Artist as Family: Dreaming up a bicycle utopia; eating non-privatised foods

Monday 16 December 2013

Dreaming up a bicycle utopia; eating non-privatised foods

We woke early and left Gundagai, the town of long timber bridges, before the sun got too hot.

We made a quick obligatory stop,

before really finding out how the Hume Highway was going to shape us.

We were surprised. Despite the noise and the speed of the traffic, the wide shoulders really helped us ride in relative peace. It was a cruisy ride from Gundagai to Jugiong (helped along by our first tail wind of the trip) where we parked our bikes in the shade beside a green grocers run by the very frinedly Gino. We (dumpster) dived into his compost boxes and produced some lovely stone fruit.

While buying some local veg from Gino he asked if we needed a good camping and swimming spot.

Thanks Gino! A perfect free camping ground. The next morning we harvested some stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) beside the Murrumbidgee River.

Nettle is high in iron and great for relieving painful muscles and joints. Just the thing for weary bike tourers. Lightly blanching the nettles takes away the sting, produces a healthy tonic to treat urinary and prostate complications and leaves a perfect fodder material for making an excellent pesto with almonds.

After our free medicinal hit we cycled up the road to the very bourgeois The Long Track Pantry for a breakfast cup of tea and a loaf of yummy bread,

before easing our way into the heartland of wool country.

Since leaving Daylesford over a month ago our nostrils have flared wildly and our hearts have sunk deeply with the roadkill we have passed.

We counted 81 killed animals between the left verge and left lane of the north bound Hume Highway between Jugiong and Yass, a distance of 60 kms.

This massacre included a myriad of birds, three tortoises, a dozen wallabies, several blue tongues, countless kangaroos, flattened foxes, rabbits, a wild pig, two echidnas and numerous snakes including this young copperhead.

Given there are four lanes and four verges on this dual highway one could surmise as many as 324 roadkilled critters for every 60 kms of highway. That's a staggering 5.4 deaths per kilometre. The Hume, according to Wikipedia, is 838 kms in length which means, if you average it, there are quite possibly 4,525 corpses along this highway at any one time.

But it wasn't just the sickening aspects of this road – the senseless massacres, the climate changing and packaging pollution that proliferated – we found worth observing,

the Hume offered up sweet moments of beauty and surprise, especially when we got off it (in this case in Bowning) and found some roadside fruit to forage and help restore our battered senses.

Then when we arrived in Yass we were welcomed by an avenue of not-quite-ripe publicly accessible almonds (Prunus spp.),

some heavenly ripe plumcots (Prunus spp.) overhanging a fence,

and were given some Leeton grown oranges by a God's Squad bikie. Thanks Glen!

We camped, fished and slept under a balmy summer's night sky before facing the Hume again.

Imagine this road as a sea of bicycles...

After riding about 40 km we arrived in Gunning, a town that boasts a free caravan-camping ground with hot showers at Barbour Park, and found we were just in time for the monthly Sunday market.

We bought some regional produce,

picked some free herbs (gave them a drink),

took a swim and lunched on some delicious bush tucker at Barbour Park.

The starchy bulb of cumbungi or bullrush (Typha spp.) offers an excellent raw or cooked vegetable at this time of year. Cumbungi is ecologically beneficial for capturing silt, creating habitat for diverse species and stabilising banks. It can also become 'weedy' so it makes a great food where we are the biological control or, as Russell Edwards would say, 'ecological participants'.

Stay tuned for more free food and other low-impact resources as we inch towards the Christmas lunch table in Moss Vale,

keep safe on the roads and if you're driving, please think bike and think critter!

2 comments:

Anonymous17 December 2013 at 03:49
Another wonderful post full of possibilities. Your journey is invigorating in mind and spirit and its great to share it remotely. Here in Tassie it is just starting to warm up although everything is still verdant and green here at the moment. Love the oranges from the God Squad and Zero in front of the tuckerbox and can't wait to see what goes onto your Christmas table in Moss Vale :)
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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’.