The home emergency ward (or, theatre of deep adaptation)

Feb 3, 2026 | art, biology, Collective preparedness, craft, creative frugality, experts, fear, foraging, Free to learn, healing, health, home educating, homelife, lifemaking, medicinal plants, men's health, neopeasant education, radical homemakers, School of Applied Neopeasantry, storytelling, uncapitalised medicine, weeds | 76 comments

Some readers may be offended by the graphic nature this post. Discretion is required.

This week the ‘home theatre’ took on new meaning in the School of Applied Neopeasantry’s outdoor kitchen.

It became a site of needlework poetics and self-doctoring after Patrick took a blow from a cricket ball, bowled by Woody.

What a grand opportunity for this grubby neopeasant to practice the craft of self-suturing, and for us to share the story.

Earlier, at the ground where the sport took place, Woody and friend Fab scattered to find plantain (rib wort) as blood spewed forth onto the pitch. This useful, sometimes scruffy common medicine is found in almost all places where wounds commonly take place.

Years before, playing soccer, Zephyr had run to find his old man the same herb after Patrick sustained a head injury that required a number of stitches. Both times, then and now, Patrick masticated the coagulating, antimicrobial leaves in his mouth,

and quelled the blood of the head wound by placing the green mush onto the cut. A medical doctor friend, whom he played soccer with 12 years ago, stitched Patrick on the side of the field, and remarked how well the plantain had stopped the flow of blood. This time, after dabbling with self-suturing a little since the soccer head collision, Patrick felt ready for the next stage of creating the home emergency ward.

Sooted stretched sheep skins gave wall to the surgery, and blood-stained hands and dirt under the fingernails spoke of no violence of purity, often claimed by those who say they want to keep us safe. A sewing needle was fetched and so too the workshop’s old diamond stone to sharpen it by.

Then some modicum of cleanliness followed with the sharpened patchwork needle being dropped in a small dish of Brother Eucalyptus oil.

And the thread on hand, a piece of dental floss, was threaded through the needle and lowered into the oil as well.

So far we had all that we needed for the surgery. A kettle of boiling mountain rain water was poured into a bowl, then some previously boiled, now cooled water added, and then a splash of the cleaning oil.

This made a wash solution for inside the wound and around it.

Courage was mustered by this doctor of poetics, though the natural shock at the cut after the ball struck, was anaesthetic enough not to warrant worry for the procedure. Breath was breathed. Trust was trusted. A stable hand placed the needle. Some more youthful eyes would have been good, but not on offer, so in it went.

Relief! The first stitch holes punctured as though a through line in the series, Collapse of the cult of safetyism.

After puncturing the skin in two places in the middle of the wound, and pulling the threaded needle through, Patrick tied a double knot.

He cut off the remains of the dental floss thread and did the same for another two stitches. “This is fun!” He exclaimed to Meg. “The home theatre of deep adaptation.”

Patrick laboured gently just as he had done countless times sewing up our torn or worn clothes over the years. He was mightily chuffed with himself by the end of the third stitch. Self doctoring (and dentistry) in a time of collapse is more exhilarating than you would think. It’s empowering.

After the stitching was complete, he smeared our garden bee’s honey across the wound, as an external antiseptic and wound healing salve.

The whole procedure took around twenty minutes, and a few hours later (after a deep sleep) the bruising appeared.

48 hours later, after two days of deep rest and goodly sleep – the best medicine life has on offer (which hospitals disallow) – including nine hours of listening to the mass catalogue of woundings and killings in a telling of The Iliad, Patrick’s wound looked like this.

A cricket ball weighs 156 grams and Woody bowls at around 100 km/hr. So effectively this cricket ball is a punch in the face at high velocity. It is the order of things when a son, fairly, beats his dad. Another 48 hours on, the wound looked like this.

The following day was Saturday, and Patrick captained the senior cricket team, scored 60 runs alongside Zeph’s 57 and Woody took a wicket to each contribute to a mighty win. Initially Patrick batted in a helmet (a first for him), but took it off because he couldn’t quite see the ball. On Sunday, day six, he took the stitches out,

which was actually the most difficult bit, and where much of the learning took place.

