Listen to the audio version of this post (18mins), or read below.
Industrial progress is our civilisational spell. It is the spell of the modern, of comfort, of innovation-anxiety, of hyper-domestication, of estrangement and separation, of unashamed pollution. The collective name we call this spell is hypertechnocivility.
From birth we are conditioned to conform to this story. Early on daycare separates us from our most significant protectors, leaving us vulnerable and often emotionally wounded. As wounded fledglings industrial schooling grooms us to become compliant cogs in the narrative of progress. Technical colleges or universities finish the hardening process, equipping us with trades or degrees to serve industrial capital, rewarding us materially, as long as we are compliant, dutiful and stay under the spell, or in our lanes. By our mid twenties we become modern serfs in service to the Financial Industrial Complex. The key to success is to do as you are told, become upwardly mobile, and not look at what’s really going on around you.
Every industry larger than cottage is subordinate to the Financial Industrial Complex, which controls all the other global raiding parties – Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Military, Big Ag, et al. Big Finance is the apex predator of this greater mob of morally depraved elites because it controls the capital for all other industries, including government.
It was the Luddites (1811-1812) who mounted the first and only serious rebellion against the spell casters of industrial progress. This happened in the midlands and north of England, where a number of our family’s ancestors hail. Initially the resistance focussed on ‘machine breaking’, smashing the frames of early industrial textile machines that were reducing the capacity of cottage weavers and hosiers to earn a proper income through their fine crafts.
A new power class was emerging in England at this time. The early industrial manufacturers established the first chapter of mass production. They had in turn derived from a revolutionary political theology designed by Adam Smith and others who gave spark to modern predatory capitalism, and lobbied parliament to bring in draconian laws that further prevented common folk from self-provisioning. The classical political economists knew that capitalism could only work if The Common – land that could once be used for people to produce or gather food – was enclosed, and townsfolk, artisans and peasants could no longer easily create non-monetary economies of community-sufficiency.
The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelman is a comprehensive resource for examining the dark and mostly untold story of Classical Political Economy.
While the enclosures began in feudal England centuries earlier, Smith and co conspired with the church and state to make sure people were economically fragile and thus exploit-ready for manufacturers and other industrialists. This in turn created unbound poverty and suffering, which would eventually force people to move into the growing manufacturing centres to look for work, kickstarting a de-ruralisation process that continues today:
Displaced populations leave the land and make their way, uselessly, to the cities; urban ghettos swell and fester; families without skills recognisable in the cities compete for the few available jobs or go on the public dole, using food stamps to buy what they once knew how to grow. –– Kirkpatrick Sale (1995)
The wretchedness caused by enclosure and through dispossession of ancestral commons led to mass poverty. This created widespread crime that in turn led to the advent of populations being policed for the first time, as well as the establishment of faraway colonial jails like Australia. Industrial progress is also the story of made-man mass suffering, exported from England to across the world.
The history of the Luddites’ powerful though short lived uprising to save their autonomous economic-technological-cultural relations is told in Kirkpatrick Sale’s detailed Rebels against the Future: Lessons for the Computer Age. Sale’s social history brings greater awareness of the mass exploitation of labour that occurred at this time, which was required to catapult industrial capitalism into existence.
Through the many stages and processes of industrial progress we have more or less become an estranged species of anthropocentric urbanites who no longer yearn to be in relationship with earth-honouring technologies, or living within processes of regeneration. We fabricate stories of progress such as efficient electric homes powered by lithium-ion batteries, without reporting on the millions of fires these batteries start each year and the horrific costs to environments and people that the mining of this one particular metal creates.
In every new technology manufactured by the story of industrial progress, harm proliferates. Look behind the curtains of any new product, any new drug, every new digital tool or means of production, and someone or something is sick or dying. Electric technologies requiring rare earth minerals or metals won’t save us, but these technologies just might:
So, given what we now know about industrial progress, is there anything we can learn from the original Luddites? Is there anything to learn from their gallant failure, which took an English army, larger than any that fought against Napoleon, to crush their resistance?
The first lesson for us from the Luddites is violence only begets more violence, and the state is designed to ultimately protect capital before workers. As we have seen for decades, governments will use excessive force against any uprising, and Big Tech is almost fully capable now of silencing any form of dissent or using dissenting subgroups to create ideological silos in a bid to continue the colonial practice of divide and rule.
Before they resorted to violence, however, the Luddite’s political strategy was to petition the political class.
Lord Byron made his maiden parliamentary speech speaking up for subjugated artisans who were being rapidly turned into impoverished subjects of capital. But shortly afterwards Byron became famous for his writings, and his attention in support of the Luddites disappeared. And then no one in the political class championed the traditional textile artisans whose industry was the first to be subject to the moral depravity of early industrial capitalists. Such powerlessness, especially felt by weavers, led to greater acts of violence against textile manufacturers’ machine parts (thousands of weaving frames were smashed), then against the factories (some were burnt to the ground), then manufacturers themselves (some were murdered).
Secondly, Luddite resistance didn’t pivot towards alternative self-organising economies. Luddites wanted to maintain life as it was, where cottagers would raise their children to take on the craft or trade of the household with their future generations engaged in meaningful, self-organising labour that was rewarded by money. Luddites and their kin perhaps could not imagine alternative economic lifeways as some of us are crafting now. Rapid onset poverty has a way of destroying creativity and thus diminishing the scope to problem solve because the sole concern of destitution is sheltering and feeding oneself and family.
