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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subsistence permaculture’s feral abundance (the shootin’-fishin’, catch ‘n cook post)

Apr 6, 2024 | appropriate technology, autonomous edibles, carp, culture, Djaara mother country, ferals, fishing, hunting, neopeasant, post-industrial thought, rabbits, radical homemakers, raising boys, relationships, relocalisation, subsistence economy, subsistence permaculture | 18 comments

Listen to the audio version (14 mins):

Neopeasantry is our way of describing permaculture subsistence, a reaching into a glorious poverty – an abundant, anarchical economy that enables rich culture to spring forth; an earth-first, bankers last economy-culture. That’s neopeasantry. Not capitalism, not communism, more akin to a fair-share distributism, only not a theory but lived.

Today’s post specifically focuses on the abundance that is feral carp and rabbit, here in Djaara Mother Country. You can switch these two species for any weedy or ferally plant, mushroom or animal that is abundant in your region. While the information is specific, the spirit of incorporating unwanted abundance (abundance that capitalism is blind to), can be translated across endless species, riches and relationships, that is if we change our attitudes to things we’ve been told aren’t very good. Here, we intend to explain our techniques of procurement and processing, and share a recipe or two, including Magpie Meg’s famous carp mousse (or feral fish paste).

In this post we will cover how we come by this food, honour it and every part, be the biological controls of these tenacious critters, and generally participate in the flow of gifts that is life inside the thrum and wild grace of Mother Country.

Mother Country herself – the giving-taking earth who enables so much life to be made and unmade – is a sophisticated ecologist. Not an ideological one who sits smugly in the neoliberal academy. Her wisdom goes beyond correct and incorrect species and industry imperatives, and although she is perennially wounded and polluted by the narcissism of a now globalised kidult economic force, this Mother is more interested in those who are ecological participants, those who see her, those who listen, and those who sing divine gratitude into her ground for everything she gives. This is when she ceases to be dead matter, ever ready to be exploited, and instead becomes the Mother of all things.

There is no fear nor favour, no moralising goddess beyond the little walled city of neoliberal materialism, Mother Country is endlessly more vast than this tragic reduction of life. While ferocious and terrifying at times, she doesn’t wreak skygod fear and war-like terror into souls that ignore or exploit her. The mining industry carries on apace unharmed by her, is materially enriched by her, but miners die in their souls independent of her will. It is their souls who become forever unsettled ghosts in Country. Her consciousness extends beyond a childish right and wrong story. She deserves no cult, no pagan worshipping, no church built. She is already church. If she requires anything from us it is just a returned animist culturering, to be in sync with her and thus be a people in participation, wide-eyed appreciators, embodied in her patterns and gifts, which she gives in exchange for language, culture, food, medicine, fuel and magic.

Ferals are some of these gifts. The way we honour all her gifts is directly related to the gratitude we feel for Mother Country, which in turn informs the culture and rituals we perform as community. There is no appropriation here, the culturing is direct, felt, inspired, microbial. It is an exchange of presence.

Our economy as subsistence permaculturists or neopeasants is not based on scarcity. We don’t have anxiety about not having enough money like we once did, although we are still dependent on the monetary economy for about 20% of our needs. This is mainly for foods and resources we cannot grow, husband, witch, procure, wild harvest, or hunt ourselves. As many of you already know, we do not call this self-sufficiency but rather ‘community sufficiency’ – a term we’ve been advancing for a decade now to give power to the relationships that help us transition from narcissism to accountability, from wage-slave consumerism to radical homemaking, from soul-dead materialism to singers in the church of Mother Country. Relationships in this new/old economy are key to the unshackling from the banker’s realm. Trust, acceptance, skills and resilience are our focus.

