Gariwerd boomerang

For a while now I've wanted to make a boomerang. A recent trip to Gariwerd became the perfect time to do it. I took a few basic tools with me and late one afternoon I set out from our camp to find an appropriate wattle limb.

Near to where Zeph, Gabe and I were camping I found a lightwood wattle (Acacia implexa) that had blown over in a storm. It was still quite green and I found a suitable part to cut out.

I then got to work with my small hatchet cutting a basic form,

before beginning work on shaving down the sides. Traditionally, a stone head axe of a similar size would have been used to shape such tools.

I then used the small saw to do some more basic shaping,

returning to more shaving until most of the wood was removed. A boomerang is the precursor to an airplane's wing and precedes this technology by about forty thousand years. It has a flat under side and a curved up side.

I then used my pocket knife to finely finish the boomerang. It flew well, but didn't return. Someone at the camp joked, if it doesn't return it is not a boomerang, it's just a stick. I needed some better advice than this so we headed off to the Brambuk Cultural Centre again.

We admired the traditional boomerangs in the Brambuk collection,

and booked in to the boomerang throwing workshop with Jeremy. He kindly gave some great tips on getting my next boomerang to return. He suggested that the shape of mine was generally used for ceremonies. Next time I will try to find an acacia root with a greater natural curve.



On no other continent did people develop a returning arrow. This ingenious tool really indicates an incredible intelligence. I have often heard it said that Aboriginal people purposely didn't develop their technology beyond their edible and ceremonial needs. This represents a mature sensibility to land and resources that the west (and its anxiety for innovation) could really refer to now.

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Gariwerd bush foods

Zeph and I joined the Victorian home educators camp at Halls Gap in the Grampians this week. We came with a community friend Gabe and the two boys joined over 100 kids from all over the state (and further afield). For five days we experienced unpredictable weather, night games, wrestling, abseiling, rock climbing, new friend making, swimming, tiredness, ball games, bike-riding, sunburn, boomerang throwing, cuts and bruises and some autonomous food.

Blow fly grass (Briza maxima) also known as quaking grass

It is true spring, one of the six seasons in Gariwerd, and there is an abundance of edible flowering plants covering the ground. These are the traditional bush plants used by the original people and the newly naturalised plants that have come since 1788. Many are edible and/or medicinal. One favourite newly naturalised plant at this time of year is wild onion, otherwise known as three-cornered garlic or angled onion because of the triangulate stem shape. We found swathes of them along the path that runs into town and on to the Brambuk Cultural Centre. Great food for being on the go.

Three-cornered garlic (Allium triquetrum)

The garlic was growing near pockets of Milkmaids, a perennial herb native to woodland forests of southern Australia. The tuberous roots are edible cooked as potato and like yam daisies they are crisp and starchy eaten raw.

Milkmaids (Burchardia umbellate)

Everywhere throughout Gariwerd relationships between traditional bush food species and newly naturalised tucker are apparent. Common resources are shared between species who get along without ideological register or monetary warring.

Deer (Cervidae family) and Kangaroo (Macropod, meaning 'large foot')

We visited Brambuk and spoke with the knowledgeable and generous Blake, the chef at the centre's Bushtucker Cafe. Blake and I shared notes. He introducing me to some of his preferred herbs and spices from nearby and other regions of Australia,

Round-leaf Mint (Prostanthera rotundifolia),  Strawberry Gum (Eucalyptus olida), Wattleseed (Acacia sp) Lemon myrtle (Backhousia citriodora)

and I demonstrated how to find desirable starch at the base of mat-rush (lomandra) leaves just outside the cafe. Lomandra is also known as basket grass and was used for traditional basket making. The seeds can be ground into a flour meal for cakes. The plant is a good source of vitamin C, iron and fibre.

Mat-rush (Lomandra longifolia) a common source of starchy food

At Brambuk we also learned about uses for honey-myrtles. The local people called these plants Gutyamul. The scientific name is Melaleuca. The nectar was added to water to make a sweet drink. There are thirteen species of Melaleuca in Victoria and like all the Banksia species the flower spikes can be used to make a sweet cordial or a fermented beverage.

Honey myrtle (Melaleuca sp.)

We also learned about the traditional uses for grass trees and how the seeds were ground as flour and the stem was used as a fire-stick for the ingenious fire-stick farming that was common to all Aboriginal peoples. The resin was used to bond materials together such as stone spearheads to wooden shafts.

