Ryan Dickinson 00:00
So I'm joined today by Patrick Jones, really appreciate it. We're in the love shack right now, it’s very nice.I came through Daylesford maybe two months ago, and I was over at the petrol station filling up. And I look up, and there's someone hooting down the road on their bicycle. Leafy greens out the back timber on the front. And, 'I'm like that's f****n' Patrick!' (laughs) Yeah, it was amazing. What's your typical morning?
Patrick Jones 00:58
Firstly, G'day, Ryan. Thanks for inviting me on. And I just might mention we’re in Djaara people's country. Yeah, southern Djaara people's country.A typical morning is usually a plunge with Meg, my partner, in in our tank. We've got an old tank that was gifted to us that we took the top off and so we start with a five minute plunge in cold water, icy water when it's winter. And after that everything seems to be easier that comes after that, for the rest of the day. So yeah, that's a very enlivening way to wake up. And we usually do that on dawn, and then go back inside, not run back inside we re-acclimatise, then head back. We've already got the fire going and the kettle on and then we sit or we'll stand around the fire, just warming up slowly drinking tea and checking in with one another. And then generally go and check on the flerd, which is the small flock of sheep and the small herd of goats that we often run together. At the moment they're in separate places.
Ryan Dickinson 02:22
And that's common land?
Patrick Jones 02:24
Both common and private land. So a lot of neighbors. Yeah, with the request of, 'Do you want our sheep to do your lawn mowing?', And they go 'Yeah, that's fine. That'd be great.' So yeah, we are farmerless farmers.And so we've got a flerd of about 15 animals. And yeah, either doing fire mitigation work in the forest or I guess grass fire mitigation, biological mowing in, you know, unused paddocks so we're on the edge of suburbia, between the town and the forest. And, and that forest goes on in runs into the wombat forest which the town is almost surrounded by. So it's rated as a very high bushfire region. And so we've been using goats much like families and people did up until about when the gas came through. And there was always a house cow and there were goats and sheep, just keeping the weedy woody weeds at bay and, and also providing important local milk and meat to families, converting weeds basically into meat and milk.
Ryan Dickinson 03:59
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. That's great. I didn't know that you had a cold plunge. That's amazing. Okay, so with those 15 sheep are you shearing them?
Patrick Jones 04:18
No, they, so there's half of about eight sheep and they’re dorpers. So they're self shedding. And they're very hardy like goats. But both of them really their soft spot is their hooves so making, keeping their hooves clipped. And just yeah, just keeping an eye out for infection or particularly with this wet season, foot rot.But other than that they're just incredibly hardy animals and they browse. The dorpers are a cross between Dorset In England, where my ancestors some of my ancestors come from. And “per” is the Persian. Yeah, so it's this incredibly hardy, resilient sheep.
Ryan Dickinson 05:12
It's like perfect for [the] Australian climate.
Patrick Jones 05:14
Yeah. Really good for Australian climate. Yeah. And yeah the non-shearing aspect is great. And then they are a meat sheep. Yeah. So they put on incredible density of growth, and the same size sheep as the goat, you might have double the amount of meat. Yeah. Even our goats are meat goats as well.
Ryan Dickinson 05:39
Yeah. So how often? How long have you had the flerd?
Patrick Jones 05:46
I guess we started with goats about four or five years ago.Yeah, we were doing bushfire mitigation work with neighbors. Using boards that we, we learned this technique through David Holmgren with his work down in Spring Creek, which is really great community managed forest. And so about eight years ago, we started working with volunteers and neighbors. And just going into the forest just near here with boards and ladders and just sort of laying these two to four meter high bramble blackberries down onto the ground, and then just maintaining by stomping and then we'd have the Bush School kids come through and we do what we call “blackberry surfing”. And we'd get them a little board each from the tip, some sort of, you know, thing they could lift and then going down these sort of steep gullies trying to stay on the boards as they flip and crush and Yeah, bring that, particularly the dry canes of the blackberries that the BlackBerry leaf itself is fire mitigating. What's all the dead dry canes [missing]. That's what's actually. And then once those, they're broken up and crushed by the, by the heavy weight of humans, and now goats and the goats getting to the leaf, so eating of the leaf and putting all the canes on the ground.The canes are full of lignin and they break down really quickly and create this beautiful humus.And then once the sun can hit the forest floor, we've done a survey of 32 indigenous species coming back. In that area where the goats are, so we just make sure the goats aren't in that forested area in the spring and summer when the seed sets happening. And so we've really tipped the balance of like one dominating weed species to multiple species. So yeah, that's, that's been in a very short period of time.
Ryan Dickinson 08:00
Yeah, that's amazing. So those species that are coming up, are they like woody species? So they're going to essentially shade out where those blackberries were?
