Permaculture Neo-Peasantry with Artist as Family and Morag Gamble

It is my delight to welcome Artist as Family to the Sense-making in a Changing World podcast.

You can follow Artist as Family as they head off on their new cycling adventures around Australia here,  watch their wonderful series of practical videos on Youtube, and feel great inspiration from their Instagram sharings.

Artist as Family are Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr and of course Zero (their dog). I am so happy to share this conversation with you. I have been a long admirer of their creative and radical approach to permaculture 

Before covid, my family had the great pleasure of visiting their home in Daylesford, Australia in Djaara Mother Country. They live on a quarter-acre permaculture plot which is home to their School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University. Artist as Family is a practice - a unique form of performance art, comprising how they live, get their food and medicine, and move around; performing modes of life making they call permacultural neopeasantry.

Meg and Patrick teach a unique skill set of radical homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers and online through various videos, talks and blog posts.

They are bloggers, unschoolers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, goat-herders, gardeners and video makers who also make music, but mostly are a family who belong to a fabulous community and a beautiful small patch of sacred forest, and therefore describe being much more than the sum of their parts.

Watch the youtube conversation here.
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• Download this list of 10 of Morag's favourite books.
• Morag's 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.

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LEARN MORE ABOUT THE WORLD OF PERMACULTURE WITH MORAG GAMBLE

Explore the permaculture films, articles, masterclasses and other resources on Our Permaculture Life Youtube cha

Transcript

Morag Gamble: 0:00

Welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble.. Permaculture Educator, and Global Ambassador, Filmmaker, Eco villager, Food Forester, Mother, Practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it's been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life we first need to shift our thinking. The way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever. And even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on? So our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, and reconnection. What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I'll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we'll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can't wait to share these conversations with you..

Morag: 1:54

Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face. I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I've seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what's happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I've created the Permaculture Educators Program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth programs, women's self help groups in the global South and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program. If you'd like to find more about permaculture, I've created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We'd love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly, and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I'd also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land in which I meet and speak with you today, the Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.

Morag Gamble: 3:35

In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, I'm delighted to be joined by Meg and Patrick, two fifths of Artists as Family, the insights, stories, and music they share about living their values, simplifying their lives, radicalizing their home economy, creatively responding to what it means to be fully human and being in loving kindness in these time. Meg and Patrick are artists, makers, writers, creators, urban farmers, urban foresters, and unschoolers living on a small part in urban Daylesford on a fraction of the energy and money of typical households and yet thriving. Meg works for David Holmgren for two days a week, but the rest of her time and Patrick's time are in the gift economy. Meg and Patrick described their way of life as permacultural neo-peasantry and together we explore their approach to home, community, education, money, work, travel, freedom, and contribution. So come and join us on this wonderful journey of, of life through the eyes of Meg and Patrick. Welcome to the show Meg and Patrick, it's so wonderful to have you here. So I'm calling in from the land of the Gubbi Gubbi people here and also the Jinibara people and I'd like to acknowledge and pay respects to the elders here. I'm also originally from the land of the Wurundjeri people in the Kulin nation, and it's not far from where you are, a little bit further, but where are you calling in from?

Meg Ulman: 5:11

Yes, so this is also the land of the Kulin nation people, the land of the Djaara people, yeah, we’d also like to pay our respects to ancestors and elders, and all first nations people watching today or listening today, so thank you.

Morag Gamble: 5:32

Well, it's so great to have you on the show. This is, particularly this show, is all about exploring different ways that people are making sense of what's going on in the world right now. And, but have been for a while and I know this has been a life path that you've both been walking for a long time now and have so much insight into how we can make sense and something, I was just looking at some of your materials before we came on and I love the way that you express what you're doing as performance art. This, you know, this whole idea of Artists is Family is being performance, about its performance art about how you live, how you get food and how you move about, just want to talk a little bit about that and how you describe yourselves as artists and what that means in terms of neo-peasantry? Is the way you described this way of living permaculture in neo-peasantry. I think maybe that's a really good place to start because it kind of frames every other part of the conversation, I think..

