Patrick had the pleasure of speaking with art historian Silvia Bottinelli this morning about her research on the politics and aesthetics of food sovereignty, the origins of her work, and some of the challenges and cultural renewal taking place in art practices that include agrarian nodes.
In a previous video, we offered our contribution to her book, Artists and the Practice of Agriculture, which constitutes an interview Silvia conducted with us a few years ago.
In today’s conversation, Patrick begins by asking Silvia about her origin story into this research.
Hello from our nestings by the fire, preparing for our community’s winter solstice.
We have some news! Happen Films has just released a trailer of their about-to-be premiered feature documentary, The New Peasants, based on our family and community. To some extent we feel a little exposed right now, as this film shares our life, including a very painful family story, to a much bigger audience. However, we are abundantly grateful to Jordan and Antionette at Happen Films, the composer Tommy Castles, and all the crew who worked on it, and we hope it inspires people in their journeys back to being land-bonded peoples in diverse, gallant, soft-hearted, hard-bodied ways.
Before we embed the trailer we’d like to share with you some of the key films that have inspired us along the way. Each film has a unique theme for us, and each has informed and helped us to journey on this path we call neopeasantry, or subsistence permaculture.
Reclaiming The Babushkas of Chernobyl (2015) speaks to the resilience, meaning-making and determination of Ukrainian peasant women who stole back into their ancestral villages in the exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to live out their lives freely. Despite the toxicity of the land, many have been out-living their fellow villagers who have been existing in the sorrow of disconnection from their Mother Country, while the babushkas have their land-bondedness intact.
Making The Nettle Dress (2023) is a story that integrates grief, beauty, craft and connection to the land. It shows what is possible by unplugging, living simply, and returning to a rooted, earth-conscious making. It gifts us an insight into how our ancestors laboured in hand crafts and how this ancestral technology is complimentary to living with pain and processing grief. This film exemplifies for us a permapoesis approach to life and culture; that is, a permanent meaning-making approach.
Salvaging The Gleaners and I (2000) made by Agnès Varda reveals many forms of salvaging from the wastes of industrialisation, from food to other materials for life making. The filmmaker is not a passive voyeur extracting story from peoples usually unseen in capital-modernity, but a sleeves-rolled-up, camera as witness poet-anthropologist.
Communing Honeyland (2019) is a film of interspecies relating and daughterly tending, detailing what pragmatic and earth-bonded love can be, in a depleted village biome. It is an example of slow cinema, of letting the story unfold, and empowering the subjects – Hatidze Muratova, her elderly mother, and the bees – to speak mostly by their doings. In the shadow of economic and personal hardships, and ecological ruination, Hatidze’s joy for the bees and the true gold and gift of honey, shines through in her eldership, and exposes the vulnerabilities of a desperate, smash ‘n’ grab mentality, a madness that incurs upon her life, which she attempts to understand.
Sovereignty The Seeds of Vandana Shiva (2021) is an honouring of one of the most fierce warriors for the rights of peasants and food sovereignty, that is the agro-ecologist and permaculturist, Vandana Shiva. Not only a public speaker and advocate for a de-corporatised food system, Vandana walks her talk, setting up seed-saving initiatives that directly challenge the privatisation of the world’s food by the US agri-business hegemony and others who perform economic and environmental terrorism on indigenous, peasant and wage-slaved peoples of the world.
Healing The Work (2017) is the radical story of compassion, healing and post-traumatic growth inside a US prison. A group of experienced community volunteers, experienced in men’s work, gather with a group of incarcerated men, who step inside a held circle of masculine vulnerability to discover their inner power, souls, and connection with one another. This film shows what is possible and reveals the necessary processes of deep listening, for the rocky future ahead.
Coercion Schooling the World (2010) is an important critique of western education colonisation being rolled out by NGOs and other missionaries of empire. It reveals the continual patterns of colonial shaming tactics, which the west brings to land-bonded, peasant communities and shows how these missionaries disregard traditional, ecological and place-based knowledges. It examines how western schools are merely industrial-capitalist compliance factories, aimed at destroying diverse cultures in the name of ‘doing good’ and bringing so-called ‘backward’ peoples into the 21st century. In this intelligent telling and reframing of the global educational crusade, the film makers allow we western subjects of capital to reflect on the propaganda that has driven our civilisation, and in the process de-cultured and homogenised us.