Grass tree (Xanthorrhoea sp.)

The walk to Brambuk and back to our camp was around ten kilometres. The sun beat down in the afternoon and we were talking up the need for a swim when we came across what I thought was an enormous bolete mushroom, but my mycologist friend Alison Pouliot (who knows the area well) believes it is Phlebopus marginatus. We placed a dollar coin on the cap of this big pore mushroom to give a sense of the size.

Phlebopus marginatus

While at Brambuk we also undertook a boomerang throwing workshop. A second Gariwerd post will follow on making and throwing a boomerang.

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All Rights Relinquished

There is a colourful stoush going on at Overland about:

PLAGIARISM:–
More virulent than MODERNISM
More critical than POST–MODERNISM
Read the full story inside!

Home, Stewart. Plagiarism: Art as Commodity and Strategies for its Negation, London: Aporia Press, 1988.

Tipping, Richard & Mansell, Chris. Lessons for Plagairists (with a Special Proem by Bill Posters, Complete with Precepts and a Handy Compendium of Instructions), Sydney: Well Sprung Productions, 2013.

And more grist for the mill at Notes from the Sinister Quarter.

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Now is the time to be hunting salsify

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Artist as Family's new project...

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Relations of learning

Taking our eleven year old, Zephyr, out of school has been a long-awaited blessing and I'm slowly developing a teaching method which is increasingly simple, involving only walking and being open. Learning can't be quantified when we happen across a jelly fungus called Yellow Brain (Tremella mesenterica). An old and highly sophisticated organism that attaches itself to its food source, this saprotrophic fungus, like most fungi, help decompose dead matter and turn it into soil. This understanding of life, this directness of contact with earthly processes, makes our walks about relationships.

Today we walked across the town's lake bridge and noticed the degrading pebble-mix concrete barrier and the lichen covered cherry plum and the grey melancholy of deep winter. Our blood and woolen warm engagement with these cold elements and our closeness together as father and son brought a quietness to us both. A simple joy that encouraged openness.

In the forest on the edge of town we noted that the numerous little mounds of rabbit droppings are partnered with an ancient moss (Polytricum sp.) and when we later bumped into a friend on his mountain bike traversing another part of the town's edge we learned that it is the buck rabbit that makes these little mounds as territorial markers, as nitrogenous cairns, that the spores of such moss so obviously gravitate to in order to make an easier life.

As we walked and talked of such connectivity, we discussed the many different type of relationships that exist in life – the mutualistic, the parasitical, predator-prey, the advantagious and the loving. None of which are exclusively human, as Zero, our kin dog Jack Russell likes to remind us in his own particular creaturely way, and who nearly always joins us on our homeschool adventures, using senses we've long lost but surely need to rescue.

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Another place of simple feeding

Numerous birds come into our garden and share the bounties there. Some are rare and singular, others in great numbers come daily. Occassionally one or more of these abundant species, namely the seed loving fruitarians, occassionally become ecological food for us. We use non-industrial tools to hunt them, which usually means we shoot them with our home-made bows.

Autonomous fruitarians

As locavores we try to eat outside of the industrial food system because of the blind violence that can be attributed to that food supply. We know that autonomous birds are regularly killed and their lives wasted for the farming of vegan, vegetarian and omnivore fruits, nuts, pulses and grains. And, unlike modern agriculture, we don't believe in 'pest' species. Every organism that comes into the garden is an ecological player – the greater diveristy there is, the healthier we all are. This is permaculture logic, which is the opposite thinking to monological agriculture that attempts to scale up single species production in order to make food a predictable commodity.

We contend that if we can see our food – grow, forage and hunt for it – we have a better chance of knowing what species are doing well and thus are fair game. Industrial food, contiguous with growth capitalism, must waste resources in order to capitalise significantly on just one kind. We see this in industrial fishing where millions of tons of fish are killed in drag nets and routinely wasted because the market doesn't see them as desirable.

We argue that small-scale, simple tools, non-transported resources and accountable killing all combine to constitute a future model of food and culture sustainability, and we believe this theory, which we actively practice, will help us adapt to changes in climate, economics and fossil resources while also mitigate the adverse effects industrial resources cause to these things. This is essentially observing indigenous peoples intelligence worldwide and composting the myth that super-scaled, highly chemicalised transported agriculture will feed the world. This is a colossal myth of our time.

