An interview with Patrick Jones

A N I NT ERV I EW WI T H

Pat r ic k Jone s B y

Nic hol as

Walt on - Heal e y &

J e s s i c a

L. Wi l kin son

We first met Patrick Jones at a poetry symposium in Melbourne in July 2011. He had just presented a paper on the poetics of transition (a version of which appears in this issue of RABBIT), and we were struck not only by his ethical principles and intentions, and the way in which he conceived poetic potential in everyday practices, but also by his notably tranquil disposition. He referred to the changes that he and his family—his girlfriend Meg Ulman and son Zephyr—were making in an effort to become self-sufficient and ‘locavore,’ that is, eating only food that is locally produced. As he described the act of killing— with bow and arrow—a Sulphurcrested cockatoo for meat, the birds in surrounding trees shrieking wildly, the audience was silent, captivated. This was a man taking responsibility for his choices for living and eating in an age of ‘energy descent.’

We bought a copy of his 2008 publication A Free-dragging Manifesto—published alongside Peter O’Mara’s subtext in a publication they jointly titled How To Do Words With Things—and were both amused and fascinated by his ‘graffiti’ work with the body. Dangling from bus shelters or lying on busy urban pavements brings new meaning to performance poetry, as Patrick tests the limits of what the body can do as a ‘writing tool.’ Further, his experiments with what he calls ‘free-dragging’ and slow-text mesostics create visually exciting verbal constellations, which slow down our readings of the work, and thus prevent our consumption of the work in normative, assumed ways.

‘Permapoesis’ is the name of Patrick’s main blog (permapoesis. blogspot.com), and a term that he has developed, ‘incorporating permaculture principles and Indigenous thinking, to define a practice of art that participates in what it represents; that is of its environment; that generates little or no waste.’ This is an art practice that incorporates and develops sustainable living, where walking, foraging, gardening and hunting can all manifest as poems, with an important locavore ethic.

In late August—a warm day for Winter—we travel by car to Daylesford to interview Patrick at his house, or ‘quarter-acre-squat133

with-a-mortgage-on-Dja Dja Wurrung-land,’ as he calls it. Turning into his street (a quiet lane, really, which ends just beyond his house, though one can continue along a grassy track into the forest Commons) we are confronted with a game of street soccer between Patrick, Meg, Zephyr, and their community friends. Their little dog Zero is joining in, too.

We spot a rooster, named Zerzan, wandering free-range around the garden with several other chicken friends. There are no fences or gates here, and the animals are free to roam. We are led to the verandah and presented with a lunch of dips, goat’s cheese, dried fruits and bread, all locally produced and sourced. The mineral water has come from the spring, and Patrick, Meg, Zephyr and Zero take us there, after we eat and talk in the sun for two hours.

Considering the themes of and activities surrounding our discussions, we decided to present the following conversation organically as it occurred during our meeting. The following transcript therefore begins during a discussion of art and the figure of the artist, and proceeds through to a conversation about ‘energy descent’ and art as the practice of everyday life. Our leisurely dialogue in the sun is followed by a walk (and some stumbling on the part of these interviewers) through the forest Commons, where Patrick shows us wild mushrooms, grafted fruit trees, and the rapid waters of the spring.

Jessica L. Wilkinson & Nicholas Walton-Healey

August 2011.

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N W- H :

Do you think chance enables the artist to relinquish some of their control on the outcome of their work?

PJ:

Chance is such a great way of including Earth others and other elements and allowing them to come into the work. It’s sort of like a control chance thing so that the relationship between intention and openendedness… they’re contradictory things that work together.

NW-H: Openendedness produces some of the most interesting art.

The typical lack of it in photography is one of the reasons I find David Hockney’s photocollages so interesting—in layering time or presenting multiple perspectives, Hockney creates something which is openended for the viewer—you always spend more time looking at his photographs than anyone else’s.

PJ: As a painter, Hockney understands how to hold his own attention and obviously his spectator’s or audience’s attention. The slowness of building a painting and the physical aspect and the different speed at which paintings come into the world definitely feeds into his work as a photographer.