Today, time-poverty, including among the wealthy, similarly destroys the ability to problem solve because responding to a predicament intelligently requires a mind not over-filled with stresses and distraction. To respond to the predicaments of our time, however we are reading them and which ever ones jump out at us and call for our attention, our minds need to be connected to the universal creativity of the living of the world.
The lack of pivot of the Luddites was probably also due to the demotion of subsistence (or non-monetary) economies, again due to prior enclosure laws. While Luddite cottagers, at night, focussed on organising secret militia attacks in numbers that are astounding to consider right across the industrialising midlands and north of England, they could have alternatively spent this time covertly growing crops on marginal or hidden lands, keeping pigs and chickens in simple enclosures, poaching the game and stock of the landed gentry, and generally setting up underground food networks, which also distributed other basic needs to people. This form of covert economic resistance may have resulted in the manufacturers having much less of a population to draw on for labour, and therefore lessening their ability to exploit workers with wages that barely enabled people to survive.
Thirdly, life is not worth living when we are enslaved or owned by others and we cannot augment our own economic forms with kindred souls. Many Luddites had nothing to lose but to gather, swear oaths (a crime considered worthy of hanging or transporting to Australia), and form secret militia groups that would conspire to attack the new masters.
The political classes learned from the political violence the Luddites escalated between 1811 and 1812. After the Luddites were eventually smashed, the new rich manufacturers, the established political elites and the financial class gradually conspired to produce more subtle ways to placate and incarcerate working peoples and turn them into docile factory slaves. Industrial schooling, drugs, alcohol and mass entertainment became important tools of capital that worked on placating and making soporific the rebellious spirit the Luddites possessed. As we know, these are still some of the tools used for compliance today.
Adaptation before panic has been a message we and countless others have been singing for some time now. Collapse now and avoid the rush, as John Michael Greer famously wrote in 2012, precisely two hundred years after the last Luddite was publicly hanged.
The Luddites had no such prior story to inform them. No story of pivoting or reclaiming. Nothing before them had so utterly transformed human life and economy, as rapidly. Today, it’s hard to see anything that the three industrial revolutions haven’t already shat on, so an argument for economic alternatives, village rebuilding and reclaiming a ceremonial species approach should, you would think, have greater agency. So what are the road blocks?
Fear is central to killing off the creative agency needed to spell a new story of economy and culture making. The spell of Industrial progress is bound by fear. What will my parents think? What will my partner think? What will my peers think, if I take off the chains and leave the cave of industrial progress?
The Luddites wanted to preserve pre-industrial life where handmade tools aided cottage productions of beautiful and useful things, and contributed to a village logic that was not centred on extraction and pyramidal hierarchy, but rather was rooted in relationship with local, bioregional, land-accountable practices of life making. Yes, manorial lords stood over village folk to lesser and greater degrees, however, this powering-over was relatively benign by comparison with the misery of early factory servitude. As the spell of industrial progress spread like a plague throughout the world, the word Luddite naturally became a pejorative term employed by hypertechnocivility to shame-label critics.
Although all three of our wheelbarrows have derived from industrial mines, factories and markets – two salvaged from the local tip shop and one purchased new and given to us as a gift – they represent technology that can be replicated by materials walked for and harvested respectfully in nearby common land, which we help care for. Our wheelbarrows are low-impact transportation technologies that enable us to take large amounts of fodder to our goats and collect our winter fuel. We do not take for granted their simplicity or their meaning in recrafting ecological economies of place.
While we currently have access to a car, and we hold a small title of land that belongs to the great industrial legal lie terra nullius, we give no money to Big Finance, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Military or any other industrial complex. We have crafted a cottager, community sufficient lifeway based on ancestral relations to local economy making, brought forward into the context of today and the Mother Country we live within. We don’t dress in period costumes or romanticise what was. Instead we find kinship with our ancestors and community in reclaiming and re-skilling, while recognising the greatest threat to life is the romanticisation of industrial progress.
Rather than violence as our response to the sickly spell of industrial progress, we choose defunding its power. This, for us, is the most rich and rewarding form of resistance, which is steeped in relationships that the Financial Industrial Complex or its challenger, Big Tech, can never have jurisdiction over. Sharing our story, linking with like minds, revillaging, and teaching our lifeways and learnings at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, is all we can do alongside the primary concern of actually crafting economy that refuses to participate in industrial progress. This scale is human and local, and soon to come back offline. Living the change. Living life outside the chains of the cave. Sharing our learnings with others. Dancing in the face of industrial progress without fear. This is our power.
Our wealth is time and relationships and knowledges and skills almost entirely found outside the vast drag net of the Financial Industrial Complex. We generate so little money that we don’t pay tax, therefore we don’t support the war machine or participate in government welfare given to corporates to promote earth- and health-wrecking technologies, such as gain-of-function synthetic medicines or drone warfare or more toxic biotech farming practices.
Yes, we are neoluddites. Yes, we are conspiracists. Yes, we are anti-vaxxers. Yes, dirty hippies. Yes, witches. Yes, op-shoppers. Yes, radical homemakers. Yes, neopeasants. Yes, some of us are quite toothless, repair things and practice self-suturing.
Hello dear Readers. A heartfelt Happy New Year to each of you!
This end of year/new year season is often marked with big events. Bushfires, higher road fatalities, work stresses, greater financial pressures, family arguments, and major global events. Over this holiday period, the horror of the Bondi massacre and a brazen US kidnapping – presumably part of a plan to steal Venezuela’s oil and gold, needed to help lubricate the US war machine.
For summer solstice we gathered, celebrated and feasted at Melliodora with friends and kindred spirits, and the FireChoir men performed two of their original songs.
