Artist as Family bowl, and a prayer for peace and resistance

Mar 6, 2026 | autonomous edibles, belonging economies, food culture, food medicine, genocide, government, homelife, human rights, lifemaking, locavorism, militarism, post-industrial thought, rabbits, reculturing, resistance, state violence, war | 25 comments

As many of you already know about us, it’s the everyday local labours of living an earth-honouring economy alongside a wide-ranging understanding of geopolitics that informs our makings, our permapoesis, and our wellbeing.

To acknowledge this next phase of rupture in the unfolding collapse of the global village, we present two offerings for the week. First, by Meg, on some of the food medicine that fuels our poesis, and the second a prose piece by Patrick offering a powerful response to the immorality of western hegemony, ruled by the Epstein class.

In this piece, Meg invites you into our kitchen to share a typical seasonal lunch.

And, in the following piece, Patrick calls on the possibilities of active peace-making and resistance. (Audio 2:40mins)

A message of Peace and Resistance (from a family in transition)

As moral peoples of the world, let us all stand against the genocidal psychopathy of western leaders. Let us not be divided and distracted by the corporate-billionaire class establishment media and the empire’s state broadcaster puppets. Let’s stand against evil men who start wars and escalate mass suffering with bullshit justifications. This is an opportunity for the west to reconnect with Homer – compassion for ‘the other’ – that built western culture 2700 years ago. Let’s reconnect with an earth-honouring cosmology – the sacred feminine, which human cultures of place have lived within for most of human life. Let’s stand together to rid the world of war mongers, their lobbyists and businesses across the industrial, collapsing global village, not with violence, but by recreating local economies which take back sovereignty of our basic needs, serve our local biomes, and give the Financial Industrial Complex, who profits from mass suffering, nothing. Take away their destructive dollars by boycotting industrial food, medicine and energy productions, earn only a little so as not to be taxed and have your tax dollars support the war machine, and reap the rewards of relocalisation by becoming more connected to our home places, more healthy and more aligned in our souls. The future is radical localism. Defund the bankers that fund the missiles. Let’s work and be together. Create community sufficiency, and start breaking the machines that incarcerate us. We may not be able to bring justice to the aggressors of war and the perpetrators (or bystanders) of rape, but we can choose to give them nothing. We are the majority. Let’s only give our money and time to small local cottage industries, get out of debt, downscale to do it, find others to establish non-monetary exchanges with, relearn the skills our ancestors knew, and live again without conveniences the machine has hooked us up to. Conveniences keep us enslaved to the bankers realm, and therefore enslaved to the war machine. Liberate our hearts and our lives! Let’s no longer be complicit subjects of empire.

As always, we welcome your responses, feedback and shares.

Oh, and we still have some places on our April 4 tour. Come join us!

Come ask us anything!

Jul 11, 2025 | animals in subsistence permaculture, Artist as Family online event, belonging economies, ceremonial species approach, children's learning, Collective preparedness, colonisation, commons, community, creative commons, culture, earth stewardship, energy descent, farming, Fire circle, First People, food medicine, food sovereignty, health, home economies, home educating, interspecies relating, lifemaking, neopeasant education, radical homemakers, raising boys, reculturing, regenerative culture, relationships, rites of passage, sacred country, School of Applied Neopeasantry, social warming, storytelling, subsistence permaculture, transitional communities, village rebuilding, walked-for food | 12 comments

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.

We are looking forward to meeting you.

Warmly,
Magpie and Blue Wren

The New Peasants (plus 12 companion films that have inspired our journey)

Jun 10, 2025 | agriculture, appropriate technology, autonomous edibles, bees, belonging economies, biodiversity, children's learning, civil violence, colonisation, community sufficiency, creative commons, creative frugality, culture, David Holmgren, degrowth, earth stewardship, ecological knowledges, eldership, energy descent, farming, food culture, food medicine, food sovereignty, foraging, gleaning, Grief, Happen Films, herbs, home economies, interspecies relating, lifemaking, locavorism, love, low-carbon, medicinal plants, neopeasant culture making, peasants, permapoesis, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, regenerative culture, relocalisation, storytelling, subsistence economy, subsistence permaculture, the commons, Vandana Shiva, village rebuilding, walked-for food | 27 comments

Hello from our nestings by the fire, preparing for our community’s winter solstice.

