Plasticity?

I was recently invited to submit a short video poem as part of a collection to be exhibited at this year's Sydney Writer's Festival (17-23 May), curated by Angela Stretch. What, video poetry at a writer's festival? Outrageous! But don't be alarmed, the exhibition doesn't make the official programme.

So, I decided to make a new work with Zeph, which I finished editing today. It will be viewed without sound in Sydney, but I've made it to work with audio as well. Meg helps build the vocals and all together we make another Artist as Family + Peej collective effort. Enjoy!

born free of ideology
we are gullible and trusting.
we learn from our elders
and we pass on the abstractions
to our children.
the depression rate
doubles every ten years.

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A chance hound

I caught a ride on a Greyhound bus recently, traveling overnight between Melbourne and Sydney, and had the pleasure of sitting next to Chris, a blogger from Newcastle. He got me up to speed with some of the climate science debate that I'd tuned out of, and I relayed to him some of the potentially exciting permaculture bottom-up rebuilds going on around the world, including the hot topic of Detroit. Chris is a mathematician and physicist by trade, and puts his digital two cents worth (quite literally) here. He is also part of the Newcastle Transition Town movement and I was able to explain to him a little about our own group – the Hepburn Relocalisation Network. I'm a snorer and a constant mover in sleep at the best of times so if you read this Chris, apologies in retrospect if I kept you up. One of the things we discussed while still compus, and something I can't ever appreciate, is why the mainstream press is only interested in "Climate Change" when Peak Oil is actually more calculable, arguably better understood and just as societally problematic, and why aren't all these things – energy descent, global warming, aggregate-growth based ecological destruction, factory farming, animal slavery, anthropogenicism and anthropocentrism just labeled for what they are collectively – Ecological Crisis?

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Anybody can be good in the country

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Not everybody can be good in the country...

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Primitive poetics

On Saturday a few of us adults took 12 boys on a bush adventure for Zeph's birthday. We walked for two and a half hours, stopping to make, observe or find things to collect. One of the activities they were assigned was to collectively build a shelter in ten minutes. The first peg shows the result. At the end of the walk we came across the remnants of a large forest installation I made between 2000 and 2005, where boardwalks and wallaby grass tracks led you through a series of environments subtly altered as physical or biophysical poems.

The type of sedge grass in this forest is the oldest locally living flora. Their origins predate eucalypt forests and are supposedly as ancient as the dinosaurs.

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Every available...

Designed by Abram Games, 1942. From here.

Thanks for the link Ianr.

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Greenwash #9 in Trouble - Uncapitalised Fruit

Have you ever wondered why public parks (with few exceptions) are not filled with fruit and nut trees, vegetables and herbs? Or why schools don’t teach children about local ecology and Indigenous food plants? Well that would be sending the wrong message: That people could forage at their leisure for their own resources.

Click on the below text to continue reading.

The work just installed, 1999.

Zephyr practicing parkour on the library wall, 2010.

Giving a Fuji a light late-summer prune, 2010.

Showing Zeph the ropes for maintaining the poems, 2010.

This work also derives from childhood memories of walking home from school with my older brother, picking apples and plums on the 'nature strips' as we went.

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