Alba the brave (our week of screenings, meetups and foragings in Scotland)

Aug 23, 2026 | adventure, Alba (Scotland), camping, children's learning, community, community sufficiency, ecological economy making, enclosures, farming and colonisation, fishing, food culture, foraging, fungi, locavorism, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, rabbits, reculturing, relocalisation, revillaging, school of the road, social warming, travel, walked-for food, wild foods | 30 comments

We crossed unceremoniously into the rolling borders of Alba – the Scots Gaelic word for Scotland.

We headed to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills,

to test out the right to roam principle in Scotland. We drove up the laneway and got as far as here (Little Sparta is just beyond the trees). We got out of our little hire car, stretched our legs and inhaled the good air, when

along came the farmer on a quad bike. “May I ask what you’re doing here?” he said in a stern though fair-minded Borders accent. “Can we not camp here?” Patrick replied, to which the farmer gave us a thorough explanation about the limited access to Little Sparta, which was currently closed and probably beyond our budget anyway. It was getting on, we needed somewhere else to test the right to roam. Nice fat cows, green pastures. Scotland was not in drought like the south of England only a pebble’s throw from here.

From Little Sparta we found ourselves winding and wefting through delicious country and popped out at West Linton, and pitched our tent on the village green (a corner of which begins here),

just across the way from this little cemetery.

We were taken by this little town and reflected on the town clock centrepiece. When town clocks began to appear across Europe and lives began to become ever increasingly organised by clock time, what was lost? This too-fast-for-pilgrimage adventure has had its side effects. Ordinarily when we travel by bicycle or on foot, time spreads out horizontally and it feels like a week is lived in a day.

Under the orders of a rental car and a full itinerary we are living in an industrial haze (an off-gassing city on four wheels) with little moments of getting out of the machine for connection and kinship.

From West Linton in the south we bolted to Findhorn in the north. When this itinerary of screenings was being crafted we looked on the map and saw that these distances (at least from an Australian perspective) where not that far. However, unlike back at home, when a journey is stated as being four hours long one needs to double that here in the UK.

When we get out of the machine our relating bodies default into a state of walked-for food creatureliness, craving the nourishments of Mother Country.

We arrived at Cullerne House at Findhorn, and pitched our tent among the happy cohort of permaculture students camping there.

We met a bunch of inspired folk and prepared for the screening and Q&A in this space.

Imagine 70-80 people squashed into these rooms to watch The New Peasants. The audience laughed and sighed, cried and cheered and afterwards asked a string of goodly questions late into the night. There was a wonderful buzz followed by a few days to have lengthier conversations and make deeper connections. Meet Kelly! Homeschooling mum of four, radical homemaker, powerhouse of positivity, AaF blog reader and super supporter. Kelly was the reason we came to Findhorn,

and she brought us many gifts, including her family’s heather honey. Yum!

We two adults have been fairly under slept on this journey so far. Another big gift was Kelly taking Woody out for a day of fishing. He caught a bunch of undersized pollock (lythe), that he put back.

After we adults woke from our nap, we explored Findhorn Ecovillage, stopping in at the Universal Hall,

and later visiting Sylvia and Cornelia, who had invited us for lunch (complete with delicious gifted apple tart).

Patrick spent an evening in a well worn Findhorn pub with Jonathan Dawson, who co-created Schumacher College’s Regenerative Economics programme. Both sipping a nourishing pint of Guinness over several hours, sharing their thoughts, work and experiences. It was a special night while Meg and Woody connected with homeschooling families living at the ecovillage.

The next day we departed this most northern part of our travels and returned to the fast road. Oh badger! We only ever see you in this state.

We returned south through lands misted in heather.

Being on a quieter road south we had a little more agency to pull over, the gift of which we take for granted back home.

While in Alba we have been learning more about the enclosures and The Clearances that have resulted in a handful of people having the majority of the rights to the land and income. We learned that while fiercely contested over the centuries by raiders,

access to land for growing food, and for hunting and fishing is mostly out of reach for the average punter. Unlike in Australia and the US, where hunting and fishing for subsistence is accessible to a broad spread of folk, in Alba – where land and inland waterways are largely controlled by a small handful of land owners – hunting and fishing is mostly a class concern.