Patrick Jones 08:10
Yeah, so one of the dominant species is the fireweed, which is a local indigenous. Seneca [Senecio Linearifolius], I think. And they're, they're a half meter to a meter tall. Become a herb, herbaceous plant, really, they grow to about a meter, then set their flower and then seed. And so yeah, they they've become very dominant. So rather than just seeing blackberry because the blackberry will push back up to half a meter to a meter over the summer, and then at the end of summer, and at the end of the seed set, the goats go back in and munch over the winter. And yeah, so there's, but there's really rare things like various lilies and murnong, which are the yam daisies,
Ryan Dickinson 09:28
You're getting those just naturally?
Patrick Jones 09:30
Yeah, because the sea bank is there from higher up in in more, sort of less weedy places in the forest, and those seeds are blowing down. or in the soil themselves, and they just can get sunlight. And more, yeah, less dominance of the blackberry.So all the things that, you know, like even poa tussock, lamandra grasses like that. Yeah, just, yeah, we've got a little on our website, I think it's called 32 yeah, 32 indigenous species recharge after goats, after goat grazing or something like that. And the goats are great because they signal out the invasive or the new cover species. They, that's what they want. They might nibble a black wood or they might nibble a cherry ballart, that’s the indigenous cherry. But they're not that interested in them they love that, they love the gorse, they love the wheat, the blackberries and all the, you know, sow thistles and things like that. And milk thistles.
Ryan Dickinson 10:29
Wow. Okay. And you mentioned their gorse. When I was driving in, I came down from Mansfield. And kind of you can just slowly see the gorse increasing. It's kind of there's a couple of little shrubs there on the side. And then you see like, whole paddocks just filled with it. And yeah, I remember watching a documentary of this guy in…
Patrick Jones 10:54
In New Zealand, Hugh. Yeah, that's a wonderful documentary.
Ryan Dickinson 10:58
And he's kind of he says, ‘You know, you don't need to cut these out or poison them or whatever you can just seed beneath them, and they will kind of provide safety for your seedlings to come up, which will eventually shade them out.’Yeah. And I kind of I had the thought that the gorse is essentially telling the farmer like, ‘This spot now has to become forest. This you know, you can try and have this as grassland, but you're, you're fighting a losing battle.’ Yeah, yeah. But you could use goats to kind of reduce that and let the sun in to get more species to come on.
Patrick Jones 11:39
Exactly. And it's not total annihilation. It's not like good species, bad species, correct. Incorrect. It's not that classic sort of binary that happens in just about every aspect of our culture, it's actually saying, well, the goats eat the flowers, and some of the new growth of the gorse. And so they just reducing the seed bank. But it's not a total annihilation. And the same with blackberries when the blackberries just become ground cover. They have all this, as I said, this soil building, they’re bank retaining, from erosion, because they're often on steep slopes. They're, like blue wrens, which are very important animal to me, their preferred habitat in this area is blackberry brambles. So a lot of small birds use blackberries or hawthornes too and also ringtail possums do, to build their drays or their nests. To yeah, for as protection. So it's this sort of good bad binary is really, it's not very nuanced. It's not really seeing what country is doing with these newcomers species and how these newcomer species are in-placing in country and so yeah, it's a much more dynamic and more than human consciousness and complexity that's going on that demands our attention.And that botanist Hugh [Wilson], I think his name is that, that yeah, that film is based on Happen films, I think is the the people that make it. They’re friends of ours and yeah.Yeah, so that story is so wonderful, because it is a botanist, seeing what the land likes not imposing but actually observing, understanding and then seeing those gorse plants operating as nurse, nurse plants, I think that's the term he uses. And then the, the indigenous seed stock is there. They're not actually planting in anything. It's all coming. It's all in the soil. So these are seeds laying dormant, waiting for some nursery plants or some upper canopy. And then once they're there, they're starting to seed and then they push up through and shade out the gorse. So the gorse is seen, understood as a pioneer species. Yeah actually, like the blackberry and much like the fireweed. The indigenous fireweed is, is a pioneer species. Yeah.
Ryan Dickinson 14:27
And I wonder too, I came down from Queensland. My old man has a property up there now. And his property as well as much of the roadside up and down the east coast is covered in lantana. And I wonder if lantana does a similar thing, because we've noticed well Dad noticed that there are quails on his property. They love living under the Lantana. And then it was interesting like we were kind of pulling some out to make a few tracks around the place. And I just had the thought that if we, or unless we replace the function that the lantana is providing here, it's gonna continue to come back. So there's no point pulling it out and being like, ‘This is now lantana free.’ It's here, like the lantana lives here.But talking to my dad about it and like we can just kind of prune them back so that they're not just reaching out and covering everything, keep them as small bushes [they’re] still going to provide that habitat for the birds and everything.And also the flowers that the Lantana produces. If you mix those with coconut oil, you get a really good insect repellent. And the property is covered in midges. So it's kind of almost this, this trade off gift that the Lantana is giving it's like, you know, ‘I live here as well, but here’s a flower. Noticed there's some bugs in the area.’, you know? And yeah, it's just it's a, it's a really, it's a different approach, I think it's a different way of looking at the land, and instead of judging it like that's a bad plant, I want to get rid of it that's more appreciating its gifts, and that it lives here. And if we're not going to eradicate something, what relationship do we have to it? And what relationship do we have to the land?
