The joy of uncertainty

On our second (and last) night in Violet Town we were treated to dinner by Denise, who we met at the VT Neighbourhood Centre. 

Denise cooked us a delicious Mexican bean dish served with flat bread and a salad from her garden before we swapped some tunes on her guitar. With Denise's good company and generosity we beaned out of this happy town heading east again towards Benalla, leaving behind our best freeloading camping spot so far, along the Honeysuckle Creek.

At Baddaginnie we spotted critter-like Bulrush flowers. Bulrush, or cumbungi (Typha spp.), was a useful traditional food. The outer rind was peeled off the underground stem and layed before the fire, the fibres were then twisted to loosen out the starch (Tim Low, 1988). The soft white starch of the young shoot can also be eaten raw and the left over fibres can be spun into tough string. The immature flower stalk can be woven into mats. (Survival.org)

A little further on we spotted Salsify (Tragopogon) flowers that had gone to seed. There is so much naturalised free food (thistle roots, salsify tubers, wild lettuce) we've missed the chance to eat this season because they've already become too woody, and there's so much naturalised free food (cherry plums, figs, nectarines, peaches, apples, walnuts) that just aren't quite ready.

So we keep a look out for local produce to supplement what we find and what we have brought with us.

After a brief stop in Benalla we rode out into the heat of the afternoon to find a camping spot along Lake Mokoan. We are really starting to embrace the uncertainties of each day. Where are we going to camp? Who are we going to meet? Will there be drinking water? Will there be power? What will we find to eat?

We arrive to find that the once man-made lake has been returned to a magnificant Yorta Yorta wetlands. It is brimming with more-than-human life, which must necessarily include death to keep things cycling.

With the decommissioning of the lake the caravan park has seen better days. We were welcomed not by the manager but by permanent residents Gary and his grandson Josh, who brought over some beers while we set up camp. We're starting to experience the incredible generosity of people and understand the importance of sharing stories while sharing common ground.

We are also discovering the different plant guilds that are forming in certain regions. At home, oaks, hawthorns, apples and blackberries have formed ecological partnerships with blackwood wattles, peppermints and messmates making habitat and food for numerous species. Here, in northern-central Victoria, we are finding that figs, walnuts and loquats are the naturalising trees. We are regularly seeing newcomer figs (Ficus carica) growing under heavy-drinking eucalptys,

and loquats (Eriobotrya japonica) growing under nitrogen-capturing wattles. These newly naturalised, drought-hardy food species will be important to observe as the climate changes our growing regions and knowledge of local food becomes increasingly crucial to community health and survival.

After a solid snooze (eaten in quantity, loquats have a gentle but noticeable sedative effect), some oats and juice and a bit of a wash,

we left the wetlands and the caravan park and set out for Wangaratta, cycling through gangster territory, up into the infamous Warby Ranges where we discovered these Grass trees (Xanthorrhoea spp.). The seeds of these plants were ground as flour and the stem was used as a fire-stick for the ingenious fire-stick farming that was so common to Aboriginal land management practices. The resin was used to bond materials together such as stone spearheads to wooden shafts.

We recharged in Wang,

before setting off on the rail trail to Beechworth.

Not far along the trail we came across a splendid black mulberry (Morus) full of ripe fruit.

We are too early for some, too late for others, but just in time for this sweet delicacy rich in vitamins C and K, high in iron, and an anti-inflammatory and will lower blood pressure. Wow, all that free medicine. Who needs multinationals?

Social warming continues to play a big part of our travels. Being on bike and not windscreened off from the world enables plenty of opportunities to meet and sniff the locals.

We're having more opportunities to hunt too, though so far unsuccessfully. We've shot arrows at rabbits and have tried to spear trout in the shallow clear streams we pass. As eleven year old Zeph (who will join us shortly) reminds us by phone, 'it takes time to learn what Aboriginal people know about getting bush food'.

After a leisurely 27 km ride out of Wang we camped at the old Everton Station just 15 kms short of Beechworth. We had previously saved our municiple charge (we're using our motors less and less) and a good night's sleep (more loquats) for this last section of the trail, which we were warned was pretty steep.

And arrived in Beechworth through a sustainable air-conditioning system,

to find a free home for a few days along Spring Creek in the centre of town.

In the past ten days we have slow travelled from Jaara Jaara to Yorta Yorta country inspired by Indigenous patterns of existence and how we might recreate them in a post-oil, climate change world.

We hope you've had a good ride too.

Gift economy

We said goodbye to the Goulburn River and the Murchison caravan park, home to a community of colourful permanent residents – Desley, Brian, Keith and Di – and headed east.