We are understanding that the right to roam ethic is merely the elite classes throwing the mob a manky bone – ‘We’ll control the land, take all its riches, and have majority access to its wealth, and occasionally you mob can walk across a field, pitch a tent, and have a little fish (in designated areas). However, if you take a salmon or a deer from our lands to feed your family we will call this poaching. Hunting and fishing is what gentlemen do.’

In a charity shop we found a timely copy of Danny the Champion of the World. Not only a wonderful story for Woody to read but a manifesto for all who have self-respect, and want to safeguard common-folk life for the future.

On the way back south we stopped at a little village called Boat of Garten, where a local, Kevin, called us in. Kevin has been a long-time blog reader and when he heard we were coming Alba way he offered to host a community screening and meetup in his home village. We stayed with his gorgeous family,

and Kevin took us on a little journey before the gig, which included foraging wild raspberries,

and guiding us to a happy pop-up woodland pub called the Gather Inn.

This sweet woodland was full of people thinking and acting for the relocalisation of food and culture, and it was mightily intergenerational with zip lines, cubbies and magical hangs.

A pretty nice old homestead resided next door to the pop-up pub,

and when Patrick looked down after he took the above photograph he discovered a helpless little critter in the grass.

Sadly, this little newborn rabbit was likely not going to grow up and live a goodly rabbity life among the hedgerows nor bound about the fields where these grand old cattle folk graze. Highland cattle can withstand the brutal Scottish winters outside.

We have to keep reminding ourselves that these are indigenous species – rabbit, blackberry, cattle and thistle – and unlike at home, there is no government regime for spraying the plants or deliberately spreading virus among rabbit populations.

So much of the biota of what constitutes our peoples’ medicine is freely living here. “Hello yarrow, my old friend.”

We gathered at the community centre in Boat of Garten and Kevin warmly introduced us and the film. It was a bonnie night of connecting and many conversations followed,

including back at Kevin’s where he poured a few drams of his favourite local whisky before bed.

The next day Kevin took us for a walk in the woodland behind his home. We excitedly gathered up chanterelles,

and wild blueberries among the tick realm of the heather.

We glimpsed a Common lizard in the undergrowth,

and two boys in the tree tops.

We gathered Penny Buns,

and orange birch boletes.

During the morning’s exploration in the woodland with Kevin and his two children, Dusty and Sorley

a morning which included spotting two roe deer and conversations about hunting, poaching and augmenting community organised food security, we gathered up a capful of mushrooms to take on our way.

We returned to the big road, passing both little and large curios of interest, too fast,

and then, for about an hour, at a snail’s pace.

Eventually, we crossed the hypertechnocivil suspension bridge back towards Edinburgh,

and arrived at Chris’s permaculture oasis in Penicuik in time for dinner. Chris had a number of volunteers staying with him, including Eleanor from France,

and he’d set up some tents for us to sleep in among the garden and various building projects.

Chris was getting his food, shelter and energy needs in order, and his volunteers were helping and learning, obtaining practical skills, which they were actively seeking.

The town centre of Penicuik was just up the way,

and a brisk walk before breakfast offered lovely heights. It is considerably colder here.

On our second night at Chris’s, Patrick cut and cooked our little haul of woodland mushrooms,

as our contribution to a potluck. Meg gave an honouring of the food,

and Woody learned new games. There was much discussion about The New Peasants,

which we’d showed earlier in the day at the University of Edinburgh, in a room above and to the left of this grand archway at the Old Medical School.

While walking around the city, Woody spotted a ball kicking scene and we asked to join in.

After a kick we glimpsed a hillocky rock through the city streets,

and knew we needed to get there. So we adults walked and Woody flew

to Arthur’s Seat,

where we startled a mother pheasant and her chick (out of frame),

before descending into an eight foot high patch of nettle.

In many places in urban Alba we’re reminded of Ivor Cutler’s, Life In A Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. 2, Ep. 11,

and in other places high-walled fortification speaks of pre-industrial militarisation, which Ian Hamilton Findlay was dancing with at Little Sparta.

