Artist as Family: With every problem comes surprise and delight

Tuesday, 3 December 2013

With every problem comes surprise and delight

We have spent five nights camped at the very beautiful Colac Colac Caravan Park awaiting parts to fix Patrick's wheel. We have practiced free-range parenting, the art of patience and some wild food gathering, bringing us more delicious loquats,

and...

This lovely mama went straight back in the Nariel Creek from where we clutched her. It is now 'closed season' for Murray spiny freshwater crayfish (Euastacus armatus).

Over our short stay we have got to know nearby Corryong by riding into town for supplies.

We've also got to know a little about the horse thief Jack Riley, romanticised with ample hyperbole as the good-boy-hero Man from Snowy River, buried in the town. Thanks for the history lesson Warwick!

We have been touched by people's generosity. Phil, our host at the caravan park, organised the wheel to be couriered to the Albury bikeshop, made numerous phone calls on the progress of the repair and kept us in good humour when it looked like a much longer wait than first thought. Thanks Phil!

Our friendly neighbours in the park loaned us their bike so we could all go on local expeditions. Thanks John and Jenny!

And these lovely women who we met in Corryong, gathered up their freshest garden produce including a dozen eggs and brought them out to us at Clack Clack. Thanks Nina, Eden and Jum!

Your food was a blessing. By living out of our own garden, food swaps, community gardens, food co-ops and by foraging and hunting we haven't had to shop in supermarkets for nearly seven years. On this trip, with much less access to local food, we are finding out first-hand just how impoverished the industrial-corporate food industry is. At home we would avoid any food grown in another state, on the road we're struggling to find bought food made in Australia. It was great to be able to cook up local garden frittatas for the neighbours on our last night.

There is just nothing like real food that has come from loved earth. Until science is freed from the economic imperatives of industry, people are going to be kept in the dark about how innutrituous, health-degrading and ecologically damaging our modern food supply really is. The annual increases in pharmaceutical medicine is proof enough that much modern food is woeful deception dressed up by PR firms.

For our children's sake, isn't it time we put our resources back in our own hands?

4 comments:

Greg Foyster4 December 2013 at 11:42
Hi Patrick and Meg,

You have done very well to source local/community-grown food while cycle touring. When you're pedalling around you get ravenous, but it's hard to find good food without local knowledge. Plus a lot of small towns have a supermarket, and that's it. I found it particularly difficult to source fresh vegetables while cycle touring in Tasmania, for example. Hopefully, as more people learn about your story, they will spread the word and you'll be offered produce from home gardens.

Keep pedalling!

Greg
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Anonymous5 December 2013 at 19:48
played a couple of footy games
for local team Cudgewa back
in 1987...

great place..!

travel well......

mrO
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About Us

Hello! We are Artist as Family – Zero, Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr. We live in Daylesford, Australia on a quarter-acre permaculture plot, home to our School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University on Djaara peoples' country.

We base our creative practice on our concept of permapoesis, which simply means permanent making or regenerative living – an antidote to disposable culture. We practice an art that participates in what it represents; an art of social warming in an era of global warming. Food ethics and politics are central to our practice. Generating food that brings human and ecological health and global justice is our creative call to arms, within the sphere of the local. We teach a unique skill set of radical neopeasant homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers called SWAPs (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists) and teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs). We are bloggers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, poets, artists, video makers who also make music, but mostly we're a family who belong to a bloody great community and therefore we're much more than the sum of our parts.

Past and current projects

Artist as Family have conducted a number of fruitful projects in the past including '17 Days' (2009), commissioned by the Lock-up Cultural Centre in Newcastle and 'Food Forest' (2010–), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, our work was featured in the international anthology of ecological art, 'Art & Ecology Now' (2014), and we wrote the Art of Free Travel (2015) about our 400 day cycle adventure to Cape York and home again in Central Victoria, which was shortlisted for an ABIA in 2016. We continue to give talks to sustainability groups, art schools, university students and community organisations. We teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs) from our home, at Tree Elbow University, which is the site for The School of Applied Neopeasantry in Daylesford, Victoria.

17 Days (2009)

'17 Days' involved foraging for anthropogenic waste along the coastline and throughout the city of Newcastle. Day after day we carried out the same simple task of walking or bike riding to collect countless bags of rubbish. We swam, played in the sand, picnicked, rested, communed with locals, gazed (as inlanders) in awe at the sea and picked up other people’s discarded refuse. After 17 days we had amassed a monumental pile of industrial food and drink packaging, which we exhibited at the Lock-up Cultural Centre as simply: the everyday detritus of hypertechnocivility as collected by a family on holiday.

Food Forest (2010–)

'Food Forest' is a public artwork that doubles as a community garden, a work that aims to foreground biodiversity and demonstrate that materially art can be generative, can be a resource unto itself, rather than just an extractor or exploiter of resources to make market desirable products. In other words art can be generative contiguous with ecological functioning. Food Forest is therefore a work that attempts to blur the traditional western line between art and that estranging term ‘nature’.