In praise of the humble wheelbarrow (or, What Luddites can teach us today)

Feb 25, 2026 | animals in subsistence permaculture, appropriate technology, Authoritarian Technics, belonging economies, Big Tech, books we are reading, capitalism, collapse, Collective preparedness, commons, community sufficiency, earth stewardship, ecological economy making, enclosures, fear, food sovereignty, government, home economies, Hypertechnocivility, industrial progress, lifemaking, lifetaking, Luddite, politics, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, reculturing, relocalisation, revillaging, salvaging, School of Applied Neopeasantry, state-corporate nexus, story, subsistence economy, terra nullius, the commons, time, unpopular politics, witch hunts | 23 comments

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.

And yes, we are among the freest people we know.

Mother Country & Father Fire (a winter solstice story)

Jun 22, 2025 | agriculture, biodiversity, biology, bushfires, celebration, ceremony & ritual, change, civil violence, colonialism, culture, Djaara mother country, earth stewardship, ecological crises, ecological knowledges, energy descent, Father Fire, fire, First People, interspecies relating, lifemaking, love, magic, Mother Country, myth, peace, post-industrial thought, story, storytelling, winter solstice | 14 comments

A story by Blue Wren (15 mins; read and/or listen).

Not being able to find a suitable myth to share for winter solstice, given the emplacing context of our lives in Djaara Country, as the longest night approached Blue Wren listened and opened, and in came this story. This offering was just one of many stories, poems and songs shared on the night of our community solstice celebration. We hope you enjoy this insight into our ceremonial night in our deep winter forest commons, held by Mother Country & Father Fire.

Once within a fairly timeless land, Mother Country and Father Fire ruled the earth-well worlds of the world. Wedded in exquisite union they lived harmoniously for all of days. Father Fire only a subtle disruptor, a gentle gleam in the dark, wet primordial forests of the Mother, and brought to earth by Grandfather Sun to warm, to illuminate and cook, to potash, and help make ceremony in the luscious belly of Mother Country.

One day Mother Country and Father Fire brought to life a new child, who they named Brother Eucalyptus. He grew out of the light, dusty potash of his father and the rich dark humus of his mother. He began life on the margins of great wet, shade-lit forests. Born a needy, troubled soul he soon began fighting with his siblings, especially Sister Southern Beech who ranged across her Mother with great presence. He felt unseen by his accomplished sister, and would often be found moping about on the rare scab lands of his mother.

His siblings, on the whole, found him crass and quite acidic, and they increasingly turned their backs on him, and from this grave wound of rejection he developed poison in his roots that he began to use on his Brothers and Sisters, releasing it whenever they came close. At first this didn’t matter too much, his territories were small compared with Sister Southern Beech. So, initially, no one really noticed, but gradually Brother Eucalyptus took more and more of his mother’s nutrients and life force and land for himself, and everywhere he grew the ground dried and hardened. He discovered that his inflaming disposition was conducive to making wildfire, and so he conspired to steal fire-craft from his father so that he could both poison and burn his overbearing sister and populate himself in her ruins.

One Brother, however, he could not poison or burn very well. Brother Blackwood – an inspired peacemaker – learned how to play companion to his greedy brother. Because Brother Blackwood could see his Mother suffering and depleted, he taught himself to swallow surplus quantities of nitrogen out of the air, plant himself next to Brother Eucalyptus wherever he was, and release the precious goods into his brother’s roots. Brother Blackwood taught Sisters Silver and Black Wattles to do the same, and soon they took away some of the burden off their mother. While this gift helped their mother to keep the cycles of living and dying rolling, Brother Eucalyptus continued to expand his range, causing ever greater drying and unruly fires.

For the first time in their long union, Mother Country and Father Fire began to argue. “I am the dark, Father Fire,” said Mother Country, “all the shade-filled forests, rich humus, subterranean springs, night countries and underworlds of my body enable more life to be lived. That boy is destroying me, stealing all my earth-givings. You have given him fire and he is burning all my beautiful daughters and sons. Enough is enough!” But Father Fire hadn’t given his errant son the magic and responsibility of fire. It had been stolen, like it had been stolen from Hephaestus, the industry god, by Prometheus in another world. In frustration Father Fire retorted: “Do not accuse me woman, I would not do such a thing! That boy is disrespecting me too; he is out of control!” And so went the argument for an age, backwards and forwards went their unhappiness. All the plants and fungi, the lichens, mosses, and lillies, the kestrels, wedgetails, fantails, magpies, wrens, ravens and robins, the brown snakes and black, echidnas, ringtails and owls, and all of life suffered as the parents warred, and Brother Eucalyptus continued on with his wound-rage.

