Today we are sharing both audio-only and video versions of our recent online session, Ecological participation (guiding child-led learning in a forest). Once again the format is a one hour presentation by Magpie and Blue Wren (with cameos by Woody and Lilly Pilly), followed by 30 minutes of goodly question time.
Patrick had the pleasure of speaking with art historian Silvia Bottinelli this morning about her research on the politics and aesthetics of food sovereignty, the origins of her work, and some of the challenges and cultural renewal taking place in art practices that include agrarian nodes.
In a previous video, we offered our contribution to her book, Artists and the Practice of Agriculture, which constitutes an interview Silvia conducted with us a few years ago.
In today’s conversation, Patrick begins by asking Silvia about her origin story into this research.
Our cherished friend and community elder, David Holmgren (below left), best known for being the co-originator of the permaculture concept, turned 70 this year, and to celebrate, a small group gathered under the grandmother pear tree at his home, Melliodora, to share food and to honour this special man in our lives, and the lives of so many.
People offered various forms of praise and story in what became an open-mic-this-is-your-life-Dave-Holmgren kind of event. Patrick prepared this honouring, which we are sharing with you today. Here’s the audio and the text, if you wish to read along (10 mins).
And here is the man with Patrick’s praise, taller than the man himself.
How has David, and his work, affected your life, Dear Reader? Your anecdotes and stories are most welcome.
Thanks Ian Lillington for the first photo and Su for the second.
We left the sleepy, mahjong town of Lujing, outside Chengdu city in China early in the morning.
We had a plane to catch.
We could not find another way of getting to India overland from China due to border disputes, politics and bureaucracy, so we spent a little time among the clouds,
got forcibly fumigated by the air hostesses before landing, and arrived in Kathmandu three hours later. After going through immigration and customs, changing currencies and setting up a Nepali sim card, we hired a Tootle.
A friendly Nepali man took us to the lodge where we were to stay on our first night.
We walked some of the intense streets of Kathmandu,
and some of the gentle ones,
witnessed people gathered at the butchers,
and at the stupas and pagodas.
We came across personal struggles,
transportive skills,
and bigger challenges affecting people day to day,
Kathmandu is the first city we’ve visited on this journey, since we left Darwin, where drugs and alcohol are causing misery in peoples’ lives. Woody was grabbed by a man in the street. The man was inebriated, by substance and grief. He tried to cuddle Woody, forcibly, which set we parents off. We are all learning how our vulnerabilities as travellers conjure up fear, and reactivity, especially when just arriving in a new country. In reading J Krishnamurti again,
he reminds us how fear is often a precursor to violence, to a lack of freedom.
We parents were upset by the inebriated man. He required our compassion, our witnessing of his grief, our openness. Woody required protection and surety. Krishnamurti makes much sense to us, especially his thoughts about religion, however inside books, sense can be very clear-eyed, while on the streets such papery clarity can soon dissipate.
On another occasion on the edges of the tourist district of Thamel in Kathmandu,
Meg was pushed aggressively by a street vendor because we’d stopped in front of his stall to talk with another man who wanted to know about our travel plans. The push had the desired effect as we quickly left that unhappy place, after Meg offered back her views about his behaviour. We must have been an unwitting block for his livelihood.
The man who wanted to know of our plans, like many older street businessmen in this tourist district, wanted to yarn with us so as he could better weave our needs as travellers to his financial needs. Initially we were irritated and put off by this in Kathmandu, but later after speaking with Nepalis and understanding how business works here, we realised this perceived pushiness comes from an indigenous trait of connection through gossip and story sharing mixed with colonisation’s imported scarcity anxiety and lust for material riches. Nepal is currently in conversion from an indigenous culture into an imperialist one, guided by the west, China and India. This is the process from human-ecology interactive violence (eating, farming, hunting, gathering) to what Deborah Bird Rose calls, ‘man-made mass death’.
It’s easy for us to refuse what’s on offer in Kathmandu, in most cases. We are on a shoestring budget. But we also enjoy speaking with people and sharing story, even if we know there is financial intention behind the interest. It is part of the local/foreigner dance, here.
On our first night in this city, we went looking for and bought a khukuri from Ramesh, a former Gurkha soldier.
Gurkhas are a Nepali fighting unit who have a reputation for fearless military prowess. The word itself derives from Go-Raksha – protector of cows. This again reveals the conversion – cowherds become militia, famously employed by the British empire to their dirty work. No, we didn’t buy the big knife or khukuri, Patrick was given that by Ramesh to bring drama to our shared photo. Rather, we bought the little one that now travels on Patrick’s belt. It cost AU$30.
Happily, we’re back in the business of sliced mangoes for breakfast. Yes, this local green variety is ripe!
Wearing a knife again brings things up for us. We’re not going to pretend it is only for mangoes. While we are big fans of Krishnamurti’s ‘freedom from fear’ invitation, and for wisdom like this,
we also think there is a right time and place for what we call appropriate, conscious, or ecological violence, such as hunting, subsistence farming and slaughtering, and self defence. We say this without fear in Nepal. It is wild and unruly here, but quite safe in most places.
The work that Krishnamurti perennially invites us to partake in is understanding our inner violence – impatience, irritation, superiority, lack of curiosity, absence of compassion, preciousness, and so forth – and he offers meditation (post-thought peace), breath work (being in a state of wholeness with the world), and a daily mental practice of recognising early when we enter states of fear or anger, which when not faced, can lead to wounding. More common is psychological wounding than knife or physical wounding. This goes a little way to understanding the high suicide rates of men in Australia. While there is much necessary media about physical violence to women, few want to see more subtle and more common forms of psychological violence in our communities, especially perpetrated against men. The societal acceptance of Clementine Ford’s extremist misandry, especially in the so-called liberal media, is testament to this.