Today power and colonialism are more covert, camouflaged in neoliberal window dressing. It appears as though we are evolved and peaceful, yet we modern subjects of capital are part of the most destructive empire to have ever existed.

This is the Edinburgh ‘Futures’ Institute where Patrick had academic work to do, invited by the University of Edinburgh.

While his dad was co-examining a doctoral thesis, Woody was contributing creatively at the Fringe Festival.

After Edinburgh we journeyed south to Macbiehill to stay with (another) Chris and Erinn,

in their lovely home.

Chris showed Woody how to make a bowl on his lathe,

and Erinn took us into their garden’s young food forest.

We shared a few gentle days with these goodly folk, yarning and gathering stories, and drinking a delicious elder flower sparkling wine made from this purple variety,

and devouring a magnificent haggis. You could tell Woody was not enjoying himself in Alba.

Growing up as a forager since birth, Woody never fails to be delighted by land that offers hidden treasures,

and while the wild raspberry party roamed, and Chris tended the haggis, Patrick walked along the road and brought back a bunch of lush dandelion leaves and three mature horse mushrooms to add to a horta dish.

Before we left, Chris and Erinn took us around to their friend James’ place for a meetup. James is a permaculture teacher and is currently building his family’s home with larch poles.

James and his family might be the only ones in Alba to have mature grapes on the vine.

James gave us a tour of his woodland, and the structures he and his volunteers have built.

One volunteer, Sam from New Zealand (blue t-shirt below, with Woody and Arlo) had recently returned from an IDF prison after being kidnapped from the flotilla. He and Woody had a great time talking about the merits of being unschooled.

Our time in Alba was winding up and we farewelled our new friends, dropped off the hire car in Glasgow and headed to the central train station.

We trained and stopped, ate blackberries,

and bussed to the west coast,

where at Stranraer we came to camp. We bought some bread and cheese and walked the town, encountering a medieval tower-house converted to a Victorian prison,

and an Episcopalian house of worship,

before pitching our tent for the night.

It was a rough Friday night in the park. Alcohol and hotted up street cars raged the streets til late, and when we woke at 5.50am the next day to catch the Cairnryan ferry to Éire, we had no idea of the big day that would unfold. More on that to come.

For those in Éire, we are screening The New Peasants at An Teach Saor in County Galway on August 25. If you are local and would like to come along, please get in touch for more information. If you are further afield, An Teach Saor (Irish for ‘The Free House’) is a land-based permaculture community and gift-economy smallholding in County Galway.

Community Sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies

Jul 19, 2026 | animals in subsistence permaculture, Artist as Family online event, autonomous edibles, bees, belonging economies, bicycles, biological control, cars, collapse, community gardens, community op-shop, community schooling, community sufficiency, creative frugality, ecological economy making, ecological knowledges, economics, edible weeds, energy descent, family, farming, ferals, fermenting, fishing, flow of gifts, food co ops, food sovereignty, foraging, gift economy, goats, home economies, hunting, Hypertechnocivility, Insurance, locavorism, love, map, medicinal plants, mushrooms, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, post-industrial thought, preserving, rabbits, radical homemakers, raising boys, reculturing, regenerative culture, relationships, relocalisation, resistance, revillaging, roadkill, salvaging, storytelling, subsistence economy, subsistence permaculture, the commons, walked-for food, wild foods, wood energy | 0 comments

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.

The home emergency ward (or, theatre of deep adaptation)

Feb 3, 2026 | art, biology, Collective preparedness, craft, creative frugality, experts, fear, foraging, Free to learn, healing, health, home educating, homelife, lifemaking, medicinal plants, men's health, neopeasant education, radical homemakers, School of Applied Neopeasantry, storytelling, uncapitalised medicine, weeds | 76 comments

Some readers may be offended by the graphic nature this post. Discretion is required.

This week the ‘home theatre’ took on new meaning in the School of Applied Neopeasantry’s outdoor kitchen.

