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!
Ordinarily we are an arts collective that focuses on what can be done within our homes and communities to be less reliant on what we call, hypertechnocivility. That is, how can we support ourselves and others to transition to non-war economies and lifeways that honour life, land and people. But this post isn’t so much about living the new story, at least not in a local, humus-enriching sense. Rather it’s about marking the next stage in the descent of morality in the west, and the next stage in the diminishment of free speech, especially in relation to Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people.
So here’s the thing. A nation state commits a genocide, murders international journalists, doctors and aid workers, purposely starves home-destroyed peoples by freezing supply lines, ignores international condemnation, meddles in the affairs of other countries by misleadingly collapsing Zionism as the same thing as Judaism, and pressures other nations to adopt harsh new laws that give powers to incarcerate critics of its genocide.
How is this happening? Well, let’s hear from a victim of this state violence.
All terrorism committed by empires are the result of big geopolitical and financial forces, playing to win with little care for the rule of law or international agreements. If you apply first principles to the why and how of the current moment you may also arrive where we have: It is Israel and the US wanting to control the middle east to capitalise on all the lucrative resources in the region. This is about empire domination, and most western countries support it and some get perks for doing so.
Iran is the last significant sovereign state in the middle east standing in the way of total American-Israeli hegemony there. Iranians don’t want an American-Israeli regime change in their country; this is just what western governments and the western corporate media are massaging western peoples on the path to war with Iran.
If you are interested to hear a voice from inside Iran, here’s an academic speaking a few days ago on what he is seeing on the ground in his country. Seyed M Marandi takes us through why recent protests began in Iran, who caused them, who escalated them into terrorism, and what counter protests took place in opposition to the terrorists.
It sounds a little more complex than the ‘Iranians want regime change’ routine we get fed in the west, doesn’t it? Marandi said today about the American-Israeli preparation for war with his country, that “Iran’s sin is that it, alone with its allies, actively supports Palestine and opposes genocide in Gaza.”
This week the Albanese government caved in to the Netanyahu government and to anti-Palestinian hard liners in Australia to bring about a royal commission concerning the Bondi massacre, while at the same time pushing through its ‘Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026’ on January 20. Here is a copy of that draft bill and the memorandum.
The draft states, it’s “immaterial,” whether “the conduct actually results in hatred” or whether anyone “actually” feels intimidated or fears harassment. There is a view (or a political strategy) that criticism of Israel is making people in the Jewish diaspora unsafe, but as Antony Loewenstein, a Jewish Australian journalist argues, this is just a foil for stamping out dissent against genocide and other Israeli atrocities, such as decades of land grabbing in Palestine.
We are a part Jewish household, and proud of it. So please stand with us and millions of others around the world who speak up against the violence imposed by the extremist Israeli regime and its war partner, America.
So what can you can do to help arrest this slide into ever greater authoritarianism and moral decline by western governments using ‘hate’ and ‘safety’ as weapons against peoples’ rights to protest and critique? Send a submission to the Australian Government to reject the draft bill via this page by 4pm tomorrow (15 January, 2026). Share this post because it includes Palestinian, Iranian and Jewish perspectives that are not aligned to the empire. Stay informed using first principles (not team sports) inquiry. And last but not least, steer clear of state-corporate propaganda as the American-Israeli terror alliance escalates its hatred in 2026.
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.
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.
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.
While the electrical experience in Jakarta was fascinating and relatively complex,
the hybrid smog from motor exhaust and cigarettes was heavy going.
We were very much part of the traffic; part of the problem; part of the toxicity. Since arriving in Dili and travelling west by land and sea to Jakarta, we’ve found that hitch hiking is impossible. There are taxi drivers on every street eager to pick up as soon as there’s the smallest intimation that a lift is required. It took about two hours in a cab from the railway station to drive about 20kms, grinding through one continuous traffic jam to where we’d booked a room for a few nights in an apartment building called the Casablanca East Tower.
A $30 a night room with this view.
Since we left Vincent in Surabaya, he being the final thread of relationship woven for us by Yanti way back in Dili, we are socially anchorless in Jakarta. We went in search of connection.
We explored back streets,
and street food warungs,
and were thankful for the delicious gastronomic arts of this city.
We loved the simplicity,
and flavours, and it was here Patrick fell in love with gado gado – an Indonesian salad served with a peanut sauce dressing.
We beheld richness in the poorer suburbs,
and a green emptiness in the bourgeoise ones.
Afternoon storms became a pattern while we were in Jakarta, and we got caught out in one.
Coming across a truck selling sweet potato, our cold climate farming bodies dreamt up crop trials for this coming summer. If tuber vegetables can replace cereals at home, we are another step closer to unshackling from monocultures. While this may sound eco-ideological, it was actually our love of sweet potato for breakfast at Ego and Yanti’s where this desire grew.
We came across a man repairing shoes on the street. Patrick handed his over, and we walked on for a while,
exploring streets inhabited by the transported abundance of Java’s rural productivity,
and stopping here and there to savour the goodly fare.
Between deluges the cobbler had glued, re-stiched and polished Patrick’s shoes. His handiwork cost a mere $3.50.
We were happy to spend a few nights in Jakarta getting high,
and getting down low,
and discovering communities growing food together,
such as Green Farm.
We were happiest in this city either playing music as a family, trying new foods or exploring productive gardens.
However, try as we did with the locals,
we really just consumed food, returned it to leaky, decrepit plumbing systems, and absorbed volumes of pollution. We also got fairly pissed off, at one point.