Energy The Power of Community (2006) is a seminal film for us. It marks both the beginning of our relationship (Meg’s and Patrick’s) and the start of our permaculture transition. When one of the film’s stars, Roberto Perez, came to our town hall to show it and to speak and field questions, we recall him saying on that night, ‘Grow your own food, catch your own water, say hello to your neighbour.’ We heeded his advice. The film details how Cuba responded to their oil taps being turned off due to the collapse of the USSR. From starvation to permaculture abundance, the film tracks the struggles and exposes the reality of life for all of us in an energy declining future. Although this film is nearly 20 years old, it still exposes the current energy blindness of the west, and allows us to step through it into life after cheap oil, as we descend further into that reality.
Stewardship Fools and Dreamers (2019) follows the life of botanist Hugh Wilson, who with a small cohort of people and a patron, practices radical, low-impact land restoration in New Zealand. This is one of our favourite Happen Films, and Hugh is a true elder – clear-eyed, humble, caring, unfazed, resolute and determined. It is a film that shows how working with and listening to, instead of imposing ideology and big technics, can bring you into right relationship with Mother Country. Hugh’s method of healing trammelled country is largely about getting out of the way and observing what Country is saying by her doing. It also requires seeing out the critics and the judgements. This is a film for those interested in land management and land care in a post-industrial reality.
Medicine Juliette of the Herbs (1998) is a film that gives deep insight into the medicinal wisdoms of author, mother and herbalist, Juliette de Bairacli Levy. It shows how herbalism is powerful medicine for land-bonded peoples and animals, and how this type of medicine belongs to a commons, shared mostly via feminine power. This inspiring film shines a light on our current era of extreme chronic disease, and how masculine-privatised medicine is seemingly ruining our health. Juliette’s book, Nature’s Children, is our first go-to text whenever there is a health issue in our household. Our family stopped seeing doctors 8 years ago, and Juliette’s life work has in part enabled this.
Subsistence Pig Earth (1979) is a film by John Berger, based on his book of the same name. Berger lived with alpine French peasants in the 1970s and wrote about their lives, their culture and how modernisation was decimating their subsistence livelihoods by seducing peasants into debt to buy modern farm equipment. This debt was often the death knell for peasant economy, which was largely free from wage-slavery and bankers dictating the terms for life making. Berger’s critical examination of the hubris of modernity as experienced through the humility and humanity of land-bonded peoples of place, is an important story for the west, additionally because peasant agriculture still exists in Europe. While Berger is reporting the end of these lifeways in the 1970s, he probably underestimated the longevity of the energy bubble that has created what we call hypertechnocivility. Many of us will return to subsistence lifeways before too long, and Pig Earth is a nearby reach back to how most Europeans lived only a handful of generations ago. It certainly doesn’t perpetrate the myth that ‘peasants are only wretched, poor, diseased and stupid people’, and other such propaganda spread by capitalists and Marxists alike.
Emplacing Reading Landscape (2023) is a film that documents the life practice of ecological thinker, permaculture co-originator, friend and mentor, David Holmgren. David’s unique way of seeing brings us back into appreciation for how our most skilled ancestors looked and understood the Mother. David sees with many overlaying lenses – geological, hydrological, technological, cultural and energetic, to name a few. He brings these lenses together into an integrated whole way of looking. He has taught his method for decades, helping others to skill up and be present to what is, in order to know how to work with, and be in relationship with, Mother Country.
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Without further ado, here is the trailer to Happen Films’, The New Peasants (2025).
We would love you share the top films that have most sung to you as you have prepared for a world with far less energy and wealth, but steeped in beauty and abundance.
We are now feeling a little time pinched. We need to pack up our bags again, including our latest knitting projects,
and start moving west. We only have a few weeks left of our travels to journey across to Kashmir, down to Jammu and Amritsar, then across to Navdanya (Vandana Shiva’s farm), back to Jashan’s family farm in Punjab, before leaving India and heading for home to reconnect with friends, neighbours, family and Zero, who has been staying with this dear unschooling family.
Meet Preethipal, whose first family comes from Jammu, and Natasha, Daya (aka Black Cockatoo), and older brother Jasper. Zero has been living with this loving lot since we left nearly four months back. We hold so much gratitude for them all.
So, we went to buy tickets for the government bus from Leh to Srinagar. It leaves at 2pm each afternoon to travel 420kms. Because the road is closed from 10pm every night until dawn, it means the bus has to stop in the middle of the night and that would mean we’d be travelling across two days without sleep. (We marvel at those who can sleep on these wild buses). At the ticketing office, Patrick enquired a number of times trying to understand why this bus, (unlike the Manali to Leh bus, which covers roughly the same distance and leaves at dawn), doesn’t leave at first light and get in on dusk. He really wanted to understand, and our government ticketing mate really wanted to explain.