Patrick Jones: 6:36

Yeah, that's great. That's a really juicy, chunky beginning place. Yeah, so let's just, maybe start with our ancestors, our peasant ancestors from various parts of Europe. And the Middle East, land bonded peoples who had many holidays, seasonal holidays to celebrate together on common land, usually where the festivals took place was on the commons. Peasants had throughout particularly through up until the middle ages, had lots of different rites, rites of passage and rites of spring and rites of harvest. And so this was all celebrated with dance and song and homemade alcohols and some of the celebrations would go from kind of serious, intent and a kind of calling on the dead and calling on ancestors, through to sort of, and over the course of a few days, we would break down into sort of lots of grief release, lots of orgiastic behavior, lots of connection with place and particularly a kind of animist sensibility to world. And so this isn't really the typical narrative that modern subjects of capital neo-peasantry, it’s always used, or quite often used in a pejorative sense. And there are many peoples who come to Australia in recent times that have come from peasant ancestries who are really running away from a kind of what I would call a fooled or collapsed peasantry where some larger control mechanism of state or communism or fascism or church has really, completely disabled the performative and the celebratory and the connectedness of the peasantry. So it comes with a really bad rap. And I feel like, I guess as neo peasants performing, I guess, a land bondedness and bringing ritual back to a country that is stolen and we sit so problematically upon an in. But to stay just in that story of a no belonging place is I think more dangerous and more damaging to the land. And so we've found ways in to connect with local Djaara culture, local Djaara people, the land itself, the biota itself, and the forest, just near here, which is a really important place for many rituals and many, the Bush School that we run, which we might talk about a bit later, the men's and women's and non-binary groups that we have, around five circles in there, they’re coming together and sharing food with neighbors who are, after working day of, pulling tires out of the creek and, planting trees, et cetera. So, I feel like in many ways, for a number of years, we've been re-performing what our ancestors knew, connection to neighborhood, connection to place and doing that, as I said, sitting in that troubled place of land dispossession, which is originally, our land dispossession, my, a lot of my ancestors came here as convicts. But so, you know, the story of European peasantry being dispossessed is the same story. It's the connect world. It's not the same story, but it's the connected story with indigenous dispossession here. So I feel like in, just to finish on that, that we both started in the arts, Meg as writer, me in the visual arts and permaculture has really been a way of being a wonderful exit strategy from what we would perceive as Western art practice, which is very sort of rarified and getting art back into habitats of everyday life. And the creativity is particularly, when we became parents, just to see the unbounding creativity of children, and then looking at our home, very rarified and very sort of alienated art practices and thinking there's something wrong with this story. And so I feel like that's it in a nutshell, really, that's the reclaiming of what we've lost reconnecting to our land that wasn't, that we have no ancestral connection to, that we're making ancestral connection to. And the re-inviting of a community approach to creativity and culture making.

Morag Gamble: 12:20

There's so many, it was a juicy question, there’s so many juicy answers in that, I want to pick up on. The whole idea of that uncomfortable place that we are in, I think this is, I don't, can you maybe unpack a little bit about how you've approached that. I mean, you did mention a bit, but I think this is something that so many people are sitting with now and somehow get a bit frozen and stuck in that space. So I wonder whether you could maybe share a bit more about how to unstick in that really difficult conversation. I think that many people find themselves in and not knowing how to move forward.

Meg Ulman: 13:15

Yes. First, I'd like to say, I think it's really important that we stay with the trouble, that we stay with the discomfort, with the ickiness, the guilt, the shame, all of these feelings, I think, are really important that we sit with and that we don't just say, oh, everything's going to be okay. Or just rush on to the next thing or buy the next thing, or, yeah, I think it's important that we honor all of our emotions, the positive ones that feel positive and the ones that don't. And I don't think that we could give other people advice about how to unstick. I think we could just tell our story and how, what worked for us and sitting in that place of discomfort was a big part of it. And I think also living in a culture where we are told from all angles how to feel and what to value, when we decided that we didn't want to live within the grips of that culture. So tightly anymore, that also working out what we wanted as individuals who are alive, if this very delicate point in history at the moment, what is, what do we want as individuals? What do we want as a partnership, as parents, as a family? How do we want to be in our neighborhood, in our community, in the world further afield? Yeah. How do we want to act, how do we want to think, how do we want to get our food? How do we want to interrelate with, with humans and more than humans? Yeah, that was a lot of questioning and it really important to sit in that place of not knowing the answers while we just figure it out, because, you know, we had our parents, we have our grandparents, we have our magazines and billboards and corporations and schools and businesses and governments, all telling us how to think and what to value and how they would like us to be as global corporate citizens or customers or whatever we're called. And I think for us as a family, to really, in terms of, the issue of, and the problem of the ongoing problem of being on stolen country and how do we make sense of that? How do we make peace with that? Is it possible to, and just to be on country, just to listen to the land and listen to, the birds and the winds. And before we impose our own ideology onto the garden, of course, there's observe and interact, which is interact with each other, with the world, observe ourselves, just how, yeah, how, let the land guide us to how the land would like us to be. And what does that relationship look like? And does the land want us to concrete everything and poison the soil, or would the land like to be honored and nurtured and to be in relationship with us and to see how human you are and our seeds, all of it as a gift of a true relation of yeah, a relationship.

Morag Gamble: 17:21

Yeah, beautiful. I wonder what was the point at which you realized that you wanted to live this way? Was there, I'm sure there's not a point, but maybe there was an insight or what was the thing that set you on the path to transition from where you were to this and maybe what is, no, it's going to be too big of a question if I ask you that, but I will ask you anyway. What was some of the steps along the way that you were able to transition or did you just jump right into it??

