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A selection of our writings from 2009 to the present. If you'd like to keep up to date with our latest posts, please subscribe below.

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Category: time

Mapping Our Menu

Feb 5, 2010 | family, food, street food, time | 1 comment
For the next three years, Patrick will be a student again, undertaking research for his doctoral thesis in the areas of ecology and poetics. Part of his research is to document our family’s transition from being oil dependent to as self-sufficient as we can be in terms of water, energy and food.

We have solar panels, water tanks and bikes. But what about our food?

We have been spending a lot of time in the garden talking about what it will take for our family to become self-sustaining in terms of what we eat. So, to determine how far we have to go, we decided to mark the beginning of our journey by spending 24 hours eating the food we have growing here in our garden or provided by our chickens, and the public food we are able to forage locally. No salt and pepper, no butter, oil or any condiments. We only drank our own rain water. We didn’t drive anywhere all day and we didn’t spend any money.

7:06 am
7:08 am
7:10 am
7:13 am
7:20 am
7:26 am
9:32 am
9:35 am
9:48 am
11:07 am
11:35 am
11:45 am
12:39 pm
12:44 pm
1:24 pm
5:12 pm
7:46 pm
7:50 pm
8:13 pm
8:27 pm
As you can see, we by no means went hungry, though we all lacked energy throughout the day, had headaches at one time or another, and felt lackluster.

Patrick: I experienced a mild depression along with a headache. As the head gardener in the Artist as Family, I know how much work it takes to generate our own food, and this challenge – or experiment – really emphasised the enormous task we have of becoming self-sufficient.

Zephyr: Just before lunch I had a nap!! I haven’t done that since I was three years old.

Meg: I had a meeting to attend in the afternoon. While I was sitting in it, I couldn’t help but feel that the issues that were being discussed that I normally feel are vital and worth discussing, were completely irrelevant compared to the imperative issue of finding food for one’s self and one’s family.

40% of greenhouse gases come from industrial agriculture (supermarket food): pesticides, fertilisers, tractors, harvesters, packaging, transportation, refrigeration, lighting etc. Food prices are only going to rise courtesy of peak oil. Communities that start to plan for energy descent now will be better off in the long run. What the Artist as Family is learning, is that relocalisation is a several year transition.

17 Days

Oct 11, 2009 | beach, family, social warming, time | 4 comments
Well, our residency has come to an end. In 17 days, we have collected much rubbish and many friends. We love Newcastle and are sorry to leave, though we are looking forward to returning to our community, our garden and our chickens. To everybody we met, thank you for making us feel so welcome, and to everybody who followed our journey on this blog, thank you so much for your support.

But before we bid you adieu for now, we hope you enjoy this short film about our time here. Until next time, signing off, The Artist as Family.

Thirsty Work

Oct 10, 2009 | beach, bottled water, government, plastic, time, waste | 1 comment
Now that our Lock-Up exhibition has been and gone, today we relaxed somewhat. Meg and Zeph took to the streets on their bikes as sightseers and Patrick worked on the film.

The lady behind the counter of the kiosk at Newcastle Main Beach told us that the local council asked them not to sell any drinks in glass as they are likely to end up smashed and injuring someone. So instead they only sell plastic bottles that get left on the sand or placed into one of the many bins that go straight to landfill sites without being sorted. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Today as we navigated the beaches and streets, we were very impressed at how many water bubblers we came across – a fantastic council initiative to encourage people to rehydrate without having to pay money for a disposable bottle.

Never Mind

Oct 6, 2009 | bottled water, plastics, recycling, time | 7 comments
Our camera stopped working yesterday, a terrible thing to happen to a family of bloggers. This image is one of the last shots we took of our pile before it flipped out.

This morning we biked to a service centre from where we are hoping to hear good news. The technician we spoke to said she would do her best, though she was hesitant to say she could fix it, because it is six years old.

“Why spend money fixing an old camera when you can spend less getting a brand new model?” She asked. A valid question. If you are talking about the cost of things in dollars.

