Patrick speaks with Diego Castaño Valencia, a Colombian GP who found permaculture in Australia, and came to volunteer with us this past week.
Diego regards permaculture as an antidote to the industrial medical complex and to globalised industrial society more broadly, and is about to head home to Colombia to put into practice what he has learned on his travels.
Listen to the audio (46 mins).
We had such a wonderful week with Diego. We hope this yarn gives a little insight into our time with this special young man who is taking his life seriously, with grace and curiosity.
As always we welcome your reflections and your 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.
Meg speaks with Yara Dowani, a CSA farmer and permaculturist from the West Bank of Palestine. Yara tells of her journey from city girl to managing Om Sleiman farm, the continual challenges of producing nourishing food under occupation, and her hopes for Palestine.
Listen to the audio-only version (50mins),
or watch the video.
In their conversation Yara mentions the film Five Broken Cameras, which is set in the village near where Om Sleiman farm is situated. The farm is under constant threat of Israeli settler expansion, which you can see on the horizon in the below image.
Artist as Family is holding a solidarity raffle at each of The New Peasants screenings we attend to raise money for a water filter system for Om Sleiman farm. If you can’t make a screening but would like to donate, click here, then click One Time Gift, and in the field that says Name, please write down your name with Om Sleiman beside it. We’ll add this to the funds we are raising from raffle tickets sales. The raffle prize is two nights accommodation in our Permie Loveshack in southern Djaara country.
As a part Jewish household, we stand alongside innumerable Jewish investigative journalists and public speakers around the world (including, Antony Loewenstein, Aaron Maté, Charles Eisenstein, Gabor Maté, Max Blumenthal, and Katie Halper), who stand in solidarity with Palestinians and against the colonial and genocidal regime in Israel.
Enough is enough!
Big thanks to Yara and the other farmers at Om Sleiman farm for doing this work and so bravely sharing your story of resistance agriculture.
Hello from our nestings by the fire, preparing for our community’s winter solstice.
We have some news! Happen Films has just released a trailer of their about-to-be premiered feature documentary, The New Peasants, based on our family and community. To some extent we feel a little exposed right now, as this film shares our life, including a very painful family story, to a much bigger audience. However, we are abundantly grateful to Jordan and Antionette at Happen Films, the composer Tommy Castles, and all the crew who worked on it, and we hope it inspires people in their journeys back to being land-bonded peoples in diverse, gallant, soft-hearted, hard-bodied ways.
Before we embed the trailer we’d like to share with you some of the key films that have inspired us along the way. Each film has a unique theme for us, and each has informed and helped us to journey on this path we call neopeasantry, or subsistence permaculture.
Reclaiming The Babushkas of Chernobyl (2015) speaks to the resilience, meaning-making and determination of Ukrainian peasant women who stole back into their ancestral villages in the exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to live out their lives freely. Despite the toxicity of the land, many have been out-living their fellow villagers who have been existing in the sorrow of disconnection from their Mother Country, while the babushkas have their land-bondedness intact.
Making The Nettle Dress (2023) is a story that integrates grief, beauty, craft and connection to the land. It shows what is possible by unplugging, living simply, and returning to a rooted, earth-conscious making. It gifts us an insight into how our ancestors laboured in hand crafts and how this ancestral technology is complimentary to living with pain and processing grief. This film exemplifies for us a permapoesis approach to life and culture; that is, a permanent meaning-making approach.
Salvaging The Gleaners and I (2000) made by Agnès Varda reveals many forms of salvaging from the wastes of industrialisation, from food to other materials for life making. The filmmaker is not a passive voyeur extracting story from peoples usually unseen in capital-modernity, but a sleeves-rolled-up, camera as witness poet-anthropologist.
Communing Honeyland (2019) is a film of interspecies relating and daughterly tending, detailing what pragmatic and earth-bonded love can be, in a depleted village biome. It is an example of slow cinema, of letting the story unfold, and empowering the subjects – Hatidze Muratova, her elderly mother, and the bees – to speak mostly by their doings. In the shadow of economic and personal hardships, and ecological ruination, Hatidze’s joy for the bees and the true gold and gift of honey, shines through in her eldership, and exposes the vulnerabilities of a desperate, smash ‘n’ grab mentality, a madness that incurs upon her life, which she attempts to understand.