Patrick Jones: 18:01

I feel like for me, that it's been a reclamation, a story, a transition of reclamation of what I had, as a kid, I was able to free range along the local creek, which was full of honeysuckle and yabby out of the creek and bring those yabbies home and add them to the pot. And mum would make a yabby quiche. I was able to sit out in my undies and light a fire. And I, you know, at about age six, seven or eight, I felt I was an indigenous boy. I completely embodied that story. And I, so there was a big old gum tree up to probably about three or 400 years old, just up the corner from where I grew up in the country, New South Wales. And so I used to spend a whole lot of time around that tree. There were lots of possums, you know, it’s a big habitat tree and the creek was just nearby. And I think just the childhood, I mean, I did later go off to school and it was kind of reformed. But I feel like my adult life and meeting Meg and joining our environmentalisms together and really, you know, waking up in our thirties sort of, you know, having followed as I mentioned before, practices in the arts and just really looking at our kind of complicit involvement in what I later in my doctoral work called hyper-techno civility is this hyper technologically focused relationship diminished culture that is all about tools and technology before people and trees and environments and bondedness to place. And so I just, you know, all I have are things like my, my paternal grandmother's wild health wisdom of growing up where she would say, always let a healthy dog lick your wounds. And we always thought that was pretty crazy, but you know, I always did because I was given permission and as I became older, I realized that every time I had a cut on my foot and the family dog would lick my wounds, it become the wound. And it was like, wow, this is sort of like the remnants of ancestral knowledge in my grandmother that I haven’t lost and that's such a beautiful thing. And I feel like, as modern subjects of capital were raised to say the past is irrelevant, don't worry about the stories of the old, they're all just primitive and barbaric. This is only the present and the future is important and therefore we're sort of at sea, we're kind of have no, um, we're bobbing around without those connection stories and those connection medicines and those, those things that make us well and healthy and free of anxiety. So I think that, like, as Meg was saying before, shame and or sitting in the guilt is important, but as long as it's productive guilt and productive shame, because there's nothing like festering guilt and shame, it just brings more trouble and trauma into the world and white unproductive guilt is devastation to the land and to people. And so, I feel like, yes, it's important to recognize the different types of guilts and shames and to say, well, actually I want to use this guilt and shame to be active and to actively, well, in my case, reclaim what I came to understand that I’ve lost.

Morag Gamble: 22:21

So with the work that you're doing, in all different aspects, it is about this, reclaiming and sharing the love and kindness and connection. And you do this through so many different ways through, how you're living, how you share how you live, how you're running, as you mentioned earlier, a Bush School as well. Can you tell us about some of those ways that you’re through what you're doing as Artists as Family, as performance art, as parents, that you're finding ways to help to share the kind of work that you're doing and the kind of thinking and the kind of being, and kind of loving that is just inherent in what you do.

Meg Ulman: 23:13

For something that we're often saying to Woody, our nearly nine-year-old, if you want something in the world, it's up to you to create it. And instead of waiting for other people to do it, or to give you what you need, it's up to you to speak up and make that a reality. And so we try to embody that in our lives as parents and as a family and as an art collective. And for example, three or four years ago, I was wanting to start a fermenting group and I was hoping that some, you know, I needed people to troubleshoot with, I needed to say, why is my ferment all stinky? Or why is this all gloopy? Or why is it bubbling away? Isn't it bubbling? Or why is this got mold on it or whatever it was. So instead of just hoping for a group and hoping for this community to appear, I just, we had a dinner here and we were going to start a fermenting group. And everybody bring a dish, doesn't have to be fermented. People came and we just started a free monthly, fermentation group called Daylesford Culture Club and it's been going strong ever since. And yeah, just a way to create community and all the things we do, we run, all the different groups we run, non-monetarily, is it either a gift exchange or just a flat non-monetary exchange so we have, also take volunteers here. So we run, applied near[ now I can’t remember] the School of Applied Neo-Peasantry and we call, the property's called, Tree Elbow. We call it Tree Elbow University and again, that's non-monetary and just a way to exchange knowledges, exchange labor, exchange microbes when we were not in lockdown. And we can have people here. Yeah, just a way, another way to share what we do, share our learnings, share those ancestral reclamations, and just to share stories and hear how other people go about living in a carbon positive way. So we also run a Bush School, a weekly Bush School called Forest and Free. This is a third iteration so when Woody was younger, we had a Make and Play and then that morphed into a Feral and Free, now, Forest and Free, so we kind of run it, we get burnout, stop it for a while and then get invigorated and restart it. But on that note, with what you mentioned earlier about you asking for, being bold enough to ask for what he needs, I think he did say dad I'd really like for Bush School to go again. And it was like, okay, well that, I've heard that there's a, that's a call to respond to rather than just starting it from nowhere. And so that, as an unschooling family, it's been really important to have the Bush Schools cause most of the kids are from the local schools. There's about three or four local schools that they’ve come to, come from, sorry. And that's just a really great way of integrating so there isn't this sort of us and them between homeschoolers and unschoolers and school folks and yeah, that's, those sorts of things have been really important in our journey to make sure that we don't become, like, while people call the way that we live quite extreme or radical without cars and without supermarket foods and, giving up so many different things.

Patrick Jones: 27:26

With our closest, we call us, we live in an unintentional community. And so the neighbors on the street and the relationships to them and the non-judging and the working together and the sharing of resources and things of, you know, in terms of influencing our neighborhood in a permacultural way, it's just happened, not by telling, but actually by just doing. And that seems to be, to me, and it's the same with the Bush School as well. That seems to be the most exciting thing. Just put two hours a week for kids can get out of quite controlled environments in school. They're not allowed in schools to climb trees and not, certainly not have knives. I had a pocket knife, we were all supposed to have a pocket knife at school when I was at primary school, so this is just a generation not every school had kids pocket knives, but ours did. We could have fires at school, supplies, knives, and tree climbing. Well, those things that you can get at this forest school and mainly because we do it, non-monetarily, we do it as volunteers and we ask the parents and the kids to share the risk and to say that risk is an ordinary part of life, it's a really necessary part of life. And if we don't, and not in a competitive way at all, but in our own abilities, if we don't take risks, if we don't get lost, we don't take risks, we don't fall out of the tree if we don't take risks and it's not about creating a risky environment. It's a very fine line. Obviously, we don't want to create a kind of situation where people are hurting themselves all the time, but, you know, kids grow up beaten by jack jumpers and burnt on the fire and fallen out of trees and got at lost dark coming home from a game as the winter sun is going down more and more quickly at the moment.