Patrick Jones 16:28
A naturalist friend of mine recently told me about a small tract in somewhere in maybe north central Victoria or central Victoria, where gorse has actually been sectioned off as to be preserved because it is the habitat of a very rare and endangered bird, indigenous bird. And so, you know, I think this sort of as conservation movement becomes more developed and mature and more complex in its thinking. You know, like the destruction of willows along the creek still continues here. And so the floods, where the floods have been the destruction and the erosion is like, really significant. But there's still a lot of biodiversity officers that will get any money they can and throw it into an excavator to go and clear the incorrect species. And of course, then just create another trauma in the land, like goldmining was a trauma like sheep farming was a trauma, and particularly over, over grazing of sheep. And that's the other thing, you know, people say, ‘you're an environmentalist, when you've got sheep?’, it's like, well, we've got such small numbers. I mean, we're constantly rotating them. And they so they don't, you know, create compaction, they actually, they're, they're improving the grass diversity they’re fertilizing. And so, yeah, so grazing animals, and when when animals are allowed to graze, and move through the land, and not just be locked into cells, and overstocked it's a completely different scenario. But yeah, that I think, you know, when I, on the other hand, when I talk about, you know, the complexity, or the maturing of the conservation movement, you know, that that's quite a that's quite a sort of sentence, I might have been confident in terms of projecting into the future, a few years back, but you know, that that is sort of such middle class hubris, just even that idea that we’re going to have conservation and that it will mature and become complex. But will conservation even be a thing in the next 10 years? as people are scrambling just to survive, and that when we are facing a lot of a lot of big challenges? A lot of trouble?
Ryan Dickinson 19:21
Yeah, definitely. And it's, yeah, it's such a resource intensive thing that we do with conservation. You know, it's it's so much driving around, and it's so much use of poison and so much use of fuel powered devices and all this sort of thing.
Patrick Jones 19:39
Yeah, it's a it's an industrial industry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was getting at. That's the shorthand.
Ryan Dickinson 19:48
Yeah, I was talking with a friend like I've got quite a few friends that are in conservation. And, you know, I mentioned utilizing goats for weeds for woody weed reduction and this sort of a thing. And he's like, ‘you know, it's just not, viable on our end, you know, you've got, you've got four people looking after entire sections of forest, he's like, we don't have the resources necessary to do a lot of this work, we have to work with poisons, we have to work with these things, because we have to tick boxes, you know, we need to make it look like we’re making that effort, you know, I was like, that's, that's an interesting angle, like, you don't actually hear that from them that, like, they don't have the resources to be able to do the right thing. It's kind of, you know, he was talking about, like, the people that live there need to give more of a s**t about the place and need to be more invested. And they need to visit the creek beds, and they need to do some of the some of the weeding or just some of the, the pruning, you know, let let more sun in try and reduce some of the, the toxins flowing in from the road and you know, all this sort of stuff, you know, but it's, it's up to the locals of a place. You can't have four interventionists coming into the entire Cardinia Shire ranges, being able to manage it, like four people cannot manage a forest.
Patrick Jones 21:31
Without big industrial input. And this is neoliberalism. The economies of neoliberalism demands that there's only four people, four experts that with the, with the privileges of massive amounts of fossil fuel inputs, and, and this is the hubris of neoliberal thinking and education, because this all, you could apply what your friend has said about, you know, the frustration, across every field that comes out of particularly out of universities, because they're in the business of crafting jobs and industries that are in that mindset. And so generation after generation, there is the removal of the onus on local people like the CFA, for example is going through this at the moment its always been community led. And, and the Andrew government has put in, sort of top down leaders and paid positions, and this has created a real tension within the CFA because it's whole principles based on volunteers.And I was involved in a CFA project. As a volunteer, there was about 15 of us, and it was part of community fire mitigation groups around Victoria. And millions and millions and millions of dollars were spent on setting up these groups. And each group had a very high paid bureaucrat, probably, I think, about 130,000 a year. And the bureaucrat was to do the, you know, the paperwork, write notes, keep the group together, you know, like a facilitator. And we had a really good facilitator. And we worked as a group for nearly I think it was about two and a half years and we did this great plan. And there was old timers in there that just wanted to burn the s**t out of the forest and there's spray spray spray and then there was a few of us who were saying, ‘Well, let's try goats let's try a biological approach as well.’And so we we came up with this master plan, if you like and and you know, this is like meeting once a week or once a fortnight taking time away from our families and our other community work. And we came up with this very big, beautiful plan and we were called the Daylesford community managed forest crew, whatever we called it I can't even think of it now. I think it was bushfire mitigation group. You know, we're told from headquarters in Melbourne that we were the most successful and organized group and the ladidadada. And so it comes to actually getting the funding and the five year rolling out the five year plan and there was some technicality in in the in the there was one box not ticked. That was nothing to do with our work but a bureaucrat in or parks or some one of the other agencies. And, and as a result we missed out on funding that year. And he was, you know, it was so extraordinary that to know that there were just millions of dollars, and not one single group in Victoria succeeded. And we gave a really good shot. And, and all I can think of is, it's either bureaucracy gone completely and utterly mad, or the whole thing were designed to fail, so that you don't have community sovereignty. And you continue to chip away community sovereignty and just to keep it in the hands of the of the state.And with COVID, we saw that we saw the disempowering of people, and the heavy hand of the state come forward. And this is just leading up to COVID, this project.So I feel like that first hand knowledge of: here is a functioning group hearing about all the other groups falling away, fracturing, having arguments, we had lots of arguments, but we worked through it, it was like, sort of like, it was fantastic. And some of the old timers from the CFA that laughed at me and another fellow for bringing goats into the discussion. At the very first meeting, we said, ‘Well, we'd also like to try our goats,’ and we were just laughed at and then the goats actually had the only formal trial we had with the local council was, was doing a goat trial and trying to work out how to scale that and, and the goats all the time, we're on common land with our herd, which is about 25 to 30 Goats at that stage with three of us working them, and we weren't looking for money. We weren't like looking, you know, we were thinking this it'd be good cottage industry stuff. We could we, we were interested in, in presenting the idea and showing empirically that this is, is a goal.
