Key Audit Findings

We found our first bubbler of the day near the corner of Lonsdale and Spencer streets at 8.35am.

We found that to make sure we didn't miss any of the bubblers in the chaos of the city we had to slow right down.

We found the entire contents of somebody's home out in the street. What a lucky country we live in that so much waste goes unwanted.

We found our friend Brett who joined us on our audit. We found him at the lovely Kinfolk café, which is staffed by volunteers and whose profits go to a selection of different charities.

We found that although we only drink rain water at home, we loved drinking a toast to all the working bubblers we came across.

We found that after a while we even started acting like water bubblers.

We found that we started seeing bubblers even when there weren't any.

We found a few over-zealous bubblers.

We found lots of important reasons to carry out our audit.

We found wheelchair accessible bubblers,

dog accessible bubblers

and bee accessible bubblers.

We found the wasteful remains of the winning entry in the 2011 Melbourne Urban Prize for sculpture.

We found bubblers being repaired.

We found bubblers from great heights.

We found some very brave people at the Occupy Melbourne protest; people willing to stand up to the corporate greed that is killing our planet.

We found some great examples of people growing their own food.

We found people will go to great lengths to get a drink of water.

Overall what we found was very positive compared with Patrick's findings from four years ago.

We found 46 bubblers in the CBD region, 19 more than last time.

We found 39 working bubblers, 21 more than last time.

When we enquired at the City of Melbourne council offices we were told that on average there are 788,000 people who use the city every day, 77,400 more than last time.

We found 1 working bubbler per 20,205 people whereas last time it was 1 working bubbler per 40,000 people.

Congratulations are in order for the City of Melbourne. It's fantastic to see that they have started to take the issue of bottled water pollution seriously. We encourage them to continue their great work by providing even more water bubblers for the people of Melbourne who are concerned about drinking just and free water.

And lastly we found that walking over 15km auditing Melbourne's bubblers sure did make us sleepy.

Water Bubbler Audit

Four years ago, Patrick spent a day walking through Melbourne auditing the drinking water fountains in the CBD. His walk revealed that there was one working bubbler per 40,000 people in the city. He charted his findings on a map which he made freely available:


This coming Monday the 21st November, Artist as Family will spend the day retracing Patrick's walk through the CBD as we re-audit the city’s bubblers. We want to find out if the City of Melbourne is still committed to encouraging bottled water pollution or whether they’ve begun to transition to a sustainable and just free water supply by repairing all the broken bubblers and installing new ones for thirsty summer city dwellers.

Did you know that for Australians to drink bottled water, over 500,000 barrels of oil are required every year??

If you live in Melbourne, please feel free to join us for any part of our walk. We will have a mobile with us, so please call or text to lend us support or to find out our whereabouts: 0418 523 308.

Stay tuned for the findings of our audit.

Tip Trip

It's been nine months since we sold our car and we have loved every minute of it. Yes—even walking in the pouring rain in winter. We agree with British adventurer Ranulph Fiennes who said "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing."

But there is much to be said for walking in the sunshine, and today we said it as we walked to our local tip. We wanted to get rid of some unwanted goods, and have a fossick to see if there was anything we had use for at home.

We fossicked high and we fossicked low. And we fossicked around and around the Earth Ship demonstration wall we built earlier in the year with waste warrior Michael Reynolds.

We test rode all the bikes,

we sniffed out hidden treasures

including 30 metres of tangled chicken wire we are going to use to keep our five hens and one rooster out of a new garden bed.

We spent the better part of an hour pulling it this way and that until

it was ready to roll up and

roll all the way home.

Work Experience

Liam wanted to see what a typical week for Artist as Family entails, and what constitutes 'work', according to us. Here's a short vid that snapshots our social warming adventures.

This is Liam

Liam goes to the local secondary college and this week is doing work experience with Artist as Family. Liam lives around the corner and every day this week has arrived on his bike at 9am with a bag of wild apples picked by his mum, ready to start the day.

Rather than just relegating Liam to spend time in a studio as he might have done with other practising artists, we have been out and about this week showing him how we live and make our art of the everyday.

As we live car free, riding and looking after our bikes is a big part of what we do

as is promoting bike culture in our town, and the monthly local Critical Mass ride.

Because we don't shop in supermarkets, thinking and talking about what we eat is also a big part of what we do. What we put in our bodies fuels the art we make, so if we want to make environmentally and socially responsible work, the food we eat needs to represent this. Every Wednesday we shop at our local organic bulk food table. This week we bought olive oil, almonds, tahini and 2kg of fresh juicy feijoas.

We made pasta.

We planted garlic before the full moon.

We measured up a potential site for a community food garden and drew up a draft plan of it to present to our local council.

We made music

and most importantly, we made a great new friend.

Food Forest ten months on

Any available land

We recently co-conspired with other community members to create another public food garden. Here's a short video we made to document this unauthorised direct action.

We've set up a Facebook page for the garden here.