If we keep developing language to describe our actions as we deepen them, then we can perform new/old forms of economy and culture making. For the language we use either incarcerates or liberates us. If we talk about economy as one thing – a thing in which the bankers alone puppeteer – then we are already ensnared. But step-by-step, season by season, relationship by relationship, word by word we can transform our worlds of the world into economic cultures that are dynamic, giving, in-service-to and receiving. We do not have to be anybody’s slave, and we don’t have to rely on unseen slaves from far away to augment our economic and cultural reality. Believing that we must conform to the universal wanking bankers is swallowing the bourgeois propaganda we’ve been force fed since birth.

We say, Enough! to that. Let’s grow up!

No more Taylor Swift narcissism or gratuitous alcoholic romps that never did fill the great hole in our souls that never needed filling. Rather, here’s the uncle figure at the end of the street who teaches the teenager his drumming, the grandmother who hands down her Polish pickle recipe, the brother who demonstrates his method for field gutting rabbits, the neighbour who shows the child the art of catching carp with compost worms, the story telling adventures of elders. Expensive, bourgeois workshops are not necessary, going into debt to buy land to farm is not required, tooling up can be done in a sleeves-rolled-up spirit of salvaging and repairing. An open-heart, a passion for not being enslaved, and making space to learn and share new skills, is liberty.

Rabbit

Big thanks to Jordan Osmond for the next two pics.

Some of the loveliest moments Patrick has experienced as a dad these past years, is when he’s been out hunting with Blackwood. As day recedes into night, the nocturnal world transforms their psyches in a myriad of ways. Father and son have lain on their backs beholding the stars, waiting for rabbits to return to the fields from their burrows, after gunshots had spooked them. A few rabbits before dusk are always a gift,

but the underworlding of night brings many more treasures. Any opportunity for Patrick to pass on what he’s learnt is the action of the gift in flow. In this picture Patrick demonstrates the field gut, which is the removal of the intestines not long after shooting to save the meat from spoiling.

The rabbits, with pelts still on, go into the fridge overnight, making skinning easier the next day.

It’s not entirely true rabbit meat is devoid of goodly fats and therefore of little nutritional value. The older the rabbit, the more pockets of fat it will have stored. Countless blessings rabbits! We honour and praise you as appropriate food. No industrial inputs grew you up.

In such honouring, all parts have meaning: The intestines left in the field for scavenger animals and soil communities to process, the heart, liver and kidneys used to make pâté, the bodies wrapped and frozen for winter roasts and stews, and the skins stretched and salted,

then sun dried,

to be later tanned and turned into useful textiles.

Other ferals, such as European wasps, help clean off the excess meat from the pelts making the scraping process later on, less work. While we are not engaged in colonially-constructed perverse incentives, meaning that we don’t intentionally help to grow these ecologically domineering, albeit undervalued species, we also don’t hate on them, nor any other more-than-human ferals who have settled as feral kin in Djaara Mother Country. We also eat European wasps.

Blackwood and Patrick went wood collecting yesterday and were set upon by angry wasps for the inconceivable crime of splitting logs too close to their nest. Blackwood received a sting on his leg and Patrick had wasps attempting to sting his neck but fortunately they couldn’t penetrate his beard.

In the past week, Blackwood took the life of a rabbit. His first. He stretched the pelt using a frame on a stand we found on the metal pile at the local tip.

We people, our species, can both love and kill animals. The two expressions are not mutually exclusive. Supermarkets have fed us the hubris and estrangement that they are. On the day after his first rabbit kill, Blackwood accompanied his mum to a neighbour’s home to put away their chooks and pet rabbits. He cuddled so much love into those dopey rabbits. That same night we watched Watership Down for our weekly movie night, and a few days later Blackwood was out again on a hunt with his dad. We, of our species, can hold many paradoxes, stories, ways of relating in the world, and this is a beautiful craft.

After stretching his first rabbit pelt, Blackwood then followed his mum’s recipe to convert the raw wild rabbit meat into jerky – a light, preserved and portable food to take on walking or cycling adventures – a food which can easily be rehydrated in the billy.