The dental floss had began to fall apart, and we didn’t want any of it to be left inside in case it caused an infection. Dosing up on zinc, vitamin C, sugar-free food, plantain salve, mineral water pumped from down in the forest, and significant rest assisted Patrick’s immune system, so he could more quickly recover, fight off infection, and get back to the cricket. However, on day six, he was concerned that the poor integrity of the thread could send all the good doctoring backwards.

After the removal was complete and the wound site cleaned, it looked like this.

Then, on day seven of Patrick’s healing, Zeph called us from work. A large pane of glass had fallen and shattered across his arm, cutting it in several places. The nearby Maldon clinic doctor refused to even look under the bandage and told him to go to Bendigo Hospital emergency ward.

Patrick collected him in our friend Bei’s car, spoke with Zeph about potentially home suturing, attempted to get hold of a suture kit from some medical friends, talked about the possibility of laceration to a tendon or a nerve, and then decided it best to head to Bendigo. They arrived at 4pm, got triaged (that ugly word), had the cuts looked at, and then took a seat in that hot, stuffy place.

While waiting Patrick was thinking about our friend who lost a finger in this same emergency ward, due to having to wait seven hours to be looked at. When he was finally seen, the doctor said, oops, we needed to have seen you hours ago to have saved your finger. At the three and a half hour mark Patrick asked Administration Clerk 1 politely whether he could take home a suture kit and do the job himself.
The nurse looked confused and said, “No… I don’t think so, I’d have to ask.”
Patrick responded with a smile, in his wife-beater singlet: “I am a doctor you know.”
“Are you?” she said unsurely.
“Yes, a doctor of literature,” he replied smiling. “I stitched up my own face last Monday.”
She glanced at the wound above his eye.
“Let me look in the system… Oh, your son is next in line, shouldn’t be long now.”
“Thanks nurse, appreciate it.”

They were having fun. Or, at least Patrick was. Then, miraculously, Zeph’s name was called and we were ushered into a fairly dirty little clinic by a lovely Sri Lankan doctor. Patrick asked if he could watch the procedure because, as he said, he loves to learn. The doctor was obliging. Zeph was mightily relieved that at 8pm (the incident having taken place around 1pm) someone was finally going to take a look at his arm and assess whether there was tendon or nerve damage.

By comparison, in the home emergency ward last week Patrick stitched himself up within an hour of his accident. Because of his old man’s keen student-like attention and questioning, the doctor was very accommodating and taught as though giving a workshop. Patrick repaid the favour by schooling her on toxic adjuvants in vaccines and the over-prescribing of them, after she offered Zeph a tetanus shot. Naturally, due to her education in western medicine, adjuvants (the largely untold shadow side of vaccinology) were things she had never heard of. She was refreshingly open to learning. Her first job was to ascertain whether there was glass in the wound and whether a tendon or nerve had been damaged. She washed the wound under a bright light.

She used a syringe of salty water to irrigate out any broken pieces, and then showed her impromptu student how to open the wound and look down into it after flushing away the blood, to search for any white regions. White, Patrick discovered, means nerve or tendon. After the clean out, the lacerations looked quite trivial. It pays to thoroughly investigate the situation first, thought Patrick. “Observe first. That’s what I should have done when I first picked up Zeph,” he later reflected to Meg.

Patrick noted the way the doctor cut away the dead skin, and how she applied the nylon thread and the fishhook needle to suture Zeph’s wounds. As a fellow sewer, Patrick was impressed.

While a makeshift emergency ward suited Patrick’s purposes to self-suture last week, it’s a little different doctoring someone else without the right gear or missing knowledge. However, after last night’s free tutorial, it’s actually all pretty straight forward. Suturing skin is really low-skilled labour, and we have no idea why nurses are not trained to do this work, especially when small regional hospitals and clinics are now refusing to do it. This morning we heard from our medical friends saying they have saved for us some unused suture kits whose expiry date has passed, and instead of burning them as medical waste, and contributing to the great waste pollution stream of the industrial medical complex, they’re going to give them to us.

“I could have done this myself,” said Patrick to Zeph on the late, long drive home last night, “but I’m glad for the extra schooling.” It certainly has been a week of gold in terms of learning for a future with an ever greater reduction of services in regional Australia.