A counter argument to ours that always comes up goes something like this: If we all hunt and forage then there will be a quick depletion of these species. My response to that is: by forest gardening for most of our food and sourcing some from small nearby organic polyfarms, then supplementary foods can be gleaned, hunted and foraged for without significant depletion. We need to eat around 90% less meat and start getting localised animal proteins from many nearby places including insects. Additionally, if we stopped driving trucks and cars we would see a great decline in wasted mammal life on roadsides, and once we lessen the burden on the environment that superfarms have, then we will see greater abundance of autonomous species more broadly still. Industrialism takes so much to make so little.

We are arguing for greater accountability in resource consumption and this will help produce a leaner and cleaner culture.

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Today's walk

Fifteen of us walked out from the Daylesford Neighbourhood Centre today for one of my four hour foraging workshops, bracing winter's cold ground joy.

Foraging workshop. Photo: Dave Cauldwell

We came across about thirty to forty autonomous foods including mallow (Malva) and wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum).

Mallow (left), wild radish (right). Photo: Dave Cauldwell.

The young leaves of acanthus (Acantha) can be eaten. The flowers and fruits (cheeses) can be cooked as a vegetable.

Acanthus. Photo: Dave Cauldwell.

Buckshorn plantain (Plantago coronopus) can be eaten raw in salads or cooked.

Buckshorn plantain. Photo: Dave Cauldwell.

Spear thistle root (Cirsium vulgare) is my favourite vegetable at the moment. Washing the clay from one in Lake Daylesford made a perfect end to the walk.

Washing spear thistle root in Lake Daylesford. Photo: Dave Cauldwell.

Especially after chopping up the root, giving it a splash with local (Captain's Creek) red wine vinegar and serving it out to the lovely crew who came on the walk today.

Patrick Jones' foraging workshop, Lake Daylesford. Photo: Dave Cauldwell.

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More homeschooling adventures: more on appropriate technology

Almost two years ago Zeph and I went out with a bow-making friend, Peter Yencken, in search of suitable bow timber. Peter had previously taught me how to make a bow at one of his workshops.

Not far out of town we discovered a small copse of Osage orange (Maclura pomifera). This small North American tree is excellent for making bows, as practiced by indigenous peoples of that country.

The fruit is edible but not that desirable, although improved by frost, as so many hard fruits are. The timber is extremely durable and as hunting, locavorism and accountable killing are high on our list of activities we wanted to make something well and long lasting.

It took us well over an hour to carefully cut out a log, which was extremely heavy. Peter took the small log back to his workshop and with a bandsaw cut two staves out of it. One for Zeph and one for himself. We then air-dried Zeph's at room temperature until yesterday.

Then, twenty two months later, we spent the day with a rasp slowly filing down the timber until it began to flex. We knew that you could easily go too far too quickly and end up with a weak or broken bow, so we slowly filed and tested, filed and tested, stringing the bow at times to test again the flex.

And then, just before dark it was ready. An arrow was placed in the bow string, aimed and flew lethally into the straw bale target. 

As we intentionally don't hunt with industrially made weapons we require old technologies and skill to supplement our mainly vegetarian diet with animal proteins. Our next project will be a boomerang, that ingenious 'arrow' designed to return.

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Rooted

Appropriate technology is an ideological movement that encompasses technological choice and application that is 'small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled'. I'm not so sure about the desirability of labour intensity in this otherwise sensible list, that's why I forage, you harvest food that you haven't sown. My new root tool that I bought from a foraging, hunting, gardening, cooking shop in nearby Trentham, will enable us to more easily forage for autonomous root vegetables and therefore for non-monetised complex starches.

Tonight I cooked this little spear thistle root with dandelion roots in animal fat and salt. We'll be eating more of these delicious roots (related to artichokes), abundant in winter, now we have a hand tool that we can easily carry around with us. 

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Spore and sport prints

Last Saturday a neighbour asked me to identify a mushroom. He thought it was a Swiss Brown (Agaricus bisporus) and wanted me to confirm it. I didn't think it was but said I'd conduct a spore print for him. Later that day I found what I thought was a Swiss Brown and added it to the page. My neighbour's mushroom (on the left) left a white spore print, my mushroom (on the right) left a dark brown spore print true to Swiss Brown mushrooms.

Here's what the two mushrooms look like underneath. They are fairly aged. With mushrooms it is easier to identify them when they are younger, however spore prints are extremely helpful for identification and might just help you decide not to eat a particular mushroom that could be toxic.