On Christmas day Artist as Family gathered for a simple BBQ and later in the afternoon Woody, Zeph and Patrick went fishing at nearby Cairn Curran,
each catching a large carp,
which Meg transformed into her famous carp mousse (click for recipe).
Patrick and Meg met on New Years Eve in Daylesford twenty years ago, and since then we have been regulars in the town’s NYE parade. Here’s a pic from around 2016. Yep, that’s Woody on the right in the purple dress and green shoes blowing his whistle.
This year none of us really felt the spark of creativity to organise a float, until late in the day an idea crackled in Patrick. He got tinkering in the workshop, and an hour later popped out all zombie-like with heavy sign in hands.
We sent the above image to some friends inviting them to join PJ in his pjs and sleepwalk down the main drag with him. Meg documented the stellar performance that Su Dennett and Dave Holmgren joined.
We are paying close attention to the growing tech feudalism unfolding, which western governments are helping to usher in under the guise of safety. A few weeks back we were locked out of Substack for refusing to comply to demands for facial recognition data on that site, due to the Australian Government’s new and overreaching digital ID laws, supposedly aimed at protecting children. Know any kids on Substack? We don’t either.
We’ve been listening to a brilliant Sydney criminal lawyer raising awareness concerning an Israeli phone hacking company called Cellebrite, whose products are currently being used by numerous Australian institutions. We’ve tuned into a British journo-comedian uncovering the surveillance enhancing deeds of tech company, Oracle, and how that company is significantly infiltrating the UK government. And we’ve been learning about the long-standing collusion of The Rise of the Thielverse & the Surveillance State.
But what does the western corporate media really want us to pay attention to? Chinese and Russian infiltration and hacking tech, right? All three links above have helped us understand further what is being prepared for western populations by western corporatism, and we highly recommend them.
On NYE Patrick, Su and Dave were spontaneously joined by Jean-Marc and a blow-in called Rachel. Both have been active in highlighting the genocide of Palestinians over the past two years. An article appeared in the Green Left telling how Rachel was stopped by police on the night she joined our float, and asked to put away her Palestinian flag.
As far as we’re aware, not since c1975 – when cartoonist and national treasure Michael Leunig (with friends) entered ‘Fun in the Forest‘ in the Daylesford NYE parade, where their float featured “real trees on the back of [a] truck and Mr Curly chased [a naked] female around the trees… greeted with hoots of laughter…” – have the police intervened in the free self-expression at this grass roots community event in our town. Many people cheered and clapped our Sleepwalker foot float. Apparently one person complained about the Palestinian flag. That’s democracy for you.
However, not all is solidarity. In our backwards and forwards with Rachel assisting her with her Green Left (GL) article, Patrick also expressed to her the loss of trust many of us felt in the GL’s capitulation to Big Pharma and Big Health during the great pandemic exaggeration years. Most of the GL mob back then refused to see the captured narrative and revolving door health officials, such as the head regulator of the TGA during Covid. Here’s Professor Skerritt revolving his door just 8 months after retirement from the TGA to become an ‘independent director’ of the largest pharmaceuticals lobby group in Australia. Go John!
‘Medicines Australia’… sounds so helpful and righteous, doesn’t it?
Patrick was also wishing to let Rachel know of the loss of human rights that resulted in the Green Left’s naivety. If anyone needs a recap of that pitiful time you can revisit Patrick’s long-form piece, The Left got Covid almost entirely Wrong, and why it matters.
Unity among diverse groups is what’s required now. To form a unifying stance of mistrust against any form of the state-corporate nexus. To trust any large industry that has enthusiastic state backing is a straightforward recipe for serving up more divide and rule colonialism. Globally, large industries and governments pay billions to nudge units (behavioural science companies) to sucker people into believing ‘we are doing this for your safety’. Our prediction for this year is Israel and the US will create a false flag operation to justify a major war with Iran. This will elicit a world war and thus greater crackdowns on free speech will ensue and bring in a general state of info-confusion and possibly even civil war in some western countries. Ever more sophisticated fake news delivered by AI tech will intensify greater justification for governments to erode our rights and mandate digital IDs for everyone. We will see political gulags emerge, further political assassinations, more journalists sacked and muzzled, and a further shadowing of independent websites like our own.
In the face of all this, one lecture series that has been important to us in expanding our understanding of the historical contexts for what is occurring today geopolitically, is the 28 part Secret History series, delivered by Professor Jiang, beginning here.
Professor Jiang’s work is wonderfully informative and provocative, though at times a tad shorthand. Gratefully, however, he says to his students, ‘don’t take my word as truth’, and states he’s ‘presenting theories, which are there to be challenged’ – the mark of a proper teacher. Western universities used to have such engaged teaching, and in part of this lecture series Prof Jiang speaks of his time at Yale University and gives a good summary as to why the western neoliberal academies are in decline in step with the broader empire. We’ve witnessed this too and spoke about it often over the past several years. Funding and research is often dependent on one’s compliance with neoliberal agendas. True scholarship, therefore, is sidelined to the margins. Our response has been to leave the neoliberal academies as potential places of knowledge and wisdom, and to immerse ourselves in more expansive intelligences.
Honey is filling the hives in the garden as we write this post, goats are converting gorse and blackberries into divine subsistence protein, Meg and other women are fasting in the forest and listening in Mother Country, sunflowers are on point of flowering, strawberries are setting a new flush of fruit, and each morning before dawn a young fox returns to our chicken forest to figure out a way in.