Meg’s rabbit jerky recipe: Cut the lean meat into thin slices and place in a bowl. Add spices such as cayenne pepper, cinnamon, cumin, sumac and minced garlic. Splosh in a whole lot of tamari and mix it all together. Cover with a plate and place somewhere cool for 12 – 24 hours. A fridge or cellar is fine. Then place the strips on racks and dehydrate until the meat is fully dry. A low oven (50 degrees C) or dehydrator will do the trick. When dry, place the jerky pieces in a jar, label and store.

Carp

Between the storing of wood and preserving of summer’s abundance in the cellar, we have also found time to go fishing. Here is Patrick’s simple set up for catching carp with compost worms and a hand line. Notice, in the image below, the line between the two stakes is being held down by the weight of leaves still attached to a very light branch. When these leaves rise up it indicates a fish is on, or at least taking the bait.

Carp is often devalued in Australia. If carp isn’t put onto ice packs in an esky or cooked on coals straight away it releases histamines throughout the body which gives it an unappealing flavour. Dealing with this is the first hurdle for enjoying this bountiful critter.

The second is the cooking process. Carp, like barracuda, has many small ‘y’ bones that make it, again, unappealing to eat. So we have developed a strategy to process every part, including the scales, head, tail and bones, only excluding the guts. First up, we cut the fish into chunks, add tallow (or any goodly cooking fat; not harmful vegetable cooking oils which we examined in a recent post), garlic and onion, and bake for an hour in a warm to hot oven,

then we put the parts into a pressure cooker, add a few cups of water, and put on the stove for a number of hours, intermittently checking the water level

Over this time, all of the parts of the fish and alliums melt, and Meg then weaves her magic…

Meg’s carp mousse recipe: Place the pressure cooked fish and allium mix in a food processor and add herbs such as parsley or oregano (fresh is best, but dried is good too), then salt and pepper. Sometimes Meg adds some olive oil if the mix is a bit dry. Process until it forms a cake batter consistency. Best spread on bread or crackers, but also yummy straight from a spoon. Store in a jar in the fridge, or freeze for when abundance wanes.

So many skills of economic resilience inform others. When we learn to make chicken liver pâté, we know how to make bunny liver pâté. When we know how to make goat bone broth, we know how to make bunny bone broth. When we know how to make chick pea hummus, we are well on the way to making carp mousse.

What undervalued riches of life do you value, Dear Reader? How are they part of your transition away from economic incarceration? We need not pay for much, but we need skills and knowledges to live this way. What are those skills you value so highly? We’d love you to share your alternative economic lifeways with us, even if you’re only just beginning down this magical, defiant and liberating path.

With autumnal glow,
Artist as Family

From Gerroa to Genoa (Wet days, warm people, dangerous roads and Dark Emu visitations)

Jan 24, 2016 | bicycle activism, bicycle touring, foraging, rabbits, radical homemakers, rain, spear fishing, stealth camping | 6 comments

We left Warm Showers Claire, who was busy hosting a number of sodden cycle tourers, such as this jolly soloist Angus,

and rode out of Gerroa to begin our coastal descent. In Nowra we bumped into more fellow pedalist comrades who were riding around the world from France to raise awareness about climate change,

before our book event at Dean Swift ABC book shop, where we spoke to the possibilities of climate changed economies and societies of regard.

More rain and more barely ripe public stonefruit in southern Nowra,

and we were off on another wet leg,

to Huskisson, where booksellers Noela and Jill greeted us for a little signing event,

and Jill and her man David

put us up for the night, avoiding another soaking from the tricky gods of acummulating clouds. We’d had enough of things by now. Dangerous roads, anti-cyclist drivers, unrelenting rains. So we mapped out the alternative (option 2 Huskisson back to Albury),

and even though we thought it would be easier to cancel the remains of the tour and ride back to Nowra, train to Sydney, train to Goulbourn, ride to Albury, train to Melbourne, train to Woodend and ride the last 40 kms home, we didn’t. Something in us wanted to see this through.

Our decision was confirmed by this sweet family, who had read about us in their local paper a year earlier, got in touch and invited us to stay a night.