Almost everything that has to be done through a government office in India is, to our logic, upside down thinking. To send a package home, for example, took us over an hour in a GPO, where we were the only customers. It required several trips to various offices in the building to get a slip signed, something else scanned, an item approved up the chain of bureaucratic command, and even a trip to another office around outside the building to print off some more forms. We were frisked before entering the GPO by armed guards, so Patrick, wearing his Ghurkha khukuri knife, quickly opted to stay outside the gates, hanging around, waiting and waiting, with the lads and their automatic rifles in the street.
At the Leh bus station, after about five attempts at an explanation – “Listen here Mister Australia” – Patrick was none the wiser. After all the diagrams, mud maps of the journey, and justifications for leaving at 2pm, the only thing Patrick could ascertain was the leaving time has been this way for 16 years, and therefore cannot be changed. The ticket officer had impeccable English, Patrick had shit Hindi and Ladakhi, and the two fellas finished off with a good laugh. After 30 minutes we left without purchasing tickets.
Later in the day we met a young couple from Punjab, Ritika and Ritesh, and got yarning. They were planning to hire a share-taxi to Kargil, half way to Srinagar, the next day and invited us to join them. The cost each was little more than the price of a bus ticket. We left at first light,
not knowing how we would get from Kargil to Srinagar but mother country willing we would arrive in Kargil with time to either find another mode of transport or book a room. We once again found ourselves moving in divine lands,
which held divine and simple culture.
After a few hours we came across a solo yak on the roadside. Yak, sheep and goats have been herded by Ladakh shepherds for generations.
We stopped to say g’day to this curious and gentle beast, stretch our legs, take a photo,
and play some cricket.
We travelled on, taking it pretty slowly as Woody and Ritika had developed motion sickness. The dogs in a little village we stopped in had the benefit of Woody’s omelette breakfast, after he brought it up. They first took a sniff,
then dived right in. Ritika and Ritesh are on their first road trip as a couple, having met at work. Their parents don’t know they are together and these youngtimers said that they are going to have to break it to their folks, at some point, that they want to be together, and not have their marriages arranged.
Breaking from traditional culture is big for many people we met in India, especially as culture is so rich here, with so many diverse ethnic and religious groups and lifeways. And for some, staying with the traditional ways is all they know, as with these Ladakhis. We felt such kinship for their ways and colour and textile.
Because, like Tibetans, Ladakh folk are not aggressive but relational and contextual, and because their customs and traditions are lived into presence, they shine as a people. And they stand up to bullies, like the Chinese army, who earlier this year tried to stop herders performing their cultural and economic lifeways. Ladakh culture is a whole culture, and seeing a wholly in-tact culture gives us a better sense of our own reculturing with community-kin back home, as infant and entirely different as it is.
We stopped for a pee break and came across this welcome party for a Ladakh leader.
Today, Ladakh shepherds are loosing territory, but not just to the Chinese authorities. They are also being barred from ranging with their sheep, goats and yaks by the Indian military, (the 8th largest army in the world), who have ever greater control in the Indian Himalayas.
There is growing militarisation across the frontier between China and India.
Our journey with the Punjabi love birds ended at Kargil. They went north to find India’s most northern town, Thang, with Ritesh’s brother, an army officer. We couldn’t find a local bus for the afternoon or the next day, so we booked another share taxi for the following day, and checked into this hotel for the night,
in this room,
drifted the second largest human centre in Ladakh through the afternoon,
and left for Srinagar the next morning with four other passengers and a driver. We three inhabited the backety back.
Winter is coming, and Ladakh folk are drying fodder, building their firewood supplies, and no doubt preserving their foods.
As we inched towards Srinagar and the altitude dropped, more grazing land appeared.
We arrived in Drass, a town that boasts it is ‘the second coldest inhabited place in the world’.
We asked a café owner here how he spends the winters, which can get down to -60°. He said he and people in his village do a lot of sleeping and resting, because they work hard during the rest of the year. We swapped notes on heating and cooking systems, he told us about his wood stove at his home, we showed him a photo of ours, and we sat down to eat his delicious omelettes.
We are getting used to having chai and omelette for breakfast or lunch. This one, later in the day, came with a local pickle.
