A forest camp

Two friends of mine and I have been working on establishing an ecological business, A Forest Camp, for adults, family groups, businesses and organisations. 

Campers will be asked to come by public transport to Daylesford and walk into the bush with their forest guides (that's us!). Over a weekend (or longer, depending on the group) they will eat a non-packaged, locavore vegetarian diet of locally sourced organic food (and some foraged foods, depending on the season). Campers have the option of building their own shelter or sleeping in a tent. They will be able to learn how to make fire and many other bush skills, if they desire. But mostly this camp is to provide the space for people to be students of a forest and rejuvenate their senses.

The image above shows my fingers about to pick and eat an unripe native cherry (Exocarpos cupressiformis). Still edible when yellow, though when they turn red they're delicious.

Please check out the site and spread the word. 

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A small video-poem concerning agriculture and well-being

I wrote this poem and took the footage roughly a year ago when in Mole Creek (Tasmania) visiting family. I finished editing it yesterday. Enjoy!

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A ten minute crash course in edible fungi

Two new friends that I met through the community gardens, Dave and Doug (and Doug's lovely son Malachi), came out foraging with me yesterday in pine forest plantations on the edge of town. I asked Dave if he would film our little excursion so we could make a beginner's guide to foraging edible mushrooms.

Identification is critical before consuming 'shrooms. Books and static images are not often enough to identify accurately. I hope this little video document provides enough tips to get you started. And remember, if you're not 100% sure, trust your instincts and do not eat it.



For much of my fungal knowledge attained thus far I owe to my friend Alison Pouliot, who runs courses in south-eastern Australia in autumn every year. Thanks Alison!

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Another community food garden

A drawing I finished today...

Click for bigger

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Hit and miss (in the gift economy)

I walked for two hours today with my mushroom brush, Zero (Jack Russell) and an empty basket, hiking through various types of forest from eucalypt to pine and mixed species that surround the town. Foraging is so hit and miss, which is what I love about it. I like that nothing is guaranteed and that it's based on chance and perception. I was ready to head home when I decided to push on down a little creek-hugging track where I scored some rather aging but still edible saffron milk caps (Lactarius deliciosus) and wood blewits (Lepista nuda). 

Then coming through the bush on the edge of town I spotted a laden fig tree (black genoa, I think), and asked my near neighbour if I could take some. He obliged and I happily returned home with a basket half brimming with uncapitalised goodness. I'll drop some 'shrooms off to him shortly, on a day I get a bigger haul. 

As the mushrooms were quite wet from last night's rain I dried them out in a low oven before I added them to a garden soup of leeks, potatoes, mustard greens, parsley, warrigal greens, spring onions and chickweed. The figs are a surprise gift for my beautiful and pregnant Meg. Happy days!

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Walking for Food

I've been in Hobart for twelve days staying with my friend Glen, attempting to put together a first draft of all the chapters I've been working on over the past thirty months that constitute my doctoral research work, 'Walking for Food' (working title).

While at Glen's I was able to forage in his local neighbourhood. I brought to our table rosemary, figs, mallow, dandelion, hawksbeard, apples, feijoas, fennel, borage flowers, stickyweed, rosehips, crab apples, and up on Mount Nelson high above the suburbs I came across the one fungus I saw in hobart, the curry punk (Piptoporus australiensis), which I consumed only as sensory delight. Walking and foraging helped me loosen up my sedentary studious body, but I also resorted to quick break outs in Glen's apartment overlooking the Derwent River.

Arriving back in Melbourne yesterday morning I wandered once more disappointingly into The Age while I waited for a cup of tea and read another stupid article on foraging. Will the bourgeoise please take a plate of death caps now. Actually the article was not really on foraging at all but on secreting, privatising and selfishly capitalising on the autonomous food commons. Arseholes!

Photo: Meredith O'Shea

On my last night in Hobart I was a guest speaker at a dinner-debate titled 'Eating Wild Fungi: Fun or Foolhardy', an event that was part of a national symposium of mycologists and fungi enthusiasts that aimed to generate more awareness of the important role mycelium plays in life production. I wrote this little number while at the symposium.