What are your self-doctoring lessons and stories? We’d love to hear how you are responding to the decline of affluence and the real, everyday need to skill up at home to take the pressure off a broken health system, made even more bankrupt by the ridiculous and excessive Covid response.

Onwards and upwards! Thanks for reading all the way and stomaching some of the more gory images.

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.

Stinging nettle for arthritis and allergies: neopeasant medicine food series

Nov 15, 2022 | food medicine, uncapitalised medicine, weeds | 33 comments

Patrick speaks to some of the virtues of Urtica dioica – the common stinging nettle – and how we use this generous and powerful medicinal plant as both food and medicine.

The more we interact with the living earth – the gifts, tonics and salves that come from intimate, walked-for and cultivated biomes, which we are participants of – the more we merge with Grandmother Gaia and Mother Country. This is the gift of true medicine.

How do you use nettle? What common complaints does nettle heal for you? What do you bring to nettle? We’d love to hear your experiences with this oldtimer medicine plant.

Civil roads, underworld sharks, olympian neopeasants and crabmongers for China (Wadawurrung to Gadubanud Country)

Aug 16, 2021 | foraging, Uncategorised, weeds | 32 comments

There’s an ever present chill from saltwater wind that we’re becoming more hardy and alive to, so too the smell of old fish, which proliferates our hands and our clothes. We are in ever greater degree the great unwashed in an increasingly controlled human world, but life supports us in her abundance, provides shelter when it rains,

a wall to pitch a tent behind when ferocious winds rip through the night,

and calm, magical mornings to set out upon.

The roads have been endless providers too, of such things as road killed ringtail

and hare for Zero meat,

valuable rope to add to our kit as we neglected to bring a washing line,

and pretty good shoulders for cyclists.

We left St Leonards after two weeks of lockdown with a spring in our pedals, camped at Barwon Heads and rode on to Torquay, stopping for regular breaks.

At Torquay Magpie caught up with her office work in a sunny park,

while Blackwood cut some three-cornered garlic (Allium triquetrum) for the dinner pot.

and Blue Wren toasted some almonds on the municipal BBQ as Zero took a nap.

Each day we have been travelling in and out of Magpie, Blackwood and Blue Wren countries, and down here on the coast Willy Wagtail Country is ever present.

In the park in Torquay we happened across Monica, and after a far bit of yarning she invited us to mind her home (including her neighbourhood compost drop off) for the weekend while she was to be away tree planting.

In exchange we got to work repairing doors,

nurturing housemates,

and restoring her bike to roadworthy condition.

While in Torquay it felt good to help out at Monica’s while she was planting trees, but we also rested up, and explored the coastline.

While this town is the gateway to the Great Ocean Road we left Torquay in winter sunshine

and headed back inland. We wanted to volunteer at Common Ground Project, a ‘not-for-profit community farm that promotes food security by creating fair access to locally grown, healthy food.’

which is managed by these two bright sparks, Ivan and Greta.

We were offered beautiful food, shown a goodly camp spot, and had a chance to learn more about how their regenerative farming practices are feeding people in the community. The next day we rode towards Deans Marsh, in the traditional lands of the Gadubanud and Gulidjan peoples, thus leaving Wadawurrung Country for the first time since our first day’s ride back in early July.

The road offered up these wood blewits (Clitocybe nuda) before we arrived in Deans Marsh,

where some lovely locals Sian and Ads showed us a beautiful place to camp. Then in the rain we left to climb our biggest hill of the trip so far.

From Deans Marsh (elevation 155m above sea level) we pedalled for more or less 12km up hill, stopping for drink breaks,

encouragement cuddles,

and to take layers off.

Then we arrived at the top. Yippee!

The ten kilometres down hill was heaven. We soared and glided, laughed and whooooped out loud. Woody was learning what Zeph learnt on our first adventure – ‘a hill is just a hill.’ At the bottom was lovely Lorne, a place to pitch our tent and, as we discovered, another snap lockdown starting that night.

We headed for the nearby jetty, 2km from our home camp, and fished our way through the lockdown.