It became a site of needlework poetics and self-doctoring after Patrick took a blow from a cricket ball, bowled by Woody.

What a grand opportunity for this grubby neopeasant to practice the craft of self-suturing, and for us to share the story.

Earlier, at the ground where the sport took place, Woody and friend Fab scattered to find plantain (rib wort) as blood spewed forth onto the pitch. This useful, sometimes scruffy common medicine is found in almost all places where wounds commonly take place.

Years before, playing soccer, Zephyr had run to find his old man the same herb after Patrick sustained a head injury that required a number of stitches. Both times, then and now, Patrick masticated the coagulating, antimicrobial leaves in his mouth,

and quelled the blood of the head wound by placing the green mush onto the cut. A medical doctor friend, whom he played soccer with 12 years ago, stitched Patrick on the side of the field, and remarked how well the plantain had stopped the flow of blood. This time, after dabbling with self-suturing a little since the soccer head collision, Patrick felt ready for the next stage of creating the home emergency ward.

Sooted stretched sheep skins gave wall to the surgery, and blood-stained hands and dirt under the fingernails spoke of no violence of purity, often claimed by those who say they want to keep us safe. A sewing needle was fetched and so too the workshop’s old diamond stone to sharpen it by.

Then some modicum of cleanliness followed with the sharpened patchwork needle being dropped in a small dish of Brother Eucalyptus oil.

And the thread on hand, a piece of dental floss, was threaded through the needle and lowered into the oil as well.

So far we had all that we needed for the surgery. A kettle of boiling mountain rain water was poured into a bowl, then some previously boiled, now cooled water added, and then a splash of the cleaning oil.

This made a wash solution for inside the wound and around it.

Courage was mustered by this doctor of poetics, though the natural shock at the cut after the ball struck, was anaesthetic enough not to warrant worry for the procedure. Breath was breathed. Trust was trusted. A stable hand placed the needle. Some more youthful eyes would have been good, but not on offer, so in it went.

Relief! The first stitch holes punctured as though a through line in the series, Collapse of the cult of safetyism.

After puncturing the skin in two places in the middle of the wound, and pulling the threaded needle through, Patrick tied a double knot.

He cut off the remains of the dental floss thread and did the same for another two stitches. “This is fun!” He exclaimed to Meg. “The home theatre of deep adaptation.”

Patrick laboured gently just as he had done countless times sewing up our torn or worn clothes over the years. He was mightily chuffed with himself by the end of the third stitch. Self doctoring (and dentistry) in a time of collapse is more exhilarating than you would think. It’s empowering.

After the stitching was complete, he smeared our garden bee’s honey across the wound, as an external antiseptic and wound healing salve.

The whole procedure took around twenty minutes, and a few hours later (after a deep sleep) the bruising appeared.

48 hours later, after two days of deep rest and goodly sleep – the best medicine life has on offer (which hospitals disallow) – including nine hours of listening to the mass catalogue of woundings and killings in a telling of The Iliad, Patrick’s wound looked like this.

A cricket ball weighs 156 grams and Woody bowls at around 100 km/hr. So effectively this cricket ball is a punch in the face at high velocity. It is the order of things when a son, fairly, beats his dad. Another 48 hours on, the wound looked like this.

The following day was Saturday, and Patrick captained the senior cricket team, scored 60 runs alongside Zeph’s 57 and Woody took a wicket to each contribute to a mighty win. Initially Patrick batted in a helmet (a first for him), but took it off because he couldn’t quite see the ball. On Sunday, day six, he took the stitches out,

which was actually the most difficult bit, and where much of the learning took place.

The dental floss had began to fall apart, and we didn’t want any of it to be left inside in case it caused an infection. Dosing up on zinc, vitamin C, sugar-free food, plantain salve, mineral water pumped from down in the forest, and significant rest assisted Patrick’s immune system, so he could more quickly recover, fight off infection, and get back to the cricket. However, on day six, he was concerned that the poor integrity of the thread could send all the good doctoring backwards.

After the removal was complete and the wound site cleaned, it looked like this.

