Hi there, if you hadn't already got the news I'm hanging around over at the Artist as Family blog for the next year while we conduct research for a new book called Free Food. In this book we aim to put together all of our experiments in foraging, hunting, gifting and swapping, low-carbon travelling, poaching, free-loading and generally living a very small ecological footprint in this very big country.
Packing up the house today. About to leave on a year's adventure. Dipping into old notebooks. Stopping on this page. From fifteen years ago. A hill in Musk, close to here: Contour ploughing.
A black shouldered kite
follows my spine –
scribed by a grader,
filled with coarse rock
pursues the depression
contours of my
tired back;
my blades
with sour grasses
of mid-summer
once covered in clover
like my belly now
dark and wet
protected from the sun's west
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.
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| Artist as Family's five day walk to Melbourne 2013 |
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As Summer approaches Artist as Family have been busy auditing Melbourne's drinking fountains.
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| Click for bigger. |
We have just completed a week of work experience thanks to Liam Scott, a student from the local high school. Liam undertook to hang with us and see what a typical week for Artist as Family entails, and what 'work' constitutes, according to us. One of the things we did during the week was to measure up and draw a first draft design for the proposed permanent Daylesford Community Food Garden. Here's a short vid that snapshots the adventure.
Last year a solitary news report became the seed bank for this near-readymade musical anomaly, which soon sporulated into hundreds of covers, rip offs and responses.
Three years ago we gave up supermarket food. Two years ago we took down the kitchen clock. A year ago we gave up air travel. And, this week we sold our car.
We have spent money on cleaning it and having it “worthy” of the road. We’re a little tense as it’s raining and one of us, eight years old, is not so aware or interested in the effects of the mud on his shoes on the upholstery. We still have some petrol in the tank. It will be enough for the journey. It’s been a year since we made the decision and we have rehearsed being carless all through the winter recording each kilometre travelled, each litre expended, and the extent to which our participation in global resource wars disables our reembodiment, our relocalisation, our humanity. And now, we’re at this point, at this significant milestone of our transition, ready to drive for the last time from the town with very little public transport to the city dripping in it, where the young guy who works for the Armed Services Credit Union, will unironically hand us a cheque which we will in turn cash in at the bicycle store. (from a letter to a Hamish Morgan, Dec 2010)
According to David Holmgren, co-originator of modern permaculture, history has revelled in humanism while remaining largely ignorant of energetic and ecological factors. For well adjusted progressive types, by which I mean schooled believers in human progress, this anthropocentric worldview is easily developed through the arts. But to those sensitive to the plight of nonhumans, ecologies and the world’s poor at the hands of progress, art can be seen as just another instrument of civilised brutality and species intransigence. Welcome to part 2 of Greenwash’s ‘composted and upcycled’. (see part 1)
Shelling acorns (click for bigger).
If the above is difficult to read (click for bigger), you can also read it at Trouble by clicking here.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.
We're back from our waste gleaning residence in Newcastle, NSW. Our final post on the Artist as Family blog includes a short creative doco called 17 Days that I made using my track "Michel Duguy Compost Tea" where I sing Deguy's poem "O great apposition of the world" rockoperaesque with beats. You can see/hear here –
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