Before we left the city we scoured the streets of Kathmandu for somewhere to buy a cricket bat for Woody, and after much searching we eventually succeeded, here.
We found Kathmandu boys are mostly into football (soccer), though cricket is more of a thing here than in any other country we’ve visited since leaving Australia. We didn’t see Nepali girls playing either sports until Pokhara. Woody has been longing for a game, and we didn’t have an opportunity until we reached Bhaktapur, about an hour east of the city by car, through thick traffic.
We arrived and were instructed to pay AU$60 to enter historic Durbar Square, where we were to stay. It was too much dosh for we neopeasants, so we declined, cancelled our booking at a cheap hotel inside the square, and booked into this little sweat box with stellar views, just outside it.
A kind Nepali fella back at the gates told as that after 7.30pm the guards go home and people can freely walk into Durbar Square.
It was beautiful inside,
and fragile. In 2015 an earthquake ruptured many of the buildings.
We enjoyed this place for its dedication to the sacred, pissing street dogs, absence of motor vehicles and night time quietude and cool, though we also felt a sadness here – an old Nepal walled off from the rest of the country, which has been superseded by global imperialism and national political corruption.
We are seeing in the culture how technological ascent and the global machine conglomerate disturbs everything immensely, everyday. In Krishnamurti (1973) we read this:
“…we see that education, science, organised religion, propaganda, politics, have failed. They have not brought about peace, though technologically man has advanced incredibly.”
Five decades later we are observing that technological advances have led to the psychological derangement of people, making life faster, more furious, more interrupted, more anxious, polluted and permanently unsettled. It is perpetually draining to behold the continuous propaganda and promises of US-style empire capitalism, while living the actual realities of it.
The following day, to oxygenate our rather sedated bodies in play, Woody and Patrick started a game of cricket on the brick pavement that framed a water feature and temple outside our hotel.
They soon noticed a young boy watching and they invited him to play. He was shy and declined, at first. But after a while he started helping to retrieve the ball from the water. Woody got carried away with the bat on one occasion, which found him stripping down to his undies and swimming out to retrieve the ball. Sushil, the young Bhaktapur boy, who joined our game while school kids and teachers looked on from above in their classrooms, soon lost his shyness, and we all took turns to bowl and bat, often fielding the ball out of the pond. Sushil is a natural sportsman and he loves both batting and bowling.
Once the shade disappeared from the pitch, we all got mightily hot and so we invited Sushil to join us for a drink. Patrick and Woody found out, with limited language, his family business is peddling fruit, or should we say, pedalling fruit?
We offered him a banana lassi but he wanted a Coke,
that slow release poison in a bottle, killing the microbiomes of Nepali everywhere courtesy of the psychological warfare conducted by US empire admen and women.
We observed again in Bhaktapur that Mother Country has a way of slowly eating up that which is not required,
and like all hubristic civilisations over the last 5000 years, the US empire will be eaten up too.
The following day, when we came back into the traffic jams of Kathmandu city, we glimpsed a goatherd and his animals travelling by foot.
What are we doing in this city? We want to behold subsistence-resilience, not traffic! We stayed one more night in this little cosy, mozzie-filled room,
laughed at the phenomena of us only tripping in the streets in China’s cities, which are flat, expensive and new, yet never in the countries that keep our street senses switched on,
once again marvelled at the mind-fuck that is the electrical experience in southeast and subcontinent Asia,
and headed out to find a Nepali restaurant mostly catering to locals.
We all loved the food at the Himalayan Yak, especially Woody,
and the family who ran this modest restaurant were a big part of the love we consumed in their fare. We also liked and noted the lack of advertising outside the restaurant, just a lovely gold and red drape that suggested some form of business.
The next morning we left Kathmandu, we walked to the bus stop in the rain.
We had just received a message from our friend, Trace, who asked us to look out for cyclists carrying all manner of things in Nepal. Trace is an inspiring children’s book writer and illustrator, and she told us she is considering doing a children’s book on the subject, after years of noting and documenting the beauty of such low-tech transportation and the everyday miracles of what can be sometimes carried on a bike.
We only published one bike of this husband and wife gleaning duo, in our previous Laos-China post. So, for Trace, and anyone else who is into appropriate technology, here are the wonderful cycling twosome we spoke with in Chengdu. The husband is carrying cardboard recycling; the wife is carrying plastic.
Our bus left Kathmandu at 7am, and there was talk on the bus about the potential of landslides because of the heavy rain overnight. We travelled with great alertness,
witnessing at one point a local bus on the other side of the road marooned in road-edge mud, seriously close to tipping over.
We followed the powerful Trishuli River for some time, and when the driver pulled over for punters to buy food and use the public toilets, we soaked up the energy of the river.
On and off over this several hour bus passage, the rain belted down,
and we saw locals or government employees out in it, trying to elevate the force of the water causing the land to slide.
There were innumerable examples of the concrete walls, attempting to arrest the pressure, failing.
At Dumre we got off the bus and hopped in a taxi for a ten minute drive up to the high country of Bandipur. Oh, how our senses relaxed as we moved towards this misty,
sane,
magical,
place.
We booked into this room for AU$20 per night,
looked out onto the town from the hotel,
went for a walk,
beheld sweetness and beauty everywhere,
and felt our nervous systems calm. In the main street of the town, no motors were permitted, and we witnessed first hand what a pre-industrial village would have felt like, and the greater peace that would have resulted. We asked if this man would be happy for us to photograph him and his craft.
Instead of delivery trucks, people carried things along the street with traditional baskets.
What we witnessed here is an easy work ethic, a green gym epistemology – a time for yarning and gossip, and a time to carry and labour.
No one seemed overly consumed by their work here, although the man sewing (above) did seem to be the exception. Every time we passed his doors he was working, and we felt a sadness in him that perhaps his continual labouring helps ease. We saw in Bandipur a beautiful village, only accessible from the rest of the country by motor transport since 1998, and that despite being part-supported by tourism, is still in tact socially, spiritually and ecologically.