Garden Bed Intruder

Last year, this news item broke which provoked this musical interpretation of it, which in turn provoked us to make this:

Carless and carefree in the country

We've been bike loony over the past several weeks, trading in our car for new cargo bikes and bringing them home on the train,

initiating Daylesford Critical Mass' participation in the town's NYE street parade,

and setting off for bike camps between 15 and 40km from home.

But the last few days we've been held up in the house, watching the rain in disbelief, thinking about the fauna and flora affected by the floods, the lives lost and displaced, the era ahead.

Ride safe wherever you are and if you drive a car please think bike.

Creative commons, foraging commons

If you like our Food Forest rock operetta you can download it for free at myspace, or at triple j unearthed.

We made this music to accompany our Food Forest film, which documents our week of planting.

The show closes, the forest grows on

In the balance: Art for a changing world ends today. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to have been participants in this show.

Thank you to the MCA staff, especially Anna Davis, and thank you to Francis Chalwell and the St Michael's community. Thank you to the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, and the Keir Foundation. And thank you to everyone who supported and assisted the development of this work, especially the Surry Hills community. We hope it will bring much pleasure and social warming for years to come.

Food forest is a free food commons. We only ask that it be a shared resource and that people, when they can, bring food to the soil (compost) in exchange for its bounties.

Food Forest: A Very Public Resource

Perhaps we're clutching at One-Straw Revolutions, but an interesting thing happened recently that we thought was worth sharing. Sydney Morning Herald writer Rachel Olding emailed us to ask whether they could use the Food Forest as a site to photograph a local chef foraging for his slow food restaurant for a story she was writing. We politely declined:

Dear Rachel,

Thank you for your email.

If Jared were cooking the food for a community event, then yes absolutely, we would be thrilled for him to be photographed in the Food Forest.

As we're sure you can appreciate, the principles of the Food Forest are to promote public, uncapitalised food. The Forest supplies local residents who might not be able to afford organic food, and the church's weekly soup kitchen.

We applaud the ethics of The Danks Street Depot, and what Jarred and Melanie are championing, but it still comes down to the Forest being a public resource, that celebrates the free transaction over anything monetary and exclusive.

Best of luck with the shoot, and apologies we were not able to be of help in this instance.

Meg, Patrick and Zephyr — The Artist as Family

Olding's article is great in terms of promoting the relocalisation of food resources and providing creative ways for getting off a heavily polluting agriculture grid (that's responsible for around 40-50% greenhouse gas emissions and wholesale deforestation). In this way the Waterloo chef's ideals and ours are similar. But it's the privatisation of public food resources we object to.

What Olding's article doesn't raise is the problems of privatisation, ecologically and socially, or how this chef's activity is akin to business taking content from blogs licensed under creative commons and capitalising on the material. Why should a restaurant owner take food from a community garden or public commons (ie foraging for edible weeds in Centennial Park) and then put a price on it?

Jared Ingersoll at the James Street community garden in Redfern.

Photo: Jon Reid, courtesy Sydney Morning Herald

Growth!

September 2010

August 2010

June 2010

The Forest Floor

Patrick is in Sydney and visited the Food Forest with family friend Josh Bowes, who generously helped with the initial planting back in July. They found fungi, edible weeds, an abundance of leaf vegetables, thriving fruit and nut trees, and evidence of dynamic social engagement.

A mushroom (perhaps don't eat) and some onion weeds (use as chives in a salad) spontaneously inhabit the forest floor, while rhubarb has been harvested to be used as an organic spray.

All these things show that humans and nonhumans are participating in this garden autonomously, and as a result this little food forest system (based upon permaculture principals) really appears to be working. Residents are bringing in their compost, harvesting plants and herbs to eat, while some are using plants to make organic sprays to allay pests. The woody mulch has, with spring warmth and rain, created humidity in the soil that fungi adores. Fungi in a forest floor is a great sign of soil health and, as gardeners will know, if the soil is healthy plants are less prone to pests. Growing plants in a polyculture using companion planting methods also assists the garden's health and allays pests and disease.

Relocalised food makes news

Among sex scandals and sociopathic world leaders, Artist as Family's Meg holds ground as Food Forest makes page 3 of yesterday's SMH.

Click for bigger.

Read article here.

Bloomin' inspiring

Vote 1 Peter Cundall!

We got to spend much of the day yesterday with one of the most generous and knowledgeable sustainability gurus. We learned so much about plants and soil, garden pests and wildlife, and how an 84 year old man has lived on organic food for fifty years, has a clean bill of health, and in this time has never taken any pharmaceutical medicines.

He inspired and delighted us, but one thing he said really stood out:

"Show children how to create: the best way to do this is to show them how to grow something. Children who know how to create things never grow into adults who destroy things."

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Sprung

If you were anywhere near the top end of Albion Street, Surry Hills yesterday and you heard a high-pitched squeal, it was us! It was our first visit to the Food Forest since the Plant-In five weeks ago.

In the town we live in, in Victoria, we are still in the grips of winter: rain, frost, sleet, snow.

But here in Sydney, spring has sprung, the proof of which we saw in the Forest.

Food Forest is going to be officially opened on Saturday 21 August at 2.30pm, with a floor forest talk by the Artist as Family and gardening guru, Peter Cundall. Hope to see you there.