Life is rich and beautiful. It offers us an invitation to participate, an invitation to connect with what Professor Jiang calls the ‘divine spark’, and be part of it. There is much suffering around us, and in us. Much evil and hatred and censorship and authoritarianism on the horizon. Our political leaders will once again sell our human rights for bullshit wars and for ‘our safety’ and billionaire greed mongers will continue to enslave the material world to fill the great void in their beings where their souls once resided. The potential for such darkness is in all of us, and can usefully serve as a feedback for when we are not connected to the divine.
In 2026, western hegemony will edge closer to a great unravelling, so we will continue to be in service to the divine spark, access it in both ceremony and in subsistence, while we drink a toast to this precious life and all who are part of its eternal flourishing.
Here’s a recipe for a simple cider we might well toast such life with: Catch nine precious litres of water from the heavens and place in a ten litre brewer, add two cups of honey from the labour of garden bees, and ten sprigs of elderflower growing in the common. Let it brew for a week. Strain the flowers from the brew and let it brew another week. Enjoy this wild fermented, low alcoholic drink while listening to the cricket on the ABC – about the only thing we can trust on the ABC these days is sport. You can also make a non-alcoholic version by using whey as a starter.
So cheers and solidarity, dear friends! Let’s stay connected as hypertechnocivility descends deeper into collapse, and let’s dream together and renew the light out of the lessons from the dark.
We wrote to you in November 2023 in relation to the iatrogenocide you have actively participated in since 2021. In 2022 you even went so far as to give one of our family members unsolicited medical advice, which we captured on video.
We are grateful that our family and around 300 people in our community, did not take your advice, and as a result none of us in this cohort has long Covid, immune system collapse, died suddenly, suffered heart inflammation, had a stroke, or developed blood clots, brain aneurysms, turbo cancers, or any of the other vast array of injuries associated with these immune and heart-wrecking injections. We feel gravely for those bullied into risking their health by public influencers, such as yourself, often in order to keep their jobs. The injection never was designed to stop transmission, yet you argued it would. It is now 2025, and you have never acknowledged your wrong-doing or the harm you helped cause.
And now, as a senior minister in the federal Australian Labor government, you are also complicit in the most public genocide the world has ever seen. Your support for an extremist-supremacist government that is, before our very eyes, killing and starving innocent peoples is not surprising to us, since we lived through yours and Morrison’s Covid regime. We are not naive to the fact that whatever big industry – especially weapons and pharma – want, Australian politicians grant without question. Yes, you are not the only one complicit in these crimes, but as a MP local to our home town, we want to be clear: concerning these big geopolitical and global health issues, you do not represent us.
While we, a part-Jewish family, do not think you or any of your colleagues will ever be prosecuted for the crimes against humanity committed over the past five years, we are writing to inform you that we and many others see your complicity as part of these crimes.
In one small response to the 18 month-long genocide of Palestinians, we wish to share with you and our readers the following.
We are currently raising money for a Palestinian permaculture and CSA farm that is practicing resistance agriculture in the West Bank. As we attend Q&A screenings of The New Peasants over the next month, we will hold a series of solidarity raffles for the farm. Om Sleiman Farm grows organic food for around 30 households, however over the years members of the farm have been shot at by those guarding illegal occupation. In the two photos of the farm above, the white settlement in the background, encroaching onto the farm, is the illegal occupation at work by ethno-supremacists, who, like early settlers in Australia, believe it is their god-given right to steal land and use violent force and tactics to do so.
Can you, Catherine, imagine a world where the Australian government not only imposed sanctions on genocidal regimes, but supported grass roots groups (not NGO colonialists) to produce ecologically-sound, organic food systems across all countries? Nutritious food that would radically reduce the need for pharmaceutical interventions and thus iatrogenic corporate profiteering? By living a permaculture lifeway and developing a community-sufficient (rather than corporate-dependent) economy over many years, has meant that no one in our family has required a GP for a decade.
Your support for the illness industry globally, enforced starvation in Palestine, and militaristic genocide by Israel is not the future. It is merely Five-Eyes neoliberal colonialism in action.
If you were truly working towards healthy people and healthy biomes, and access to these essentials for life making without proxy wars, we would celebrate you. It is clear, however, where your priorities lie. You do not represent us. We reject any authority or jurisdiction you might claim to have over us.
We left Nong Khai in Thailand in a Grab car from The White Inn,
approached a sign reminding us where we’ve been, and directing us to where we are going,
departed the country through a relaxed Thai immigration, bought three tickets bound for Laos,
travelled in a van
across the Thai-Laos friendship bridge above the Mekong River,
were directed through Laos immigration,
exchanged some money, got on another bus to Vientiane, the capital, where we booked another Grab
to the Vientiane railway station, 20kms out of town. Phew; big morning so far!
At the station some locals kindly helped us navigate the rail system and the language,
and we stood in queue to buy tickets for the Laos-China Railway.
We tried to find something edible near the station while we waited a few hours to board, but we didn’t have much luck.
When we were allowed through into the station, we proceeded into a neofascist security zone, which we hadn’t experienced since leaving Australia.
After going through the scanners, we had our knives taken from us. We were really shocked and protested and asked, “How are we going to cut up fruit while we travel?” After much indignation at having our knives confiscated we were told we could pay to have an officer take them to our destination at Luang Prabang station. We agreed. It cost us AU$20, although we didn’t think we’d see them again.