The combo of chai and egg has a goodly effect on our bowels, as do squat toilets, like the one in the café in Drass.
This region is known for its trekking,
which is largely a global tourist caper. These highlands are made increasing available to tourists, that is the global bourgeoisie,
but less and less for local, earth-bonded, indigenous peoples. There seems to be a perception that enclosures and clearances ended in the nineteenth century, but it’s been a continual progression since the 12th century, at least in contemporary colonial terms.
The land began changing again more radically after Drass.
Poplars, deodars, chinars, firs, mulberries and walnuts grow in the Kashmir Valley, and pines began cropping up too,
and acute rocks that held the road from sliding. Yes, we travelled along those precarious road shelves,
on and down to the flood plains below, which became more generous and giving of grass and fodder.
Then, from browsing and grazing culture country, came more intensive agrarianism, with small holding cropping,
which eventually merged into outlying suburbs and roadside stalls,
before we arrived at Srinagar’s Dal Lake, and to a floating offer for chai.
We were dropped at the southern end. We had booked a cheap houseboat that looked lovely online. We stepped into a shikara,
and went off to discover a barely floating shit box that stank of mould. We rang the manager and asked him why the online spruik was so completely different to the reality. It was a stupid question, which Instagram had already answered for us years before. Patrick told him we’d look for something else, but the man, Hashim, kindly offered an upgrade to another boat for the same price. We moved onto the old, creaking and better smelling Teal Heritage houseboat,
and met Tariq, the caretaker, who got fishing with Woody.
We fell asleep that night bunkered down on the elderly boat, wondering whether the beds would fall through the hull, listening to the Indian army and Pakistani insurgents firing good night missiles at each other.
The morning brought another reality. A dreaminess, perhaps even a tiredness that duckboarded through our days here.
It’s hot down south. In a few days it will be 36 degrees in Jammu. We need to press on, but something is stopping us.
Srinagar had a distinctly different feel to it from everywhere else we have visited in India. We walked the streets,
coming across an old friend we hadn’t seen since last summer back at home.
There are pushy hawkers on the streets and on visiting shikaras, here,
trying to sell anything they can. Sometimes we said yes and bought tea or fruit, but when we said no, it was often ignored. The mood here is predatory, cynical, gender-lopsided and utterly picturesque.
Within 24 hours of each other, two very public fights broke out just across the water from us, on the street. Everywhere we went, armed police and soldiers stood by, on alert.
Perhaps the heightened aggression and intensity in the air was due to Indian prime minister Modi coming to Srinagar, for the forthcoming elections, which explains the heavy militarisation on the streets.
We’d noticed a political fervour back in the Kashmir Valley.
On our fourth morning, we adults woke and ran a bath, a thing we hadn’t had access to for the entire trip. As the bath filled we joked about it falling through the floorboards into the lake, and how we missed our cold water plunging. Patrick had strangely taken ill the previous day and had spent the whole of it in bed, completely drained of all life. After our bath, where we had used the quiet of the morning to check in with each other, we dressed and sat outside beholding the morning before the hawkers started their rounds,
Woody kept sleeping and after a while we turned on the phone to reply to comments and other correspondence. There was a message from Patrick’s sister, Hen, asking Patrick to call her.
……
The long and the short of it is we are signing off from this journey now, a little prematurely. We have someone very dear to us who is very unwell, and we need to head back to Australia immediately. Dear friends have made this possible, with three flights booked from Srinagar to Delhi to KL to Sydney in 24 hours, almost the complete opposite journey to how we got here.
So, we need to pack up this little room, this life on the road,
and get moving, quickly.
Thank you, Dearest Reader, for the love and support we’ve received from you throughout our journey. We are so grateful you have joined us along the way from the sidelines to share our highs and lows. We are going to spend some time offline now, and gather with family.
Signing off from India, from this failed hitchhiking, but so much more journey. With love, and big emotions, Artist as Family.
Hello dear Subscribers and other curious visitors,
Over the past week we’ve hosted three new volunteers at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, who have been learning-helping with the harvesting and storing of this warm season’s abundance. We’ve been harvesting and preserving summer crops and also prepping soils to plant winter crops while there’s still heat in the giving earth, here in Djaara Mother Country.
While we’ve been working hard – doing-saying, lifemaking, neopeasanting, demonstrating the possibilities of living a low-impact ecological-economy – Tully, Anisa, Gemma, and we mob have also engaged in many conversations.