Quite by chance we arrived in the low tourist season. Now is the coolest and quietest time of year. We booked one night, as we do with any new place, but immediately knew we were going to stay awhile. We just didn’t want to leave, and the goats were a big part of this.
Back home in Djaara Country, our flerd ran out of food while we’ve been away, and as a result kept getting out, causing generous neighbours and friends a lot of stress. Back in Thailand we made the painful decision to give our animals away. Being in Bandipur we witnessed peasant-sized small goats browsing on common land, as ours did, and the huge breeding-programme goats at the National Goat Research Centre, where we were welcomed in and shown the bucks, young and old,
and the does.
We tried hitchhiking back up the hill, the three kilometre hike from the research centre,
but there was little traffic. As as we walked we talked about saving our pennies when we get home to invest in some bigger animals.
Goats here in Nepal are a big part of daily life, and so too is play. Each day in the afternoon we went to Thulihill, the village park, to play cricket with anyone who wanted to join in. We fashioned stumps out of fallen sticks.
Playing both cricket and football here has helped dismantle the local/tourist, us/them barrier. When we come across others in Nepal we like to acknowledge them in the customary, local way, Nameste, which so elegantly translates as ‘the light in me sees the light in you.’ The more we stayed, played games and met people in Bandipur, the deeper our relations grew with the people of the village. Having worked in hospitality in our own tourist town of Daylesford for a number of years, we have a sensitivity to being ‘the locals’ too, and how tourists are often in extraction rather than connection mode.
We love the casual drying of corn between rain showers in the streets,
the Sishnu (nettle) and Bandipur (fermented vegetable) soups, served with local Tumba (millet) wine, which is clear in colour and tastes more like a spirit,
and we love Nepali money, which celebrates six indigenous Nepalese animals. The largest note, 1000 npr, is worth just over AU$10.
In the evenings we played cricket until the light faded,
and the local boys said to us, you need to get home because the tiger might be out. We were thrilled more than fearful, however, we took their advice and didn’t dawdle in the dark, more forested parts of the village.
On our third day, after writing a bunch of postcards,
we jumped on the cable car from the top of Bandipur,
and descended through the clouds to Dumre to send them. The Dumre post office, which we found online, didn’t actually exist in physical reality, despite the internet stating it did – the map is not the territory, just as data modelling is not our complex immune biomes. So, instead of sending slow mail to love ones we stopped in at the Dumre markets, brought some bananas and mangoes,
the latter of which we couldn’t get in Bandipur, and headed back up the hill, praising the craft of Baya Weavers (or, Tope Chara, in Nepali),
yellow-breasted sparrows Indigenous to Nepal and other parts of Asia.
Bandipur is just over a 1000m above sea level. On our fourth day the clouds revealed to us the Himalayas. While difficult to see in this photo, this first sighting of the majesty of these mountains enchanted us. Hint: Not all the white above the tree line is cloud.
There is an undeniable power in this country, and beautiful people. Dilap, who pointed out the mountains to us when we descended the staircase at his family hotel on that morning, is one of them.
We moved hotels to his, after the black mould became too overwhelming in our room in the first.
On the journey down from Bandipur to Dumre to catch the bus, we asked Dilap how his family survived Covid without tourism: “We didn’t have much money then, but Nepali all know how to grow food. We are an agricultural country. We help our friends when they struggle, and the food we grow at home is fresh and is healthier than from the store.”
In Bandipur we witnessed widespread home-grown food production and herbal medicine plants we use at home,
We helped heal Woody’s knee injury with our own peoples’ medicine kit – soaking this typical boyhood scuff of the knee injury in eucalyptus oil and warm water to clean it,
and later applying narrow-leaf plantain salve. He limped around for a day or two,
but soon forgot about it when it was cricket time. Woody’s immune system, of course, did most of the healing particularly with good food in his belly. We ate healthy Nepali food in this lovely town, much of it grown close by, (rice, lentil dahl, buffalo curd, veg curry and a weed saag),
and we sat and yarned in the clouds.
Bandipur bore many gifts, including the community of village cricket and a dreamy peaceful respite from the intensity of travel. We left with tremendous gratitude.
We caught another bus on to Pokhara, which was slow going (can you see the goat on the van’s roof?),
mostly because of the monsoonal rains causing landslides that narrowed the road,
but also other challenges.
It took five hours to travel 80 kms. It is currently wet in this region, and the next season’s rice crops have been planted.
We saw from the bus endless examples of subsistence agriculture. We love the fenceless nature of farming here, where cows and goats graze right up to rice paddies, and where the ‘fences’ are the human herders who stay with the animals to prevent them from eating the crops.
This being with the herd, being with the land, instead of constructing fences suits a less manic, less alienated culture. For the cow- or goatherd to observe their animal’s intelligent senses in what they graze and when and where, gives the farmer knowledges about deep and diverse nutrition. These knowledges slowly accrue in the being with, and often cannot be measured. In Nepal, we’ve witnessed how animals are often stabled for part of the day with rice straw or freshly cut weed fodder, after bouts of free-ranging.
This allows people to do other things throughout the day.
When we arrived in Pokhara, and went down to the lake, we found cows free-ranging among the tourists and locals.
The Pokhara farmer whose cows they were was on always on hand.
The very first image (thanks to Jordan and Happen Films) we published in the very first blog post of this journey, was of us moving our animals across town.
We miss our flerd and find comfort in the ways people are with their animals here, and also the way they are with each other. Like in the two-cows-by-the-lake image above, we witness daily the unashamed public affection Nepali friends have for each other here.
On the way to Pokhara we passed gravel mines on the fertile flood plains. This gravel is being used to make concrete to build roads,
and modern Nepali buildings.