Laos the nation and Laos the Laos-China Railway are two distinct countries. The former is chilled out and beautiful and wild, the latter authoritarian, stern and uptight. We have travelled through several countries with our knives, Patrick generally keeps both his knives on his belt while passing through immigration. In fact he did this here too and remarkably they didn’t pick them up in the body search, just Meg’s and Woody’s knives in the luggage scan. Was this a taste of what is to come in China? Woody was especially upset. For we adults it was like going back to school and having to endure nanny-state rules, a context that Woody hasn’t ever experienced.
His Leatherman was a gift from Steve, a kind Warrnambool man, who we met on our last big bicycle tour in 2021, and his Opinel knife and pouch were a gift from his Aunty Hen. After several hours of traveling through the beautiful Laos valleys,
where we saw many examples of subsistence farming.
it was time to get off at Luang Prabang. The armed police officer who had our knives alighted with us.
His briefcase contained some of our most useful tools on this journey, and in life generally. We were overjoyed to have them back,
but we had a problem. We knew we were going to come up against this situation again, especially in China. That night we booked a sweet little room with surprisingly cute folded swan towels, in the old capital. It was the cheapest room in the little city. Someone’s been to international hotel school in the 1980s, eh?
After arriving quite late in the day, we dropped our bags and set out to explore the town,
and to find some grub. We found a lively and packed night market, forgot to take photos, ate a delicious dinner of stir-fried veggies and rice, and came back to our swan-toweled room with mangoes for breakfast. In the morning we used our knives for the last time to cut them up.
Cutting up mangoes has been a morning ritual for weeks now, as mangoes are so cheap in Asia, and local, and in-season. We were now coming face to face with state-paternalism. We knew this was the influence of China, who paid for and jointly run the railway line we were now dependent on for our trajectory north. We headed out again after breakfast to see a little more of Laotian culture and living,
and to find the local post office to send our knives home.
We had to make such a carry-on yesterday to be able to pay get them back, and we knew things were only going to get worse the further north we headed. People around us yesterday had to hand over their work hammers, deodorant sprays, scissors and small useful knives such as ours. Hopefully we will see these prized tools again back in Australia.
After we sent off our package, we went looking for a bookshop to stock up on reading material. We walked for a while through beautiful streets,
stopped into a cafe run by this German woman and her dog,
discovered an incredible wasp’s nest above us on the footpath,
beheld more miraculous examples of bamboo scaffolding,
spent a moment reflecting on the magic of remnant ritual offerings,
before collecting our bags from our room, checking out and hopping into a van with just two seats left, heading for the station. We three squeezed in,
travelled for twenty or so minutes with a cohort of fellow travelers, and once again went through the intense process of getting clearance to enter the station. Passports, facial-scanning, security gates, body scanning, luggage scanning. Patrick had decided to keep his knife in his luggage to see whether it would go undetected. It didn’t, and the authorities refused to offer us the same knife escort service, so he gave it away to some Celtic travellers (sitting beside Woody in the pic above) rather than leaving it at the station. Now completely knifeless, we lined up to board the Laos-China Railway for our next leg.
Once again, the train attendants were officious.
The land from the train was beautiful and uncontrolled. There was longing in us for such uncivil life, and we contemplated the easiness of Thailand, sans the pollution, and the autonomy we have back home, as we don’t live in a city. As we travelled, Meg and Woody listened to an audiobook about Don Bradman, while Patrick read The Forest People: The story of Laos’s unknown tribe.
This account of Mlabri (or Mrabri) people is again another example of just how uninformed Yuval Noah Harari is when he describes human history as being a singular path of narrow self-interest. His ridiculous propaganda, we later found, is also available in Chinese.
Like countless examples of indigenous lifeways, sharing food and other resources among the Mlabri is the rule, not the exception. Every wild forested area we passed held the possibility that Mlabri are still living outside the luggage-scanning, finger-printing, facial-recognising insanity of the global machine conglomerate.
When Meg lived in Laos 25 years ago, teaching English, there were no sealed roads. While the roads now are still rudimentary, Meg was surprised to see so many sealed ones from the train. We also saw many beautiful patterns of cultivation, demonstrating other earth-harmonious lifeways are possible besides nomadic forest dwelling.
We wished we could have spent more time in Laos, but this journey to India is taking much longer than we expected, and we still have a long way to go. In the afternoon we arrived in Boten station in the north of the country, where we came across this musician playing a Lusheng wind instrument.
Later we found out that Dong people, a minority group from southeastern China, traditionally play this instrument. We waited at Boten station for a few hours for another train to take us into China.
As you might imagine, things were fairly serious going through immigration into China, which occurred after just 12 minutes of being on the train. Everyone got off. We had our temperature and faces scanned, our fingers and thumbs printed, and our passports checked and scanned, and notes were written down. It was quite a procedure. We held both apprehension and excitement for entering China.
Once back on the train we had our tickets checked and passports read again.
As we travelled, we passed millions of hectares of cultivation, everything highly organised.
We couldn’t quite believe we were in China when we alighted the train at Xishuangbanna.
We didn’t think our travels were going to take us this far north, into this epic country.
But we had significant challenges ahead. We had no money we could access, and we’d booked a hotel that required a 15-minute car ride. We didn’t have a local sim card, or a way to install an e-sim, therefore we had no use of the internet. We knew most things in China require an ID banking app, and our remnant Laos Kip had no agency this far inside the country. Outside the station we were approached by a fella who could speak a little English. We showed him the name of our hotel as he shunted us towards a driver. We conveyed to him we had no money, and he said, “Driver, ATM.” We understood. They had a brief conversation and we were led away by a sweet man who drove us to several ATMs until one relented and gave up some yuan. We all cheered and got back into the car.