Mother Country became weaker and weaker, Sister Southern Beech almost entirely disappeared, and neither of the parents could bring Brother Eucalyptus into alignment with life.

It was around this point in the story, the First People arrived. Gradually they learned to live within some of the world’s most depleted soils, and they thrived along the coasts due to the abundance of Grandmother Gaia’s many saltwater countries. After some time of listening, languaging and making ceremony, the First People began to better understand the familial feud between the great mother and father and their narcissist son. So everywhere they lived the First People dreamed with Mother Country and Father Fire and co-created rituals for deep listening and subsistence lifeways to live well with the communities of life so as to heal the rift between dark and light, heat and damp, the sacred feminine and sacred masculine, and in doing, bringing the parents of the land back into relationship.

And through this three-way alliance they developed the wisdom of fire-country land stewardship, which had the result of arresting the main harms of Brother Eucalyptus. The way the First People harnessed, respected and applied Father Fire to Mother Country, understanding each region of her in relation to fuel loads, air currents and zephyrs, ground moisture, and the propensity for potash to grow more woody life, deepened over time, and depending on where it was applied, the First People modified their practice, which brought abundance back into the belly of Mother Country. There was to be no significant return of Sister Southern Beech, and old Uncle Holly and Aunty Ivy had long since gone, but despite the morbid depletion of Mother Country, the communities of life that make life worth living began to live again, and people and plants, birds, snakes and pollinators, reptiles and marsupials developed new ways to live a good life among the scant humus and acidic soils.

Sure, there were usual human skirmishes between First Peoples, between different tribes and clans, men and women, but the unhappy colonial story of Brother Eucalyptus now guided all comers. He operated as a precautionary tale across the land. No one wanted to go back to the suffering when such total recklessness and selfishness reigned. So, for many millennia a tapestry of cultures and customs, languages and ceremonies were traded with life, with one another, and First People developed sophisticated lores pertaining to the laws of the mother and father, and a deep and abiding peace spread out across this first great era of energy descent. Even Brother Eucalyptus found some peace. It did not stop his over-taking, burning and poisoning ways, but he felt more himself in the bosom of life, rather than the sole destroyer of it.

Then, half a million new moons later upon the now spongey and rain-absorbing perennial-bread grasslands of the Mother, like a wicked spell unleashed to once again test life, wretched and trammelled First Peoples from northern lands began to arrive. The First People here came to refer to these malnourished and decultured folk as Second Peoples, because they could see they’d lost connection with their great mother and father, and therefore with the dark and the light in dynamic union. Tragically, the Second People didn’t realise how fallen from this grace they had become. They believed they carried the light better than anyone and they swore against the dark, were frightened by it, wanted to kill it off in any way they could. Their transported ideologies feared dark consciousness, feared the secreted mysteries of the divine feminine. These light-obsessed poor souls brought with them technics and poisons that were godlike and dangerous for such misshapen peoples to be playing with, and they brought an attitude of superiority, despite their wretchedness.

Much like in the early years of Brother Eucalyptus, they set out to dominate Mother Country, rob from her, and deplatform the ceremonial illuminations of Father Fire and the rich mother-bonded cultures of the First Peoples. Instead of opening with curiosity to the wisdoms of the earthly parents, they brought only one skygod with them who seemed to diminish the great Mother and her daughters. The Second Peoples had received their unilateral story delivered by the messenger, War-Brother Wheat, who had first come into presence when there were many gods and goddesses in the north who tended life. His affect eventually led to the stripping of animist cosmologies and to the development of horse-mobile armies of scale. Some Second People came to here in chains, some desperate to overcome poverty, some were what some call ‘free’, and some were mercantiles civil-ready to coordinate a mass exploitation of what some still call ‘resources’ – that is the gifts of the Mother.

Second Peoples caused untold suffering far worse than in the heady days of Brother Eucalyptus’s fury. For two hundred years most Second People found it hard to listen to Mother Country and Father Fire, they didn’t even consider it. Though some found them a novelty, they also didn’t listen to First People, and either didn’t look or joined in when First People were persecuted, debased and massacred. However, slowly and quietly Mother Country seeped her wisdom into the Second Peoples who lived in her – the farmers and hunters, the gardeners and gleaners, the swimmers of her dark snakey waterholes and the underworlders of her caves, remnant forests and bones.