We booked a boat to the island of Batam, just south of Singapore, and had to stay another night in Jakarta before it set off late the following night. So we took another room in an apartment building. At 9am, dressed and ready to explore the neighbourhood, we caught a lift to the ground floor, only to find we couldn’t get out. We went back up the elevator to a number of floors to try to get help and understand what was going on. One man we met told us people are locked in the building until 10am. WTF! Incredulous, we descended to the basement, budged open a door, and after stumbling around in the dark entered an apocalyptic passageway,
which led to an underground carpark that had no lighting. After a little orientation we came across a bolt of natural sunlight descending into this creepy underworld, indicating a road out. As we entered daylight and approached the security guards lingering at the laneway behind the building – thinking they were going to chastise us for leaving before 10am – Patrick started penning this message on the translation app:
It read: “You cannot incarcerate people in a building against their will, it is an abuse of human rights.” But the guards looked unfazed as we drew up next to them, so we walked on, away from that strange moment into the mayhem of street life, where we practiced the art of crossing busy roads,
by doing what the locals do – walk out in front of the traffic, gesturing to motorists to slow down or stop. We crossed many roads during the morning looking for an op-shop to buy Woody a t-shirt. He’s a fast growing boy, especially in the tropics.
The roads are anarchical here; they hold their own flow and logic,
and while there are few footpaths and everyone seems to drive anywhere they can, including against the traffic, it is not entirely impossible to be a pedestrian.
On our last afternoon in Indonesia’s capital we reflected on the city and its future in an energy descent reality.
There’s a makeshift spirit here and an absence of safetyism that will likely aid residents, and while the examples of retrosuburban farming we saw in the wealthier parts of Jakarta may well keep producer knowledges alive, the infrastructure collapse that is already advanced in this metropolis, could undermine any such resilience.
In our final hours in Jakarta we played music, and slept and swam,
before joining the traffic, again, to the port, to board this boat, the KM Kelud.
We’d wanted economy tickets for both the affordability and sociability but they’d sold out, so we paid for lodgings in bunk rooms.
$70 per bunk for a 40 hour voyage, and all meals included.
We found we were again the only caucasian travellers on the boat sans one young couple, perhaps Dutch, who had no thirst to converse and held a permanent look of worry in their faces. Without any phone signal, our translation app was rendered useless so we defaulted to body language with fellow passengers, were invited many times to make selfie, and practiced what little Indonesian we’ve gathered.
After several weeks of travelling west, we are now heading north again.
On the way to the port the taxi driver warned us about our belongings both at the port and on the boat. We have heeded such advice along the way, and used the lockers provided on the boat, however, neither in Jakarta nor on this boat have we felt unsafe.
We spent July 6 at sea on Indonesian waters, crossing the equator. July 6 is an important day for both Indonesians and West Papuans, as it marks the anniversary of the Biak massacre of possibly hundreds of West Papuans by the Indonesian army, 26 years ago (as Alison Bevege reports). A US mining giant, Freeport, and the Indonesian government make considerable wealth from their joint colonial project in West Papua.
There is no getting away from it, colonisation is insidious. It is in this boat. It is in the food on this boat. It is the fuel powering this boat. Industrial civilisation is nothing more than extravagant displays of colonialism rebranded as global development. While the machine of Empire sets out to conquer and destroy, perhaps all we have as a meaningful antidote is connection, even at 3am when this photo was taken. (From left Jernih, Meg, Shanty and Wenti).
Around 2.30am as we approached Batam our fellow bunk bedders’ phones came to life. It had been an enjoyable 36 hours without signal, but all that changed in the early hours. Phone addiction is next level in Indonesia. It was a media frenzy and we just went along for the ride.
The blurriness of us compared to Jernih and her husband speaks not only of device foreshortening but also of how tired our lil family felt in this moment.
Both nights on the boat our sleep was disturbed with multiple comings and goings of people, as well as their pre-downloaded media, which was played at full volume throughout the night.
We had perhaps vague, even romantic notions of an island oasis before arriving in Batam,
only to find a fully industrial port city,
where the empire had long since come, and dumped its shit.
There were remnants of ecological culture on the street. The indigenous mob here has been reduced to just 5 remaining Orang Darat people.
A culture replaced by a civilisation that has little regard for life.
These practical baskets made us laugh thinking about the local council back home, neatly ticking their sustainability boxes, rolling out ever more coloured plastic bins to the streets to organise (and hide) the various wastes of we residents.
Once again, the pollution was overwhelming in this city, whether it be cigarette smoke, burning plastic waste,
or motor fumes, which sat as an unpleasant smog above this produce market.
Motor bikes and scooters bellowed fumes across all the lovely food tables. The antioxidant medicine of chilli almost negated by the immune wrecking smog.
We bought salak, banana and longans,
and we booked another $30 room for two nights. Patrick slept for two days as he is struggling most with the pollution, while Meg went on little exploratory journeys into the city with Woody, and researched the next leg.
A big part of this trip is to put ourselves in situations where we are out of our comfort zones, to have our Magpie and Blue Wren feathers ruffled, and our Blackwood branches shaken. We are here to learn, to be jimmied open. There are things we keep learning over and over about ourselves. That we are creatures of place, creatures of a sacred Mother Country. This trip is not open ended, and although we are travelling slowly in industrial terms, we are moving quite swiftly towards India. Where we can, we are trying to stay put in one place so we have time and spaciousness to explore where we are, from the inside out. We love markets, hot food warungs, and produce stores, and understanding how other people do food.
The lesson we keep learning over and over is that we are not city people. The hustle and bustle overwhelms us and again and again we gravitate to the backstreets. The side alleys, the quieter moments. Gardens and green spaces, where our lungs and souls can breathe. We are grateful to the cities for enabling our transit, but we don’t understand what they are for and why people choose to live in such places. But that’s of course a long civilisational story, which is different for each of us.
So, here we are. Open and willing to learn, feeling the estrangement while trying to see the beauty of every moment.