At the dinner I was on the affirmative team with Tasmanian food writer Graeme Phillips and my friend Alison, a photographer and fungi educator who I've been doing an informal apprenticeship with while helping her out with the brilliant workshops she runs. We argued for a return to commonsense and self-accountability, not the continuation of the nanny state. Naturally I found this debate a platform to critique anti-ecological society, its estrangement due to a lost connection with food. We won!

Then after the dinner I hooked up with Glen for a final bash at Hobart nightlife, and headed to the Brisbane Hotel to see the FUN FUN FUN world of the 5678s. They were very cheap, cool and mingled with the common mycelium after the show. I had a chat with bassist Akiko Omo about all things punk, fungus and Hobart.

My love and gratitute to Glen for a wonderful time, and who shot this final peg as an encapsulating image of an awesome journey, at once intellectual and biophysical; metaphoric and metabolic; theory and practice; fun and fungi.

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Island of Love

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With further apologies to Blake

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Interspecies love (kind of)

Our band played last night and I had the pleasure of singing Blake's The Fly (1794), which I set to music a little while ago.



Bunch of Bandits, Glenlyon General Store. Thanks for filming Primo!

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Progress Capitalists – What will they think of next?

Image: EcoWatch.org

Published on Thursday, April 5, 2012 by Common Dreams USGS: Recent Earthquakes 'Almost Certainly Manmade' Report implicates oil and natural gas drilling, aka fracking.

A US Geological Survey (USGS) research team has linked oil and natural gas drilling operations to a series of recent earthquakes from Alabama to the Northern Rockies.

According to the study led by USGS geophysicist William Ellsworth, the spike in earthquakes since 2001 near oil and gas extraction operations is “almost certainly man-made.” The research team cites underground injection of drilling wastewater as a possible cause.

“With gasoline prices at $4 a gallon, there’s pressure to rush ahead with drilling, but the USGS report is another piece of evidence that shows we have to proceed carefully,” said Dusty Horwitt, Senior Counsel and chief natural resources analyst at Environmental Working Group. “We can’t afford multi-million-dollar water pollution cleanups or earthquakes that could pose risks to homes and health.”

Read on here.

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WWOOFing on country (a postcard from Summerfield)

Jaara elder Uncle Brien Nelson and his partner Jude Perry welcomed Zeph and I into their home last week to WWOOF.

Early on the first day we walked from our home to the bus and travelled to Woodend.

We then took a Swan Hill bound train to Eaglehawk station and had some time to wait there before being picked up by Jude.

On reaching Summerfield we came across a stand of scar trees.

Jude told us Jaara people used the bark to make canoes and

coolamons (carrying vessels) without killing the trees.

We arrive at Jude and Uncle Brien's and find a garden full of Indigenous spinach.

It was hot working in the sun and by the afternoons we needed to cool off.

Uncle Brien worked with us during the day and on one afternoon came down to life guard.

Our days were spent working around chooks, horses and dogs. We built some fences and we took some down.

During the week we shared skills, knowledges, meals and plenty of jokes.

Thank you Jude and Uncle Brien for a wonderful week.

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Step by Step

My permaculture poem Step by Step was yesterday awarded joint runner-up in the 2011 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Today I recorded the poem with some guitar accompaniment.



Overland will publish the poem in the next issue. Here's what judge Peter Minter very generously said about the work:

I think it’s probably fair to say that reading Jones’ ‘slow-text mesostic’ poems (cf John Cage) is a bit like extruding the brain through barbed wire mesh. But, as the saying goes the grass is always greener on the other side, so it’s a worthwhile endeavour in the end. Jones makes an explicit attack upon the romantic self-consciousness of white Australian literary culture and its oblivious transportation of European aesthetic modes into antipodean landscapes. ‘Step by step’ is not about ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Its typographical interferences and static slowdown, hook and strain the reading process, such that emotion, reflection and cognition are caught and inflected in the present-time of reading. Jones forces us to grapple with a specific set of poethical considerations: how does language-use contribute to the violence of colonisation and machineries and economies of ecological destruction? What kinds of vernacular interventions might inhibit such violence? Can poetry save the world? Jones’ poetry isn’t for everyone, but the world he is saving is the same one you’re living in. 