Eventually the Second People felt the call to make rituals and ceremonies that honoured Mother Country and Father Fire, which derived from the gratitude they felt by living, and the sorrow they felt for the disrespect and war-mind their people had transported. They began quite naively by worshipping Brother Eucalyptus as pure and original and distinguished, despite the many new deserts he was making in other worlds at this point. And they, these well-intentioned folk, hated on the newcomer trees they’d brought with them such as fire-calming Brother Oak, who’d made immediate friends with Brother Blackwood and who brought alkalising, deciduous leaves to Mother Country to help her make humus and balance the acidic and depleting effects of Brother Eucalyptus. Likewise, another newcomer, Sister Hawthorn, brought the possibility of habitat for possums and rich medicine fruits for gang gangs and humans alike. Sister Willow was another brought to Mother Country, and who in their civil-centric guilt began to bulldoze and poison with impunity, as though they could cleanse the creeks and rivers of their forebears’ sins. This was before Second People realised the importance of Sister Willow as a nurse tree trying to restore gold- and livestock-ravaged waterways, and before remembering her gift as a basket tree when they began to walk back plastic bags.

As Second People started to turn away from Roundup-Ready War-Brother Wheat, and the other monocultures of the mind they’d transported, they began to walk with renewal and humility in their steps, alongside their First People friends and kin. One such ceremony they came together to perform was the winter solstice – the divine honouring of the feminine dark at Mother Country’s longest hour. At this ceremony they reflected upon the majesty of Mother Country – her givings, her wisdoms, her riches and her grace.

On the occasion of the winter solstice they, the people of the land, alongside Brothers Eucalyptus, Oak, Pine and Blackwood, and Sisters Cherry Ballart, Sweet Bursaria, New Holly and Hawthorn came together to sing, share story, behold the longest night and feast on the fruits and meats of Mother Country, while warmed and illuminated by the old glorious sunlight of Father Fire.

For this is a time for reculturing harmony and love between feminine and masculine, dark and light, both within ourselves and across the bodies and psyches of our kinship other. It is a time to make humus, make rituals of gratitude and return, and to honour Mother Country for all her gifts, and for teaching us how to heal from the wounds of war, and live and love alongside her within the many underworlding possibilities of her dark.

Thanks to Jordan Osmond for the cover photograph and Catie Payne for the use of her microphone.

Yarning with Derrick Jensen (on writing, civilisation, experts, storying, bear cubs, and more)

May 28, 2025 | Authoritarian Technics, civil violence, colonialism, Conspiracy theorists, Djaara mother country, eldership, experts, gender-lopsidedness, humanure, hunting, Hypertechnocivility, Indigenous knowledges, Industry science, interspecies relating, lifemaking, locavorism, Mother Country, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, permapoesis, poetry, politics, post-industrial thought, reculturing, regenerative culture, story, writing | 10 comments

Patrick yarned with environmental writer Derrick Jensen this morning and we present their conversation here, in its entirety. We hope you enjoy this weaving, wefting, circling, listening and sharing.

Here is the audio (1hr, 11mins),

And here is the vision.

Produced by Meg with assistance from Beck Lowe and Derrick’s friend Heather.

An honouring of Dave Holmgren (at the celebration of his 70th orbit around the great ball of fire)

Apr 6, 2025 | celebration, David Holmgren, eldership, energy descent, humanure, Industrial culture, lifemaking, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, permapoesis, politics, post-industrial thought, praise, radical homemakers, speech, story, village rebuilding | 25 comments

Our cherished friend and community elder, David Holmgren (below left), best known for being the co-originator of the permaculture concept, turned 70 this year, and to celebrate, a small group gathered under the grandmother pear tree at his home, Melliodora, to share food and to honour this special man in our lives, and the lives of so many.

People offered various forms of praise and story in what became an open-mic-this-is-your-life-Dave-Holmgren kind of event. Patrick prepared this honouring, which we are sharing with you today. Here’s the audio and the text, if you wish to read along (10 mins).

And here is the man with Patrick’s praise, taller than the man himself.

How has David, and his work, affected your life, Dear Reader? Your anecdotes and stories are most welcome.

Thanks Ian Lillington for the first photo and Su for the second.

