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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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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Symbol-free feeding (on the coast again)

We haven't been able to stay away from the Victorian coast this summer and so we've had to find out a little more about the edibles down there as we camped again and had at least one main meal a day of fish and greens that we foraged and hunted (with hand spear) for. We left home in Jaara country and moved around through Wathaurong and on into Bunurong country, crossing the bay at Queenscliff by ferry.

These are some of the things we found:

Tetragonia implexicoma, Bower Spinach similar to New Zealand Spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides) by its 4 perianth segments (instead of 5), its yellow flowers and succulent fruit. Used as a leaf vegetable by Indigenous Australians and early Europeans as a source of vitamin C to ward off scurvy. The berries were used as a red dye; they are edible but not highly desirable. 

Tetragonia implexicoma (Bower Spinach)

Rhagodia candolleana, Seaberry salt-bush is a rigorous plant good for stabalising eroded sites. Birds seed this species as they like to feed on the red staining berries. Confined to the Southern coastline of Australia. The cooked leaves of young plants are delicious, the fruit is very bitter but edible, very dark red when ripe, would make a great dye.

Rhagodia candolleana (Seaberry salt-bush)

Carpobrotus glaucescens – all parts of Pigface are edible. The raw purple flowers are delicious, sweet and salty they taste like figs; fresh or dried fruit; triangular leaves cooked; high in protein. 

Carpobrotus glaucescens (Pigface)

Lycium ferocissimum the African boxthorn, according to Tim Low (1988) has orange or red berries, grows on coasts and on the plains in southern Australia, and the bitter berries are edible. We can also attest they are edible, although would be better cooked and added to honey or dried to extract the bitterness and bring out the natural sugars. They look similar to the native boxthorn (L. australe), which have smaller, fleshier leaves and are found inland in southern Australia.

Lycium ferocissimum (African boxthorn)

Meuschenia freycineti, Sixspine Leatherjacket colouration can change with growth. The species is endemic to Australia. The meat is delicious, cook with skin and peel off when ready or skin first.

Meuschenia freycineti (Sixspine Leatherjacket)

There were a number of things we tried but didn't know the names of, such as these two fish. 

Unidentified fish from Port Phillip Bay 

Alyxia buxifolia, Sea box is confined to coastal habitats along the southern coastline of Australia. Often grows in exposed situations where they are pruned by wind. The fruit is eaten by birds. We nibbled a tiny piece of berry and later found out they are supposedly toxic to humans. However, we can attest, they are not poisonous (fatal or otherwise) in a small dose. They are very astringent and not palatable at least eaten raw.

Alyxia buxifolia (Sea box)

Solanum carolinense, Tropical Soda Apple or Horse Nettle. This crazy looking thorny plant is a nightshade that hails from the USA. They start out with a mottle green fruit before turning yellow. Edibility is doubtful, we didn't try this plant and I couldn't find any information on this plant reported in Victoria, so looks like it has just landed and doing its thing. Other states have it on their radar as an introduced pest.

Solanum carolinense (Tropical Soda Apple)

Note: Although inlanders, Jaara people supposedly made routine trips down to the coast to feed on the abundance and variation of food found there. They made corroboree with other Kulin nation clans, traded goods and arranged marriages. It makes sense for us too to load up our backpacks and leave for the coast to look for some symbol-free food.

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How do we move from citizens, consumers back to ecozens

I thought I was clever coming up with the term 'ecozen' today to describe a participant or player within an ecology, but a quick search shows it is already used as a brand by several global businesses from synthetic pools to chemical companies. It seems today greenwashing and astroturfing occurs even before a thing exists or is named; such is the rapaciousness of progress-capitalism.

The word 'citizen' etymologically refers to a city dweller. But as cities are only responsible for half the world's human population, and account for 75% of global energy consumption and 80% of Greenhouse gas emissions, I think it's time to rethink its use despite already being superseded by the far more violent term 'consumer'. Words form us as much as we form them. To be clear about words and our choice of them is to be clear about who we are, what we are saying and how we are treading.

The word 'ecozen' simply means place dweller, which can be extended to mean inhabitant or being of place.

But all this is a rather slow and musing segue into sharing the main critical premises for my forthcoming book, Walking for Food: regaining permapoesis. I'm three years into writing it, which pretty much spans the life of this blog.