It was an unexpectedly difficult ride due to the lack of shade and a headwind for much of the forty-three kilometres to Violet Town. The sun baked us on this flat and straight stretch of road where annual grasses and fences dominated. Little stood out apart from the occassional creek and composition of wild flowers.

We arrived in Violet Town hot and exhausted, we found some shade to recuperate under and some free municiple power to recharge.

According to Sam from Ballarat e-bikes, "each lithium ion battery holds 0.333 kilowatt hours. Assuming someone is paying 27 cents per kilowatt hour, and the charger is 90% efficient, it's about ten cents per charge per battery." While the bikes recharge we have been collecting litter in the parks, reserves and sports grounds that we poach the power from.

We figure that the 20 cents of free energy we take from each town to assist our movement equates to about one bag of collected rubbish. When people ask us about our art practice we say we're quite well-known for waste collecting. We also pick up rubbish and pull up weeds in exchange for a free camping ground.

This morning we woke to a rich chorus of birdsong at our camp along the Honeysuckle Creek. A morning's walk enabled a feast of free food, including these deliciously sweet Nagami kumquats (Citrus japonica spp.)

and these luciously ripe loquats (Eriobotrya japonica).

Zero had earlier just missed out on hunting down a buck hare along the creek, so when we stopped for a cup of tea in the main drag we asked the cafe if they had any meat scraps for him. Success!

We've discovered three other things while being in friendly Violet Town. The first is the potential food supply in the gardens of abandoned houses, something to note as we move from town to town.

The second is walnut shell mulch. The region is a walnut growing climate, at least for now, and what a great way to use the waste product of this food.

The third is that Violet town has a range of publicly-accessible, intentionally-planted fruit trees and herbs, including figs, plums, rosemary, lemongrass, sage and olives,

which compliment the spontaneous roadside fruit growing here including cherry plums, pears, apples and walnuts.

Getting away

It was quite some effort to leave Daylesford last Friday. Months of work, teary farewells with friends and family and a general emptying of settled life. All this culminated at the Albert Street community garden before we pushed off towards banjo country, accompanied by our friend Clay.

At Guildford we spotted water ribbons (Triglochin spp.), a traditional bushfood, and dug up a small plant to discover that the rhyzome was comparatively small. While our digging tool was out we dug a hole for our first compostable nappy.

The hills of home flattened out and it was a cruisy ride into Castlemaine where Juliette and Tosh kindly offered their home and Lee and Dave generously cooked for us. But despite all the warmth and familiarity of Castemaine we were keen to push on.

There is free food everywhere (milkmaid tubers, roadside trees coming into fruit, dozens of edible weeds) but we have brought supplies still fresh from home to keep us going (thanks for the lovely cookies Chris),

so we just pass by many noteworthy things. A magnificant crop of roadside Salsify (Tragopogon spp.) en route from Redesdale to Heathcote.

We are just finding our pedals in our very new way of transitory living, which is tiring and mid-day seistas are mandatory,

for all.

Yesterday we travelled for 75 kms to Nagambie, happy for the most part. We found that our 70-80 kg bikes are rideable without electric assistance, even up the hills. We're in training for the high country.

Yet this is a year-long, low-carbon art performance, not the Olympics. We're only wanting to travel around 30 kms a day but we're finding out that sometimes a good camp spot is worth the effort. Zero leads our road train, forever on the look out for free food and free accomadation,

which isn't as difficult to find as you might expect.

We're spending about $20 a day and the nightlife is awesome.

Active activism

We, Artist as Family, stand firmly with our feet on the soil, as we stand with Jonathan Moylan.

Photo by Rasha Tayeh

For those of you who are out of the loop, Jono is a 25 year old from Newcastle who is facing up to ten years in prison and a $765,000 fine for sending a press release highlighting ANZ’s role in funding the Whitehaven open cut coal mine in north-west NSW. The mine threatens community health and food producing land at Maules Creek, and the health and survival of Koala populations in the Leard State Forest.

We reckon we're in pretty good company too:

Vandana Shiva

The photo of AaF above was taken by our dear friend Rasha Tayeh. Rasha is, among many things, a documentary filmmaker whose most recent work is The Growing Food Project, a short doco that explores some of Melbourne's urban agriculture practices and community food initiatives, where people are coming together to build local, fair and sustainable food systems. The film features Patrick's award winning poem Step by Step.

The film's premiere is on Wednesday 20th Nov at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) at 7pm.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion of food activists inviting the audience to discuss the benefits of supporting local food systems.