Ah, the comfort of strangers! Thanks Jo, Bren, Lucinda, Sam and Eliza. Even more gifts awaited us when we returned to one of our favorite guerilla camping spots south of Mollymook.

Last year we ate limpets and speared fish on coals at Collers Beach. This year Zero caught us a big rabbit,

and Patrick speared another bag of fish, including this leatherjacket and red mowrang for one of our meals.

We poached the rabbit in the billy for 25 mins and the flesh just slipped off the bones onto our fingers and into our mouths. For we hungry locavores it was a near perfect moment.

Living on Collers Beach for a few days further nourished our decision to complete this tour.

Further south in Batemans Bay we bumped into Justine and Pat, who like us were perfecting the practice of very very slow travel. When we all met up at about 3pm one afternoon, they’d travelled a whooping 2 kms for the day. We congratulated their efforts. It’s a momentous achievement to go that slow in such a savagely fast world.

While they headed north, we trundled several kms down the road to Batehaven and set up camp on some marginal land beside a little creek inlet.

On the gentler coast road to Moruya we stopped to chat to northbound rider Rapha el, a French tourist.

We picked up supplies from the wonderful bulk wholefoods store when we arrived in town, and rode on as our event had been cancelled at Moruya Books due to a boating accident in the business. We pedalled on to Old Mill Road Biofarm and kept the boating accidents at bay while we cooled down in Kirsti, Marlin, Pickle and Fraser’s luscious dam,

before feasting with this awesome lot — the brains and brawn behind one of the best market gardens on the south coast. As you can imagine the food was exceptional, cooked up by French chefs Nina and Elsa, who may well come and stay with us in Daylesford.

Southwards we rode, on and on our legs rotating, water in litres emptied down our throats, making the brief transit through our varied metabolisms out onto our clothes to transform into what we call cyclist stench. We stayed with this lovely family in Narooma (thanks Barry, Jimmie, Goldy and Em!),

rode on to Tilba,

with the kind promise of a lift to avoid the death trap 10 kms north of Cobargo where Meg and Woody had a near miss thirteen months earlier on our big trip. The kind offer came from Ronnie and her super family of Norris’s, where we got to spend a few days, sit out more rain, swim with them at Bermagui, drink real cows milk and speak on air to one of our favourite ABC presenters, Ian Campbell.

When the sun poked through we hightailed it to Bega, our bikes hitching a ride with Ronnie’s sweet folks in an empty trailer that was predestined for the southern coastal city, and climbed 10 kms west to Autumn Farm to stay with Annie and Genevieve and their kids Oscar and Olive (AKA Jo). They cooked us a beautiful meal in their stunning radical homemakers’ kitchen.

The next day we were greeted by 45 enthusiastic Bega-ites who came to our foraging workshop and/or our book event at the wonderful Candelo Books. All the crazy summer traffic, physical fatigue and rain was rendered totally worth it by this enthusiatic mob.

The Princes Highway is a national road with many signs warning drivers of oncoming petrol stops, beach spots, drowsy driving, narrow bridges, overtaking lanes and wildlife. The highway provides, more or less, a safe lane for both northbound and southbound cars and trucks. But despite the daily use of this road by cyclists, almost nothing appears that aids our safety. This is what a typical lane looks like for a cyclist.

We’re supposed to stick between the dangerous loose gravelly bit and the far left white line (intersecting on Zero’s head in the photo). Now marry the above image with this one below and you’ll get a fairly accurate assessment of just how much work there is to do to create safe transit ways for non-polluters in Australia.

Respite from the terror of this highway was found once more when we stopped in to visit Dale and Jenni in Eden again.

These two lovelies put us up last time we rode through Eden. They cooked up a beautiful feast of their home-produced chicken and veggies,

and the next morning Dale offered to drop us 25 kms down the highway where he had to drive to work.

Despite all the generous and wonderful people on the South Coast we didn’t enjoy cycling down this highway on the first big trip. And this time has been little different with few opportunities to get onto quieter roads, so getting to the Victorian border signalled a kind of home coming, a kind of relief.