Artist as Family’s all-day house and garden tour (subsistence permaculture and belonging economies in action)

Oct 30, 2024 | Artist as Family tour, belonging economies, biodiversity, community sufficiency, eldership, energy descent, fermenting, food medicine, food sovereignty, foraging, fruit trees, garden design, gift economy, goats, harvesting, health, home economies, humanure, interspecies relating, lifemaking, locavorism, low-carbon, medicinal plants, neopeasant education, permaculture, politics, preserving, radical homemakers, reculturing, regenerative culture, regenerative farming, relationships, School of Applied Neopeasantry, social warming, story, the commons, transitional communities, uncapitalised food, uncapitalised medicine, village rebuilding, walked-for food, wood energy | 13 comments

Are you needing renewed motivation and focus in your transition to a more resilient lifeway? Are you curious about how our family lives at home with little reliance on civilisation’s industrial machine? Do you feel economically trapped? Do you sense economic and political troubles ahead and want to better future-proof your household? Are you wanting to live with less debt and more relationship with the living of the world? Are you wanting to say, Fuck off! to all the con men and women (the captains of industries) in the very way that you live, and do this positively? Do you want to embody your politics and values and thus dance your talk? Do you want to learn simple hacks for living with less money and more time? If one or more of these questions resonates, then our all-day house and garden tour might well be for you.

Over the day we will cover self and community care,

re-commoning,

annual vegetables cultivation,

annual vegetable food harvesting,

fermenting

and storing the harvests,

alchemising all manners of substances from one thing

into another,

tending perennial food biomes,

making humus,

changing behaviours,

cultivating eldership,

and generally establishing and maintaining a belonging economy.

Tour details

Date: Sunday 17 November, 10am – 4pm, Djaara Mother Country, central Victoria (address will be supplied with booking).

Topics covered include: community-sufficiency, household economies, replacing fiat with compost, subsistence resilience, access to land, ecological economics, permacultural neopeasantry, fermentation for both thrift and health, organic food that low income households can afford, green gym (or active economics), children in the household biome, transitioning to a non-reliance on predatory capitalism, future proofing by skilling up, food-medicine and active disease prevention, trading fear for empowerment, self-care and unintentional communities and neighbourhoods, composting ideology with joyous pragmatism.

The tour includes: Sharings from Meg, Woody and Patrick; morning tea; a neopeasant lunch with special guests, permaculture elders Su Dennett and David Holmgren; afternoon tea; and plenty of time for questions.

Cost: $100 per person (this is the concession price; feel free to pay more if you would like to further contribute to our work).

Who is it for: The day is informationally dense so we request 16 year olds and up only, please. Participants will need to navigate uneven surfaces and at times rough terrain.

To book: Please message us to book or ask any questions – we@artistasfamily.is

Life in Old Manali (with serpent shysters, apple givers, wool spinners and Gaddi goats)

Sep 12, 2024 | agriculture, appropriate technology, autonomous edibles, beneficial flora, capitalism, climate change, colonialism, community sufficiency, compost, earth stewardship, food sovereignty, lifemaking, locavorism, medicinal plants, post-industrial thought, psychoactive plants, social warming, story, subsistence economy, weeds, wood energy | 32 comments

Little did we know it then,

but we were about to enter a temporary insanity zone. It was 8.25am at the Dharamshala local bus station and the Manali-destined bus driver was saying his prayers to an electric blue Shiva.

We left at 8.30am and drove into the mayhem of the morning.

We hung on,

and our bones rattled to every thrust and jerk, pothole and near miss. Elbows were uncontrolled and often connected with heads,

We had had such a charmed and magical fortnight in Dal Lake. It was time we fucked things up. The bus only slowed up a tad when things got really close,

otherwise it was an 11 hour near-death adventure, the driver maximising the g-forces of the black-cloud-generating-metal-box we were travelling in, racing at gaps in the traffic, breaking hard to avoid road craters or cows or people or trucks, and often driving on the oncoming traffic’s side of the road.

We copped dust and petroleum fumes as they streamed in the open windows.

This rites of passage into the belly of daily experience on a local bus in India gave us further insight into just how mortality-fearing society is in Australia. We felt this in ourselves. It was for us another process of giving up on what we thought was common and logical, and accepting what is.

We arrived late to a hotel that boasted online rooms in the centre of town. It’s true, it was in the centre of town, but not the town we had searched for and thought we’d booked. The room was filthy and didn’t in the slightest way fit the online description, but we didn’t care. We crashed and awoke to a bright new day.

We auto’d several kilometres to Manali and then onto Old Manali,

where we found this lovely, sunlit room.

