Utopian glimpses, dystopian blitzes

Some months ago we contacted the Moss Vale Community Garden to request a visit having heard from a friend it is well worth investigating. We spoke to Jill Cockram, the facilitator, who invited us to meet up when we came to town.

Jill gave us a tour of this wonderful garden based on permaculture principles and social-ecology,

she told us even daylilies (Hemerocallis fulva) are edible, all parts,

and pointed out hundreds of other edible roots, bulbs, fruits, herbs, leaf veggies and nuts, such as these hazels coming into fruit.

We picked and dug and munched and shared our knowledges,

before Jill put together an enormous bag of goodies for us to take. Thanks Jill and thanks MVCG!

Moss Vale has been good to us. We've caught up with family and old friends, we chatted on local radio and problem solved our bike situation...

We decided to take the bikes to Sydney by bus as we felt it was too dangerous to ride into the city. We wanted to have the electrics looked at to see whether they could be repaired. We also had a number of other things to do, such as visit our old friend the Surry Hills Food Forest.

In just three and a half years since we planted out this flat church lawn, incredible things have happened involving free access to the sun, rain and soil; tended by a loving community.



While in Sydney we also stopped in at the Art Gallery of NSW to witness our small part in the earth-sensible show The Yeomans Project, which was produced by artists Ian Millis and Lucas Ihlein.

We visited a small group of gentle folk held in limbo by Dickensian ASIO bureaucracy at Villawood Immigration Detention Centre.

We staged our own feed-in outside a restaurant where a few days earlier a mother had been asked to finish breastfeeding her child in the toilets as she was offending customers (our intention was to feed inside but it was closed when we arrived). We took this photo as part of an online campaign.

And, as a novel tourist caper, we rode across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to family digs in the northern burbs.

Near Artarmon we found naturalised bananas growing in a public reserve,

and in Willoughby we killed two unwanted backyard roosters,

which we roasted gratefully, stuffed with homegrown lemons.

We have had a full plate of a time in Sydney, and we are looking forward to returning to the bush where we will have more opportunities to forage, hunt and glean, pedal and camp in air that is clean and practice, once again, a logic that is lean.