About four months ago, before we left on our tour, Patrick had contacted Bruce Pascoe to see whether we could visit him at Gipsy Point near Mallacoota. Bruce’s book Dark Emu is a remarkable work of Australian history written by an Aboriginal writer concerning the profound and little known agrarianism that existed in Australia pre-colonisation. His book opens the door to a completely alternative history. We spoke in his nursery,

where he is growing yam daisies (murnongs), which were once a big part of the Aboriginal economies of regard in south-temperate Australia pre 1788. He gave us some seed to plant out in April. Dr Beth Gott, an ethnobotanist from Monash University, claims that a murnong tuber has nearly 10 times the nutrient properties of a potato and was an important part of the health of Aboriginal people.

It was in Mallacoota, Gipsy Point and Genoa that we hooked up with our friends Maya and James, who came with us to meet Bruce and his partner Lyn. Bruce offered us his boat to go fishing in and we cruised the gentle waters of the Genoa River, fishing for tailor, speaking of our river loves without, of course, the use of a motor.

We hope, Dear Reader, that whatever propels you forward into your days this year is just as enjoyable, thrilling, frightening and vital as what has been casting us forward. Thank you for accompanying us on this leg of our journey.

Cold season food and family cloth

Jul 6, 2015 | edible weeds, family cloth, foraging, herbicides, rabbits, SWAP (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturalists) | 7 comments

The cold months in Daylesford are a time of surprise and pleasure. It has given us much delight, for example, to suck out the bletted jelly from medlars plucked from the tree.

The currawongs have loved them too.

We’ve been praising walked-for snared rabbit, stewing the flesh, brothing the bones and salting the pelts.

We’ve been digging up dandelion roots for roasting and brewing into a dark thick coffee. Patrick discusses the full process in the next issue of Pip magazine.

Our goodly neighbours brought us back some fish they’d caught on the coast and we cooked them on coals in the garden, which made us nostalgic for what we loved about living on the road.

We’ve been hunting common pine mushrooms like these saffron milk caps,

and slippery jacks,

We’ve been harvesting and drying hawthorn berries for Meg’s nourishing herbal infusions (with rosemary, rose hips, elderberries, parsley and fennel).

We’ve been juicing autumn’s cellared fruit and winter’s wondrous weeds.

We’ve been free-ranging the chooks to make sure they are healthy to get them through the sub-zero nights.

We’ve been finishing off the SWAP* shed, ready for our next guests.

We’ve been reclaiming our peasant sensibilities with our friend Vasko, herding his sheep on common land as part of an organic land management model.

This is the current land management model: herbicides kill a patch of the nutritious free street vegetable mallow in Daylesford and the toxic residues end up in the local water supply.

One of the big break throughs AaF has made since our last post was to rid our household of toilet paper. We once spent around $260 a year on this unsustainable, forest-pulp product.

Here is our bathroom. Notice anything unusual?

Instead of toilet paper there are numerous cut up rectangles of cloth sitting on the cistern that are used over and over again. We cut this cloth from an old flannelette bed sheet.

In our SWAP* shed we have built a simple composting bucket toilet, note the family cloth here too.

After wiping with a rectangle of family cloth, we simply fold the cloth and put it in a bucket with a lid that sits beside the toilet. Family cloth is much softer than toilet paper and much much easier to process than cloth nappies.

Inside the bucket it is dry. Occasionally we throw in a few drops of eucalyptus oil. It doesn’t smell at all (although we may have to adapt the process in the warmer months). We learnt by trial and error that cutting the cloth with pinking shears,

didn’t help with the cloth fraying when they went through the wash.

So we bartered a sour-dough lesson with the delightful Mathilda, who beautifully over-locked them.

This is what they now look like up close.

About once or twice a week we put on a hot wash of our family cloth and hang them out to dry.

Thanks boys! And thank you Dear Reader for checking in with us again.

*SWAP (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturalists) is our version of WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms).

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Category: rabbits