Meg Ulman: 29:32

Lots of blackberry scratching.

Morag Gamble: 29:42

But it feels like a certain level of capability and resilience and strength and independence. And, you know, I also have a couple of home, not homeschoolers, unschoolers here and my place. And they often, they're a little bit older than Woody now, so they're 12 and 14 and they'll just go off with a couple of mates who are from here. Some are from school, some are not, and they'll go camping at night, somewhere around the river. I don't know where they are, but I know that they’re somewhere within the Crystal Waters Village and they take stuff to cook up, they find things, they've got their knives and whatever. And I, but I know that they're safe, you know, because they're aware, they're aware of the dangers, they're aware of where they need to be, where they could get help, how they can manage themselves, how they can respectfully be in nature. You know, like where do they go to the toilet? Like how does that even happen? Or how do they cook their food and where do they get safe drinking water from? They know all of that and they can negotiate their way around. So I think, while it seems like it could be seen to be an unsafe thing, I feel so confident that I know that these kids become responsible when they're independently there by themselves when they're just even a little bit older, you know, my eight year old, I probably wouldn't yet let go out independently at night, with another group of eight year olds, yet. Maybe soon.

Patrick Jones: 31:21

Yeah. We feel the same. But soon. Soon.

Morag Gamble: 31:29

Yeah. I mean, I'd love to hear more about, as well as the Bush School, your other thoughts around how you won school and I hear what you were saying about your schooling and how things had shifted and changed when you did go to school. I'm just wondering how are you approaching this kind of, these two questions before I lose the other one, about the unschooling and the other one is about working. So there are two quite different questions, but really thinking about if most of your things happen as in the gift economy. And how do you see work? What is work to you? What does that mean? So, you know, work and schooling, they're kind of, for me, they ended up being so intertwined, which is, I guess why I'm asking you the questions together because in my life, they are, they tend to be ending up that way.

Meg Ulman: 32:39

Yes. Maybe I'll pick the unschooling and you’d then take the work a bit. So unschooling, so I might just talk about the differences between unschooling and homeschooling for people who might not be across just the languaging of it. So homeschooling is where you have a curriculum and you have lessons and usually it's schoolwork and it's bookwork, and often the parents become the teachers. So it's still, it's the curriculum that is usually based on the parents or the governments or their education systems, ethics or imperatives. So we really didn't want that for our kids. We really wanted a much more child-led learning, which is what unschooling is. And we call ourselves an unschooling family. It's not just Woody, who's unschooled, we're all unschooling and community schooling and school of the world, and seem to be school of the road and we'll talk a little bit about our next adventure, soon. Yeah, so we, in our household, we create a very specific framework, a cultural framework and Woody is free to be, to do whatever he wants inside that, of course, within limits but for example, we're not, it's not two parents who are working full time and it's not just a kid on an iPad playing Minecraft, although I understand why parents do give their kids iPads to play Minecraft, but it's that kind of activity doesn't suit our world view and what we're trying to do in this household. And what we're trying to do in this household is really, is to live by permaculture principles to live with as much integrity as we can, which means living according to our values and our values are not, we don't value competition, we don't value greed, we don't value excessive accumulation. We don't value polluting and buying things in plastic packaging that’s single use. We're really trying to live much more in harmony and in relationship with our, with the world. And so the thing, so the activities that Woody chooses to do are up to him, so sometimes he plays violin. So sometimes he plays the violin. So he has two formal classes a week. So that's violin classes and clay classes and he, yeah,[inaudible] I can't think, it's just our life, what we do. It's like...

Morag Gamble: 36:07

Exactly. I mean, that describes that in itself. I mean, yeah, totally

Patrick Jones: 36:16

So the two formal classes are not all that formal, like Woody learns clay through community land cooperative clay space it's called and lots of kids learn there. And so they have a main teacher, Kim who's wonderful. And she just goes between the kids and they can get on with any of the projects and she can instruct as they need and sort of offer advice.

Meg Ulman: 36:42

And all the other kids who go there, go to school.

Patrick Jones: 36:46

Yeah. And then Adam is Woody’s violin teacher. He comes here for an hour every week and helps Woody integrate the family songs that Woody loves, like the songs that we're taking with us and we've written so far on the road, the songs that Woody has selected. So we've got, I don't know, 20 or 30 songs, but he's chosen nine to take to the next level in terms of his violin. So Meg and I do a recording of the song we're working on, send it through to Adam and Adam brings it to Woody in the lesson and then they work out a fiddle, the fiddle role for it, and which is really great. So again, that's kind of formal, I guess it's more formal than clay, but so that's just one hour a week. And there's been a number of times where he's, maybe three times in the last three years where he said, I really don't want to do it, violin is too hard. And we've, because we don't, as Meg explained, unschooling is not about any form of control. It's actually all about the child directing his or her path of inquiry. And sometimes it's just sitting on a couch or staring out the window, or sometimes, that’s really engaged in the project, in the flow of his own making. So, but yeah, staying, we've just said to him, look there, to have an experience of what, if you want to call this, we're forcing you to have an experience of one hour a week, so that even if violin is that, you know, what forced learning is, we know that you get a lot more enjoyment out of it, and most times you'd love it. And you turn up, but right now, you're seeing this as us enforcing that Adam comes every week, then just that's the learning, just to know, we don't want to do that all week, but at least to know that, do, so therefore you can connect with and understand what kids at school are going through because they're, you know, while there's project-based learning and there's all sorts of things that do happen in school, a lot of the time is a top-down curriculum. That's not even augmented by the teacher, it's staked down and the teacher has a little bit of influence, but the kids have almost no influence on what they do. So just sort of explaining that these are the structures that he, yeah, that to understand even what his parents had to go through. And also that sticking to things while unschooling is really about creating an environment where you don't even have to have this conversation where we're sticking to things is irrelevant because kids are so motivated generally as unschoolers so much more motivated because they can direct their ship.