While in India and other countries in Asia, we have combated the all night dog barking parties by turning the ceiling fan on a low settling and drowning them out with this white noise. While this room didn’t have a fan, it was situated beside the Beas River, which offered a more perfect muffling from a quite different electrical source.

In cooler Old Manali we came across old friends and didn’t realise how much we’d missed them. Old friends like dandelion and clover,

mallow

and apples,

and nasturtium, which we found growing beside cannabis, which doesn’t grow wild back home.

As we walked the streets and hills, we adults foraged a small amount of seeds and took a micro-dose for three consecutive mornings, once again confirming this medicinal flora isn’t for us. But this plant is for some, and Patrick wrote a poem about a notable cultural group who have made Old Manali a transitory home, and who like to partake.

Beside writing poems, Patrick likes to make things with his hands. We came across Tisha in her shop and we enquired about local Manali wool. She told us to come back in two days, and when we did she had just finished the spinning of a 1kg ball, which we bought from her.

Patrick cut some local willow,

stripped the bark and dried the branches in the window,

cut them to size,

put a rounded point on each one, and got knitting.

He was shown how to knit as a kid by his mum, and has passed this skill onto his boys. Throughout our time in Manali, the ball of wool and the willow needles accompanied us everywhere.

Like Woody’s cricket bat being a calling card for a game or a yarn, Patrick’s fibres of both wool and beard have introduced us to many, including Jimmy,

We were never too far from the source here, of everything. Of water,

of the valley of the gods,

of the givers of apples (thanks Raj!),

of Deodara cricket forests,

of pack anarchy,

and pack horses,

of snake charmers

(who turn trickster at the point of the money shot),

and of Gaddi people and their flerds (flock of sheep and herd of goats combined).

The source of our greatest love in Manali where for these humble, present people and their mythological animals.

We watched the Gaddi herd their sheep and goats through the towns,

and set up camp for the night.

We feel such kinship with Gaddi folk and the oldtimer orchardists in Manali.

When we tell people here we grow apples and tend sheep and goats their eyes light up, as did the lady gardening outside her house when we stopped to admire her magnificent creativity.

While much of India is going down to development dogs like Adani and his corrupted political mates, the soul of India remains in the land and the people who tend it. And while trickster energy is present again in Manali, in people and other mammals,

we met many who have not covered their eyes, blocked their ears or masked their mouths to what is going on. Road development, according to Sohan, who ran Dream River guesthouse we stayed at, is the main cause for the increase of flooding and landslides in the north of India, yet it is always reported climate change is the sole culprit in the news. He said, “the road workers are told to dump tonnes of boulders and rock from the cuttings into the rivers, raising the water levels, and the cuttings themselves into the sides of mountains bring about more landslides. The combination of the two in monsoonal rain times are wreaking havoc.”

Tourism and mining are big business here, and better roads mean more money for ‘development’. The social and ecological impacts of such capitalist enterprise in India are palpable. A local Manali man told us that since the 1960s the forest tribal people, the Baiga, have been victims of forced evictions by Indian authorities, often in the name of conservation. The Baiga also live where Adani and co want to mine for coal. With similar intransigence, concrete in India is the answer to all construction today, yet the intensity of rain, the steepness of mountains, and the cost-cutting by business means that concrete structures are forever falling apart. Great chunks of new road or retaining walls are regularly washed away or collapse. The more cuttings into a mountain, the more problems it causes.

It is the old ways being lived in the contemporary moment that charmed us most about Old Manali and this region. Not because we are romantics, but because we are also pragmatic performers of ancestral lifeways in the contemporary moment. Our methods are different back home, and our tools sometimes too, but we also make compost to grow more life,

store and dry wood for the winter,

ferment things,

carry fodder to our animals,

collect apples,

and store them,

and build in ways that don’t cost the earth.

For in our ancestral bodies and minds we are the us in them. There is no and. There are only lives embedded in the processes of lifemaking, in the continuum of living and dying. All the craft beer joints, wifi accessibility, bourgeois coffee houses, demanding tourists and major roads leading to lithium or coal mines will not improve India, as with everywhere else, these things will only impoverish it.

Life in Old Manali and its region is rich because of the attributes of mother country here,

and dangerous, offering a tender closeness with death.

Life here has stung us,

and soothed our bodies in hot healing spring water direct from the source.

We didn’t get to play much cricket with others, although a spontaneous game popped up in the town square on one occasion,

however, we did get to spend most days among giants.

Hoping you too have spent time this week among giants, dear reader. And among friends. Thank you for joining us on this leg.

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