Cultures that foreground ecological knowledge and background technology are
the ones that are truly sustainable and we do the complete opposite.
We are creatures of place and if we don't become creatures of place again we will
absolutely annihilate every place for every species.
The story I guess we're telling is our household and community transition away
from what I've called a hyper-techno-civility.
Which is a hyper-urban,
technologically-focused, ecologically-deficit culture.
I guess why we were drawn to permaculture all those years ago
was that permaculture was a way back
to have a connection with the things that make living possible.
We live on Dja Dja Wurrung country in Daylesford in central Victoria which is
130 kilometers northwest of Melbourne and we have two boys Zephyr who is 16 and Woody
who's 5 and Zero our Jack Russell.
And we call our property Tree Elbow.
Which is a quarter-acre permaculture plot that we've been working on for about 10 years.
It was a bare, denuded, bulldozed plot and we saw the potential of it and also the
affordability of it.
And are very privileged to be able to live here in this part
of the world but also to have access to a bit of land.
It was step-by-step, there's been lots of little things or hundreds of little
things that we've given up.
We talk about the pivotal moment, we call it the bin-liner moment.
So we had a rubbish bin, we had our compost, and our worm farm
scraps and our chook scraps and Zero our dog got the other scraps.
We'd put things in the rubbish bin and it was always in a bin-liner and then one day we
realized that we didn't need a bin liner at all and that was a big moment just
realizing what we didn't need and what we could go without.
All of a sudden was like 'wow we don't need this' and 'what else can we give up?'
and then it was trying to live without plastic and then it was wow we don't
really need supermarkets and then cars.
The average Australian car costs around $15,000 a year with depreciation,
wear-and-tear, petrol, licences, insurance, etc factored everything in.
That's NRMA and RACV figures and then the Australian Bureau of Statistics
quoted a few years ago that the average household has just
over two cars so effectively the average household in Australia is
spending $30,000 on car use
We will go to just a kilometer up the road, we've got to look the local tip
where we get a lot of our materials to build our buildings, we get a lot of our
firewood that's just discarded there and we bring it back and chop it up we we do
that on bikes with bike trailers.
And then over the last year we've turned off the gas to the house so we did
have gas hot water, gas heating, and a gas stove top to cook with and then
it was slowly like we actually don't need those things at all.
We were putting the other things in place over a number of years.
So to have a wood heater in the house which can
heat our hot water, cook our food, and dry our clothes, and heat the home.
Going without is actually saying yes to other things.
So going without cars means I don't have to be a full-time builder like I was
10 years ago. I can actually stay at home, grow vegetables, co-homeschool Woody,
I also run a bush school.
So you're pretty much five days a week in the household
and community economy, I'm pretty much seven days a week.
And so I work two days a week for David Holmgren
in his office doing publicity and admin duties.
We have this small mortgage which is part of the big global monetary economy
and we service that mortgage with a little shack that we've built which is called
the permie love shack and it's on Airbnb.
Our household income is under $30,000
so it's considerably lower than the poverty line and we feel we
live extremely richly because we have time.
At the moment our bank is our woodpile and our cellar
at this time of the year and our seed bank and things like that.
But our knowledge bank can never be taken away
unless, you know, until we die.
So teaching our kids that the most important economy is relationships and
our knowledges and those knowledges and those relationships have
nothing whatsoever to do with money, makes us extremely resilient for the
things that we face in the future and therefore we feel empowered.
So money to us is not wealth at all. Wealth is time, time-richness, family time,
community time, and knowledges, accruing knowledges.
There's over probably 150 species here locally including mushrooms, plants, and animals
that - mostly feral or weed species - that we incorporate into our diet every day.
We haven't eaten out of the supermarket industrial food system for 8 or 9 years.
We can't be self-sufficient here on a quarter-acre and even if we could we
wouldn't want to be.
We talk about it in terms of community-sufficiency not self-sufficiency.
So there's lots of batering and gift exchanging that happens with
other community friends.
We're members of a food co-op.
We hold regular working bees at the community gardens and
while they're not high productive gardens, they are learning and social spaces.
Each day is an adventure and I think having a
child in the house, for Woody to wake up and he throws himself at the world.
How big's that?
I've been using a knife since I was three.
And I said to him last week as I was putting him to bed
'how did it feel to be to be you today?'
'how did it feel to be living your life?'
and he said 'Mum it was beautiful'.
So I think just having a child to remind you, yes we're exhausted at the
end of each day from working so hard but just having that childlike wonder as a reminder.
There's no doubting our privilege in this situation.
We're privileged to have quarter of an acre of land on Dja Dja Wurrung country
I think the responsibility people who have historical privilege have is to
live better, is to learn and pay respects to Dja Dja Wurrung culture,
local Aboriginal culture, is to live responsibly and with low carbon or
positive carbon impacts, and look after the the world and plant for the next generations.
It fills us with joy to live with that amongst all the gloom and all
the terrible things going on.
For us it does make a difference to live like this.
With every bit of salt that add to the cabbage it makes a difference,
for every shovel in the ground it makes a difference.
This is not for everybody this is just how we're choosing to live
and how we're responding to the world.
That's really important that we are just
a response to the predicament of our time.
And it might not be meaningful for
other people who are mapping out for themselves how they're going to live a
carbon positive future, but for us this feels wonderful,
this feels resilient, this feels important, and this feels vital.
Yeah vital and this feels like a very rich life for us to live.
Hey everyone thanks for watching Creatures of Place.
I'm Antoinette and this is Jordan and we're Happen Films.
and if you've been following us for a while you'll
know that Creatures of Place is our first short film in a year because we've
been busy making a future film, so we're really excited to be back
on YouTube making more short films.
We wanted to say a special thanks to everyone who has
contributed to making these films, we really couldn't do it without your support.
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Thanks for tuning in guys we hope you're as inspired watching these films
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