We stayed in one of these buildings in Pokhara.
It was an oven inside because of the concrete acting as a heat bank.
Due to the monsoonal rains there are great numbers of mozzies so we needed the fan in the room all night to both repel the mozzies and try to distribute the radiating heat from the room so we could sleep. Here is the rooftop room we spent the first two nights in in Pokhara. When thermal mass is not a good thing, and not just because of the ruined fertile flood plains…
We spent the afternoon walking the streets of Pokhara to seek out various things. We looked for a shoe repairer to fix the holes in the soles of Patrick’s shoes. A skilled man in his street workshop stopped them from leaking,
and also brushed the mud off and polished them, all for the equivalent of AU$10. Locals told us he over charged us, but it’s all relative.
We also sought out more postcards, and a secondhand bookshop. There are several in Pokhara, with books in many languages. Patrick found Bikas-Binas (Development-Destruction): The change in life and environment of the Himalaya, a radical text from the mid 1980s featuring both Nepali and foreigner contributions, discussing through a development-critical lens what was happening to this beautiful region at that time. When Patrick opened this book it fell to this page,
In one of the book’s essays, Deadly Development, the author, Claude Alvares, reads the development of this region as a con-game:
“…for it seems now that the idea of economic development has been used by the ruling classes to induce people to accept not only enormous sacrifices, but the destruction or mutilation of older cultural patterns and physical and moral environments, and debilitating forms of dependence.”
There is a romantic, pre-development painting of a Pokhara village scene hung in the office of the hot hotel we were staying in. It depicts traditional stone, slate, clay brick and thatch buildings, which are only one or two storeys high and presumably cooler and ventilated. Villagers are engaged in ecologically-embedded labours,
That was a scene of Pokhara, according to the artist. This is a scene of Pokhara now, according to Artist as Family.
The irony of being dependent on some of the patterns of colonialism is not lost on us, though we baulk at most things on offer here.
Radical texts like Bikas-Binas don’t appear to exist anymore, or they are labelled conspiracy texts, and disappeared from view in the search engines. When you do a Google search for something today, it is always filtered according to the empire’s narrative. This is why
On our first evening in Pokhara we stopped to ask a man where we might eat where the locals go. John, a jovial Irishman, led us to such a place and joined us for dinner.
John, who is currently living in Pokhara, is a great source of local knowledge. We told him of our plans to bus from Pokhara to Sonauli on the Indian-Nepali border and go through immigration there. He told us that with our Indian e-visas – the most over-complicated and annoying piece of bureaucracy we’ve ever had to endure, and which Meg spent several hours filling in back in Kathmandu – we won’t be able to cross at Sonauli, and worse, John told us, “you’ll need to return to Kathmandu and fly to Delhi; there is no other way.”
We were gutted.
What we are witnessing on this journey is the more a country ‘develops’ the more ridiculous the rules become, and the less freedoms people hold. Development isn’t only about eliminating old cultural patterns and customs and transforming ecologies into construction sites,
it is also about controlling people, and herding them into sad little, hard spaces as workers or consumers, and both.
And this control stems from a desperate economic system based on a the fabrication of scarcity. Capitalists and Marxists alike perpetuate this system, which is always city-centric and debasing to people and life forces.
We are on this journey, having not gone overseas for twenty years for social, economic and ecological reasons, to give Blackwood a glimpse of other cultures and lifeways before health-fascism – biometrics linked to Digital IDs passports – become the norm, and people like us won’t be able to travel at all.
As those of you who have been following this journey from the beginning know, Woody’s love of cricket and our meeting ‘cultural others’ through a shared love of the game, combined with our more adult focus on subsistence-resilience are the main intentions for this travel. We know we need to be ever mindful of the restrictives, negatives and our expectations, acknowledge them and let them go through to the keeper.
The feralty of street dog life in Pokhara helps with this. The way they dance through the streets with their souls in tact gives us courage and guidance.
We walked for a while with these two,
up to the park, where cows graze on soccer fields and players kick around them and cricketers play until dark.
That magnificent steer (in the photo above) certainly had his eyes on the ball. How genius for a large park that enables festivals,
track running, football, volleyball, badminton, cricket and many other social gatherings, for the cows and buffalos to be the ecological lawn mowers of it,
eating down the grass while returning manure to feed the park, and being part of the social life of this beautiful commons.
Having cow pats scattered around the park certainly adds another level of coordination and awareness as a player, when chasing down the ball.
On our fourth and final afternoon of cricket in Pokhara, a two meter long, grey-brownish snake revealed itself, just near where this fella fielded a ball.
A few stones were thrown to encourage it away from the game. It was very respectful. We are impressed with so much in Nepal, especially the interspecies connections and reverence for life.
Last cricket season in Hepburn, we watched a Muckleford player bash to death a two metre long tiger snake with a cricket bat. It just wanted to cross the field to get to the creek. We players could have waited five minutes for the snake to pass. Almost everyone on the field cheered when it was dead and hurled across the boundary fence. There is deep trauma in a culture that thinks this is OK.
We moved from the top floor of the hot box hotel after two nights to another multi-levelled hotel closer to the park. The trees in the garden of the Trekkers Lodge significantly help keep the building cooler, despite it too using much concrete.
It also helped we were on the first floor. Outside our window to the south was another hot-box-for-empire building going up, but much more interestingly, corn and millet were planted together where in Australia people plant lawn seed. This backyard also housed stooked rice straw for the buffalo stabled nearby, with taro and bitter gourd on the edges of the patch for human consumption.
The sweet family who ran the lodge had other family members growing this food, and collecting fodder in the park across the road for the buffalo.