Sovereignty The Seeds of Vandana Shiva (2021) is an honouring of one of the most fierce warriors for the rights of peasants and food sovereignty, that is the agro-ecologist and permaculturist, Vandana Shiva. Not only a public speaker and advocate for a de-corporatised food system, Vandana walks her talk, setting up seed-saving initiatives that directly challenge the privatisation of the world’s food by the US agri-business hegemony and others who perform economic and environmental terrorism on indigenous, peasant and wage-slaved peoples of the world.
Healing The Work (2017) is the radical story of compassion, healing and post-traumatic growth inside a US prison. A group of experienced community volunteers, experienced in men’s work, gather with a group of incarcerated men, who step inside a held circle of masculine vulnerability to discover their inner power, souls, and connection with one another. This film shows what is possible and reveals the necessary processes of deep listening, for the rocky future ahead.
Coercion Schooling the World (2010) is an important critique of western education colonisation being rolled out by NGOs and other missionaries of empire. It reveals the continual patterns of colonial shaming tactics, which the west brings to land-bonded, peasant communities and shows how these missionaries disregard traditional, ecological and place-based knowledges. It examines how western schools are merely industrial-capitalist compliance factories, aimed at destroying diverse cultures in the name of ‘doing good’ and bringing so-called ‘backward’ peoples into the 21st century. In this intelligent telling and reframing of the global educational crusade, the film makers allow we western subjects of capital to reflect on the propaganda that has driven our civilisation, and in the process de-cultured and homogenised us.
Energy The Power of Community (2006) is a seminal film for us. It marks both the beginning of our relationship (Meg’s and Patrick’s) and the start of our permaculture transition. When one of the film’s stars, Roberto Perez, came to our town hall to show it and to speak and field questions, we recall him saying on that night, ‘Grow your own food, catch your own water, say hello to your neighbour.’ We heeded his advice. The film details how Cuba responded to their oil taps being turned off due to the collapse of the USSR. From starvation to permaculture abundance, the film tracks the struggles and exposes the reality of life for all of us in an energy declining future. Although this film is nearly 20 years old, it still exposes the current energy blindness of the west, and allows us to step through it into life after cheap oil, as we descend further into that reality.
Stewardship Fools and Dreamers (2019) follows the life of botanist Hugh Wilson, who with a small cohort of people and a patron, practices radical, low-impact land restoration in New Zealand. This is one of our favourite Happen Films, and Hugh is a true elder – clear-eyed, humble, caring, unfazed, resolute and determined. It is a film that shows how working with and listening to, instead of imposing ideology and big technics, can bring you into right relationship with Mother Country. Hugh’s method of healing trammelled country is largely about getting out of the way and observing what Country is saying by her doing. It also requires seeing out the critics and the judgements. This is a film for those interested in land management and land care in a post-industrial reality.
Medicine Juliette of the Herbs (1998) is a film that gives deep insight into the medicinal wisdoms of author, mother and herbalist, Juliette de Bairacli Levy. It shows how herbalism is powerful medicine for land-bonded peoples and animals, and how this type of medicine belongs to a commons, shared mostly via feminine power. This inspiring film shines a light on our current era of extreme chronic disease, and how masculine-privatised medicine is seemingly ruining our health. Juliette’s book, Nature’s Children, is our first go-to text whenever there is a health issue in our household. Our family stopped seeing doctors 8 years ago, and Juliette’s life work has in part enabled this.
Subsistence Pig Earth (1979) is a film by John Berger, based on his book of the same name. Berger lived with alpine French peasants in the 1970s and wrote about their lives, their culture and how modernisation was decimating their subsistence livelihoods by seducing peasants into debt to buy modern farm equipment. This debt was often the death knell for peasant economy, which was largely free from wage-slavery and bankers dictating the terms for life making. Berger’s critical examination of the hubris of modernity as experienced through the humility and humanity of land-bonded peoples of place, is an important story for the west, additionally because peasant agriculture still exists in Europe. While Berger is reporting the end of these lifeways in the 1970s, he probably underestimated the longevity of the energy bubble that has created what we call hypertechnocivility. Many of us will return to subsistence lifeways before too long, and Pig Earth is a nearby reach back to how most Europeans lived only a handful of generations ago. It certainly doesn’t perpetrate the myth that ‘peasants are only wretched, poor, diseased and stupid people’, and other such propaganda spread by capitalists and Marxists alike.
Emplacing Reading Landscape (2023) is a film that documents the life practice of ecological thinker, permaculture co-originator, friend and mentor, David Holmgren. David’s unique way of seeing brings us back into appreciation for how our most skilled ancestors looked and understood the Mother. David sees with many overlaying lenses – geological, hydrological, technological, cultural and energetic, to name a few. He brings these lenses together into an integrated whole way of looking. He has taught his method for decades, helping others to skill up and be present to what is, in order to know how to work with, and be in relationship with, Mother Country.