Ryan Dickinson 27:01
This is a viable option for you.
Patrick Jones 27:05
In weeded forest prone fire prone, weedy wooded forests. Yeah. Yeah. So I think seeing that and seeing the COVID responses, really, it's made me even more focused on preparedness without government, whether whether resisting government tyranny, or that government to the region's will just stop, like, which is one of David Holmgren’s future scenarios as brown tech and green tech kind of have colluded really. And so there'll be more authoritarianism in the cities, people will be most likely on food stamps, there'll be so you know, those who want to be in that kept more by the state will, will flock to the cities will stay in the cities, and those who will have much less services, if any, but will have a greater sense of autonomy and community sufficiency and sovereignty, will, and it's happening now, are building building those networks in regional areas.
Ryan Dickinson 28:21
Yeah, okay. Because, yeah, you you would have the receding influence as it gets more and more expensive for trucks services, or, or policing or whatever it is to kind of branch out into regional areas that would kind of recede into the centers, the major cities, and then the minor cities and the hubs and things. Yeah, and it kind of it seems like this sort of community resilience can only happen in regional rural areas. You've got you've got the capacity to at least get to know more people around you. Maybe not everyone, like I imagine there's probably several thousand people in Daylesford but you could have, you know, like, Daryl Taylor, he talks about kind of having, having neighborhoods, so kind of your road, you're all connected, you're sharing resources, you know what's going on, you know how you're gonna respond. And then kind of you then have like, larger neighbor-, larger sections, which are made up of the neighborhoods and they're kind of communicating well, but, yeah, I don't I don't see that as being viable when you've got 4 million people living in a densely populated area that doesn't grow any of its own food barely produces like, I can only imagine how few solar panels or anything, even even though they're not really an ongoing, viable option, but for the short term, you know, at least for a city to produce its energy. Yeah, I don't see that happening.
Patrick Jones 30:13
Yeah, I've got some friends in the city who are committed to being in the city. And they, they see that there is creative and creative space in that, as the city transforms itself, and, you know, even just guerilla gardening, in, in abandoned lots and homes and stuff like that. And so they're exploring that at the moment.So as you know, it's expected that the real estate bubble that's just been propped up over decades is going to finally implode with inflation, it may, they may pull another genie out of the bottle. But you know, there's emptying of like there's been an oversupply of housing its just driving another industry and neoliberal mindset of just build build, even if, you know, there's just so much excess housing. The yes there are in Daylesford and Hepburn, there's probably about 4000 people uh 4000 houses, but there's half of them are empty, or they're owned, they're only filled on the weekend with so there's, you know, in this sort of suburban town, on the edge of forest and field, not too far from Melbourne, there's, you know, there's there's a lot of radical transformation that could happen because it's become a tourist town. But there's a lot of old timers, and those of us who came by came nearly 30 years ago, mainly because it was very affordable for young artists to live and it was cheap, dirt cheap to rent, and and there was I think, one coffee machine in the main street and a few different cafes and art spaces. And there was a radical forest movement, environmental movement, and there was the gay and lesbian culture that was being built up into a very strong communitarian aspect. So there's this whole range of sort of subgroups that came here and have integrated with the old timers which you know, anything from Swiss Italian gold seekers who stayed and became farmers here through to your various different Europeans. Sadly, not too many indigenous families just just a small handful and but we do have connection to indigenous mob up further in Castlemaine and Bendigo region. But yeah, it's become highly gentrified this area. And it's with that brings a lot of challenges, particularly for young people not being able to find permanent housing. Not being able to save up for a mortgage we're probably the last generation of low income people who could afford to buy a block of land here and that was 16 years ago. And then it just yeah, has radically become vulgar. Is the only word for it. Yeah. Just the excessiveness of what was the property market as a major economic forum in Australia is vulgar. Its socially destructive, destructive. destructive.