The owner of the hotel told us the buffalo lives in this shed, near were we are sleeping,
and sometimes free-ranges in the park. All of this is done in small suburban, often shared areas, and it is giving us so many ideas about the scale of a farm, especially if daily human ‘green gym’ practices of foraging fodder are incorporated. Buffalo, at least on menus in Nepal, is called buff. Instead of beef, buff sits beside chicken, pork and goat dishes. While we spent three nights at this lodge we kept checking from where we could, waiting for the buff to come out of her shed to get a goodly photo. But she liked her little cow cave, and all we got is a glimpse of her lovely rump.
Coming to Nepal is like doing a RetroSuburban masterclass. Not just in the growing of food, but in the way people transport things,
wrap things,
and feed themselves in a way that doesn’t require many resources and is accessible to most. We loved eating masala omelettes and drinking mint tea for lunch. The cost was around AU$2, not just because we are in Nepal, but because such a meal can be hobbled together without a middleman, without a supermarket.
Cafe owners share, borrow or buy ingredients from one another, so no food is wasted. Often, when we’ve ordered something we’ll see the cook go across the road to another cafe get an ingredient or two. This is another example of working together – another indigenous trait that hasn’t been destroyed here.
On our first day in Pokhara we spotted these lovely boats on Lake Fewa.
On our fourth day in Nepal’s second largest city, we hired one.
and rowed across to the other side of the lake to trek up to the stupa. On the way we beheld more rural food production and preparations, such as future crop patches mulched and left to go fallow,
and in other patches, manure brought from the stables and animal sheds to return to the soil, akin to any organic food production that doesn’t require the mining of phosphate rock.
More intelligent indigenous-peasant lifeways we witnessed on our walk, and which we have seen all over Nepal, are the ecological air conditioning systems that invite rest, yarning and cooling. They are often about 3 degrees C cooler underneath them.
Here, the technics required to build this air conditioning/recuperation/social system incorporates local materials. Large mossy benches made from brick or stone are built around (often pre-existing) giant ficus trees, and they operate as temples of relief and shrines to the long history of people and ecologies being in union here. We walked on, up the many steps,
past the ‘tree elbow’ love tree,
leaving lying dogs to sleep,
passing fading proverbs adorned with wild flower,
until we reached the stupa.
We looked out across the lake to Pokhara, at a city of 600,000,
and rested and meditated on the shady side of Shanti Stupa,
which was built by Japanese buddhists belonging to the Nipponzan-Myōhōji order, and local Nepali devotees and artisans.
Our response to Pokhara at first was a repulsion for the tourism and imperialism that’s so clearly fucking over the culture here. But having meet with the locals on boats, such as Santos who grew up on the streets,
and over breakfast with Surentra who worked in Australia for five years as a chef,
and each evening playing cricket with a bunch of generous young men,
who generously included us in their afternoon games, we felt ourselves shift from sadness into relationship.
We witnessed sophisticated subsistence-resilience here, showing the way forward for the rich countries that are speedily coming down the affluence bell curve,
and we beheld the growth and learnings within ourselves.
so, after two weeks, we leave this spirited country full of possibility and with much post-hope positivity.
On our last morning in Pokhara, we woke to unseasonably clear skies, and thus to the majestic Annapurna Ranges of the Himalayas.
This rare glimpse (at this time of year) of the power and magic of this Mother Country somehow changed us. Perhaps it changed us in how we relate as humans, now knowing this grand scale of range is possible. Or is it that Annapurna is a mythological site, and we were briefly drawn into her mythos as we silently stared. We held no expectations to behold her because this is ‘off’ season and the Himalayas are usually covered by clouds, but behold her we did.
We realised, too late, we could have caught a ferry directly to Malaysia. Instead we had booked ourselves to travel to three countries in one day.
We love travelling by sea. Give us a jetty, port or ferry terminal any day, before an airport.
Leaving Indonesia was as relaxed as arriving into the country, way back in West Timor. By 8am we were on our way to Singapore,
and by about 8.30am we finally finished off our crumbly stores of homemade roo and rabbit jerky.
By mid morning we were arriving in the old British colonial port of Singapore,
where we experienced a rather more uptight immigration system. Still, those who were supposed to be assessing our x-rayed luggage and bodies were instead scrolling on their screens or watching a movie on their phone, just like in Indonesia. We were to find the same laissez-faire attitude in Malaysia, later in the day.
We had hoped to connect with some permies in Singapore but the timing wasn’t to be, so we hightailed it from the south to the north of this micro-country, which we found to be fastidiously neat.
From the north of Singapore (about 30 minutes by car) we boarded a five minute train that took us to the Malaysian border.
We crossed the Strait of Johor,
into Malaysia, and were thrilled to find these homemade baked goods at the station.
In the third country for the day we boarded another train to go north, with our lunch of tea eggs and beef cake.
With the bureaucracy of borders behind us and our bellies full and nourished, we settled in for a gentle journey for the afternoon,
beholding what nation states do to their respective Mother Countries in order to participate in the global-pool-of-money-tragedy-of-the-commons routine.
In Malaysia, rubber and tin industries are in decline, but palm oil is in expansion. While habitat loss and species extinction are stories well associated with palm oil farming, in more recent years metastasis cancers have been linked to palmitic acid in those who consume it. This is potentially serious because palm oil is now found in close to 50% of the packaged products found in supermarkets. Think Nutella, for example, which is more than 50% palm oil and refined sugar.
When we arrived in Gemas that night, we were asked by an Indian-Malay tradesman staying in the same hotel why would we come to such a town.
“We like non-touristy places,” was Patrick’s reply. “We want to see how people live in towns that are not famous.”
Even though we were treated like tourists and overcharged when we stopped at a local food hall for dinner,
the meals we bought were delicious and highly affordable for we radical frugalists who live in a rich country, and whose nation’s wealth is also dependent on destroying the landbase. We are not shy in ‘fessing up to the fact that our travelling is predicated on the privilege of a currency made strong by mining, thus earth-wrecking. Thus too, the local fruit here was highly affordable, a little of which we bought for breakfast and lunch the next day.