We have some news! Happen Films has just released a trailer of their about-to-be premiered feature documentary, The New Peasants, based on our family and community. To some extent we feel a little exposed right now, as this film shares our life, including a very painful family story, to a much bigger audience. However, we are abundantly grateful to Jordan and Antionette at Happen Films, the composer Tommy Castles, and all the crew who worked on it, and we hope it inspires people in their journeys back to being land-bonded peoples in diverse, gallant, soft-hearted, hard-bodied ways.

Before we embed the trailer we’d like to share with you some of the key films that have inspired us along the way. Each film has a unique theme for us, and each has informed and helped us to journey on this path we call neopeasantry, or subsistence permaculture.

Reclaiming
The Babushkas of Chernobyl (2015) speaks to the resilience, meaning-making and determination of Ukrainian peasant women who stole back into their ancestral villages in the exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to live out their lives freely. Despite the toxicity of the land, many have been out-living their fellow villagers who have been existing in the sorrow of disconnection from their Mother Country, while the babushkas have their land-bondedness intact.

Making
The Nettle Dress (2023) is a story that integrates grief, beauty, craft and connection to the land. It shows what is possible by unplugging, living simply, and returning to a rooted, earth-conscious making. It gifts us an insight into how our ancestors laboured in hand crafts and how this ancestral technology is complimentary to living with pain and processing grief. This film exemplifies for us a permapoesis approach to life and culture; that is, a permanent meaning-making approach.

Salvaging
The Gleaners and I (2000) made by Agnès Varda reveals many forms of salvaging from the wastes of industrialisation, from food to other materials for life making. The filmmaker is not a passive voyeur extracting story from peoples usually unseen in capital-modernity, but a sleeves-rolled-up, camera as witness poet-anthropologist.

Communing
Honeyland (2019) is a film of interspecies relating and daughterly tending, detailing what pragmatic and earth-bonded love can be, in a depleted village biome. It is an example of slow cinema, of letting the story unfold, and empowering the subjects – Hatidze Muratova, her elderly mother, and the bees – to speak mostly by their doings. In the shadow of economic and personal hardships, and ecological ruination, Hatidze’s joy for the bees and the true gold and gift of honey, shines through in her eldership, and exposes the vulnerabilities of a desperate, smash ‘n’ grab mentality, a madness that incurs upon her life, which she attempts to understand.

Sovereignty
The Seeds of Vandana Shiva (2021) is an honouring of one of the most fierce warriors for the rights of peasants and food sovereignty, that is the agro-ecologist and permaculturist, Vandana Shiva. Not only a public speaker and advocate for a de-corporatised food system, Vandana walks her talk, setting up seed-saving initiatives that directly challenge the privatisation of the world’s food by the US agri-business hegemony and others who perform economic and environmental terrorism on indigenous, peasant and wage-slaved peoples of the world.

Healing
The Work (2017) is the radical story of compassion, healing and post-traumatic growth inside a US prison. A group of experienced community volunteers, experienced in men’s work, gather with a group of incarcerated men, who step inside a held circle of masculine vulnerability to discover their inner power, souls, and connection with one another. This film shows what is possible and reveals the necessary processes of deep listening, for the rocky future ahead.

Coercion
Schooling the World (2010) is an important critique of western education colonisation being rolled out by NGOs and other missionaries of empire. It reveals the continual patterns of colonial shaming tactics, which the west brings to land-bonded, peasant communities and shows how these missionaries disregard traditional, ecological and place-based knowledges. It examines how western schools are merely industrial-capitalist compliance factories, aimed at destroying diverse cultures in the name of ‘doing good’ and bringing so-called ‘backward’ peoples into the 21st century. In this intelligent telling and reframing of the global educational crusade, the film makers allow we western subjects of capital to reflect on the propaganda that has driven our civilisation, and in the process de-cultured and homogenised us.

Energy
The Power of Community (2006) is a seminal film for us. It marks both the beginning of our relationship (Meg’s and Patrick’s) and the start of our permaculture transition. When one of the film’s stars, Roberto Perez, came to our town hall to show it and to speak and field questions, we recall him saying on that night, ‘Grow your own food, catch your own water, say hello to your neighbour.’ We heeded his advice. The film details how Cuba responded to their oil taps being turned off due to the collapse of the USSR. From starvation to permaculture abundance, the film tracks the struggles and exposes the reality of life for all of us in an energy declining future. Although this film is nearly 20 years old, it still exposes the current energy blindness of the west, and allows us to step through it into life after cheap oil, as we descend further into that reality.

