Great Dividing Age (for Zephyr on his 15th birthday)

Life is changing fast in your time. This can be measured in big stories as much as those not needing celebrities. Like the man we met who now voluntarily eats just one meal a day, or the four of us walking this poem line, the Great Dividing Trail between Daylesford and Castlemaine, for your birthday.

We eat the fruits of the earth early on our first day. All the long processes — the morning’s dew, storm’s temper, intentions of the bees, the fungi, worms and not-by-naked-eye critters of the soil — have lived before these gifts. We eat in this love of the earth, together. Your reluctance is for your own understanding. You see this fruit-love as mine, but she belongs to everyone who holds dear the earth. Her fruit is your adult mother and lover, sister and aunty too. 

We follow goat track and hard dry wallaby lines, trailed in blackened fox scats. Your fox has also eaten blackberry and the seeds are impregnated from pointy carnivorous tip to pointy fruitarian end. We are never just one thing.

After half a day’s walk from town, home table and cellar, the shrivelled, dried-on-the-cane berries are appealing, even preferred. Our walking unsettlement is already changing us, quickening our senses, exposing our prejudices.

We pass by the campsite where we once endured the hail and sleet and a first winter camp challenge. You boys got so wet and it seemed to take an eternity to get the fire going the next morning. We were miserable until then, but that’s how fire makes home as we discovered together. That Promethean comfort, that myth in our face, warming our frozen fingers. This story was not the beginning of your initiation at nine years old, just another story of your and my making, with friend Gabe.

We walk into the blowhole where we rest and throw rocks at imaginary beasts, 

into the prickly pear (Opuntia) patch,

shaving away the splintering hairs of the skin of her fruit. Then on to the first-date-dumpling-lunch-story where we had taken Meg and boiled the billy and I ask her into our hearts. Where she took us on seeing our fatherness and sonness, our light playfulness at Breakneck Gorge.

After lunch we dig the burdock (Arctium) roots from the path and keep their leaves. Remember this plant young fox. It only grows in cool to cold temperate climates, but it's carbohydrate may save you one day.

The seeds hitchhike around our ankles distributing their future nourishment along the track where it’s wet enough for their renewal, and we haul our heavying packs into the afternoon when my note-taking drops off and a quietness intrudes upon us. Our fatigues, with Jeremy and Connor, our bodies instead — a compaction of atoms and more-than-human microbes in numbers outnumbering us a billion to one — write this poem. Our toes crushed into steel caps siren out in the cries of white-winged choughs who follow us trailing the scats of the unseeable fox, your totem.

We finally make camp, your accruing survival skills relaxing into you.

We bring out the burdock and wrap the roots in the leaves to cook 

on the fire's coals to accompany our brought along food. 

Sleep will trouble itself with each of us on this night, not just because of our chosen sleepwear. 

Lactic acid has built its restlessness in our turmoiling, quivering muscles, and no amount of stretching will completely becalm them.

Our second morning is spent in near fruitless forest, as though the gums have consumed every last drop of every last thing but for the edible devil guts (Cassytha), not yet ripe.

Wild food? A possum, a cockatoo, a skink camouflaged before a black wallaby thumps across our animal track song and disappears. Our brought along rations begin to run out. 

No fatty Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) or lean rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) to snare and spit on a small bush fire. Instead inedible cramps form in our grieving legs before we reach Vaughn Springs and recharge with rock-given carbonated water and swim in the old Dja Dja Wurrung story of the Loddon River — Yolelerwil-meerin, Yarrayn, Woppoon, Byerr, Pullergil-yaluk, Gunbungwerro, Minne-minne, Mudyin gadjin.

Following your lead we all end up napping after lunch,

wake and break from our intended forest path and head to the little banjo town where you volunteered your fourteen year old skills and helped bump in the festival. The town held a place for you then, and will again, or somewhere else, if you continue to offer yourself to the call of others.

On our second night, well fed on the general store’s local bread and eggs, 

we camp by what’s left of the river. Mosquitoes predate through the night. Shooting stars rocket across our animal eyes, soft but no longer hunting. You three young bucks slept fairly rough, while your old man's light flynet and mattress enabled a little more rest.

On our third day of walking, I become that guy who over speaks in your direction. You groan like a trillion sons before you. 

There are no poisoned gifts to wake up to, just this waking, walking poem, and a little breakfast. 

Our last leg trek along the railway from Guildford offers up a multiplicity of feral fruit — peaches, plums, blackberries, figs, grapes, apples. Our opshop marbles are slung rapidly, illegally at rabbits. Discreteness, Zeph! Care. You have the choice to be a gift giver-receiver of the flowering earth, or a parasite, a mistletoe of grave and selfish destruction. Anywhere between this binary is still the latter. Not much in life is this clear. Nothing else is as defined between two distinct modes of being.