We’re getting used to living on golden mangoes, and sleeping in cheap hotel beds.
We woke to rain and fog,
walked through the streets,
startled the local pigeons,
and arrived back at the station.
Seeking out small towns and avoiding big cities is our aim in Malaysia, in the bid to avoid taking in too much pollution. However, we are finding that Malaysia has much cleaner environments and air than Indonesia. We have loved the absence of drugs and alcohol in the two countries. It makes us reflect just how much pain comes with addiction to these things.
From sweet Gemas we boarded a train,
and relaxed into a rainy morning of travel and air conditioning. While Patrick has recovered from his malaise in Batam, Meg was feeling a tad under the weather.
By midday our train had arrived at the Terminal Bersepadu Selatan on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, where we stood in line to book a bus to go yet further north.
No one gave Woody the memo about his politically indecent attire. At the time we were clueless that if you wear yellow clothes in Malaysia you could risk a fine of AUS$1600. In 2016, protestors wearing yellow clothing walked the streets of Kuala Lumpur calling for the resignation of then-Prime Minister Najib. Several years on, yellow clothes are still considered a symbol of protest and a threat to national security. We were completely oblivious to this next chapter of people control.
Across the world governments are incrementally stepping up efforts to censor, coerce and forbid people from exerting their basic human rights. A slow, year-by-year approach using mass propaganda tactics has seen human rights steadily dissolve across the world.
In 1951, Hannah Arendt, in her The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Does this sound like the past four years to you? Does this sound like watching, for example, ABC TV’s emergency porn propaganda during the Covid years?
Thankfully no one locked Woody away or fined him for wearing a yellow t-shirt. Coming from a family of protesters, the irony of being political disruptors even without knowing it wasn’t lost on us.
The bus we booked turned out to be filled with electric massage seats. Only none of them worked. This large coach headed off about an hour after the advertised time,
and on the way out of KL, we met glimpses of the city displaying modernist vertical gardens,
and archaic colourful temples.
The measure of a city’s soul does not concern the most elegant architecture, the most dazzling spectacles, or the most novel cafés and restaurants, but rather how the poorest members are living.
Our ‘first class massage coach’ embodied only the pretence of wealth. It was in fact the cheapest bus ticket money could buy, and it stopped several times over the course of the afternoon, to drop off passengers at unglamorous petrol stations,
taking us past thousands more hectares of palm oil monocultures,
and grand old hills and mountains,
many of which are being reduced to lime,
and cement products.
On the road we read about the 5 million year-old limestone hill being destroyed by a Malaysian cement company, and reflected on all the small projects back home where we’ve used cement, as well as all the many times we have found alternatives.
While the massage chairs were broken in the bus, and were generally fairly uncomfortable, at least one provided the right nest for rest for Magpie.
And while the rail systems in both Indonesia and Malaysia are reliable and enjoyable to travel on, we’ve found that if you are travelling by bus, always expect the unexpected. The driver dropped us off in Pekan Simpang, and not where our ticket stated.
We protested (must have been Woody’s reactionary yellow t-shirt that got us going), saying we booked a ticket to Taiping, the next town. The driver shrugged and rudely said, “You get a car.” Which is how we arrived here, at the Knight Alley Hotel in Taiping.
Woody and Patrick tucked Meg into bed and went exploring.
Taiping is known as the rainy town, but it was warm and dry, and the buildings fascinating.
There’s significant juxtaposition between wealth and poverty, arrogance and humility, imposition and makeshift spirit here.
Wherever the locals gather for meals is a sure bet there’s goodly food on offer. “I’ll take your picture, dad,” said Woody.
Woody and Patrick dined in one of the food halls in the main centre. It was bloody hot.
Chilli pan mee for Patrick, a glutton for punishment, and a fermented chicken bun for the boy.
We love the food here, and the endless trip hazards in the streets that keep us alert and watchful,
After our meals we tripped into a fruit store to buy some dinner for Meg. The fruit bat got to work, hand selecting golden mangoes for his mum.
On the way back to the hotel we found this beautiful little offering.
We were later told that the offering was most likely made to the spirit of a tree that once stood on this street corner. The beauty of this gesture reminded us of our own European animist tradition – to touch or knock on wood, to wake up the gods or spirits living there, to bring forth luck or safe passage. Traces of this tradition remain in us today, carried by grandmothers and uncles, and poets like Blake and Wordsworth, who once penned, “One impulse from a vernal wood/ May teach you more of man,/ Of moral evil and of good,/ Than all the sages can.”
Approximately 63% of the population of Malaysia practices Islam, 18% Buddhism, 8% Christianity, 6% Hinduism and 5% are other groups, which include animists, Confucianists, Taoists and Sikhs. To our minds, any spiritual practice that makes offerings to the spirits in trees that have been cut down, has our attention. Can we imagine if this was a major religious expression throughout the world? Oh, how our economic, political and cultural forms would radically change.
We left this lovely little non-tourist town, without experiencing the Taiping rain,
and were pleased we could travel the next leg by train.
It was a short trip, which included the practice of patience,
before we arrived in Butterworth, an industrial service town that powers Penang Island from the mainland.
We booked another $30 room high up in the clouds. We estimate we are spending around AUS $50 a day on this trip.
and while Meg did some office work to both fill back up the coffers and because she loves her meaningful work managing the Holmgren Design comms,
Patrick and Woody pursued their bourgeois lifestyle, and took a swim.
Woody is getting right into the spirit of this trip. When we first arrived in Dili he experienced significant culture shock. Now, several weeks on he is thriving.
In the late afternoon, we took a ferry across to Penang Island,
Woody practiced his photography,
Patrick too,
while Meg hung out with the bikies.