Then we continued on to find our hotel, which wasn’t a hotel at all, but some sort of shonky sublet business. The driver couldn’t find it because there was no hotel, there was just a picture of a hotel on the internet. Eventually he found some locals who directed him to a back door operation where we got a key card for this little apartment room.
We were grateful. We handed over our passports for about the seventh time that day. Nothing is underground here, not even shonky sublet businesses. Everything is recorded and scanned and documented. Several moments later we were also grateful for the family-run restaurant across the street who accepted us for a meal after 9pm. We sat down and we were brought tea and dry roasted soybeans.
They asked us to take selfies with them. We were quite the novelty in this city. We were going to find out that in southwestern China our ethnicity was quite exceptional. People kept staring at us. Long stares that were met with our smiles. Our meals arrived,
which we had ordered by pointing and hoping for the best as there was zero English in the restaurant and we had no internet for our translation app to work. We were so grateful for this first delicious Chinese meal and also grateful this business took cash, as across the country they are phasing it out. We noted (pardon the pun) that all the notes of money included a picture of Mao on one side.
It didn’t seem very communist to have just the one character on every note, especially a character that had caused so much suffering in the twentieth century. We wandered around the city after dinner. It was Friday night and everywhere we turned young women were being styled and groomed in some sort of costume that looked part wedding dress, part traditional costume.
There were dozens of businesses working on hundreds of young women. The street life was vibrant and had a carnival feel about it. We went looking for a sim card and were told we had to go the the business park in the morning at 9am and apply for one. So we woke early, took some bananas for breakfast as we could peel them without our beloved knives, made a cup of tea and sat outside on the balcony taking in the new day,
until quite suddenly we were forced inside with a toxic smell permeating our olfactories. We packed up and left the building gagging, alongside others who also ran outside. It smelt like turps mixed with something stronger. We handed in our key and were helped by a kind local woman to hail a driver.
We were taken to the wrong place by the driver. You just can’t go into any phone place and get a sim card here; we discovered you have to go to the right phone place, and apply for one. We hailed another car, and he took us across the city to the right phone place, even though the previous places were all the same company, the government-run China Mobile. We were noticing most of the traffic consisted of new electric vehicles and we saw only a remnant of an older kind of mobility, although it too was electric. We also noticed how well organised everything is, including the streets and the roadside gardens.
It took about an hour to apply for and receive a sim card, by which point we’d missed the train we’d hoped to catch. Before we headed to the station for a later train we walked around looking for food. We came across many police cars, cameras and prohibition signs, such as this one, prohibiting long distance riding.
Our bicycle touring sensibilities were shocked. Over the past decade, we have spent nearly two years on the road riding long distances.
Since arriving in China we are finding the authoritarianism a frightening sign of what is to come in Australia, if people don’t pay attention to the incremental rise of surveillance, digital ID metrics, biometrics, censorship, and everything else Australian federal and state governments are doing to screw up our freedoms (such as steer us into another bogus pandemic, this time bird flu). While China has learnt predator capitalism from the west to grow its economy and incentivise ‘progress’, the west (particularly the Anglophone Five-Eyes countries) appears to be learning from China how to control populations and eradicate dissent. This is how the global machine conglomerate works. Any self-respecting anarchist does not want to live in a police state that has a prohibition against long-distance bicycle or motor bike riding. Patrick has also been reading Howard Zinn’s, The People Speak,
which details the horrendous struggles working men, women, indigenous, black and minority Americans have had over the centuries, since the Spanish first arrived. Be it industrial fascists, industrial communists, or a more contemporary, insidious merger of the two into an industrial state-corporate nexus, we people will need to fight against the next wave of totalitarianism. Being in China is making us realise just what is at stake, and reading Zinn reminds us that freedom doesn’t just happen, it has to be worked for and reworked for. One of the books Meg picked up in Laos is Elie Wiesel’s Night, another timely reminder of what happens when a country gives in to authoritarianism.
And it’s not just the Five Eyes countries. The way in which the German and Israeli governments are currently conducting themselves today, they would do well to turn back to books like these.
For lunch we found a restaurant and once again navigated the menu without a clue for the language.
We thought we’d conveyed, “Chinese vegetables and rice for three” quite well, and we received a beautiful leek and pork dish and some rice. OK, fair enough. We were grateful. Then another dish arrived. Egg and tomato – delicious, but too much. And then another, Chinese vegetables, and then another, which we couldn’t recognise. We protested, but the staff had no idea what we were saying.
It was all bloody delicious although enough for six people. After we had eaten all we could, we cleared out our ‘tea chest’ container and piled in the leftovers, which we had on the train, later in the day.
We travelled north, having no idea how we were going to get to India from China, but just pushing forward in the general direction, avoiding Myanmar. We’ve heard of the rapid industrialisation of China over the past three decades, and now we were experiencing it. The scale of development here is mind blowing. So far we have seen high intensity cities and agricultural zones, with only little glimpses of wilder spaces when the fast trains have come up from the extensive tunnels, briefly for air.
We got off the train in Kunming,
went through a series of security checks and scans to leave the station,
and popped out into a city of 8 million people.
As we travel north it is gradually getting cooler. Meg managed to set up a Chinese pay app and so we could order DiDi cars by copying in the addresses of where we are and where we need to go. While we waited for one to collect us, we bought some fruit from a lovely lady at a street stall outside the station. In this photo, Meg is saying no to a plastic bag, something we find ourselves saying many times a day.
