Capitalism's Dirty Water

Coca Cola takes a lot from my local region. It sucks Dja Dja Wurrung groundwater from the ecosystem, trucks it to a Melbourne factory where it's rumoured it's mixed with ordinary tap water, then it is packaged in petrochemical bottles, and marked up several hundred percent to sell to idiot consumer-polluters as bottled water.

I came up with the lyrics for this song after I and my son Zephyr came across a fellow community gardener, Lena, had picked up a half-consumed bottled of coke that had been thrown into one the community gardens. She looked at Zeph's interest in the bottle and said, "don't worry, I don't drink this toxic rubbish", and borrowing a line from a friend she added: "this is capitalism's dirty water you know." Awesome stuff! Lena is a true elder...

So, introducing to permapoesis for the first time, the band I'm in, Bunch of Bandits singing Dirty Water. (All of us in the band met through our community gardens... Corporate bullies beware! Strong language alert, this one's aimed straight at your pea brains; or for those who know better, a jingle to sing to your kids at night to counter the multi-million dollar ad campaigns Coke directs at them):

This little clip was filmed by Zephyr (aged nearly 10). Nice work Zeph!

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Some Summer Reading

Your mother is pure Black
    happy forever with the Water Hen
Lionel Fogarty Ruby Dilli (Eyes) Southerly (Vol 71 No 2) 2011 p124


There is a cost to non-Indigenous as well as Indigenous people when the privileges of (white) society are based upon lies about ourselves and our past.
Sarah Maddison Beyond White Guilt: The Real Challenge for Black-White Relations in Australia Allen & Unwin Australia 2011 p20


Techniques and technologies necessary to manage our lives and natural resources sustainably are known. However, simple ways of living contradict the growth of commodities and services, which drives capitalism.
Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies Pluto Press London 2011 p14


Even in the full blossom of life, decay and death were just around the corner. The world was a joyous thing with maggots at the centre, Wombalano Beeaar had once told him.
Craig Robertson Buckley's Hope: The Real Life Story of Australia's Robinson Crusoe Scribe Melbourne 1980 p160


As Lewis Mumford saw it amidst the carnage of World War II, "Western civilization became mechanically unified and socially disintegrated" (Values for Survival, 190)... The supposed rationalization of technology, he found, often concealed pockets of irrationality: "immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were canceled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination" (Lewis Mumford Reader, 134).
Jed Rasula This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry University of Georgia Press Athens and London 2002 p49


Say
Australia from the edges of a wound
a circus of dusty blood sucked
from a metal carcass in Minyirr's old heart
the softly burning horizon screaming
as if a mineral-old candle
had coagulated
around the wooden boats of Enlightenment and flared
up above us
the dancing phantoms of the flaming
place-time scrub.
Stuart Cooke Edge Water (excerpt from Broome Song) Interactive Press Queensland 2011 p63

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Black Cockatoo Camp #1

Peter Yencken and I today returned from taking 8 homeschoolers out into the bush for the first of what we hope will be many Black Cockatoo Camps. As a small tribe we made fire with a bow-saw, ate a lean and very local diet, made new friends (including one injured and feathered), mentally challenged and physically exhausted ourselves and began to tune into and interact with our best possible teacher – the land that supports us.

We made shelter with found materials.

We moved in and for four days we made it home.

At night mosquitos let themselves in and ate us alive.

Each morning we foraged along the creek before returning to our fire,

around which we honed our whittling skills. 

We made simple tools with the litter of the forest floor.

We foraged yabbies, blackberries, apples, plums, wild herbs and vegetables,

which we added to the local produce we brought to the camp.

Then in the afternoons we played mind and body games

and headed to the lake

to do what kids love.

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Perfect Fruit

I wrote this nutty lil' ditty for my girl's birthday today. Happy Birthday Meg!

Perfect Fruit

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Unclouded man (or, if only our journalists would also tell it how it is)

My friend Peter Tyndall sent a number of us this little gem this morning:



Australia's day of monetary destitution cometh. Be prepared, be very prepared.

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Gardens, ecologies and reclaiming the sensible

Daylesford Community Food Gardeners had a big day yesterday of multiple events to do with transition, gardening, music and global ecological crises. We blogged some of the activities on the DCFG blog just free food.

The day ended with a permaculture forum at the Neighbourhood Centre in which David Holmgren, Ego Lemos from Timor Leste and I presented on all things permaculture and transition from industrialised agriculture. This event was part of the Boite Singers' Festival and chaired by director Roger King.

Then this morning our super SWAP (social warming artist and permaculturalist) Heath showed us this short and sharp video. Another inspiring message from Vandana Shiva:

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Black Cockatoo Camp

My friend Peter Yencken and I are just about to take 10 children out into the bush for 4 days and 3 nights to teach them what we know about foraging, intuitive movement, close observing, stalking prey, living with simple tools, making fire and building shelter. This is the first of what we hope will be many called Black Cockatoo Camps. The camps are designed to foreground bodily and ecological knowledges, while backgrounding digital, technical and abstract knowledges.

This video shares a very similar philosophy to ours. It's an inspiring story:



Find out more about this video here.

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