It was a short ride, and as none of us had eaten lunch, we stopped into this cosy shed for a snack.
The proprietor didn’t seemed that fazed by our late arrival.
While in Malaysia we’ve been dwelling on the phenomenon of the human blindspot. What have we been ignoring or are unable to see while we travel? The evidence now of scientific fraudulence and iatrogenocide in the Covid era is all around for anyone willing to investigate it. DNA contamination in the original mRNA shots is becoming a growing concern for scientists brave enough to study it, for example. We see it, hear and speak it. But it feels like the majority still prefer to actively unsee the lies, or defend them. Rather than sit in the sadness and horror of such masking (for what this means to human health and indeed civil rights), we’ve found it more important to ask, what are we averting our eyes from? What are we refusing to speak? What are we blocking our ears to?
It is the little things, the fledglings, the minutiae that inform this journey.
After we had a little moment with this chick, she hopped down from her perch and proceeded onto the road. We turned to see a man race over to her rescue, gather her up and return her to a safe place. After we’d photographed and admired the little bird, we’d turned away from her despite the obvious absence of a parent bird. The kindness of the rescuing man caused us to reflect on why we hadn’t done the same. In hindsight, it probably got down to touch. We were afraid of touching the chick, even us, confirmed terrain theorists. This event made us more aware of the greater caution we have to microbiology while travelling. While we are mostly eating street food and using tap water to clean our teeth, in the bid to train our microbiomes to co-evolve with our adventuring, we are at the same time applying the precautionary principle.
While in George Town on Penang Island, we met Tamanna and Adam, who are locals. Patrick and Meg teach on David Holmgren and Beck Lowe’s permaculture courses, both in-residence and online. Tamanna and Adam have booked in to the online PDC and Meg, in recent weeks, established a goodly email rapport with Tammana about the course. One thing led to another, which in turn led to us sharing an evening together. Adam led us to a lively street of food.
Where we were thrilled for his local knowledge.
He ordered many little tasting plates,
and the flavours were divine.
“Dinner is on us,” said Adam. We agreed with the condition we repay the generosity back in Australia. During this meal, Patrick was escorted to another realm,
into a nirvana of flavours and pleasure sticks.
We had such a special night with these two, reminding us how more enriching it is to be with locals of a place, who equally love simple and rich food culture.
The next day we headed north again,
catching a commuter train to the border,
where we had a few hours to reflect on our brief sojourn through the heart of Malaysia,
and where we beheld the switch from palm oil to rice agricultures,
and caught up with some sleep. Could someone please tape that mouth shut!
Then, before the day had begun to buzz, we were off the train,
and into a local initiative that takes people across the border in vans.
We lined up,
and were transported to the Thai border centre, where we went through immigration and customs without bother or money.
From there, we boarded a space ship to transport us to the next leg of our adventure…
When we walked through the gates of the Dinah Beach Cruising Yacht Association (DBCYA), we soon arrived at this little encampment,
and met Ray and his mate Ben. Ray is the brother of a friend back home in Djaara Country, and he kindly invited us to stay on his boat, which is ‘on the hard’.
Named after his sister who died from breast cancer, Crissy Anne is Ray’s steel hull boat, which he is working on in preparation to sail around the world next year. After we arrived, he invited us to join his local sailing cohort at the bar at DBCYA ,
where we spoke to many of the folk there of our desire to crew a boat over the drink to Timor Leste or Indonesia. We were advised to post our wish on the various yachting websites, and to put up a poster on the association’s notice board, which we did the next day,
coupled with doing some much needed washing.
The following days were spent adjusting to ‘Darwin time.’ We were a bit restless to explore this little city none of us had visited before. “Go slow and calm the farm,” Ray told us, and “drink a load of water first thing in the mornings.” We were still somewhat in our get-shit-done southerner harvest-season bodies, and we’d arrived to 32 degree celsius days with overnight lows of just 18. On our first day we walked a 6 km round trip to Mindil Beach Sunset Market, hoping for fresh produce. We got instead over-priced tourist food, though they didn’t skip on the sunset.
For we adults, while Woody sleeps, our morning tea ritual is a sacred time. Between Crissy Anne and the laundry, a large patch of Tulsi grows. A powerful herb of the subtropical regions of the world, Tulsi is a perennial basil and an adaptogen,
and a dear friend of the nervous system, especially in times of change and turbulence.
When Woody gets up, and has had his oat breakfast,
it’s time to get going. Our project on the third day was to go out to Ray’s other boat, Orfeo, which is moored in the harbour. Ray said we’d be welcome to stay on this old yacht, and help get our sea legs in preparation for crewing a boat. He suggested we travel back and forth to Orfeo by the canoe he was recently given. So we loaded up, and pulled and strained the old gal a few hundred metres,
down to the wharf, dropped the canoe into the water and left Meg on the landing, as we were concerned the load was already too heavy.
Patrick and Woody rowed over our packs, food bags and instruments, then came back for Meg. We all approached our new home with excitement.
While Woody fished, his parents cleaned up the galley and were settling in when it became evident that Orfeo was an ill-fated operation.
There were problems with the solar power system, so there was no electricity, meaning our perishable food was being cooked by the day’s heat collecting inside the boat. We tried to problem-solve with Ben by phone, but the multimeter was back on shore, and there was no way we could locate the problem. Then we discovered that the canoe was taking in water. Patrick used a cup to empty it and we repacked the little boat and rowed back to shore with our sea tails between our legs. We moved back into Crissy Anne and in the work area beneath her we lived, cooked, communed with Ray and his many friends, and in the quieter times Meg got some office work done for our dear friends and permaculture elders, David Holmgren and Su Dennett.
Patrick worked on Ray’s collection of bikes. We may not be sea savvy folk, but we are bike savvy.
Only one of Ray’s four bikes was in working order, so Patrick stepped into his mechanic body until they were all functional.