Ryan Dickinson 34:01
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now I have a few friends that have in the last kind of few years, but around the Dandenong ranges, and it's kind of similar, you know. I think in the year of 2020, house prices went up 60%. Just in that area. And yeah, it's just it's not, it's not viable. You know, it might it might be mildly viable if the economy was stable and didn't have all of these horrific wounds all across it. But there are. So many of my generation don't necessarily have the inclination to learn the economic reality. And to be willing to be like, ‘This is not a sustainable spot. And this is way too expensive. And we probably don't have a 30 year, mostly stable economy to get us through. And so, you know, maybe we move to more regional areas and kind of do that thing.’But it's interesting that you talked about kind of the artists and the alternative people kind of turn up to, you know, cheaper areas.
Patrick Jones 35:32
And then that creates a kind of sexiness. Yeah, they,
Ryan Dickinson 35:37
they dramatically improve the area and slightly wealthier people who think they're still cool. They move in, and they're like, ‘This is the hip spot. This is where it's happening.’
Patrick Jones 35:46
It's like, yeah, baby boomer boomers in the 60s and 70s. With exploring those, yeah. Intrepid travel to was bringing saying, ‘We just found this amazing culture or this village’, and you know, and then 10 years later, there's a McDonald's. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the this is a perennial problem with. And you know, it's only it's only enabled by cheap oil. And we're at the end of that time.
Ryan Dickinson 36:31
I've got some other questions, we'll just see.So what you and meg do here. And in the local Daylesford area, it's one of the few at least that I'm aware of few like committed, courageous setups of being willing to relinquish standard capitalistic mindset, and to just drop as many layers and continuing to drop layers of like, ‘No, no, let's just get closer. Let's localise more and more.’And I heard a line guest today ‘be famous for five miles.’ And that's, that's Meg and Patrick, for sure. Like? Yeah, like what? What compelled you both because you were both living in Melbourne. Kind of doing relatively that standard sort of thing? Why did you? Why did you leave?
Patrick Jones 37:46
Yeah. I mean, Meg came from Melbourne. I came, as I said, nearly 30 years ago from Sydney. And but I grew up grown up in country, New South Wales, in a town. And so I knew that I wanted to live outside of a city.When I was 25, I moved here. So I wanted to be close to a city, but I didn't want to be in a city. And Meg came later, I didn't even know about Permaculture, when I moved here, Dave and sue are friends and mentors and elders. And Dave being the Co-originator of the Permaculture concept was, I'd been living here for a number of years when I got here and kind of we're in you know, we go to film night, someone put on a film about what's happening in part of the world and an activist film or just a, you know, inspiring story and Dave and Sue sometimes they and their son, Oliver, and we put on a few things, my partner at the time, and I put on a few things at our place. And so just sort of slowly got to know those guys and, and then just as Meg and I were getting together I, yeah, I was really I had a lot of anger for the system that I'd inherited and I was directing that through different art projects and collaborative projects and looking at the whole world as just another industrial set of economies where Art is yeah, it becomes just commodifiable. Even even someone like Banksy, you know, walls have been taken down by billionaires and reassembled in their private homes and, you know, and so yeah, I was doing to produce I was in Art collaborating with a practice of, I guess, anti-art, anti capitalist art. And then we were starting to get invitations to the museums and art centers and stuff like that. So. So we dissolved that. And then Meg and I started Artist as Family. And we then we also got in, started doing projects and started getting invited to do things. And, and the MCA and Sydney said, you know, we'd like to collect some of your stuff, you know, we want to have it in the collection, it's just like, there is nothing, I don't have any. And that, I guess, was the whole point that so, Artist as Family became this sort of radical performance art family, with our eldest boy Zeph, and Meg’s the stepmom to Zeph. And he was about eight or seven at the time, and, but it was like our households transition away from fossil fuel dependency and how to do that in the community setting. And so became, putting on a workshop or bringing people together to see a film, or some films we were making, on how to do things like how to raise Carrots. It just became everything. And like, as we were learning, we were sharing. And so the practice was sort of almost like a documentation Art practice of how our household was transitioning from, you know, regular two cars. Bin line is, in the been, you know, pretty, pretty, pretty standard sort of Western way of living to, you know, this not having a single flush toilet, being car free for 13, 14 years. You know, radically transforming our economy from 100% reliance on the neoliberal monetized economy to just 20%. And so that 80% means relationships, it means skills, and just over, I guess, 15 years, just that slowly step by step, exchange of skills and economy, to what we call neo-peasant applied neo-peasantry, which is a reclaiming of our ancestral land bonded ancestors, of a reclaiming of land bonded ancestral ways of being so on foot, walked-for food, walked-for medicine, walked-for energy, as much as possible. And so yeah, we still, we still buy things in and we still buy stuff. But that's a small part of the picture these days and, and so when the pandemic hit, our central banks were our fully stocked woodpile, and our fully stocked cellar. And, and so economically, we were really prepared for we've been preparing for these things not as prevalent more as, like the neighborhood, what what Daryl Taylor talks about the neighborhood, we've arrived there, too. And in COVID, that was the most exciting thing to see this even more strengthening in the neighborhood sphere. And I think starting a bushfire mitigation, informal group with neighbors, and just because neighbors stop and they're on a walk, and they say that, yeah, you know, Blackberry surfing down the slope and go, ‘Well, that looks cool. What are you doing?’, And then you start talking about bio mitigation into like, ‘Oh, I'll help you let text me next time you're gonna do some stuff.’ Yeah. And so just growing those networks. And so when COVID happened, we had this really strong neighborhood of around 30 households on this sort of southwest part of the town and and so sharing of resources, checking in with one another. And so yeah, community sufficiency is something we've been really pushing for a long time, like, you know, this, the idea of self sufficiency and that prepper prepper idea of, you know, the, of the nuclear family is, is is pretty vulnerable. But when your economy is spread, is not say, in this central bank modality, but it's also not just a replacement, like in some sort of formal barter system like LETS (Local Exchange and Trading Systems) or something like that. It's actually multiple households who have multiple different resources that you're in a flow of gifts and a trusted relationship with that, that to me, that, to me seems highly adaptable. And so whether it's a bushfire, whether it's floods, whether it's war, there's a whole lot of scenarios, whether it's the increasing heavy handedness of the state, the enclosures of Like seems like the state in the last few years is really targeting people like us who are living a one planet existence. Because the state wants people to live in the fourth industrial revolution, so called ‘Eco Fix’, which is might might reduce eight planets to four planets, but it's it's just a lot of greenwash. And a lot of mining that has to happen in order for that to happen. But then there's this sort of, you know, wood fire, wood heating is being targeted as this polluting thing. Whereas you know, what's often missed from that is just the huge infrastructure costs and fossil inputs to create an industrial grid or to maintain an industrial grid. It you know, every log of firewood runs nine appliances in our house, we are home based home economy, and we use two kilowatt units of power a day. And the average Australian is 18. And the average American is 28. So, and yet, we had home making using the workshop, making food preserving food. So we are using power. And yet that hub that oven stove, dryer, hot water system, everything is our toaster kettle, all these things are driven by this one unit. And we walk for or ride our bikes to get that fallen wood. And we selectively harvest and have a relationship with the forest. And then the wood ash gets sifted. And the charcoal separated and crushed, activated with our urine goes back into the forest goes back into the garden. And the potash goes back into the forest and back into the garden. So there is this when when you hear this simplistic argument against wood fire. As as renewable, like truly renewable energy, particularly when where we are in a town surrounded by forest, and we can walk for our energy. And there is no industrial. We have a small, sorry, we do have a small, one kilowatt solar system and that's back onto the grid. You did that about 12 years ago. And, and so that's the, that pretty much neutralizes our power, that one kilowatt system. But we won't be replacing that because you were sort of aware of just how much biome destruction occurs with with solar panels and wind farms and EV cars. So I mean, not that we'd ever have an EV car, but these, these so called fixes. I mean for us 15 years ago, or 12 years ago, solar and wind seemed good as a kind of methadone program to bring us off oil. And just to have this sort of, but now it's like supposed to replace oil. So it's, it's like a mining bonanza that has to occur and the destruction of, more destruction of the land around the world, in what particularly in Australia, because with the so many rare earths and essential minerals for that, so called ‘Green tech revolution’ to take place.So yeah, so like, I think this sort of having a one kilowatt solar system has been a methadone program and our ability to scale down so is that if we lost power, we would be totally cool, if we would be. But you know, we may also lose this. This, we may be environmental, refugees, or we, you know, there's so many possible scenarios, and that's where hunting and foraging is really important, particularly raising our kids with those skills, because we may be on the move as well.
Ryan Dickinson 49:49
Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's a that's a reality that's kind of that's a harder one. to come to terms with, say, you might have to actually walk everywhere and get all your own food. And, you know, avoid dangerous mobs that don't know how to do, that don't know how to build relationships, so they're kind of relying on heavy handed tactics.
Patrick Jones 50:22
A friend of mine who's now a Permaculturist, used to be an SAS soldier, and he had gone to many parts of the world where there was unrest. And what led him to Permaculture was that the mar- the guys in the jeeps with the semi automatic or fully automatic weapons, were always in a crazed state. Worried about being shut out there in a kind of rape and pillage mentality, dangerous men to be around.But the villages that worked together, would have ways to alert everybody, that these men were coming into the villages, where women and children were hidden from view. And there was a little bit of food left out. But most of the seeds most of the food was was hidden from view. And so seeing how effective people working together compared to the crazy dudes who had no anchoring, no grounding, no love, no regular good nourishment. And, and probably all the psychological stuff of like, who would have ‘What Are We Fighting For any way?’, but just being caught up in the cycles of violence that young men are led to, with this promise of salvation or whatever, whatever the promise is, from those who are engineering those men to be in those Jeeps.And so his story, I mean, this is secondhand, I haven't experienced this myself, but hearing that story, just really galvanized, just the importance of small groups working together. And regardless of what, you know, you can see Mad Max type scenarios are potentially there. But you can also see how the strengthening of people's resilience and care for one another in times of crisis that always the care across households and across the streets always ramp up as well. So that's a really important thing consideration because I think if people are just focused on the Mad Max thing, then they're focusing on them, they're missing out on the potential resilience that lies in building deep relationships with not just people, but of course, with country as well.