Morag Gamble: 40:08

I’ve had a conversation with my son recently. He doesn't like the term unschooerl and we don't know another term to use because it's, you know, we're doing very much like what you're doing. And, but he kind of feels like it, it doesn't, it's sort of saying what it's not, not what it is. I don't know. I'd love to find out another term if you ever come across one, to kind of play around. I've tasked him with the thing, well, what do you call your learning? He’s just going, I have no idea, I just am, I’m just being me.

Meg Ulman: 40:39

Of course we’re not, it’s not like we’re, like with Artists as Family, when we decided to call ourselves that because we're not artists over here and parents are here and gardeners over here. It's all one. And it's the same thing with unschooling. We're not schooling over here and we're not just being kids over here and we're being with other kids here. It's all one beautiful compost. I think it's self-directed learning or self-directed education or our friend, Jen Ridley talks about it as family education, because in many ways the kids are growing up in a family context and the family is generally connected to community. And so, and that's really important with unschooling or alternative forms just to, the connectedness to community. I mean, one of the great alarms of people, you know, when they hear that we're homeschooling or unschooling, it's usually collapsed as homeschooling, but, is, well, how are they going to socialize? It's like, well, that's a really interesting question because socialization is engineered in school and it's usually engineered to a year group. So in a kind of healthy village scenario, children can engage with many different people from elders right down to little babies. And so what we find in our, what we've found in our own unschooling experience is that, our children and other unschooled schooling children and homeschooling children are able to connect with different age groups very easily. Whereas, at school, it’s so socially engineered. And I mean, I even have recalls of this. I didn't know anyone really below me at school. No one counted, maybe the year above me did, but it was, that's like, that's a disconnection, that's just another disconnection. So, you know, I mean, we might go on about problems with schools. They're really, we can talk about that later, but, or at another.

Morag Gamble: 42:55

Yeah. So, well, thank you for that. I mean, it's, I think what you're saying too, is this very much about it being part, it's an extension of the whole way of being that you're expressing as a family. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you express your, like your approach to work and economy and sort of the radical home economy approach and what does that look like in Artists as Family, your work life? I even like, I know that it's all one, but like if we sort of have to look at that context, what does that, how do you describe that?

Meg Ulman: 43:34

So in terms of work-life, there's non-monetary work and there's monetary work, and again, like your son, I don't like the term non-monetary because it explains what it's not. So maybe we'll just call it the gift economy but in terms of our monetary work, we are able to work. So I worked two days a week in the formal monetary economy and five days in the gift economy and Patrick seven days in the gift economy. We've also got, um, a small shed that Patrick has built out of reclaimed materials that's on, the weekend holiday market because we live in a very touristy area. So we go without a lot of things, which is how we are able to live by not working in the formal monetary economy very much. So, as Patrick said, just over 10 years ago, we both sold our cars and we don't fly overseas, we don’t play anywhere, we don't shop at supermarkets. We don't go, we don't have a lot of, I mean, you can see our home here for people who are watching this on YouTube, the visual. But we have things that we don't, we're not huge consumers. That's just not part of our story, which means that we are able to focus our attention on the things that are very important to us, which is staying home and not just because we're in lockdown, but then really being part of, really embedded on the land here. And You know, local communities give back, be part of all the different community groups that we're part of. And that we facilitate, really give back to the forest here, be in service to what, like Patrick in terms of being in service to the living of the world. And we have, in terms of income, we have, we run house and garden tours, we wrote a book several years ago.

Patrick Jones: 45:56

Occasionally get a royalty check.

Meg Ulman: 46:10

We get lending rights when the book is borrowed, lent it out in libraries.

Patrick Jones: 46:11

We tried to talk to our publishing, having it as a creative commons book. They just laughed at us.

Meg Ulman: 46:18

Yeah. I mean, we have a small solar system on our roof, we've got water tanks. So we don't use toilet paper, for example, in the house, we just use family cloth, so putting over the years, you know, turning the gas off. Then when we moved into the house, there was gas, hot water, gas stove top and gas, heat, gas heating so we had spent time at an anti coal seam gas blockade. And when we returned home, we just didn't feel comfortable switching on the gas anymore so we put certain things in place and now we have a wood heater that we use for eight or nine different appliances. So it heats our water at his house. It dries our clothes. We bake in it, we do roasts in it, it's out dehydrator.