You can purchase your tickets here.

And while on the topic of Patrick's poetry, a huge congratulations are in order:

Patrick has just completed four years of doctoral research. In a nutshell, Walking for food: regaining permapoesis is:

a biographical thesis that investigates how we might transition to fairer, more just and sustainable communities. It draws on Indigenous knowledges and permaculture modelling in the attempt to demonstrate achievable societal change from the household and community economies out. The thesis contends that modern living is inherently damaging; and on such a scale that personal accountability is degraded. The ecological and social consequences of this are clearly evident, and the thesis challenges us to transition to radically different forms of living where permanent making replaces disposability, and personal accountability is once again performed.

If you're interested in receiving a PDF of the final draft, please contact us.

And while we're on the topic of positive and inspiring activists, Perth based singer songwriter Charlie Mgee, AKA Formidable Vegetable Sound System, recently visited the Hepburn Shire during the Swiss Italian Festa where he played a fabulous set of some of his songs from his album, Permaculture: A Rhymer's Manual.

Charlie's album focuses on bringing simple concepts of sustainability into the spotlight using the power of music, rhyme and humour to convey the permaculture principles in fresh ways to new audiences. If you get a chance to see Charlie play, we highly recommend you grab it.

And, while on the topic of grabbing: there has been much handlebar grabbing in these here parts as the departure date for our adventure draws near - 6 days!! We have been spotted all over the place as we ride with our panniers fully loaded on practice rides from starboard to port.

If we don't get a chance to post again for a while, see you on our way up the continent!

Mapping our new route

If you live anywhere along this new route and would like to hook up, barter, organise a foraging class, host us or just have a cup of tea, please let us know.

Supported

60 days ago we launched our Pozible campaign calling for support for our upcoming research project Free Food. We are thrilled to announce that we successfully raised $3,727. From all of us here at AaF HQ we say a very very humble thank you to our generous supporters:

Anthony and Henrietta Cheshire, Luke Pither and Kate Gerritsen, Lucas Ihlein and Lizzie Muller, Louise Jane Cruikshank, Michelle and Joe Fiordaliso, Geoffrey Michael Clark, Chris and Vanessa Wood, Matthew Phelan, Clay Ravin, Anne Gleeson, Angela King, Kath and Liam Wratten, Angharad Wynne-Jones, Greg Foyster and Sophie Chishkovsky, Stuart Jonai, Jackie Kerfoot and Samuel Jones, Tim Woods, John and Franziska Ielo, Zara Pearson, Nicola Hensel, James Stuart, Su Dennett and David Holmgren, Sandy Lee Jones, Josh Franklin and Tracy Anthony, My Bearded Pigeon, Belinda Raposo and Cecile Knight, Diego Bonetto, Jeff Brownscombe and Rakaia Nault, Lena Mazza, Trudy and Primo Clutterbok, Mariana Teuila Isara, Petrus Spronk, Candice Boyd, Tia Crane and Jeremy Fullerton, Georgina and Geoffrey Williams, Adam Krongold, Deborah Kelly, Jill Berry, Tricia Meeley, Alana Napurrula, Bruce Thurlow, Becky Aizen and David Alter, Tiana Hokins, Britt Hollingworth and Josh Poidy, Annshar Wolfs and Jason Shorter, Lisa Jackson, Raia Faith Baster, Simon Holmes, Ivor Bowen, Sharonne Blum and Johnny Russell, Juliette Anich and Tosh Szatow, Lee and Dave Edmonds, Jason Maher, Licky la Grim, Peter Brandis, Petra Beuskens and Nick Wong, April Phillips, Joanne McCombe, Jacinta and Cameron Saunders, Nicole Brammy, Laurel Freeland, Dallas Kinnear.

With just 3 weeks to go before we leave, the preparations for our trip are well under way. We had a garage sale today as part of the national Garage Sale Trail. Thank you to everyone who came by and who left with armloads of our goods that we are thrilled have found new homes.

On the media front, Meg was interviewed by the lovely Megan Spencer today on ABC radio. You can read the blogpost here and listen to the full interview here.

Practice runs

We headed to Trentham this afternoon (sans Zeph) with some of our panniers stuffed full of camping equipment for the first of a series of practice runs. Thanks to Sophie and Greg who visited last friday (spruiking, or should we say spoking, their brilliant book Changing Gears at our local bookshop), we are feeling better prepared for the mid-November departure. Sophie and Greg are peddling their wares to 30 bookshops in just 60 days, between Melbourne and Sydney.