Congratulations Joel Ephraim who's poem Rock Candy won the prize, and Sam Langer's Clouds fall like snow on the sky’s clear rocks who shares runner up with me. Also congrats to commended poets Rebecca Kylie Law, Alana Kelsall, Ella O’Keefe, Astrid Lorange, Fiona Hile, Stephen Nichols, Andrew Slattery, Banjo James, Molly Murn and Aden Rolfe.

Read Peter's full report here.

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The scorn of women

This poem traces thoughts and feelings from the so-called 'late' birth of my son ten years ago to the expected birth of my second child this coming spring. The poem documents the political ground lost to women and families who wish to birth at home over this decade, and the increasing pressure from medicine to turn women into compliant patients and disempower them. This is a father's call to arms, to defend the rights of their partners to birth at home away from the interference and sterilised hysteria of medics.

"Doctors and medicine become necessary when people create a sickly environment." Masanobu Fukuoka, 1978

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Another clear picture to draw inspiration from...

Milkwood Permaculture co-founder, Nick Ritar, puts together a well-structured argument to help fight human complacency, idiocy and anxiety in an age of crises.

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Real Estate

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Nicole Foss on resilience and financial collapse

Hepburn Relocalisation Network and Sustainable Hepburn Association (SHARE) last night hosted Canadian speaker Nicole Foss. A theorist and practitioner, Foss is well across looming energy, economics, psychology, sustainability (the real kind – not just economic), security and climate conundrums. Here's a slide from her talk:

And here's a snapshot about what's she on about:



And here's a wee bit of footage of Foss and David Holmgren fielding questions in the town hall last night.

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Walking and weaving country

Here's a short documentation of my first day's walk through Jaara country to take a traditional Aboriginal weaving workshop and meet the founders of Bunjil Park Aboriginal Education and Cultural Centre, Jude Perry and Uncle Brien Nelson.



Here's the small basket I made at the workshop.

This is the hand-drawn map that I used on my walk.

And here's Jude and Uncle Brien extracting worm tea at Bunjil Park.

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News propaganda for a Brown Tech future

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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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Food Forest - 18 months on

We've just had a trip to Sydney where we visited friends and family and spent two days at the Food Forest with locals pruning, planting, thinning, watering, mulching and feeding the garden.

Here's my drawing of the Food Forest from May 2010. We planted it later in July.

Here's what it looks like after our working bee last week.

And here's what the garden looked like back in July 2010, just after the planting was finished.

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Gardens subvert the dominant paradigm

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After Blake

The story of Daylesford Community Food Gardeners first nine months demonstrating how a guerilla action at one garden developed into three community gardens throughout the town.

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Permaculture Principles

I've been at an advanced permaculture course with David Holmgren and today we unpacked, critiqued and revalued his 12 principles. Here I set them out with a selection of photos Meg and I have taken over the past couple of weeks.

1. Observe and interact.

Clover flowers amid eucalypt leaf litter.

2. Catch and store energy.

Renewable, local energies.

3. Obtain a yield. 

Home garden harvest within chicken run.

4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.

Community garden principles of take and return.

5. Use and value renewable resources and services.

Local food production and renewable transportation.

6. Produce no waste.

Easier to do in less affluent localities.

7. Design from patterns to details.

Parasitical relations; native cherry and friend.

8. Integrate rather than segregate.

Public (guerilla planted) broad beans.

9. Use small and slow solutions.

Bike maintenance workshop, DNC

10. Use and value diversity.

Today's course participants.

11. Use edges and value the marginal.

Jaara bush tucker; native cherry (turns red)

12. Creatively use and respond to change.

Design principles exercise, 4.45pm 

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