother and the sacredness of all life in the face and thrust of neoliberal transhumanism, is what we and many others are working towards.

The return of the grasses

What we have seen after ten years of tooled people and 5 years of managed herbivory is the return of grasses, lilies and other more delicate oldtimer species. While not all the returning species are oldtimers, the diversity of species has grown significantly.

The attempt of transitioning fire-prone woody weeds in the forest to a grassy woodland ecology is our intention. My pledge that I will never give the CFA or any other government agency the reason to return to this part of the forest has now been maintained for over a decade.

Local actors from government agencies thankfully respect our work and leave this community project alone despite them having legal powers to remove us. We have gratitude for this.

All the while zero dollars are spent on this work, with the exception of some electric netting, solar packs to run this fencing, and the occasional purchase of an animal.

I’ve heard in the drier parts of Europe, especially in Spain and Portugal, where villages have been deserted and traditional peasant activities such as goat herding to eat down the fuel load no longer occurs, the fire seasons are getting worse. When this is reported, I have noticed, it seems as though it is always climate change alone that is the culprit, rather than urbanisation and an elitist urbane ideology that believes industrial schooling is the only form of education and the only path that can possibly produce happiness and fulfilment in young people.

Such an uncontested attitude has contributed to these villages being abandoned and the ecologies that surround these villages becoming no longer managed. Over the last several decades of aggregating hypertechnocivility, young people have been told it is shameful to live simply with the land and those doing this propagandist telling have lost sense of their own ecological education and thus connection.

The film Schooling the World examines this civilisational hubris and gives context for why the West cannot adequately understand or respond to ecological and climate crises.

As new peasants we are returning home, not home in ancestral Europe but home in a peasant-indigenous soul sense where family and food, biomes and ceremony make us people of the land. Make us land bonded.

Over the years we have kept informed Djaara leader Bec Phillips and elder Uncle Rick Nelson, who both live further north in Djaara Djandak, about our forest labours and engagements. Bec has spoken to us about a potential burn in this forest by Djaara women who are bringing back traditional burning to Mother Country. These cool burns favour indigenous biota, whereas the hotter burns favour gorse and blackberry regeneration.

Uncle Rick Nelson speaking at the fire circle, 2020. Photo by Stewart Carter.

Making sure the goats don’t graze down emerging oldtimer flowers and seeds or overgraze and compact the land, we move the animals regularly to avoid this. As the grasses have returned, we now have a flock of sheep to assist the herd. We have added a flock of Persian and Dorper (Dorset-Persian crossbreeds) sheep and they too both browse and graze, although in a different ratio to Boer goats.

As mentioned, our flock herd or flerd, never stay in one place too long to over-impact the land. As we are not a business we don’t need to keep growing the numbers of ruminants. Because these animals have four stomach chambers their digestive biomes ferment the weed seed load in Country from as much as 100% down to about sixty percent depending on the species of plant.

Indigenous browsers such as swamp wallabies and eastern kangaroos are seen now in greater numbers in the forest as more grass returns.

A length of ponds

The forest is still recovering from the trauma of gold mining and other forms of settler misuse in this area. Gold mining brought European farming practices without understanding the nature of the terra.

The little nameless creek that runs along the eastern side of this forest, not far from the community fire circle, was gutted out in the 1860s and has been functioning as a meandering drain ever since. In heavy rains, the southwestern part of the town deposits all its fast-running stormwater there. Blackberries and willows and oldtimer fishbone ferns do much to slow this water down, so when it runs into the Wombat Creek it doesn’t dump too much sediment in it.

This creek, after emptying into the Wombat, then runs into numerous larger creeks and rivers until it empties into the mighty Murray River (Dhungala, Murundi, Millewa/Milawa), which then empties into the ocean in South Australia, hundreds of kilometres downstream. Hence this little recovering creek drain is a very upper tributary of a large and complex river system delivering cool mountain water to the lower reaches.

It is my wish, before I die, that platypus and native perch return to this stream ecology.

A number of years ago we had a unique student volunteer come to the School of Applied Neopeasantry to stay. Ed had recently been at the Mulloon Institute in Canberra, an education centre based on the work of farmer-ecologist Peter Andrews. Andrews had observed over his long practice of ecological agriculture he called ‘natural sequence farming’ that by creating leaky weirs across degraded and eroded creeks people could slow and spread big rain events, and could therefore rehydrate the land significantly by holding up the water long enough so it could absorb deeply in the land and eventually return a chain of ponds effect that held water permanently. Effectively, he too was speeding up the ecological succession stages for stream recovery, which the Mulloon Institute advances well after his death.

Ed had brought with him Andrews’ craft of building a leaky weir that wouldn’t cause further erosion, and in that week we had together built the first one. Our family, with neighbours and our student volunteers, went on to build another five over that year. There is still another ten or so to build down to the Wombat Creek, but I have stopped this work for a period in order to observe how these first six are operating in Country.

Within a short time, perhaps six months, frogs began chirping down among the ponds. Wood ducks and mountain ducks took up residence fairly quickly, and the fishbone fern population doubled in numbers in the first year.

Now, four years later, the diversity of flora, fungi and fauna species have grown, responding to the more permanent water availability, especially through the dry summer months, and with the suppression of the apex newcomer species while maintaining enough bramble to be used as habitat.

Uncle Rick beside one of the community made weirs, 2020.