It was a pleasant 22 km to Trentham, which is precisely the distance we need to average each day in order to arrive in Moss Vale for the summer solstice. It was a sweet, slow ride after some early gear problems. Avoiding sticks and loose gravel in places were minor challenges, which nevertheless were helping us to get calibrated to the ins and outs of bike touring again.

We arrived at our favourite bakery, RedBeard to refuel with a late lunch. We joked, if only there was a RedBeard at the end of every 22 km stint. Their food uses the best regional ingredients and their breads are baked in a wonderful old scotch oven. Al Reid, one of the two brothers who set up the business, quizzed us about our bikes, the electric kits we've had installed and the scope of our coming trip. As we ate, chatted and rested we recharged our bike batteries. Thanks John and Al.

But the purpose of our trip is to find free food, and as we'll not have many RedBeards to call in on we'll need to find our own source of good food along the way. On the return leg we pulled over to photograph some lovely roadside clumps of new season cranesbill. The leaves make a good steamed vegetable. This mostly medicinal plant, used for the treatment of diarrhoea, gives new meaning to our current preoccupation with practice runs. The notes we have written so far for this particular cranesbill follow.

Cranesbill (Geranium dissectum) purple flowered native of Europe; naturalised in Australia; roots are rich in tannin; used for the treatment of diarrhoea, gastro-enteritis, cholera and internal bleeding; externally, used for the treatment of cuts, haemorrhoids, vaginal discharges, thrush, inflammations of the mouth. It is best to harvest the roots as the plant comes into flower since they are then at their most active medicinally; leaves can be cooked as a vegetable; roots and leaves can be dried for future use; seeds roasted. 

We also made this little video during the week, which speaks our notes on wild salsify. Now is a good time for many autonomous root vegetables such as spear thistles, dandelions, hawksbeard and salsify.

Mapping our first leg

This is a rough map of our first leg. If you live somewhere along this route and would like to host us, barter with us, organise a meet and greet, put us up in your backyard or any other form of exchange we'd love to hear from you. We can garden, cook, fix things, teach foraging and a do range of other things in exchange for a camping spot, an occasional hot shower or recharging our bike batteries. Please contact us by email, Facebook, Twitter or leave a comment on our blog.

There are hundreds of food species that are free and live outside of supermarket idolatry.

Help us to achieve this new work by clicking this link and sharing and/or pledging your support.

Free food – our new adventure project

We're getting prepared to rent out our house and head off for a year of bike-camping along the east coast of Australia, extending our knowledges of free food that we will forage, hunt and hopefully barter for along the way.

Photo: Dave Cauldwell

We're loading our most essential tools onto just two bikes that we've recently had converted to electric to help haul on the hills, and we're doing plenty of practice rides before we go.

Photo: Dave Cauldwell 

With successive GFCs looming, climate chaos and the end of cheap crude oil, Artist as Family want to take the gloom by the handlebars and extend our everyday art practice of resource generation and accountability into evermore 'social warming' opportunities. This new adventure will be a kind of biographical nomadism where we will share our experiences weekly (from mid-November), recording recipes, making ecological notes, airing our dirty laundry and generally performing our unique form of art based on our family's idiosyncrasies and taste for permapoesis. At the end of our travels we will compile a book and possibly even stage an exhibition that will include videos, drawings, photos and writings we make along the way. We aim to show that it's possible to live without being entirely dependent on the monetary economy, as we adapt to change and engage further with lean logic.

Rent our home for a year

Open plan, double-glazed, solar powered, fully furnished (negotiable), permaculture house and garden in Daylesford, Victoria. Short restorative bush walks to Lake Daylesford and mineral waters and even shorter walks to town. Buses to railway stations for possible car-free living.

Shop for groceries at the Hepburn Wholefoods Collective, walk and bike everywhere, order your organic vegie boxes direct from nearby farms, grow your own food in our garden's delicious soil and/or at one of the community gardens, walk out and camp in the surrounding bushland, shop for clothes at the community op-shop or see the latest films at the community run cinema.

However you want to live, come and trial living in Daylesford for a year. Our home is two bedrooms although the study/office can become a third bedroom. Apart from extensive fruit trees, the garden also features chooks and ducks, a trampoline, rainwater tanks and a dog run. We will remove all personal belongings from the house so as it is as much a neutral space we can provide for you to make your home. However happy to leave plates, cutlery, pots etc...

lounge

kitchen and dining

main bedroom

entrance

southside

produce

$350 per week plus bond. Available from Novemember 2013.

Call us for more information or to arrange an inspection: Meg 0418 523 308 or Patrick 0400 897 850.