On other printing news, as one of the resident artists in the local soccer team one of my jobs is to mark out the pitch. On Sunday, just before the games began, this is what it looked like. 

Our soccer club probably has more artists, food gardeners and community gardeners (non-conformists) per capita than any other club in Australia, and possibly one of the only grounds where mushrooms commonly grow amongst the weeds and introduced grasses. Our canteen is developing as a model for healthy community food – this is what I mean by non-conformist.

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A brief journey through ecological crisis (a brief history of privatisation)

plough (agriculture)

> 10000 <

hierarchy (debt)

> 5000 <

literacy (industrialisation)

> 300 <

skyscraper (cheap oil)

> 80 <

hypertechnocivility (blood minerals)

> 30 <

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead showing skyscraper font born out of the monocultural field.

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Civility today (or, more notes on unaccountable violence – the pepper spray remix)

University of California at Davis (Photo: Louise Macabitas)

Rio (Photo: Victor Caivano)

Istanbul (Screenshot via Osman Orsal /YouTube)

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More courses available...

I've extended my foraging classes indefinitely through the Daylesford Neighbourhood Centre. But I will also travel to take them in your neck of the woods.

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Accountable killing

My MFU lecture given last night, as part of the series All creatures great and small: Animals and us.

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One poet visits another...

Benjamin Laird's excellent trek through various zones of my poetical biota.

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Animals – us, them and usthem

Last Saturday morning I was woken by an ABC radio producer and a minute later I was on air spruiking for a series of lectures on animals that Melbourne Free University are hosting throughout May.

Here's the brief, rather sleepy radio interview with Hilary Harper regarding my Week 6 (May 30) talk concerning the accountable killing of animals.



The central question I am pursuing in my talk is how do we reclaim an ethico-animal accountability in an era of pacifist-sanctioned corporatism? In the way in which we kill or have others kill for our resources (whether we be vegan, vegetarian or omnivore) how do we move from mass-death industrialism to one-on-one ecological killing? How do we 'fess up to being creatures again; 'fess up to being both predators and prey in a highly abstracted and ecologically estranged culture?

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A new season of foraging walks

Today I took the first group out for a new season of foraging walks around Daylesford. We identified about thirty-five edible plants and a few mushrooms over a four hour walk.

Half way along we stopped for autumn fruit-and-acorn cake that Meg had baked for this inaugural and lovely crew – current students from the Castlemaine Permaculture Design Course. The cake was made from forest and/or garden ingredients – honey, olive oil, acorns, eggs, plums, peaches, quince, apple and rain water. These ingredients came from our home garden or nearby small businesses (Kyneton olive oil and Daylesford honey). Baking powder was used, but this is optional. (See earlier Artist as Family acorn cake recipe. A video showing how to turn acorns into flour will appear on this site shortly. Also please see my videos for turning hawthorn berries into fruit leathers and making dandelion coffee).

Patrick Jones foraging walks 2013

Students were each given notes that I have compiled that give details and uses for over eighty edible and medicinal plants, mushrooms and some fauna common to temperate Australia.

Walks run every Saturday from April 20, 1-5pm (all weather except for torrential rain). A minimum of six people each walk, $30 per person. For bookings call Daylesford Neighbourhood Centre on 5348 3569 or email. 

I will also travel to your community to take foraging walks. Email me for more information. Minimum of six people required.

Some of the edibles we came across today included mallow, plantain, sow thistle, honey fungus, lomandra, chickweed, watercress, slippery jacks, rosehips, hawthorn berries, acorns, sticky weed (cleavers), clover, gorse, dandelions, hawksbeard, dock, fathen, kangaroo apple, wild fennel, black nightshade, vetch, sheep sorrel, calendula, yarrow, wild radish and rocket.

Thanks to student foragers Felicity, Michael, Rita, Em, Natalie and Grace for making the first walk such a joyous occasion.

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The Real Through Line

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First draft, sent...

My supervisor/editor, Kate Fagan, received today the first draft of my manuscript Walking for Food: Regaining Permapoesis. After three and a half years the work is by no means over, but it feels like a significant achievement.

First draft, Walking for Food, 2013

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Walking a poemline

Artist as Family are planning to walk to Melbourne from our home in Jaara country and we wish to do this respectfully acknowledging the elders and traditional communities of the country through which we slowly travel.

The walk is to celebrate the completion of my manuscript, ‘Walking for Food: Regaining Permapoesis’. My manuscript and AaF's five day walk to Melbourne both attempt to raise issues around food and energy sustainability and environmental ethics. The book heavily quotes Aboriginal voices and sensibilities relating to the respectful treatment of country.