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Without further ado, here is the trailer to Happen Films’, The New Peasants (2025).
We would love you share the top films that have most sung to you as you have prepared for a world with far less energy and wealth, but steeped in beauty and abundance.
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.
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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.
This is not a wafty, throwaway praise. This is an embodied knowing, a deeply felt thank you for the living, growing, seeding, podding, storing and shitting of plants. For their many giving parts.
Whether plants are in their own autonomy, in relationship with measureless earth others, or requiring peoples’ union to thrive, plants embody the feminine divine. Mother Country is the vessel in which all things are brewed, hotly or coldly, and plants are often the very fibres that enable the alchemy of such fermentations throughout life, into death and back across into life.
They are encasements of nourishment, wisdom holders, inebriation agents and great revealers.
But so much plant living has been violated by industrial food, energy and medicine capitalisms. Plants have been incarcerated, mined and used as gratuitous commodities. When welded to the dominant culture we devour them, we’re never fully satisfied, never fully full. Why? Is it our relationship with plants has radically changed under the spell and ideology of modernity’s project?
We have never had more food available to us in our short time as a species, but is it in this glut that gluttony occurs? That we are unfulfilled?
So many of the capitalisms that exploit plants are greenwashing capitalisms. Biofuels are the obvious example, but almost all uses of plants are a form of enslavement, within the machine of hypertechnocivility.
Domesticating plants, it has long been said, is the story of our own domestication. This is not always the same story as the process of becoming hypertechnocivil – that is, so industrialised to think we are the only species worth feeding – our food automated and chugged into cities, from where anthropocentrism powers over all life.
However, if we open to the ritual possibilities, the medicinal, magical and teaching properties of plants, can we call on our more expansive selves – the broader, mythological, transformative and cosmological potentialities of our selves – to take hold in our daily actions and processes?
This, we’ve found, is more possible when our foods, energies and medicines come from the gentle labours of our creaturely bodies. When we are ecological participants in loved biomes. When we are creatures of place. A loved homeplace.
When we walk for the plant gifts that make our lives possible, we cannot but step into the magical and divine realms of plants. From such a place both abundance and gratitude flow. We, people, can once again co-union with plants. It is deep in our cultural DNA that we live this way. It is lifemaking connected to ancestors. It refuses the severings of modernity.
Highly cultivated plants such as grapes thrive in conditions where people yearly prune their radical vines. In turn people thrive by eating the fruits created by the goddess herself.
Borlotti beans don’t need highly cultivated soil as they fix nitrogen in the earth and bring fertility to any earthly biome. Their colours delight us in the sun, under which we dry them to store for winter fuel.
Basil loves the full brunt of summer’s heat – a powerful herb and food medicine destined for almond pesto.
Ella, one of this week’s volunteers at Tree Elbow, communes with prune plums. We all delight in this prunus variety, also destined to be dried for winter’s cellaring and eating.
Volunteer Beau works alongside Blackwood with spelt from Burrum Biodynamics to alchemise this old grain into pasta to join the almond basil pesto for dinner.
Patrick sets up a tree net to catch acorns for their harvesting, thus stopping the midnight clang of hard little nuts landing on the water tank and waking the underworlders sleeping nearby.
Blackwood demonstrates his method of acorn shelling to his family and volunteers, using a nut cracker. Acorn meal will be used with spelt for winter pancakes and for the brewing of Patrick’s acorn beer (a recipe which can be found at the end of his re:)Fermenting culture book).
It has been a week of communing with plants, glowing in the gratitude of abundance, and savouring this time of harvest with volunteers and visitors, including Jess from Canada, who like Beau and Ella brought a joyful spirit to Tree Elbow.
The week finished with Wild Fennel – our local herbal medicine circle led by local witches, Catie and Zoe. Their beautifully facilitated plant medicine circle elegantly brought us all into deeper presence with the holy Tulsi, while we were warmed by the equinox fire in the garden at Tree Elbow.
A special thank you to Jordan for the pic of the plant circle, Catie and Zoe for the love and for the crafting back of the peoples’ medicine, and to Beau and Ella for your loving attention and joyous labours this week as SWAPs.
We look forward to hearing from you which plant or plants you are present to right now. What herbal teas or medicine plant foods are you most grateful for? What is your latest herbal/harvest discovery?