We became aware of an intense police presence outside the station. The lady with the fruit stall and other stall holders were moved on by police screaming orders at them through a megaphone. Guards in mobile towers patrolled the station with machine guns,
and everywhere we turned there were CCTV cameras watching and recording. We travelled through the extremely lit CBD of Kunming,
across the city to the cheapest accommodation we could find online. It was hot inside.
We remembered the images of Chinese people during Covid, screaming from the balconies of their apartments to be let out, and we sensed what these inhumane lockdowns must have been like for people here. We were grateful we could come and go as we pleased, although having arrived and walked up 14 flights of stairs we weren’t going anywhere, we were well past ready for bed. We’d eaten the lunch leftovers in the late afternoon, and we still had some steamed sweet potato we’d bought earlier in the day. So we ate those, put on a load of washing,
took a shower, and went to bed in a sauna of an apartment with wet towels covering us. It was coolish outside, but these apartment buildings are heat banks. The motorway the apartment towers were built beside finally quietened late in the night, and we awoke to rain, coolness in the streets, and a Chinese tea set.
Just near to the apartment we found a friendly little restaurant. We ordered just two bowls this time,
and shared them between us as we are learning the portions here are often very generous. This delicious noodle soup breakfast cost just AU$4, and we were invited to keep refilling our bowls at no extra expense. It was at this meal we quite suddenly fell in love with China. Despite the unpleasant surveillance state and the attempt of Maoists in the twentieth century to eradicate the past, China still holds its deep cultural roots dear. Its soul is still intact, as are the souls of many of the people we are meeting.
Every meal we’ve eaten in this country has been outstanding. This lovely fella approached us after breakfast and asked whether we needed anything.
Steve has been learning English for several years and we shared some lovely moments together outside the restaurant. Our endorphins were tripping after our warm, albeit brief exchange. We DiDi’d back across the city to Kunming Station, noticing the old and new of China intersecting in many places.
Mobile phone towers proliferated the motorways,
and millions of rusting solar hot water systems sat upon apartment rooftops alongside their associated stainless steel header tanks.
We bought some more fruit at the station and went through several thresholds again to check in,
having to line up and scan our passports (the locals had their Digital Identity cards scanned) twice in the space of seven minutes. We witnessed one man being sent back because of a problem with his ID card. He was distraught.
The volume and scale of everything in China is incredible. The train we booked to Xichang was 16 carriages long. We were in carriage 15, which took about a half kilometre fast walk down the platform to board on time. Many had to work hard to get to carriage 16 before the train left.
Once again we settled in with our various books, audiobooks and writing projects, and travelled under ground for much of the trip. Each time the train resurfaced we were met with intense cultivation,
even on the drier, rocky hilltops perennial tree crops were growing.
These fast trains travel at around 165km/hr. We arrived at Xichang Station in the afternoon,
and DiDi’d into town.
We were dropped off in this leafy street,
where we had booked this comfortable room, the cheapest we could find in the city at AU$60 a night.
We dropped our bags and went exploring, finding we were in a neighbourhood full of sleepy fruit merchants.
Woody was thrilled. Many people work hard in China, and they take sleep whenever they can get it.
The family run hotel we were staying in was again a friendly place, and in the evening the team helped us to navigate our way to get to the opening of the Torch Festival, which was occurring in the city.
The Torch Festival is an annual traditional festival of the Yi minority. Fire is the symbol of the Yi people’s pursuit of light, and is believed to have the ability to drive away insects and pests, and protect the growth of crops.
Whatever went on there, we’d missed it by the time we arrived, but nonetheless soaked up the afterglow.
There was such a buzz about the place,
and many people asked us to take pictures with them. We obliged and had a lot of fun taking pictures with strangers. We woke the next day to this rather prosaic but nonetheless interesting view from our room window.
By mid morning we farewelled our happy hosts,
walked back to the street stall holders to stock up on fruit that didn’t require a knife,
admired the chickens and the wonderful characters selling produce on the street,
and spoke English with the brothers (the one-child policy ended in 2016),
while we waited for our fast ride,
with a Didi driver wanting to be a F1 driver, back to Xichang Station.
Agricultural crops are grown right up to and throughout the cities, and even right up to the train tracks at Xichang Station. We are continually amazed by the intensity of production.
There is something very special about this country – the people, the food, the buzz on the streets. And one of the things that enamours us most is the clean air. While we’re not green tech enthusiasts and we know e-cars are just another industrial revolution that will continue to mine, deplete and poison the world, the lack of motor exhaust pollution makes being in this heavily populated country an absolute pleasure.
After another four hours on a fast train we arrived at the city of Chengdu in Sichuan province, the gateway to Tibet.
Our first hotel in this city, again the cheapest we could find at AU$60 a night, was the filthiest we’ve stayed in for our entire trip. It was situated beside a large teaching hospital,
and in the morning we woke to a street-wide blackout that went on until after we’d left for some damn-delicious dumplings for breakfast.
Meg did some more research and found us another hotel room. It is the fanciest we’ve stayed in on our trip so far, but for the same price as the previous night. We’ve been spoilt outside Australia, being able to get goodly rooms for between $15-$40 a night throughout southeast Asia. We know back in Australia the same rooms would all be over $120, which is why we travelled the Australian leg with a tent and sleeping bags.
While few people speak English in China, every second person wears a t-shirt with English words written on them, or printed on walls are philosophical phrases or advice in English, sometimes making sense, but often lost in translation.
We’ve also noticed the absence of street dogs in these modern cities, which is very different by comparison with the rest of Asia, though people’s pet dogs do hang out on the street, occasionally.
