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.

Beginning the sun wise ceremonial calendar with winter solstice (living in eight seasons)

Jun 22, 2026 | art, celebration, ceremony & ritual, commons, community sufficiency, creative commons, creative frugality, culture, Djaara mother country, drawing, earth stewardship, Father Fire, Fire circle, food culture, kinship, lifemaking, love, magic, Mother Country, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, permapoesis, post-industrial thought, reculturing, regenerative culture, revillaging, social warming, storytelling, transitional communities, winter solstice, wisdom, wood energy | 10 comments

We kicked off the ceremonial year with 60 odd (by every metric) kinfolk for our annual ceremony to honour the divine dark of the sacred feminine, for winter solstice.

To celebrate this moment, and our community’s deepening of ceremonial approaches, we publish for the first time, The sun wise ceremony calendar, specific to our mob.

We gathered with candles, seed breads, pickles, chestnut and kidney bean stew, rabbit cassoulet, quince tart, medlar pie, feijoa cheese cake, elders and kids.

We paused and listened at this time of the deep dark.

We paused and listened to Mother Country and Father Fire.

Paused and listened to old sonnets,

and newly hatched raps.

Paused and listened to soulful old songs,

and vitalising ones, sung for such a hearth.

Paused and listened to stories meticulously crafted or spoken off the cuff,

and the FireChoir brothers sang Mother of Mountain. We offer it here as a little insight into the ceremonial feast that was this year’s winter solstice gathering.

Slowly one after another we departed from the fire-lit clearing, and walked back through the dark forest to begin our patient sun wise journey towards the summer solstice.

Thank you Brett Ellenport and Leonie Van Eyk for such wonderful images.

Wherever you are we wish you a merry solstice, and a goodly pause.

_______

NB. If you are still wanting to attend all or any of the four online sessions we’re hosting in July, there are still some spaces available but you may want to book now.

Three drawings for the end of history (before returning to place-based, oral-wisdom cultures)

Mar 17, 2026 | art, collapse, drawing, earth stewardship, ecological crises, ecological economy making, eldership, energy descent, farming and colonisation, industrial progress, life cycles, lifemaking, lifetaking, love, militarism, Mother Country, permapoesis, post-industrial thought, reculturing, relocalisation, resistance, revillaging, rites of passage, transitional communities, village rebuilding, war | 2 comments

Wheel of social-ecological succession (or, the life stages of wisdom peoples of place)

An eschatology of industrial progress (before returning to oral, place-based, mother-country cultures)

The arrival of the last (and short-lived) monotheistic empire (before returning to animist expressions of life making)

Feel free to share our current graphic sense-making, and as always your comments are dear to us.

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.

Bridging, on the way back to indigeneity (kinship, initiation, druidry, homesteading, wisdom and eldership) with Yin Paradies and Victoria McKay

Jul 23, 2025 | capitalism, ceremony & ritual, colonisation, commons, community, culture, eldership, enclosures, Grief, Hypertechnocivility, Indigenous Australians, interspecies relating, kinship, love, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, reculturing, regenerative culture, relationships, rites of passage, sacred country, village rebuilding, wisdom, wounding | 10 comments

Make yourself a cuppa and settle in for our next long-form yarn with Yin Paradies and Victoria McKay from Anam Cara Homestead.

Both Yin and Victoria invite us to be on the bridge that spans between modernity and what they call our ‘primal’ selves, and to find and nurture fellow travellers in that place of reclaiming.

We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we have.

Listener’s note: At one point the audio goes a tad crackly in the conversation but it doesn’t last long.

(Audio duration 1:11mins)

And, here is the video.

In honour of our dog-kin, Zero

Jul 21, 2025 | adventure, animals in subsistence permaculture, dogs, family, love | 62 comments

Our dear old dog, Zero, took his final breath yesterday afternoon. We buried him this morning. He has been our trusty and beloved dog-kin for 15 years. He has always been fully in life, showing up everywhere; in the home food forest,

at the community garden,