NW-H: Hockney emphasises the influence of Picasso on his work, especially his photocollages.

PJ: I have issues with Picasso. Guernica is a fine piece of work—it’s this moment in history where Europe is in such a bad way and he finally comes out of his womanizing, self-interested space of aestheticising and into the world politically, and thus creates this incredible piece through his brilliance. My mum was privy to these really large books of his work—she had two or three volumes of several hundred of his etchings that he basically did in, I don’t know, three months. He had such an incredible output. And I would just pore over them and love the looseness of them, their lightness of spirit—they’re very gestural. At 40 however, I find him

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morally problematic because of his self-interest. Do we take the art or do we take the art with the artist? It’s a constant question.

NW-H: He certainly reinscribes those ideals of the romantic genius.

PJ: Yes, isolated and self-interested. His self-interest is justified through his so-called genius. That classic romantic artist position is so tedious. I find it so boring. And maybe why I find it so tedious is because we’re sitting here in this time of climate chaos unfolding and we have this foreboding set of problems on the horizon to do with energy and climate and technology.

NW-H: Do you think those problems can be divorced from the ideal of ‘the creative genius’? It seems they are linked; we’ve reached this state (of climate chaos) by investing in the notion of ‘progress,’ a notion that is itself reinscribed through the position of the classical avant-garde artist.

PJ: Thinking ecologically necessitates that we think not in ascent or progress, but in descent—that’s the premise of my research and the logic of this household. Not just preparing for an energy power down—which is here by all accounts through peaking fossils and other things like phosphates—but that it goes beyond those pragmatics of preparation for what we’re seeing unfolding in countries like England and America right now, economically and energetically; food crises in so-called brother and sister countries. Australians are still buffeted—wrapped in a cotton wool world for a little bit longer courtesy of good trade with China. Ultimately though, that has a short lifespan. We’ll never see the kind of affluence that we’re experiencing now. No other human culture has ever seen it and will ever see it again, because there’s nothing to replace those fossils—the fossils that have created the affluence that has created the complexity that has created the idea or myth of progress and the myth of Apocalypse as well.

I’d rather see the myth of descent or the descent scenario. That’s the central question of my doctoral work—how do we write for 136

descent? For me, decent is both a scary world (not apocalyptic) and a world of great potential because descent culture is a way to reacquaint ourselves with ecological systems. When we’ve got high affluence, that goes out the window because our thought systems become more and more disembodied or removed from the need to be directly engaged with hand-to-soil, earthly things. And so affluence necessitates that our separation becomes greater, which is what we’ve seen in the last two or three generations. We have forgotten we are animal.

But at the same time, preparation for descent culture does not involve a reversion to Christian agricultural toil, which would be horrible. Talking about future scenarios is very fanciful, but what isn’t fanciful is that we have a friend Paul, who we communally garden with and who lives out in the forest. Paul has no fixed address and is one of many people we know making decisions based on energy declines, getting out of the religion of industrialism before they are forced to. And the forcing is a mass panic. So of course it’s fanciful to be thinking five years ahead but there are actual descent scenarios happening right now.

JW:

What are some of the decisions you are making?

PJ: The thing I’ve come to realise, sadly outside of working closely with [Indigenous Australians] Dja Dja Wurrung people, like Debra Bird Rose has in various communities, is saying ‘okay, what is the culture that’s been here before and who has actually been a successful ecological culture?’ and there’s only one, so that necessitates investigation and the investigation so far basically says to me, in a broad sweeping brush, agriculture is mega-fucked. Agriculture is total class war, it’s war with animals, and it’s separateness and alienation from the earth and other beings.

Whether I look at Dja Dja Wurrung here or any kind of other culture that I come across in my research, those that are foraging gardeners and hunters live within a kind of whole logic. The

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Wathaurong mob in Geelong I’ve read are trying to re-create their traditional food supply systems—so hunting and foraging—but also community gardening. Unlike traditional agricultural methods of ploughing the earth or Christian agricultural toil—which, though one predates the other, are both still essentially non-ecological cultures—the Wathaurong people are trying to recreate their hunting, gathering and gardening modes, spreading seeds and doing forest gardening.