On Gemma’s last day, she asked whether she could record Patrick for a university assignment. Gemma is studying environmental science and has, true to her openness and curiosity, organised two radically different placements for her summer work experience – with Artist as Family and with Parks Victoria. Go Gemma!
We have edited this little interview, recorded on Gemma’s phone in the garden at Tree Elbow, into a twelve minute excerpt, and we’re sharing it as a way of giving an insight into some of the subjects/conversations we have with volunteer-students at the school, this time occurring at the end of a neopeasant lunch, just before we all headed off for siesta.
We hope you enjoy this little moment (12min listen) with Gemma, pictured here with Meg and Patrick.
As always, your input, questions and comments are valuable to our readers and to us, so please feel free to offer up what’s living in you after listening in. Also, we have a place available next month if you’re interested in volunteering and learning with us. Head here for more details and please get in touch if you’re keen to join us.
For those of you who are out of the loop, Jono is a 25 year old from Newcastle who is facing up to ten years in prison and a $765,000 fine for sending a press release highlighting ANZ’s role in funding the Whitehaven open cut coal mine in north-west NSW. The mine threatens community health and food producing land at Maules Creek, and the health and survival of Koala populations in the Leard State Forest.
We reckon we’re in pretty good company too:
Vandana Shiva
The photo of AaF above was taken by our dear friend Rasha Tayeh. Rasha is, among many things, a documentary filmmaker whose most recent work is The Growing Food Project, a short doco that explores some of Melbourne’s urban agriculture practices and community food initiatives, where people are coming together to build local, fair and sustainable food systems. The film features Patrick’s award winning poem Step by Step.
The film’s premiere is on Wednesday 20th Nov at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) at 7pm.
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion of food activists inviting the audience to discuss the benefits of supporting local food systems.
And while on the topic of Patrick’s poetry, a huge congratulations are in order:
Patrick has just completed four years of doctoral research. In a nutshell, Walking for food: regaining permapoesis is:
a biographical thesis that investigates how we might transition to fairer, more just and sustainable communities. It draws on Indigenous knowledges and permaculture modelling in the attempt to demonstrate achievable societal change from the household and community economies out. The thesis contends that modern living is inherently damaging; and on such a scale that personal accountability is degraded. The ecological and social consequences of this are clearly evident, and the thesis challenges us to transition to radically different forms of living where permanent making replaces disposability, and personal accountability is once again performed.
If you’re interested in receiving a PDF of the final draft, please contact us.
And while we’re on the topic of positive and inspiring activists, Perth based singer songwriter Charlie Mgee, AKA Formidable Vegetable Sound System, recently visited the Hepburn Shire during the Swiss Italian Festa where he played a fabulous set of some of his songs from his album, Permaculture: A Rhymer’s Manual.
Charlie’s album focuses on bringing simple concepts of sustainability into the spotlight using the power of music, rhyme and humour to convey the permaculture principles in fresh ways to new audiences. If you get a chance to see Charlie play, we highly recommend you grab it.
And, while on the topic of grabbing: there has been much handlebar grabbing in these here parts as the departure date for our adventure draws near – 6 days!! We have been spotted all over the place as we ride with our panniers fully loaded on practice rides from starboard to port.
If we don’t get a chance to post again for a while, see you on our way up the continent!
2. No matter how a person tries to frame or revise our culture there’s no getting away from it – wealth delivers pollution.
3. Researchers tell us that the level of happiness peaks just above the poverty line, but we already knew this. Any accumulation of wealth after this point disables the adequate distribution of resources in order for local populations and ecologies to self-renew.
4. 32,000 people were treated last year in Australian hospitals for self-harming. The mental health of the country is flailing. An increasingly toxic food supply system is in part responsible. For a culture whose dominant ideology is based on a growth profit-pollution paradigm, figures like this will only increase.
5. The social and ecological costs of liberal growth economics should now be accounted. The world’s elite impoverish life for everyone, especially the world’s poor. An elite few are currently privatising the atmosphere to create the world’s biggest commodity market – capitalising on pollution. This is sold as a solution – emissions trading and offsetting schemes – just as the Green Revolution was sold as a solution – privatised seeds and chemicals – for world hunger.
6. With ecological economics, community sovereignty of food, water and energy resources, and with permaculture principals you don’t have to wait around for outmoded governments to reenter the real world; to understand soil microbes; to understand a just and sane way; to understand the profit-pollution paradigm; to understand the relationship between biodiversity and collective social health.