Here they are:

Life is uncertain and human ideologies are consistently flawed, but there are a few things we can be clear about: 

1. Life is made and unmade within ecological communities; ‘man-made mass death’ is an interruption to life. 

2. We are born animal, we require animal protein from birth, we excrete animal wastes, and we die animal. None of this need involve cruelty, markets or pollution. 

3. Real wealth comes from the land; it is generative and relational, and non-extractive. 

4. Poverty is a construction of private property and abstract systems of wealth. The answer to poverty involves free access to land and to local knowledges. 

5. Energy, and its degrees of availability, shapes all life. 

6. Life is not progressive but rather performs in waves of ascent and descent. 

7. Sustainable societies foreground ecological knowledge and background technology and labour. 

8. Sustainable societies produce no waste and do not engineer ecological overshoot. 

9. Complex societies are primarily products of high energy availability, not superior intelligence. 

10. Complex societies are rarely sustaining for long periods because they are inherently wasteful and destructive. 

11. Mainstream thought promotes pollution, greed, narrow self-interest and shortsightedness, but rarely recognises itself as being ideological. 

12. Science is merely an extension of humanism when it is accountable to industry’s imperatives.  

13. Western culture, and those under its influence, operates as a doubling performance looping mastery and amnesia. 

14. Climate change is a product of unsustainable development, driven by energy availability and market capitalism. 

15. Governments control so as corporations can more effectively exploit; this is sophisticated violence. 

16. Non-procreation doesn’t solve overpopulation, rather perpetuates the myth humans are not really animals. 

17. Reckless procreation is a thing of ignoring limits or being under stress. 

18.  Love is a thing that cannot be measured or treated; it is always relational and generative, never extractive and violent.  

19. Perennial food ecologies produce and return nutrients in place. Conventional annual agriculture mines the soil and requires the transportation of other mined inputs for synthetic succession. 

20. A weed is a plant in the wrong place, according to anthropocentrism. 

21. A sensible life involves the senses. In a violent and interrupting society sight dominates the other senses. 

22. Schools perpetuate ideologies of mass control; they explicitly teach children how to veil or normalise mass violence by becoming conformist cosmopolitan consumers.

23. Being born is regarded a medical emergency. Infants are rushed into life in an ambience of hysteria.  

24. Dying today is prolonged, passive and drugged. Bodies are either burnt as carbon or buried and released as methane. In either case death becomes pollution.

The following people helped form such views: Derrick Jensen, Peter Minter, Deborah Bird Rose, Bernard Stiegler, David Holmgren, Masanobu Fukuoka, John Zerzan, David Graeber, David Fleming, John Michael Greer and Vandana Shiva.

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Walking for Food – geopoetics

Over the last month, while ima Meg recuperates from long nights of breast feeding, Woody, Zero, (sometimes Zeph) and I, dada, have gone out walking every morning noting all the free public food in our local commons.

We and our thrown together clipboard have seen cold, windy, dry, warm and joyous mornings this spring and today, adding a few last finds, we finally got rain. Ah, the joys of being car free!

Patrick Jones – Creative Commons: Foraging Commons

Yes, the map is not the territory but it has been a useful project to see just how much food is available that is autonomous and not reliant on agriculture's heavy-footed resources and processes.

Over the past several years we have kept a mental note of certain trees and plants, but carrying out this exercise has made us even more aware of the autonomous floras – indigenous and newly naturalised – that are building mutual relations. It is common, for example, to see elderberries parking themselves under blackwood wattles on the fringes of town.

Blackwoods are themselves companion plants to eucalypts. Hawthorns, which are now habitat for ring-tail possums and their berries are a preferred food for gang gangs, proliferate in these new ecologies alongside blackberries and oaks and a host of other plants, longtime or newly naturalised.

I wonder if we, newly arrived creatures, are making or looking for such mutualistic relationships. It seems while we are still dependent on conventional farming practices we are still aliens of place, extractors and miners, not those that engage in the generative and relational.

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Permapoesis (on Radio National)

From Radio National's Off Track programme:

So far, the Permeate series has focused on artists who are inspired by the environment.

But today, Miyuki Jokiranta introduces Patrick Jones…

Listen here.

And for the astute listener, yes I mispronounce 'deliciosus'.

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