Patrick Jones: 47:12

It took two and a half years to pay for that, timber, fuel, power hub being our stove. And, as to make it run so many different appliances. But it's more than that, it's a connection to the nearby forest when we go to look for wood, when we empty the stove of the ash and the potash, we separate them and make activated biochar with a charcoal and we have potash and then that goes back to the forest where it came. And so that people sort of this wood energy just at the emissions point from the chimney particularly, if it's not a very efficient heater, but in terms of like having most of your energy needs, and I think we have electricity, our electricity needs are just two, just over two kilowatt hours a day. And the average in Australia is 18 and the average in America is 28. So that's quite a low energy household. And so, our energy comes from our work for way of being in the world of bicycle. Because we use a bicycle trailer to go and retrieve it. And there's, so there's about an hour a day of being in the forest and Woody, that's a big part of his and my connectedness and our learning in the forest is going out to get the wood. And so it's an hour to go and get the wood, bring it back, chop it, stack it and bring it in. So that's on average a day and there's about three hours towards food. So there's, it's really a four-hour working day for the nuts and bolts for our food and energy and medicine resources. And so we always like to say permaculture provides an opportunity to attend to food, energy and medicine with capitalism. So it's not to say that we won't ever not, you know, that we will occasionally go to a supermarket if we're away from home, we will go to a chemist if we need to if one of us gets sick, but because of the way we live, we very rarely get sick. And we, the three of them keep us, you know, collecting the wood that's going to power the house and then to grow the food, that's going to power ourselves and then to put that human waste back into a very well-organized composting system, a human composting system, which goes back into the soil to feed. So I think those things, those processes are relational-based, but in a nuts and bolts economic sense, they’re hard, they’re four hours a day. And then to pay for that kind of tenure, the privilege, as Meg said, does the two out, two days a week in the formal economy and we've got this little, very affordable Airbnb, which is not a house. It's not, you know, people couldn't actually live there, but very low budget people used to come to Daylesford such as Meg andI, because we could afford to actually come take the waters, go for Bush walks but it’s, everything is high-end now. So we really like to, a little shack called Permie Love Shack, it’s 90 bucks a night and it pretty much services our mortgage. So we get three nights a week,on average throughout the year that it's rented. And so that cancels out the big global, so the Airbnb global monopoly and the mortgage monopoly when we just sort of cancel each other out and then we can get on with our life, yeah.

Morag Gamble: 51:11

Yeah, that's great. And I love the fact that you're saying that it's not, and all of those things are not separated, they're integrated, like you're saying, going and attending to your energy needs is the time that you're also caring for the forest and also building relationships with your son and you know, that there are no separations in that way, like going to work, paying for these, doing that, it all becomes this beautiful, integrated whole, I wonder, like during COVID I noticed that you spent a lot of time making some beautiful films about the things that you do, the way that you access your food and process your food and lots of other things. I wonder how was the response to your, to your way of living during COVID, do you get lots more people coming to you saying, how do you do what you do? We kind of really feel like we need to know more about this now. Was there a shift that you noticed?

Meg Ulman: 52:16

Yes, there was definitely a shift and I think as people really realized how unstable centralized systems were that they were relying on for their food, mainly for their food, but also for their goods that they were buying. When they realized how unstable they were, people were really open to new ways of being, and also very old ways of being. So we, which is how we have been living for a long time. So yeah, it was really, and also I feel like we've been preparing for a pandemic for many years, although we didn't know it at the time as I'm sure it was in your household too, that your home-based, that you're growing a lot of your own food that you don't rely on these big external systems. So when people had that wake up call when COVID hit lots of permies around the world, we're seeing great interest in their work and in permaculture as a really positive solution.

Patrick Jones: 53:31

You can say everything you want about climate change and ecological crises and pollution in the Pacific trash vortex and you know, keep creating the arguments, but unless you see empty supermarket shelves, it doesn't, that's the thing that really galvanizes people. That's the thing that actually says, oh, wow, those nutters across the road, or those, is that what they are about? Oh, that's all right, I get the connection now. And there's been this, yeah, I mean, after the first, I can't remember. I think we're in the fourth lockdown here in Victoria, but we're taking one for the team, for the rest of the country. After one or two of them, we got very depressed because we saw all these interest, we had time to, because we weren't doing our community work. We thought, well, let's, we can do on more online.

Meg Ulman: 54:32

We didn’t have volunteers.

Patrick Jones: 54:41

Yeah, no volunteers, so we had time to make these films and that was a really special time, but then coming out of it and then seeing the trucks gear back up into the old story, it was very, very disappointing, but sort of several months on from that, and seeing, the sort of continual world in crisis and, you know, capitalism of course uses crisis to its advantage at all. I think, isn't my only client who wrote about disaster capitalism but there's many theorists who have looked at just how capitalism needs crisis to generate a whole lot of income. And so while people's jobs are affected and people's livelihoods are very vulnerable at the moment, there's somebody making lots of money off this all around the world, but also, I think people are recognizing more that this is an opportunity for regenerative thinking and transition towns and permaculture. And I mean, Meg works for David Holmgren and you've seen just a huge amount of interest in permaculture and retro suburbia is like a number one seller, even though it's not a single piece of mainstream media press in Australia, it's like sold more for an$80 book because it's such a, it's a huge Bible. It's a very expensive book, particularly for those, most of us are low income who are wanting it, many of us are. So yeah, just to have sold so many copies and of course the ebook copy, which is pay what you feel has been tens of thousands of copies of that. So to make that much more equitable and distributed, accessible economically.