Stewardship
Fools and Dreamers (2019) follows the life of botanist Hugh Wilson, who with a small cohort of people and a patron, practices radical, low-impact land restoration in New Zealand. This is one of our favourite Happen Films, and Hugh is a true elder – clear-eyed, humble, caring, unfazed, resolute and determined. It is a film that shows how working with and listening to, instead of imposing ideology and big technics, can bring you into right relationship with Mother Country. Hugh’s method of healing trammelled country is largely about getting out of the way and observing what Country is saying by her doing. It also requires seeing out the critics and the judgements. This is a film for those interested in land management and land care in a post-industrial reality.

Medicine
Juliette of the Herbs (1998) is a film that gives deep insight into the medicinal wisdoms of author, mother and herbalist, Juliette de Bairacli Levy. It shows how herbalism is powerful medicine for land-bonded peoples and animals, and how this type of medicine belongs to a commons, shared mostly via feminine power. This inspiring film shines a light on our current era of extreme chronic disease, and how masculine-privatised medicine is seemingly ruining our health. Juliette’s book, Nature’s Children, is our first go-to text whenever there is a health issue in our household. Our family stopped seeing doctors 8 years ago, and Juliette’s life work has in part enabled this.

Subsistence
Pig Earth (1979) is a film by John Berger, based on his book of the same name. Berger lived with alpine French peasants in the 1970s and wrote about their lives, their culture and how modernisation was decimating their subsistence livelihoods by seducing peasants into debt to buy modern farm equipment. This debt was often the death knell for peasant economy, which was largely free from wage-slavery and bankers dictating the terms for life making. Berger’s critical examination of the hubris of modernity as experienced through the humility and humanity of land-bonded peoples of place, is an important story for the west, additionally because peasant agriculture still exists in Europe. While Berger is reporting the end of these lifeways in the 1970s, he probably underestimated the longevity of the energy bubble that has created what we call hypertechnocivility. Many of us will return to subsistence lifeways before too long, and Pig Earth is a nearby reach back to how most Europeans lived only a handful of generations ago. It certainly doesn’t perpetrate the myth that ‘peasants are only wretched, poor, diseased and stupid people’, and other such propaganda spread by capitalists and Marxists alike.

Emplacing
Reading Landscape (2023) is a film that documents the life practice of ecological thinker, permaculture co-originator, friend and mentor, David Holmgren. David’s unique way of seeing brings us back into appreciation for how our most skilled ancestors looked and understood the Mother. David sees with many overlaying lenses – geological, hydrological, technological, cultural and energetic, to name a few. He brings these lenses together into an integrated whole way of looking. He has taught his method for decades, helping others to skill up and be present to what is, in order to know how to work with, and be in relationship with, Mother Country.

Without further ado, here is the trailer to Happen Films’, The New Peasants (2025).

We would love you share the top films that have most sung to you as you have prepared for a world with far less energy and wealth, but steeped in beauty and abundance.

Neopeasant subsistence (a photo essay by Max Roux)

Jun 4, 2025 | belonging economies, Collective preparedness, community sufficiency, creative frugality, degrowth, direct action, earth stewardship, energy descent, farming, fermenting, food medicine, gift economy, home economies, homelife, interspecies relating, land management, lifemaking, locavorism, love, low-carbon, magic, Mother Country, neopeasant culture making, neopeasant forestry, permaculture, radical homemakers, reculturing, School of Applied Neopeasantry, social warming, storytelling, subsistence permaculture, SWAP (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturalists), transitional communities, village rebuilding, walked-for food, youngtimers | 32 comments

Last week we hosted a share house of five goodly youngtimers from the burbs of the city south of here. Max Roux was one of them. Max slung his camera over his shoulder as we forested, farmed, gardened, creeked, salvaged, ate, played, loved and listened to one another. This post is from the fruits of that connection and Max’s sleeves-rolled-up documentation.

You can see more of Max’s work here.