As soon as we hit the road on these cruisy contraptions, we began to feel more at home in Darwin. “You don’t get done for not wearing a helmet,” said Ben, “if you stick on the bike paths you’ll be fine. The cops have plenty of other things to deal with.” The cult of safetyism in Australia’s southern states was just not apparent here. Instead of KeepCups and lattés as the dominant cultural drug-milieu by day, it is stubby holders and beer up here, which creates a continual boozy social environment. For a family on bikes, we had to be vigilant.
The bike paths are numerous and the little city is mostly flat.
There were shouts of joy as we rode Larrakia (saltwater) people’s Country, and the warm wind whooshed over the stickiness of our skin. We explored fishing spots,
caught some lovely things such as Blue swimmer crabs,
and introduced ourselves to a shell fish we’d never seen before, and strangely couldn’t ID it.
We sat, reflected, listened and relaxed in saltwater Country,
and gleaned old line and tackle on the low tide, salvaging the useful parts and binning the potentially hazardous.
We caught a bunch of fish in the first part of the week we were in Darwin, but many of them were inedible (puffer and bat fish), or they were undersize (bream and trevally). The blue bike Patrick fixed, the best of Ray’s treadlies, was stolen from underneath Crissy Anne the night after it was back on the road. Alongside feeling relaxed here in Darwin, we have also felt an uneasiness; a discomfort.
After many conversations with locals it was becoming increasingly apparent that crewing a boat for a family of three with no sailing experience was a bit of a pipe dream. We were generously offered a passage to Indonesia with Sleepy Dave, but he isn’t going until August. India is calling.
Ray is a yacht race referee in Darwin. He presides over the organisation of a number of races and he told us many sailors stay in Darwin over the dry season to join these events or repair their boats.
Ray has been so generous, going out of his way to help us while in we’ve been in Darwin. But, having inhabited the belly of Crissy Anne for several days,
we don’t want to overstay our welcome. With a fair amount of reluctance we booked a short flight to Dili in Timor Leste, 720 kms away. For a little more we could go all the way to India, but that’s not the point of this trip, to travel so fast. Meg and Patrick haven’t been overseas for twenty years, and Woody never has. We were really hoping we could do it without flying. From Dili we intend to continue northward, island-hopping towards India. Now we’ve made that decision we have work to do. Foremost, biking our winter gear and sleeping bags up to the post office to send home,
op-shopping for summer wear,
by thrift and by chance,
and obtaining some US dollars for Timor.
It’s been a strange time in Darwin. It’s almost a segregated town, at least from an outsider’s view. There’s mob here that are not Larrakia people, who have come to Darwin from remote communities, or other parts of the country. Then there’s mob here that have big grief stories, who have turned to substances that bedevil them, which in turn keeps them exiled from their respective communities. These troubled street folk are treated sternly, sometimes viciously by settler shopkeepers, security guards and managers of supermarkets across all ethnicities. Visitors are warned by locals not to engage with blackfellas looking for coin, smokes or grog, so they are often ignored or avoided. Ben told us, “It takes about two weeks for newcomers to Darwin to become racist.” On the street you have drug and alcohol affliction, and then in the board rooms, shrewd tactics of corporate power use Aboriginal people and culture to both aggregate and make-look-civil the destructive extraction of Aboriginal resources, for empire. This reckless corporate mining company, for example, dons Aboriginal art in its foyer as false flags of progressiveness and care.
It’s easy for blow-ins to jump to conclusions about a place. We understand the problems here are complex because they are generational and because western civilisation is a sophisticated propaganda machine. Drugs and alcohol have different impacts in differing cultures, depending on peoples’ approaches. Clearer for us now, is how industrial grog and industrial mining come from the same mythos of greed and subjugation, and no good culture can come from these things. These activities done in an indigenous way would require ceremony and ritual, where over-extraction or over-consumption are not present because of the gratitude and connection these cultural expressions elicit. Indigenous activities done at a scale of bioregional accountability can never be systematically or globally harmful, can never produce man-made mass suffering. Suffering is an ordinary and sometimes necessary part of life, it is a great teacher, but not on the scale industrialisation causes. This, we’ve found, is a critical difference between industrial and indigenous ways.
Towards the end of our time in Darwin, we returned to the Fishermen’s Wharf and were reminded to speak to Saltwater Mother Country, a quiet ritual we often do down south. Before we fish at a place, we speak our intention for coming. “We’ve come to catch food for our family tonight, and we will only take a little of your abundance.”
Fairly shortly after we arrived and acknowledged Mother Country in this way, Woody’s rod started bending,
and the youngtimer began pulling them in.
Four beautiful bream (from $1.50 worth of chicken) made our dinner on the second last night.
Patrick’s attempt to add to the bag saw him bring in several little critters and this Moon fish, which is apparently good eating though, due to its size, he released it.
We are leaving Darwin with much gratitude for what Country and the people have taught us here. To slow down. To accept the stickiness. To acknowledge it takes time to adjust to new places and ways. To be with the disappointment of flying and not crewing on a boat. To better understand the life-wreckingness of industrial substances and extractions. To not reduce complexity to a facile judgement. To further behold the propaganda and hubris of this nation and its subservience to empire. What can a family do in the face of all this? Eat meals together, ask questions, meet people and find out our commonalities with them, and bring more love into the world.
We didn’t come to Darwin to catch trophy fish or take in the club life. We didn’t come for the burnouts of Supercars and military jets. We didn’t come to consume Aboriginal art or Aussie-ised Asian food. We came as pilgrims on an adventure seeking nothing famous or big, rather for the accumulations of everyday magic, provided by the goddesses of small things.
Thank you, Dear Reader, for continuing to follow our journey. We feel tremendously supported by our community back home, the community of subscribers here, and the community we’re meeting on the road.
