In this offering, permaculture elder David Holmgren is our guest in discussion with Patrick speaking about this next phase of global energy transition, and thus societal transformation in the local context.
Here’s the audio version (1hr 52mins).
David and Patrick’s hour-long conversation is followed by a compost of goodly questions from community participants who gathered and shared food together for this event. We hope that this long-form drop will aid in your preparations for the coming months.
This event recently took place at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Tree Elbow University in Djaara Mother Country.
Huge, hug-filled thanks to Jordan Osmond from Folklore Pictures (formally Happen Films) for both the sound and vision.
We’d love to hear from you about your preparations, priorities and musings at this time.
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.
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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.
We seem to be in a pattern of weekly blog missives. We’re going along with it as there is energy for that. Here, on the southern ridge bone of the Great Connecting Range in Djaara Mother Country, winter has momentarily returned with overnight temperatures plummeting to 1 degree celsius. This chilly weather system has coincided with our water heater springing a leak, the tank of which we drained and which, in turn, has meant we can’t light our wood stove so as not to damage its water jacket chamber. So we have been rugging up and sitting with the gratitude of what this hearth means in our life, when all is well with it.
In other news, Zephyr has stepped back into a creators role for Artist as Family. Zephyr experienced the full horror of modern drone warfare in Ukraine earlier this year, and escaped with his life, while he lost a number of comrades who had also joined the Ukrainian army. First Person View (FPV) attack drones have become an ugly part of modern warfare, meaning that soldiers – people – can be tracked and attacked with flying ordnance by a remote controller. Another cowardly gift from late industrial capitalism. As part of his recovery from the trauma, Zephyr has taken up using a FPV drone for peaceful operations, and gifted us this footage he took of Tree Elbow’s spring garden this week, to help promote our forthcoming house and garden tours. Thanks Zeph!
Zephyr is setting up a small business with his drone, so please get in touch if you’d like to employ his services in central Victoria. And, please get in touch if you’d like to attend one of our full-day house and garden tours (January 18 & April 4), which also includes time in the nearby commons that we co-steward with our neighbours and our goats. Meet Pav, the newest member of the blackberry munching herd.
This week we’ve been listening to Tommy Castles’ music. Tommy composed the exquisite soundtrack for The New Peasants. One of our favourite compositions from the soundtrack is called Bike Scavenger (ft. Carl Dickens). This music enters the film as Patrick fixes the wheel of his bike trailer to ride up to the local tip – our hardware store – to collect materials. The New Peasants will shortly be available to view online, and for peeps in this neck of the woods, Radius Gallery is holding a screening and Q&A on November 23, MC’d by David Holmgren.
In other news, The Pretty Good Cricket Podcast has just dropped Episode three. This week Blue Wren and Black Cockatoo dive into a sodden pitch and welcome in their first guest.
Well, that’s our neopeasant round up for the week. For those of you who have requested a video from us about hosting men’s and women’s circles, stay tuned. We are on to it. We love hearing from you in this quiet cul-de-sac of the web, so let flow in the comments section for a little more connection.