Artist as Family’s all-day house and garden tour (subsistence permaculture and belonging economies in action)

Oct 30, 2024 | Artist as Family tour, belonging economies, biodiversity, community sufficiency, eldership, energy descent, fermenting, food medicine, food sovereignty, foraging, fruit trees, garden design, gift economy, goats, harvesting, health, home economies, humanure, interspecies relating, lifemaking, locavorism, low-carbon, medicinal plants, neopeasant education, permaculture, politics, preserving, radical homemakers, reculturing, regenerative culture, regenerative farming, relationships, School of Applied Neopeasantry, social warming, story, the commons, transitional communities, uncapitalised food, uncapitalised medicine, village rebuilding, walked-for food, wood energy | 13 comments

Are you needing renewed motivation and focus in your transition to a more resilient lifeway? Are you curious about how our family lives at home with little reliance on civilisation’s industrial machine? Do you feel economically trapped? Do you sense economic and political troubles ahead and want to better future-proof your household? Are you wanting to live with less debt and more relationship with the living of the world? Are you wanting to say, Fuck off! to all the con men and women (the captains of industries) in the very way that you live, and do this positively? Do you want to embody your politics and values and thus dance your talk? Do you want to learn simple hacks for living with less money and more time? If one or more of these questions resonates, then our all-day house and garden tour might well be for you.

Over the day we will cover self and community care,

re-commoning,

annual vegetables cultivation,

annual vegetable food harvesting,

fermenting

and storing the harvests,

alchemising all manners of substances from one thing

into another,

tending perennial food biomes,

making humus,

changing behaviours,

cultivating eldership,

and generally establishing and maintaining a belonging economy.

Tour details

Date: Sunday 17 November, 10am – 4pm, Djaara Mother Country, central Victoria (address will be supplied with booking).

Topics covered include: community-sufficiency, household economies, replacing fiat with compost, subsistence resilience, access to land, ecological economics, permacultural neopeasantry, fermentation for both thrift and health, organic food that low income households can afford, green gym (or active economics), children in the household biome, transitioning to a non-reliance on predatory capitalism, future proofing by skilling up, food-medicine and active disease prevention, trading fear for empowerment, self-care and unintentional communities and neighbourhoods, composting ideology with joyous pragmatism.

The tour includes: Sharings from Meg, Woody and Patrick; morning tea; a neopeasant lunch with special guests, permaculture elders Su Dennett and David Holmgren; afternoon tea; and plenty of time for questions.

Cost: $100 per person (this is the concession price; feel free to pay more if you would like to further contribute to our work).

Who is it for: The day is informationally dense so we request 16 year olds and up only, please. Participants will need to navigate uneven surfaces and at times rough terrain.

To book: Please message us to book or ask any questions – we@artistasfamily.is

Being home (food, medicine, and life mostly outside the machine of the Capitalocene)

Oct 12, 2024 | agriculture, bees, belonging economies, biology, Capitalocene, celebration, censorship, compost, culture, fermenting, food medicine, goats, health, home economies, homelife, humanure, interspecies relating, lifemaking, permaculture, politics, speech, subsistence economy | 44 comments

We’re home. Well, nearly all of us are home. Woody and Patrick knitted their way back to Djaara Mother Country on a 12 hour train journey,

and were collected by dear friends who also helped us with the expenses of getting back from Kashmir, fast. Meg has stayed in NSW to assist Jan and Robert, Patrick’s mother and father, in their home. It was Patrick’s mum, Nana Jones, who became seriously ill after a medical procedure was botched. The doctors and nurses were incredibly caring, for the most part, and miraculously, despite the anti-sleep, anti-fresh air and anti-food the hospital mandates,

Nana has recovered and is back at home after a month escaping death.

There is nothing like a crisis in a family to bring everyone more closely together.

Patrick and Woody have celebrated the return of Zero, who has come home from staying with friends. His dementia and deafness have accelerated. Unsurprising for a 14 year old dog who has lived a kick-arse life. He spent the first day home searching high and low for his beloved Meg.

There is a special joy in the spring air here that only a close encounter with the death of a parent and the ageing of a dear dog can muster. Our presence to life is magnified at the moment, and it is the trace of our travels that is feeding into this. Adding to this joy, our chooks are back home, after also staying with friends, and we received our first egg on the afternoon of their return. Precious gold.