“Because we subscribe to the Repair Manifesto,” we told her.

“I’m glad there are people like you,” she smiled. “Otherwise I’d be out of a job.”

As we left the service centre and pedalled towards the beach, we all agreed that that Repair should be added to the Reduce. Reuse. Recycle trinity. We can definitely see the merit of the first two actions, but the third? It’s no wonder it features so far down the waste hierarchy:

When people choose to buy bottled water instead of soft drinks, the individual health benefits may be high, but the energy spent and pollution created to drink (or eat) anything from disposables has a great societal toll, regardless of what the vessel holds.

Every day as we bend to pick up forlorn plastic bottles on whichever beautiful beach we are on, we marvel at the complete lack of care exhibited by those who litter. But today on the beach, as we collected we talked about people, ourselves included, who buy packaged drink or food and then put the waste in a recycling or regular bin, thinking we’ve done the right thing.

Lest we feel too hopeful that we can properly process the waste we have collected over the last 12 days, here’s Donovan Hohn to set us straight:

Never mind that only 5 percent of plastics actually end up getting recycled. Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling method exists. Never mind that plastics consume about 400 million tons of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas may very well run out in the not too distant future. Never mind that so-called green plastics made of biochemicals require fossil fuels to produce and release greenhouse gases when they break down…

How Did We Get Here?

Sep 29, 2009 | food, social warming, time, waste | 3 comments
It doesn’t look like much, just a regular pile of beach flotsam that one would ordinarily walk right past. But when you spend all day at the beach looking down at such debris, you see the small aqua square of plastic, the cigarette butt and the top of the icy-pole stick. We could have chosen a photo containing far more waste but thought we’d use this one to give you an indication of the minutiae of so many of our minutes.

Although we still picked up the larger trash items today, we mainly concentrated on the small. Slowing down and focusing gave us time to contemplate and wonder and ask, How did we get here? How did we arrive at a place in our society that nearly every broken wave upon a beach contains some fragment, however small, of oil-based waste?

These questions make us think about this book, that we adults were both read as kids. We bought it for Zeph a few days ago in an op shop, for him to find on our shelves when he becomes more curious.

The questions we asked ourselves today both started and ended with these foodstuffs, gifted to us by Gerry, the Director of the Lock-Up and the co-keeper of the soil and chickens from whence these goods did come. We are missing our garden and our hens so these gifts are much appreciated.

To help us answer the question of how our culture got so tangled up in this anthropocentric mess we looked to the walls of the Lock-Up’s exercise yard for some answers.

Each marking tells a story of circumstance and place, that is rich with history and individual misfortune, but doesn’t quite answer our question as specifically or collectively as we’d hoped.

Our search continues.

About Time

Sep 26, 2009 | art, beach, bikes, family, gleaning, time, waste | 4 comments
Having our residency in an old jail really pronounces our ideas about time and how we choose to spend it. One of the important aspects of our project is time decompression. This morning we woke to blustery dustery gales outside, which would have made it difficult to ride our bikes anywhere. Although we were free to leave the building, we still felt like prisoners of sorts.

The This is Not Art festival starts this coming Thursday, so we are pressed for time to get some kind of exhibition of our work ready. Having a looming booming deadline is a great motivator, but it’s also a great tool for compressing time. Today we tried to strike the balance of working towards something and drifting at the pace of our own clocks.

After the wind quietened down, we biked here and there, picking up rubbish as we went, ending up like storm-water inevitably does, at the beach.

Our goal was to pick up as much plastic as we could to add to what we have collected up until now:

The beaches here are so beautiful, one of the reasons we thought Newcastle the ideal place for an Artist as Family adventure. While the littlest artist busied himself with paying homage to the land art movement of the 60s,

we two older ones combed the beach for waste, looking much like our chickens at home do as they forage in the soil for grubs.

Here’s a pic of what we found today, soaking in the sink when we got home.