Ryan Dickinson 53:03
Yeah, yeah. And I think that that's kind of where the distinction between say, localizing resilience, as opposed to prepping, the prepping, it's like, I need to have as many of these resources for myself, you know, just locked away and neither have my guns. And it's yeah, it's not it's not about the building relationships, it's like, that's essentially irrelevant. They're like, ‘No, no, I've just got to look after me and mine, and ride it out until the power comes back on.’
Patrick Jones 53:41
And, you know, some of the preparedness for that sort of starts with being uncomfortable having a s**t without toilet paper, and doing a respectful s**t in the forest. And, you know, this is so extreme for most of the culture now. Yeah. And, you know, we saw with COVID, the toilet paper. The rush on toilet paper is like, wow, that's really there's nothing more beautiful than taking a s**t, like the mammal that you are, you know [in the] forest. That's, and the other thing too, is embracing uncertainty. If you think that you can build a bunker and maybe you know, people are intelligent to build a nuclear bunker, and you put all the canned food down there. Well, what happens next? There's a beautiful film called The Babushkas of Chernobyl. About these ladies who were elderly. They're elderly now, but they were everyone was taken out of the contaminated zone in Chernobyl and Ukraine and they were sort of shunted into these other villages and the a bunch of women stole back, mainly women, there were some old timer men as well, but they since passed on when this documentary was made. And they were living in highly radio active, the traditional village, their indigenous village, and they were out living the women, and the people and the men in the villages in the so called safe areas, right? Because they were happy, they were in their country, they were perform-, they were fishing, they were foraging, they were gardening, they were in there, and they were out living; radically. That's why so, what that made me realize is just, if you are happy, and you have meaning, are not happy in the capitalist sense. But if you have, if you have purpose and meaning, which brings a certain amount of joy, and you have connection, and, you know, a, I would love to know what, what it would be like to live generationally in my ancestral villages. And then that would be but I love this land here and becoming an ancestor of this land, whether that's correct or not. That's just what happens when we become emplaced and then bonded to somewhere. And so, yeah, I think there's, there's an intimacy that we have with this land as a family and, and many of our neighbors and friends and the community know the land beautifully. Like, know it know it intimately. And so there's, there is a sense of like, while we may have to be on the move, there also may be a pull to come back to the land that knows you, as you know it. And those sort of relationship, those relationships are so beyond the measurement that science can offer. And I think that that story of the Babushkas in Chernobyl is just such a remarkable I mean, because there's a story that most of us know about the incredible biodiversity with the absence of most people. Yeah. And so the Babushka is also living this sort of freedom that they probably didn't even have when…
Ryan Dickinson 57:47
Yeah, sure, because they've been totally left alone. Like, no one's, no one else is coming in there.
Patrick Jones 57:52
Yeah, there's a few services that come in, there's a few people all suited up, and, but they're really doing it underground. Like they're not supposed to be there. But the authorities turn a blind eye, just because this is their space, and they weren't this is their beloved homeland. And, yeah, so that film was pretty amazing.And then, as I said, with the SAS friend, you know, the, it's just, they, the story it just unbox, my mind. And with all the stuff that I have, like, you know, moving through country as a tracker, and learning those skills, and as a forager, and learning those ancestral skills, and reclaiming those ancestral skills, just like the farming and gardening aspects. And, you know, we might be on the move with us with with our, with our flerd. And, you know, and then that could, you know, I've often thought of having to move from here and, and just to be moving through country shepherding and just with just even with a small handful of animals, and yeah, that, that that's now possible, because we have those relationships with those animals. And yeah, they may be stolen and they may be killed, and we may be killed for our food or some crazy thing might happen. We might be isolated because we're moving just as a small family, and so vulnerable in that way and we've lost connection. But, you know, there's, I think, the embracing of uncertainty. And, you know, the, there's nothing, there's nothing assured there isn't any way in life, but particularly, I think, where we're standing right now, in this collapse of, of the Empire, and just the destruction that will take place with that collapse the The greed and the base behaviors that are coming. But there's also beautiful things that are coming.