Artist as Family's five day walk to Melbourne 2013

On the fifth day I will present the last chapter of Walking for Food at the poetry symposium, The Real Through Line. This chapter constitutes a letter to Maya Ward regarding her book The Comfort of Water: A River Pilgrimage and critiques the place of writing within a culture of ecological intransigence. 

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Excerpts from Dave Jacke's Daylesford talk

Edible forest gardener and permaculturalist, Dave Jacke, came to Daylesford for a brief talk last Wednesday while touring the country giving workshops on temperate climate food forestry.

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Edible forest gardens afoot

Poster by Ian Robertson

Dave Jacke, author of Edible Forest Gardens, is coming to Daylesford to speak on Wednesday March 13. Jacke is a permaculture pioneer who has taken the Forest Garden concept beyond it tropical origins showing it can be adapted to temperate climates. This talk is a unique opportunity for local permaculture practitioners and anyone interested in ecological solutions to hear Dave Jacke speak while he is in Central Victoria. More

And, from this week's The Advocate newspaper, more local food forestry plans afoot...

DAYLESFORD will soon boast a five-acre food forest, thanks to a partnership between Daylesford Community Food Gardeners, Daylesford Neighborhood Centre and Daylesford Secondary College. The food forest will be built on permaculture principles and will boast more than 60 species of food producing plants, a poultry system and bees. Daylesford Community Food Gardeners co-ordinator Patrick Jones said the Daylesford Secondary College Council had already approved plans and the project was now seeking funding. The food forest will be planted at Daylesford Secondary College and will be a fifth community garden for Daylesford. Read on.

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IZAZEZOZ

Melbourne poet ∏.O. reads one of his poems from Rabbit journal #7 the Sound issue at Embiggen Books last Tuesday. 

∏.O. and I had a brief discussion about pros/cons of internet publishing after I asked him permission to publish his performance of IZAZEZOZ. The agreement we made was I would host it for six months and then remove it. This means this video expires on the 26 August 2013.

Others who read at the launch included Ania Walwicz, Autumn Royal, Tim Grey, Anna Fern, Susan Hawthorne and myself, reading Poisoned Gift.

Photograph: Nicholas Walton-Healey

Thanks so much Jess and Nick from Rabbit.

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Wandering through the Universal Archive

A new chapbook of mostly Australian poetry, Wandering through the Universal Archive, has just appeared online curated by poet Fiona Hile. This anthology centres on collaboration and includes poets Michael Farrell, Oscar Schwartz, Amaranth Borsuk, Brad Bouse, Toby Fitch, Kate Middleton, Pam Brown, Maged Zaher, John Kinsella, Justin Clemens, Charles Bernstein, Richard Tuttle, Jessica Wilkinson, Simon Charles, Timothy Yu, Ken Bolton, John Jenkins, Marty Hiatt, Sam Langer, Astrid Lorange, Eddie Hopely, Nick Whittock, Tim Wright and myself.

What follows is an excerpt from Fiona's introduction concerning the work I contributed and my practice more broadly.

Somewhere in the middle of the Australian state of Victoria, the poet and artist, Patrick Jones, is painstakingly gathering and reorganising remnants and cast-offs. Artist as Family is just one permutation of an ethos of ‘permanent making’ that takes place under the rubric of what Jones has termed permapoesis and has included the design and installation of a public food forest for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Broadly speaking, Jones’ poetic mode is one of epistemological intervention. It rebels against what it thinks of as the ‘neat technocratised rows’ of printed poetry in English just as it seeks to disrupt the agricultural categorisations that insist on the eradication of weeds. For Jones, weeds repair land damaged by farming and industry and prepare the ground for reafforestation. His construction of a comprehensive Daylesford Community Commons Map that pinpoints the location of off-the-grid edible fruits and plants foregrounds issues of inclusion and exclusion. Who gets to decide what or who belongs where and to whom? If a plant or a letter or a word is in the wrong place it is viewed as a ‘mishap’, or a disruption. To overcome this ‘the eye has to get out of the machine and walk … the text becomes something the eye has to forage for or through.’ The map and the two poems gathered here constitute ‘a refiguring or reclaiming of the geopoetical – poems of the earth.’ 

One of the two poems Cordite published as part of Fiona's chapbook is called Winter's pharmacopeia, and it goes something like this:

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