I’m not sure how much more I can teach you. Your fox-like pride wants to teach yourself or learn from others. I get this. Your fox smells freedom. I want more than anything to let you go on your wanderlusting. I want to blow gently onto your free-seeking sails, away from the sad story of school and now home. 

Yesterday’s mineral water – calcium, sodium and magnesium et al – today quells our long haul aches, our last 12ks to Castlemaine. Remember this free medicine from the underworld. Remember this communitarian walk, before you solo out in search of your own people. We'll always be here with open doors and wide open tracks to walk with you, but not always open to just anything thrown at us. 

On our walk we gathered up the cowboy's arse paper (Mullein) along the post-industrialising track. You may want to note such soft and useful gifts.

We ate sweet March flies (Tabanidae), raw and toasted on coals skewered on sharpened stick — fly kebabs! They tasted good, did not make us sick, it would be prudent again to note this animal protein easily hunted, little energy expended.

And we noted the flowering fruits that would be consumed by others later on.

Greeted by farmer’s and ancestral shade trees at the market in the park, just this coming together at the end of our walk, could go unappreciated where your ideological father spoke about the urgency of non-monetary economies with agrarian friends and finished off the first draft of this walked-for poem, scribed on paper.

You’re right, I’m not listening to you, much. But I do see you and will come to listen more closely as your voice grows and you become comfortable in your own unique and unusual skin, like the young men you have been walking with. 

I see and feel the yearning in your fox burrowed skin, it pops out in over excited pimples. Trust your resilience and the skills you possess that no industrial school has imparted. Your many schools of life will be your health. More and more you will start living your story and joy will fill you up as you grow into her and respect the lores of her and your own tellings. This may be a long road for you, especially if you continue to worship mass society's false gods who only quicken mass death. The teen-age is merely a product of such unrelenting consumption. Go that path and tragedy will be your story. Abandon the ad-men, con-artists and poisoned gifts that are killing the flowering earth and your beautiful spirit will be unleashed with the great force of love you possess. 

Happy birthday Zeph! Much love, Dad.

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Food sovereignty? It's a peasant (not a money) thing...

Food Sovereignty Alliance chair Tammi Jonas recently took umbrage at Artist as Family's application of the term neo-peasant. She wondered whether we were "colonising the discourse". Tammi has just hosted Joel Salatin, other food celebrities and a host of punters, at her farm in Central Victoria. The event raised nearly $40,000 for the purposes of setting up a legal defence fund. I wrote to Tammi in the spirit of debate. 

Hi Tammi, if you're interested, here's a little more unpacking as to why we use the term neo-peasant:

In an economic sense it's peasant non-relianace on money that we identify with, and see money as the great curse [to ecological] cultures of place due to money's need to grow markets and exploit people and environments. This, essentially, [ends up as] neo-liberalism, growing anti-ecological city-centric cultures permissive of their pollution outputs. Hence our concentration on degrowth money economies and the growth of localised (non-transported) non-monetary economies (urban, rural, suburban).

Neo-peasant Woody (4 yo) walks-for and wheelbarrows a small portion
of the household's fuel in readiness for the winter.

We feel that Joel Salatin, for instance, is super cool when it comes to biology, but super problematic when it comes to his choice of economics. His form of economics we consider Christian-capitalist or conversion-capitalism. It is by nature imperialist as it must aggregate. In this way the great work he does in the biological field is undone by his economic form. To feed hypertechnocivilians (city dwellers) is not a reason for such activity, it only aggregates the problem of people not being accountable for their resources and not in relationship with the processes and communities of life that make life possible. We will never become an ecological culture of place while this pattern continues.

An ecology of money's waste in Central Queensland (passed by bicycle).

These books also give contexts for our term neo-peasant:

Life without money (editor lives in Castlemaine, RMIT academic)

The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (on how self-reliant and organising peasants were kicked off land and forced into the factories to become essentially what our grandparents were).

Debt: The first 500 years (you've probably read this awesome text)

It seems strange to us that regrarian is OK but neo-peasant is not. Perhaps you could unpack this? Do you think traditional agrarians would be offended by this term you use? I understand we have a (middle-class) choice to reconnect with our respective family peasant histories, and hence that's what the neo is doing. It immediately locates our privilege of education. We're immediately 'fessing up to this by using the prefix while honouring our ecologically intelligent ancestors and calling for a return. 

Yours in community of change-makers.

Patrick

So far I haven't heard back from Tammi. But the questions raised concern us all. Why participate in the monetary economy? Why serve a system of economy that is inherently flawed and ecologically destructive? Why raise money to pay lawyers and thus pay heed to laws that only apply if raising money is at the heart of your economy? 

Meg prepares gifted, grown and gleaned food in Artist as Family's kitchen.

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