Then, on day seven of Patrick’s healing, Zeph called us from work. A large pane of glass had fallen and shattered across his arm, cutting it in several places. The nearby Maldon clinic doctor refused to even look under the bandage and told him to go to Bendigo Hospital emergency ward.

Patrick collected him in our friend Bei’s car, spoke with Zeph about potentially home suturing, attempted to get hold of a suture kit from some medical friends, talked about the possibility of laceration to a tendon or a nerve, and then decided it best to head to Bendigo. They arrived at 4pm, got triaged (that ugly word), had the cuts looked at, and then took a seat in that hot, stuffy place.

While waiting Patrick was thinking about our friend who lost a finger in this same emergency ward, due to having to wait seven hours to be looked at. When he was finally seen, the doctor said, oops, we needed to have seen you hours ago to have saved your finger. At the three and a half hour mark Patrick asked Administration Clerk 1 politely whether he could take home a suture kit and do the job himself.
The nurse looked confused and said, “No… I don’t think so, I’d have to ask.”
Patrick responded with a smile, in his wife-beater singlet: “I am a doctor you know.”
“Are you?” she said unsurely.
“Yes, a doctor of literature,” he replied smiling. “I stitched up my own face last Monday.”
She glanced at the wound above his eye.
“Let me look in the system… Oh, your son is next in line, shouldn’t be long now.”
“Thanks nurse, appreciate it.”

They were having fun. Or, at least Patrick was. Then, miraculously, Zeph’s name was called and we were ushered into a fairly dirty little clinic by a lovely Sri Lankan doctor. Patrick asked if he could watch the procedure because, as he said, he loves to learn. The doctor was obliging. Zeph was mightily relieved that at 8pm (the incident having taken place around 1pm) someone was finally going to take a look at his arm and assess whether there was tendon or nerve damage.

By comparison, in the home emergency ward last week Patrick stitched himself up within an hour of his accident. Because of his old man’s keen student-like attention and questioning, the doctor was very accommodating and taught as though giving a workshop. Patrick repaid the favour by schooling her on toxic adjuvants in vaccines and the over-prescribing of them, after she offered Zeph a tetanus shot. Naturally, due to her education in western medicine, adjuvants (the largely untold shadow side of vaccinology) were things she had never heard of. She was refreshingly open to learning. Her first job was to ascertain whether there was glass in the wound and whether a tendon or nerve had been damaged. She washed the wound under a bright light.

She used a syringe of salty water to irrigate out any broken pieces, and then showed her impromptu student how to open the wound and look down into it after flushing away the blood, to search for any white regions. White, Patrick discovered, means nerve or tendon. After the clean out, the lacerations looked quite trivial. It pays to thoroughly investigate the situation first, thought Patrick. “Observe first. That’s what I should have done when I first picked up Zeph,” he later reflected to Meg.

Patrick noted the way the doctor cut away the dead skin, and how she applied the nylon thread and the fishhook needle to suture Zeph’s wounds. As a fellow sewer, Patrick was impressed.

While a makeshift emergency ward suited Patrick’s purposes to self-suture last week, it’s a little different doctoring someone else without the right gear or missing knowledge. However, after last night’s free tutorial, it’s actually all pretty straight forward. Suturing skin is really low-skilled labour, and we have no idea why nurses are not trained to do this work, especially when small regional hospitals and clinics are now refusing to do it. This morning we heard from our medical friends saying they have saved for us some unused suture kits whose expiry date has passed, and instead of burning them as medical waste, and contributing to the great waste pollution stream of the industrial medical complex, they’re going to give them to us.

“I could have done this myself,” said Patrick to Zeph on the late, long drive home last night, “but I’m glad for the extra schooling.” It certainly has been a week of gold in terms of learning for a future with an ever greater reduction of services in regional Australia.

What are your self-doctoring lessons and stories? We’d love to hear how you are responding to the decline of affluence and the real, everyday need to skill up at home to take the pressure off a broken health system, made even more bankrupt by the ridiculous and excessive Covid response.

Onwards and upwards! Thanks for reading all the way and stomaching some of the more gory images.

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.

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.

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

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Category: foraging