Zero had developed gunky eyes, which he nursed by staying quiet on the jetty, letting the sun treat him.

Blackwood pulled up an array of fish including this Australian salmon (Arripis trutta) which we enjoyed for dinner,

Blue Wren caught Port Jackson, Banjo and Draughtboard sharks (Cephaloscyllium laticeps) on his hand line and threw them all back,

and Magpie went after crabs (Ovalipes australiensis), which were delicious out of the billy.

A jetty engenders a special kind of community. It is a place for learning, marvelling and praising what the sea has to offer, and it is a place for connection and for song.

Public amenities are really the great civic remnant of a pre-corporatised world. These colonial structures are so often incorrect in today’s world where colonialism’s new face – paternalistic corporatism – is ashamed of yesterday and seeks utopia in a post-human tomorrow. We’re as happy to wild shit as find solace in public amenities. When you live outside it gets down to practicality – available ecology or architecture, digging tool or flush away your precious nutrients?

Another public amenity built in the pre-corporate colonial era is the Great Ocean Road, built by returned soldiers of the First World War. All the plaques along the road confuse whose Aboriginal country we’re riding on but are clear on the story of the mayor of Geelong’s project to have traumatised men return from France and construct a picturesque coastal road like in mother Europe. This road, emptied of tourist traffic, has been a cyclist’s joy.

Wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum L.) grows in abundance where the disturbance of settler road meets oldtimer coastline. This feral, uncorporatised food is a prize to neopeasants and gallantly sings into the trauma of our shared ancestries.

As are these turkey tails (Trametes versicolor). Both weedy brassica and bracket fungus are wild medicines,

and they belong to a very different medical philosophy than corporate health, which is lead foremost by monetisation and control. Charles Eisenstein details this in his latest essay where he writes: “When herbicide-resistant weeds appear, the solution is a new herbicide. When immigrants cross the border, we build a wall. When a school shooter gets into a locked school building, we fortify it further. When germs develop resistance to antibiotics, we develop new and stronger ones. When masks fail to stop the spread of covid, we wear two. When our taboos fail to keep evil at bay, we redouble them. The controlling mind foresees a paradise in which every action and every object is monitored, labeled, and controlled. There will be no room for any bad thing to exist. Nothing and no one will be out of place. Every action will be authorized. Everyone will be safe.” As Charles goes on to argue, the pursuit for ever greater control generates ever greater divisions and social illness.

Human wellbeing is wrapped up in connection to people and place, regularly diving into other worlds for not just food but insight,

to behold our own wildness as contiguous with the living of the world, be predator and prey in the same instance,

to find delight and challenge in the fierce determination of kin,

to experience the full force of the world and only retreat from it for short periods of recuperation,

and to pull on the primal materiality of ancestors.

We rolled into Apollo Bay in Gadubanud (Katubanut) Mother Country and dried out the tent.

Rainbows keep rolling in on this saltwater winter country,

as do the facilities to cook a public meal.

We soon found a hidden coastal camp site protected from wind, tides and rain. A place to call home for a while,

interact with the locals (Arctocephalus pusillus),

fish up some more shark (to throw back),

accept gifts (Seriolella brama) from fellow fishers (thanks Lonnie!),

cook up both gifts from sea and field,

and listen to local crabmongers talk about the elite markets in China for these Tasmanian giants (Pseudocarcinus gigas).

We are common students on this bicycle pilgrimage. All three of us human folk learning to cook in a windy kitchen without walls,

fishing up species we’ve never before encountered (Heterodontus portusjacksoni),

beholding the advance of more-than-human greatness (due to fewer boats on the ocean),

while observing the encroachment of dehumanising politics in subtle and not so subtle forms.

This pilgrimage begs for breathing with the wind, the gales, the gusts, as windbags ourselves. It begs for not holding our breath in the anxieties of corporate-apnea. It begs for not using scientific nomenclature, roads or public toilets without understanding the colonisations of these useful but unnecessary things. It begs for us to find gratitude in every food we eat that comes loaded in story. It begs for us to share our learnings and extend our studenthood with kinfolk we come across on the road like Sian and baby Kai,

and with you, Dear Reader. Thanks for riding along with us. We’ve travelled 177kms since St Leonards and while setting out in winter in a pandemic might have seemed to some a crazy-arse thing to do, we’ve really enjoyed the cold and the reduced noise along the coastal roads.