Ryan Dickinson 1:00:08
Yeah, yeah, I keep I keep saying to people that, you know, as terrible as all of these things are, they're the necessary preconditions for us to live a more beautiful life or as Charles Eisenstein says, ‘the more beautiful way our hearts know is possible.’We need these things to collapse we need, we need economic trouble, and we need horrifying decisions from our leaders that the rest of us don't, don't abide by. We go ‘No, no, that's, that's not okay.’So, yeah, it's that embracing uncertainty. That's, that's definitely an aspect. Because, yeah, security's, it's not assured anywhere.That's like, my friend, she would tell me that, like, we’re three, like, most of us living in the West, where three bad decisions or mistakes or calamities away from being homeless or destitute, and it's like, you lose your job, you lose your rental. And you don't have a support network, like, you're, you're out, you know. And having that having that community resilience, that, you know, you can shack out with someone close by for for a time, or maybe someone has worked for you, or, you know the forest, so you can at least go and get some food or, you know, you've kind of you've got those that that local thing that you know, you're not reliant on, on the capitalist to, to, to feed you and provide.
Patrick Jones 1:01:57
Yeah, yeah, there's a book I read, when I was probably your age, called The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts. I was just thinking, when you were talking I was thinking about returning to that book and to see what gifts if any, are still in there. But that really set me on a course of again unhinging mind from needing to have certainty. And Steven Jen-, Steven Jenkinson is also really important in this space, his work, particularly around end of life stuff. Because I think, because like often, it's, he's, he's a former palliative care worker, and and so just seeing how badly we do death, and just, you know, how important it is to do death well, and so many of us will be facing our death probably well before our biological age. And so even those of us who may be reasonably well prepared, or you know, have got some skills, you know, we're all just as vulnerable as the next person, someone who's got absolutely no skills and has invested their entire future in money and property. They may somehow survive. I mean, it's just, there's no guarantees. And that's what is what makes life so interesting and amazing. At the same time, glad I'm hedging my bets and developing the skills and that may help myself or my family or friends or neighbors or community, or like any stranger we meet, to live a better life even for five minutes. And not. Yeah, I think that's why this work with the men's work that I'm doing with a bunch of local men here is really important to that too. I'm going to have to have a pee…. You’ll learn when you hit your 50s.
Ryan Dickinson 1:05:16
Yeah, it's good to go. Well, I really appreciate your time today, Patrick. It's been it's been an excellent conversation. Where can people find you?
Patrick Jones 1:05:29
So yeah, we blog at Artist as Family . And yeah, we, we make films there, write blog posts, and we just started a little podcast series. But yeah, most of our resources are there. We're also on YouTube as well.
Ryan Dickinson 1:05:49
Yeah. Do you do guys do workshops and stuff? Yeah.
Patrick Jones 1:05:53
We take volunteers. And there's information about that on our website. Yeah, so we take volunteers for a week. And basically, people for a week get an immersive experience. It's, it's, it's like, well thing, but it's not. So it's more relational. And so we're interested in people's stories and what what they bring, it's not just, we need some weed fault, even though it might be weeding, it'd be fermenting ecological, wood harvesting, you know, everything from closing the poop loop, growing food, saving seeds, just whatever the season is, but just getting an immersive experience in what an alternative post neoliberal economy looks like. is certainly a dominant. Yeah, I, we sort of put it in 80%, that we're no longer reliant on the global pool of money if you'd like to use that expression. Yeah, so. And also, I think the importance of that is to show people that it's possible, but it's not necessarily the way that we would do it, because each household would respond differently. Yeah, to the skill set to the, to the land to whatever is present. But just to show that living this way, is can actually happen without running to the hills and creating a bunker and becoming a Unabomber. You can do it and still connect to the culture and still engage with the culture and, you know, where we we've gone from darlings of the environmental movement to you know, quite loathed, in the last few years, we're being called a lot of different labels. And, and, yeah, we're just sort of maturing into that. And, and just going up, okay, well, this is that we're hitting the nerves across a number of different areas. And it's not like we're setting out to be provocative. But yeah, that the end of the Empire is going to have a lot of rupture, and a lot of unhappiness. But it also begs for us to, for people to look critically at what's going on and to have conversations that might be unpleasant, and or prick people's shadows. And, you know, we, we all have shadows, and there are blind spots. And so yeah, just as we're getting older, we're less concerned about holding a particular narrative. There's lots of problems in the, in the environmental movement. And people like Paul Kingsnorth and Charles Eisenstein have really delved into those spaces and had been real mentors in that in that space. Yeah, and just but I think, you know, on the other hand, it's the community building and the deep connection work. The permaculture ‘people care’ aspect, that's, that's really also singing singing to us at the moment. Yeah, so it's like, that's the nourishing people work but there's also the hasn't I hesitate to use the word truth because I don't think that the truth is ever really arrived at so yeah, I can't stand the game of right and wrong. But certainly, yeah, certainly exploring what is happening and even if that if you end up if I end up saying things that make other people feel uncomfortable. Then there are good questions there for both myself and for those who are getting uncomfortable. It's an opportunity.
Transcribed by Otter
Get full access to The Somatopoetic Journal at somatopoetic.substack.com/subscribe