Before we left we told the bees we’d be gone for the winter, and on our return we announced to them our arrival home. Telling the bees about big events in a household is an ancestral tradition, especially for animist romantics like ourselves.

One of the many joys of being home has been to enter the cellar of our summer and autumn labours (mammals, plants, insects, microbes) and bring out a bottle of garden honey, which has creamed up over the winter. This is our bullion.

Woody and Patrick came home a little earlier to get more food in the ground. They first weeded row number one and planted it out with seed potatoes.

Then top-dressed the bed with the humanure compost from our household’s autumn ablutions, which has been quietly transforming itself into life-giving humus while we were travelling.

See our humanure compost workshop for more on producing this earth-giving force. The next row along in the annual garden area, row number two, has about 20 roundhead cabbages, hidden amongst the weeds, ready to kraut when Meg returns.

Sauerkraut is just one of our food-medicines that keeps us far away from the industrial medical system. Blood oranges in the garden, is another.

While on the subject of health, we travelled across ten countries, eating street food, interacting with other animals, soils and innumerable biomes and waters that our bodies had never encountered before, and yet we took no industrial medicines beforehand, no prior travel jabs, and took out no travel insurance. We got sick from pollution, and rested when we were run down. We steered clear of processed and acidic foods, and ate a tonne of chillies, well at least we adults did. Blackwood has never had a vaccine. Irresponsible or intelligent? You be the judge. From this vantage point, especially after being in the bizarrely self-congratulatory industrial medical system with Nana,

and beholding how that system is a mix of constructive and ruinous processes that often cancel each other out, our pro-active, non-participation in it is good for everyone. We don’t drain precious resources from those who have no other choice but to risk their health in an Australian hospital today. Good food, sleep, air, love, ecology, water, community and meaning are our pillars of health, as we unpack in greater detail in our Life beyond the Industrial Medical Complex video. Broad beans, planted just before we left, are just one more aspect that helps grow these pillars.

As are alliums. Meg’s leek kraut is about the best thing you’ll taste.

As is our roast goat that has been fed on a cornucopia of medicinal herbs, weeds and leaves from the forest we tend, love and learn from. Rubbing garlic kraut into the flesh before roasting is yet more gold from the gift of the sun. Mmmm, garlic kraut.

While we were away, some of you might recall, we had to give away our flerd. Our sheep and goats kept getting out, causing neighbours and friends a fair deal of hassle. After travelling through southeast Asia, China, Nepal and India, we have done some further thinking about farming on commons, and how to improve our herbivory processes. We have learned a lot from subsistence lifeways in many of these countries.

One of our biggest takeaways is the simplest thing: to spend the spring and summer harvesting and drying grass, and storing it for the winter. 10 minutes a day on a morning walk, can cut a wheelbarrow of fodder. Buying bales of feed in the winter is expensive, may hold residual pesticides and doesn’t help with managing local grass and mitigating bushfires in our neighbourhood. So cutting, drying and storing grass, as we saw in Nepal, Himachal Predesh, Ladakh and Kashmir, is for us subsistence-resilience, a term we coined while we were away. Here is the new herd we have just brought in.

There is so much spring growth here at the moment and few animals to convert this life-force into health-giving protein. A dear friend has loaned us money to buy this starter herd so we can continue to manage the local forest, (as Happen Films documented us doing a few years back), and supply our home and local gift economy with meat with no industrial inputs, while offering a bushfire mitigation and dominant weed reduction service to the neighbourhood. We are so grateful for the meat, organs and fat, which are transformed gifts from the leaves, fruits and sunlight (and much more) in the forest.

In Patrick and Woody’s first week home, hitchhiking to Castlemaine to get to a rites of passage event was a joyous father and son moment.

After hitchhiking from our home in southern Australia to Darwin at the beginning of our journey, thumbing our way to Castlemaine was a breeze. Patrick is about to volunteer again with 10 other uncle figures to guide a teen boy and their dads rites of passage. Our whole family is involved in this precious village rebuilding movement, which brings great joy into peoples’ lives, including our own.

Well, that’s about it for an update. We so look forward to all being home together and to start back up the many processes that make possible our living with little reliance on the machine of the Capitalocene.

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Category: food medicine