Artist as Family: Entering the southern reaches of crocodile country (our week in Hervey Bay)

Saturday, 28 June 2014

Entering the southern reaches of crocodile country (our week in Hervey Bay)

For the past week we have made a home in Hervey Bay, mostly living here,

in this abandoned caravan park. No services, no reception, no rules – just forest reclaiming bitumenous civility. We nestled in among the legume suckers, hidden, protected by their simple lifeways.

A public park with a toilet and a free BBQ was situated across the road where only three weeks earlier a four meter long crocodile was sighted, marking our entry into the next significant creature zone. We saw no evidence of crocodiles in this park, although we did find it very social.

The park spilled onto a small beach where we observed many tidal transitions.

For we southern inlanders, becoming calibrated to the tides has been critical when it comes to procuring what we call accountable food. Catching, killing, eating and praising fish consumes a considerable part of our day.

We began by first catching bait fish such as these herring,

or garfish,

which we willingly ate, but also used as bait to catch larger fish.

Then on other occasions we caught nothing but quiet,

reflection,

and the chance to learn from others.

During the week we heard from Rore who posted a great comment on our Autonomous foods of Minjerribah post concerning the uses of Pandanus. When we came across a juvenile of this common coast dweller we got to work.

Rore told us that the base of the Pandanus heart leaves are also edible, so we broke in and discovered hidden starchy treasure.

Although delicious, and like eating the fruit raw, we experienced a mild scratchiness in our throats. This is because Pandanus spp contain oxalates, easily treated by cooking.

Earlier in the week we met Kelly and Wendy, who told us about the free camp site, invited us home for a warm shower, introduced us to their kin dog Bell and cats Leo and Mishka, and on our last night cooked us a beautiful dinner. Thanks Kelly and Wendy!

We also met local bike advocates Michelle and Luke from the Little Blue Tandem – a cafe and bike hire business. Here they are after trying out their shop's new beach bikes.

They told us of a cycle tourist travelling up the east coast avoiding roads and keeping mostly to the beaches. Wow! What a great concept. Before leaving Hervey Bay Michelle and Luke gave us a beautiful care package of homegrown treats and a hand-knitted scarf. Thanks so much Michelle and Luke!

On our last night we booked into a youth hostel to camp, wash and recharge our electricals. Here we met two Dutch cycle tourers, Michel and Marion, who started their adventure in Melbourne about three months ago. Among other things we exchanged notes on the pleasure of cycle speed and living simply.

Once again we have itchy pedals and are ready for our next leg. But, have we made a decision to keep heading north or begin our descent south? For that answer you'll have to wait and see.

1 comment:

Unknown29 May 2015 at 22:10
Caravan Park Hervey Bay
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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’.