Morag Gamble: 56:36

You're heading on a different adventure coming up very soon. You have been on, you mentioned the book earlier that of a previous adventure you've been on. And any of the links that we you talked about, so you book or any of your websites or anything like that we can put down below so people can follow through on them. Do you want to maybe speak a little bit about the adventure that you're about to embark upon and maybe a little bit too about the previous one?

Meg Ulman: 57:10

So seven years ago, we took off, we rented out our house. We found people to cover all of the active different roles in the different community groups that we were facilitating. And we packed, there were five of us on two bikes, so we've got an older boy who's now 19, but he was 11 going on 12 on that trip. So he and Patrick and our dog Zero were on the tandem. And I had Woody on the back of my bike. So we left on bicycles and we didn't know where we're going, we’re just heading north. And we were just going on a family holiday. I mean, how do you take permaculture? We know about permaculture working in settlements, but how do you, what does permaculture look like on the road? So we went on a journey to find out. So the focus was feral foods, so eating, lots of foraging, lots of hunting, fishing and we had a couple of tents, so we didn't really have to spend a lot of money. And so we wrote about that adventure and we, the book is called The Art of Free Travel, A Frugal Family Adventure. And we are now, so last year we were actually about to head off on a hitchhiking adventure, just backpacks and musical instruments and just gonna take off, but then COVID hit and we couldn't go very far at all, just as far as outside our lawn, through the forest and so we're ready for the next adventure. And so we are heading off in a couple of months on another cycling escapade. So Patrick and Woody will be on the tandem this time and I'll have Zero on my bike. And again, lots of drifting, lots of trying to offer ourselves as, to be in service to the communities that we find ourselves in.

Patrick Jones: 59:20

I think that’s the thing for us, that is, the drifting, but also when we come to a place that has a need to drop and to participate, but not as, you know, in our own community would become, I guess, community actors and leaders in a number of different things. So it's really nice just to get in and be one of the participants and not have to organize anything, but just actually be there and be solid and to give in that way. And you know, there's so many ways to give as well and the story sharing stories is really a beautiful way to give and we'll be traveling with our instruments as said. And so we'll be sharing our stories through song as much as by meeting people and hearing their stories and exchanging yarns.

Morag Gamble: 1:00:21

So tell me more about your songs. You write music, you write music as a family. Do you write, you also bring old stories and weave them into your music as well, is that right?

Meg Ulman: 1:00:39

So, some of our songs, we have written both the music and the lyrics and some of them, we take lyrics from various different places. Some of them are really old, some of them are contemporary and where we put them to music. Sometimes we re-interpret the lyrics. Yeah. We just, what were you trying to say?

Patrick Jones: 1:01:02

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're not musicians. We are storytellers that use instruments. Um, really just,

Meg Ulman: 1:01:14

Yeah, we, we use writing, we use film, we use music, whatever way that we can share our stories.

Morag Gamble: 1:01:20

Yeah. I was talking with one of the, there's a young refugee man who I work with in Kakuma refugee settlement. And he had the opportunity to be part of this permaculture course that was running in the community for local young people. So there's like free permaculture happening. So he's part of that. And he was, he took that and he just went, this is so important for our community, not just about the food and caring for land, but actually having some kind of sense of hope where there's so much hopelessness. I think this is so important that I want to be able to share this with you throughout this refugee settlement. How do I do that? The best way I can see is by singing it and singing in a way that attracts people to hear the story, because I think it's a bit like what you were saying before, Patrick, that you can kind of talk about this. You can talk about what's going on in the world and we need changes to happen, but how do you create a different way of being that, attract people into sort of notice? And it could be the crisis of things, not on the shelves, but what other ways do people come in to kind of come a bit close, they kind of lean in to see what's happening and that what, where you started this conversation with that sort of sense of joy and connection and belonging and healing and ritual and dance and music and all of that part of life. And if that's infused with the kind of stories that you want to tell about permaculture and living a neo-peasantry life, it has so much, there's so much richness and depth in the stories that come through that and in the music that you share. And so you're going to be sharing these stories and songs I hear as you're going around. How does that work? You’re just going to kind of pull up your bikers on the side of the street and start singing.

Meg Ulman: 1:03:26

Yeah, so we've been hitchhiking and busking journeys, previously and all we had, money we had to spend was the money that arrived in our violin case. Yeah. So we're going to try our lack of busking again and just find a campfire.

Patrick Jones: 1:03:50

So we need about$35 a day to live when we're on the road. So we're not great musicians, but we heard we reckon, we might get enough coin to do that and hopefully help bring some smiles and some heart, warm hearts to folk. And it's also just a nice thing to do. I mean, busking is, can be, can be an imposition into public space so we want to be sensitive about that as well, not just sort of impose ourselves onto a town and a place to sort of feel our way sensitively in that. So we don't really know how it's going to work but.

Meg Ulman: 1:04:35

But I know that if I saw a family rock up on bicycles, obviously carrying their home with them, with their dog and then start playing, I would be very interested in thay had to say.

Patrick Jones: 1:04:46

And I feel like that's right. Cause they're all schooled in this sort of, virtuosic tradition that you have to be a good musician, otherwise don't bother. And, like, we really sort of turned that on their heads and say, well, we're not really musicians. We really want to sing because singing is medecine, song is medicine. Like, to sing is just such a healthy thing. So it's a part of our medicine, but then we've also had comments back, like, oh, I haven't seen a family playing music for years. And that brought someone joy. It's not like, necessarily our story or how we’re sounding and what genre music. It's actually just seeing a family playing music in a public park.