We did, however, in the last days of our time in China when we stayed in a more remote village, come across street dogs, this one suffering terribly from mange.
We love the bike culture in the cities. People don’t as much own them but hire them, and it is interesting that even though the state is obviously very controlling here in certain ways, it is not stupidly paternalistic like Australia when it comes to things like helmet wearing. Personal accountability and personal choice, when it comes to safety, is obviously left for grown adults to decide. We’re impressed by this.
In Chengdu, Woody hired a bike and for the two kilometres or so he rode it, cost a mere AU 20 cents. We’re also impressed by this.
While we have found the excessive camera surveillance here disconcerting,
we have also found people largely ignore the militaristic over-shadowing of their lives. People break rules here, for example they smoke in non-smoking areas. While we personally don’t like having to smoke passively, we do like the spirit of the rule breaking.
Meg hasn’t been able to work at all in China as they ban Zuckerberg and Google products. They also ban Substack. We can understand the Chinese government banning the US spy corporations Facebook and Google, as these bastard companies are censorship dogs that collude with the US government, eroding democratic diversity and political dissident reach, and censored thousands of vaccine injured people trying to tell their stories. So, we’re glad these companies are being punished by China. But Substack? Really? This important independent publishing platform is where all the independent academics, artists, thinkers and journalists who still have their integrity in tact gather their writings, and it enables readers to transition away from the court journalism of legacy media and the predators at Facebook and Google.
A former student of the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Sunshine Yang, who we recorded a podcast with earlier in the year, told us back then, “People do whatever they like in China, they just don’t criticise the government.” We’re publishing this post before we have left the country. We hope the feedback here is taken in the right spirit.
Examples of beautiful acts of anarchy amongst all the 2030 smart city correctness being grown here in China, are the many marvellous gleaners that, like the street stall folk, bring a poetic to otherwise homogenised and boring modern streets.
The regular traffic too has a beauty in its anarchy and wildness of flow. Cyclists and scooters dart every which way and even against the traffic, bringing a feralty to the streets. Jay-walking too! We’re glad we’re not driving in Chinese cities, being a pedestrian is a wild ride enough. While there are obvious strictures on peoples’ lives here, in all the cities we have visited we haven’t seen anyone homeless, drug or alcohol affected, and people are able to raise money in novel, autonomous ways in public. This family (below) is attempting to raise money for an expensive treatment for their sick child. We don’t know enough about the healthcare system here to adequately comment, but obviously not everything is covered by a universal healthcare system, which you’d think by being in a communist country would exist. Cuba is an excellent example of medicine-for-the-people, but perhaps China has followed the toxic US model of medicine-for-Pharma-profits. We don’t know. The reason we know a little of these people’s sad story is we downloaded an app that converts photographs of Chinese text into English.
Sunshine, from afar (she is travelling in West Africa currently), and a group of lovely Tibetan women we met on the street,
all gave us goodly information about how we might travel to Tibet and enter India from there. We have read that foreigners need to apply for a special visa, which takes about 20 days and we need to go with a registered tour company. The problem we are having is we only have a two week visa for China, and we also don’t want to return to Chengdu after Tibet. The stipulation is we must be accompanied the whole time by the tour guide company. But we need to travel on from Tibet to India. While we are enjoying Chengdu city, and admiring the traces of ecological culture within this now very high-tech country,
and laughing at the hubris of the greenwash,
and playing music together,
and eating consistently wonderful meals on the streets,
and coming face to face with some confronting things –
this little one, with a AU$2000 price tag, was scratching on the glass, desperately trying to get out, if only they were able to play together –
we are at the same time cobbling together plans for the next leg of our journey.
Sunshine found for us the name of a Tibet tour guide called Harry. She has been going out of her way to help us. She told us Harry could get a visa in five working days. We contacted him, excitedly, and shared our travel wishes and our time frame, and he got back to us confirming he indeed could get us visas to travel on the world’s highest altitude and highly affordable railway for 35 hours to Lhasa in Tibet, and from there he would escort us to the Nepalese border. Yay! We were so excited when we heard the news. The train ticket was only around $100 each for all that way. The Ghan railway in Australia, by comparison, is thousands of dollars. Half an hour later, however, Harry contacted us saying that the most significant festival in the year is taking place now in Lhasa, called the Shoton (or yoghurt banquet) Festival, and there is no way the officials will be able to supply a visa in such a short time. Oh no! We are so disappointed. How are we going to get to India from here?
We have come so close to getting through to India overland or by boat, sans a short flight from Darwin to Timor-Leste. All the other borders where India meets Chinese territory are not open, and they are contested, heavily militarised zones. The two countries have longstanding disputes with each other, although relations may be warming as they are both in the original BRICS currency challenge to the dominance of the US dollar and western financial institutions.
We are looking into flying from Chengdu to Kathmandu, but the flooding and land slides covering roads to the south of Kathmandu towards the Indian border is making that option look dubious, too. So we are spending a few more days in China, in a village outside Chengdu, called Lujing, which is a little wilder,
where the locals brew booze from their rice,
and dry their own corn,
and enjoy their street life,
while we gather our thoughts, do more research, and see how else we might get to India. We are so close, yet still so far away.
Thank you for following our journeys, Dear Reader. When we leave China in the next few days we will be two months into our four month journey. We have travelled such a long way from our beloved home and community in Djaara Mother Country, thank you for coming along with us. Signing off for now, hoping you are well, eating nourishing food and breathing clean air, whatever part of the world you call home.