In closing

David Holmgren, Bec Phillips, Uncle Rick Nelson, Peter Andrews, and Vandana Shiva, and many more have been the wise human elders and brains trust that have informed what has happened in this Djaara Djandak forest. But it is the forest Mother herself that has been my most significant teacher.

Learning to listen to Mother Country and to put away my civilisational hubris, European sky-god judgments, and scientific ideological categories of correct and incorrect species, has put me on a path of curiosity, relationship and reculturing since my pledge to stop the domination war approach of conventional forest management coming back to this little place now loved and frequented by many.

So far this path has brought great riches, neighbourhood bonding, nutritious food, a deepening, emplacing sense of being home, and all the little griefs along the way that have grown me up.

Being out here with these men for these for three days and nights has offered me the time to both hold what needs to be held and share what needs to be shared. This is my offering to this journal focussed on Conservation. But rather than conservation, which potentially speaks to a museum-ing idea of the biological worlds of the world, I offer a new peasant approach as a first generational base on the way back home to deep indigeneity.

Without belonging to a loved patch of earth we cannot possibly know how to act as conservationists, ecologists, farmers, musicians, poets, teachers, builders, medicine people or lovers. Ritual and ceremony in small everyday and large community forms is, I believe, our way home to wisdom. Without these things the microscope, data modelling, expert class hubris and AI will continue to destroy the forests of the world. If we are not returning deep listening and ceremony to the practices of our respective forestries, we will continue to abuse them, call them externalities, commodities and resources, and remain blind to what they have to teach us.

The welcome home ceremony (a postscript)

After three days and nights alone without food, I collected the five men and brought them back to where I’d been camping. I had all my things packed up, and I invited the men to put their packs beside mine just outside a ring of fallen, curved branches I’d assembled the night before, and to wait at the little entrance way.

Inside the ring I’d lit a ceremonial fire and arranged six squarish granite rocks I’d hand selected in the forest, which were positioned symmetrically around the fire. At the threshold of the ring, I asked each man if he was ready to leave behind what he needed to let go of and whether he was ready to begin the long walk home and into what he wants to welcome in on his return.

I then invited each man to sit down on the rock that was closest to their place of vigil and asked them to share what was alive in them right now.

This process went for about an hour, and as the men shared, I handed out a ceremonial bowl of rabbit and kangaroo jerky broth that I’d made for them earlier in the morning. To see their bodies come alive with this gentle, oldtimer-newcomer nourishing broth from Mother Country and their excitement for heading home to their loved ones was a joy.

It took an hour to walk back down through the forest, at one point crawling on our bellies through a mine tunnel underworld, which we had entered on the way there three days earlier. It was a threshold moment crawling through the Mother, coming to the other side with our gifts of vigil and silent contemplation, crossing Sailor’s Creek, going under the bridge below the A300, up an embankment, along a verdant forest goat track, and all the way towards home until we came to goat shelter number three, where I had instructions from Magpie once we got to there to start beating the goat drum. As soon as I started beating the drum, the other men beat their empty water containers, and we made joyous drummings for the next few minutes. Our drumming was the trigger for my young son Blackwood and his friend Syd to go running and telling the community that we were close by, and as we approached the top of the little descent that runs down to the fire circle we stopped our drumming because we could hear the singing of our community. As we approached we could see about 45 people there to greet us and witness our return.

We each stepped through a threshold made of community bunting with tears welling in our eyes, greeted by one of the brothers from FireChoir, Jean-Marc and Magpie, who was directing proceedings. She asked us whether we were ready to step back into community. There were no complaints.

When all of us six men sat down on the log stumps around the fire, Blackwood brought us a cup of goat bone broth and miso Magpie had fermented. This nourishment was exquisite. We drank while beholding the radiating love of kin and community. Magpie welcomed us home, spoke of the enrichment such listening brings home into family and community life, and invited me to speak first.

On the second day of the vigil I’d come across a polypore mushroom, a bracket fungus called white punk (Laetiporus portentosus) while checking on Mick, whose vigil spot was furthest to the west in the forest. That morning at the ceremonial fire with the men near my camp I scarred this semi-dried fruiting body as it caught fire for a time. It didn’t matter it went out before we returned from our walk home. I knew my European indigenous connection to walking fire with dry punks like this, and I knew of local Aboriginal uses in the same way. This was my starting place. I offered the scorched punk to the Father Fire and spoke of the connection this forest punk was making between the two fires and between Aboriginal people in this land and the indigenous ways we all possess in our souls, our microbes and in our culture before it was trampled by colonisation.

“This is a first gift we bring back into this forest hearth of community,” I said.

Each of the men then spoke a little of their respective learnings and gifts from the vigil and after each had spoken, their support person came forth and handed them a simple necklace made from string and a polished disc of hawthorn wood. For most of us in attendance, with ancestry from Europe, Asia, North Africa and North America, hawthorn is a significant heart medicine tree from our indigenous medicine commons, and a tree that has been regarded a sacred tree of fertility and young love in Celtic lore.

Mick was the last man to speak, and when his partner, Sophie came to adorn him with his hawthorn necklace they stood under a young hawthorn on the edge of the fire circle and announced to the community the coming of their first child.

~

Postpic to the postscript

Here is permaculture elder, Su Dennett, holding Mick and Sophie’s first child, Bailey Acacia, at the welcome home ceremony for the women, April 2025, with young Florian looking on.

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