Morag Gamble: 1:05:29

Or even just a family doing something meaningful together that even itself.

Patrick Jones: 1:05:35

Y eah. Yes. Exactly. So I think that, u m, yeah, the sensitivities a nd not to impose, but there's also, well, u m, you know, if yeah, but t he little bit of that we've done in the past i s, has given u s a really joyful feedback, u m, to say, yes, actually this is something that is valuable a nd, and brings joy.

Morag Gamble: 1:05:58

And for you too, I'm kind of hearing, there's this sense of freedom of the drifting, of being on the road that there's like something about that that's really important for you, that you have this very home-based lifestyle, but the possibilities of heading off and flying and migrating forbid and coming back home is part of a replenishing for your energy. Is that, is that what I'm, am I reading that right? Or?

Meg Ulman: 1:06:31

Definitely, and also to, although we are not strict followers of clock time and not having a child at school certainly helps with that. You know, we, I work two days a week. I still, we still have appointments. You know, we're meeting you at 12 o'clock to be part of this podcast and really seeing time as all linear clock time as a construct and seeing it as a great tool of colonization and really looking at our time away and all the different ways that we can when we're here at home, how we can decolonize ourselves. And it's not just to do deep, I don't see colonization just to do with black indigenous people of color, it's to do with all of us. And if we are going to be working very hard on the project of decolonization, we need to know what that looks like. What does decolonization actually look like? So taking, you know, not putting our kids in school, really trying to live without money, as much as possible living without..

Patrick Jones: 1:07:47

Dependency on white institutions. I think that's a big one, including the monetary system which is inherently a form of patriarchy or the oppressive patriarchy. So while, of course we're collecting coins, the majority of the economy on the road is what the land bears forth. And I think that foraging and just like at home, foraging and the hunting and the fishing aspects as well as the bartering and exchanging or the gifting, are really big parts of decolonizing our economic realm as well. Like, that's really a big part of our story and it's not too, I mean, we can, I mean, obviously we have, you know, a mortgage has to be explained. We are not anti-money in the absolute sense, but it is an economy that must grow. And so what we've done over the last 12, 13 years is to put money into 25% of our overall economy. And so that has been a really great transition and because yes, money is necessary to a degree, but the growing of it, or to see conceive yourself as being wholly dependent, a hundred percent dependent on money is you are in that colonized of economy because it, once you start to actually decouple aspects of your economy from it and put it into de-growth, then you're starting to decolonize your economic form.

Morag Gamble: 1:09:42

Mm, well, I wish you all the best in your big adventures and maybe it might bring you past our place. It would be so amazing. I don't know whether you're going west or north yet. But you’re so welcome to come and join us up here if you get this way.

Meg Ulman: 1:10:00

We'd love to play you a song, Morag.

Morag Gamble: 1:10:00

O h that would be amazing.

Patrick Jones: 1:10:00

This one is a beautiful poem that my mom sent through a few weeks ago by Irish poet called or American poet called Martha Postlethwaite and it's called the Clearing.

Patrick (singing): 1:10:38

Do not try save the whole world or do anything grandiose Instead, find a clearing In the dense forest of your life And wait there patiently Until the song that is your life Falls into your own cupped hands And you recognize and greet it.

Patrick and Meg (singing): 1:11:12

F alls into your own cupped hands And you recognize and greet it.

Patrick (singing): 1:13:05

Only then you know how to give yourself to the world so worthy of rescue.

Patrick and Meg (singing): 1:13:05

Only then you know how to give yourself to the world so worthy of rescue. Only then you know how to give yourself to the world so worthy of rescue.****Repeat from top***

Patrick (singing): 1:13:05

Then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue..

Morag Gamble: 1:13:18

Oh, that was so beautiful. What a gift to have someone send you such amazing poetry to be able to turn into music like that too. Wow. Well, I, as you were singing, I was just thinking, oh, I would so love you to come here and come and sing up a storm with the community here. That would be amazing.

Patrick Jones: 1:13:18

We will one day for sure.

Morag Gamble: 1:13:18

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk with me here. And like I said before, any links that we talked about or books or journeys or references that you mentioned we can put in the links down below so that people can follow that up and find out more, and maybe there's a place people can follow you on your journey. Are you going to be somehow dropping in links where you are, what you're doing? Are you just going off, off grid?

Patrick Jones: 1:13:18

We are actually going to story it.

Meg Ulman: 1:13:18

Yeah, so we are very reluctantly on social media, so we've been working with some friends in a gift exchange, so we're going to do a permaculture design of their property, and they've been making us a website that we’re trying to get off social media but that will be a bit of a process and it’s almost ready to go live.

Morag Gamble: 1:14:36

Wonderful. Well, if you could send me the link to that one and then I can pop that in there too. That'd be great. Yeah. Thank you so much and say hello to Woody. I hope he's had a wonderful day at his friend's house today. Thank you so much for joining me. Receive all your beautiful questions.

Morag: 1:15:02

So that's all for today. Thanks so much for joining us. Head on over to my YouTube channel, the link's below, and then you'll be able to watch this conversation, but also make sure that you subscribe, because that way you are notified of all new films that come out and also you'll get notified of all the new interviews and conversations that come out. So thanks again for joining us, have a great week and I'll see you next time.