With much love, Artist as Family

Preparing for the next fire season

Aug 12, 2020 | goats, Happen Films, land management, regenerative farming, weeds | 0 comments

As you may know we’ve been vlogging on our YouTube channel since COVID first pioneered Australia, and this winter we’ve been especially focussed on preparing for the next great challenge –this summer’s potential bushfire risk. We’ve had well below annual rainfall and a mild winter, at least by chilly Daylesford’s standards. Some of the bushfire mitigation work we do in Dja Dja Wurrung spoken-for country is the subject of a new Happen Film, which we’re eager to share with you here.

We do this bushfire mitigation work as community volunteers and we’re reaching out to those who’d like to support us and who have the capacity to do so. We require a little more equipment and three new nanny goats so we can keep doing this work. If you’d like to support our post-pesticide, regenerative land-mangament practices please click on the donate tab below (or, if you’re reading this in an email feed please click this link.

If you want to keep up to date with our sharing, our life hacks and even the occasional daggy music video, you might like to subscribe to our Youtube page. As for now Dear Reader, we hope you and your mob are well and full of possibility for a ‘more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.’ If you are looking for more inspiration here’s a link to our resources page.

Towards post-colonial bushfire mitigation practices (using goats and hand tools)…

Jun 17, 2019 | biological control, bushfires, colonialism, Djaara, goats, land management, post-industrial thought, weeds | 0 comments

The Austrian painter Eugene von Guerard painted this in 1864. An early colonial image of the place our privilege calls home.

There was a rapid appearance of European peasant goat grazing, browsing and shepherding upon Djaara peoples’ land at the moment when those who spoke old Dja Dja Wurrung tongue, and had survived the prior massacres, sickness and dispossessing intransigence of settlers (backed by the British nee Roman law terra nullius), were being forcibly relocated to Coranderrk.

Due to gold extraction, over grazing and then industrial-era forms of land management the wet gullies and creeks of Hepburn and Daylesford are now infested with woody perennial weeds such as gorse, broom and blackberry. While these plants provide useful ecological services – habitat, food, soil stabilising, etc – their dominance can diminish biodiversity and produce a fire threat each warming summer.

We’ve been involved in providing a climate-era response to this predicament that may be just more blind colonialism but ironically we think it is potentially a way back to the sort of land management practices of Djaara people. Using goats over a 4-year period as well as sensitive hand tools to diminish the dominance of weedy perennials, we believe we can begin to convert these steep stream ecologies back into perennial indigenous grasslands and ecology that will radically reduce bushfire risk.

As Goathand cooperative, we have just finished a trial collaborating with the Hepburn Shire Council and Federation University and the results are very positive. What we need now for this climate-safe weed and bushfire mitigation project to both upscale and outscale is broader government and community understanding of the succession process that could lead back to the possibility of Dja Dja Wurrung ecological burning processes, which have not been viable because of great stands of 2-3 m dry gorse, broom and blackberries that can climb fire up into eucalyptus canopies.

Below is Goathand cooperative‘s first film showing the trialling of goats and hand tools. Imagine this scaled up to 200-300 goats (permanently rotating around the shire so as not to overgraze until the dominance of the weeds are treated) and 10-15 human bodies with loppers and pruning saws for a few day’s work here and there. The people labour is generally nominal because the goats are so effective, but the human labour and goat interrelationship makes a beautiful marriage (not just pragmatic but one of love) and moves us towards a significant post-industrial behaviour change. Very quickly the town’s bushfire risk (Hepburn is one of the most fire-at-risk towns in Victoria) and weed cycle would be greatly diminished and no more glyphosate in our waterways or soil disturbing mechanical treatment or white-fella burning regimes, which all put the weed cycle back at stage one, dry out moisture in the soil and thus causes more fire-proneness. This is not ideal when temperatures are warming.

If you’re reading this in your inbox this video will not appear. Head here to watch.

If you’re a journo and you’d like to know more about Goathand cooperative, please get in touch.

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