So what we’re trying to do here is create a garden and extend the Commons by gleaning wild foods, mushrooms and about thirty different wild weeds and bush foods. Because we’re still in this time of incredible affluence we’re able to do this calmly—which is unlikely to be possible in a time of panic.

JW: Can you tell us about some of your more creative gardening endeavours?

PJ: I’ve been doing more grafting onto wild hawthorns—hawthorns are from the rose family, which also includes apples, medlars, pears and quince, hawthorns grow wild, they’re drought hardy, they’re tenacious…

JW: Is that these things here? [holding up a brown, flat square from the lunch spread] PJ: Yes, that’s hawthorn fruit leather. It’s more of a medicinal plant.

It’s good for regulating the flow of blood to and from the heart and thus bringing down high blood pressure. There’s an ethnobotonist in England who reckons that our European hunting, foraging and gardening ancestors got through the winter months by using a simple recipe based around preserving heaps and heaps of hawthorn berries as fruit leathers and that would’ve been just enough natural sugars and vitamin C to get them through the incredibly harsh European winter. This is the European autonomous flora that gets poisoned and chopped down and is hated and considered a weed in Australia.

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A Dja Dja Wurrung diet isn’t possible. I can’t see us bringing down big kangaroos or things like that. Though there is some cross-over between their diet and our own (yam daisies, Sulfur-crested cockatoo, pigface, native cherry, lomandra, and so on), it’s the naturalised wild foods (agricultural weeds) that have come from all around the world through multiculturalism—things that have adapted to the harshness of the Australian climate— that comprise much of our wild diet. Many of these things have really good medicinal qualities. Willow bark, for instance, is a really good all-rounder health tonic.

NW-H: How do you consume it?

PJ: Shave the bark and steep it in hot water. Allow it to sit for three or four hours and then consume it. It’s also really good in composts and for propagating plants. It’s got things that not many other local plants have. In a compost it’s just diversity, diversity, diversity.

Biodynamic gardeners always say willow bark is fantastic for getting certain trace elements into the compost that don’t come from other places. So our art practice is basically the practice of everyday life—how we glean our food, how we turn stinging nettles into something edible, or not just edible but actually desirable such as stinging nettle pesto.

NW-H: They don’t teach you these things in schools.

PJ: That’s very deliberate. I don’t mean that in some sort of conspiratorial sense, but this way of life would mean the dismantling of private property and the reopening of the Commons; the removal of fences. That would mean a major incursion onto Western thinking; culture.

Online you can find a poem-recipe of mine1 that shows and speaks the recipe for turning wild hawthorn berries into fruit leather. It’s 1. A printed version of this poem appears in the essay by Patrick in this issue of Rabbit.

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really simple and you can find it by Googling ‘A Place of Simple Feeding’ which is a line from Jean-Luc Nancy’s book which, though used in reference to feeding the mind, reflects the ethic that so many Indigenous cultures got so right—that their food system isn’t mediated and abstracted, it’s direct.

One of the arguments I’ve been grappling with is that the three main resource options we have are: veganism, vegetarianism and omnivorism. If you follow an Aboriginal thinking system, or practice a Locavore ethic, you see that those three options are very clearly part of twentieth-century industrialism. I know vegetarianism and veganism have a long history in Eastern culture and I’m not talking about that so much as about industrialised forms of these things (i.e. supermarket food and the normal places for industrialised cultures to get their food). So these (food systems) are very abstracted or veiled-violent or violent-at-arms-length.

Heidegger has this quote, which he wrote in 1949, looking at a contiguous line between industrial agriculture or the agriculture that moved out of chemical warfare labs into chemical agriculture labs at the end of the Second World War and so very quickly he is picking up the relationship between motorised agriculture and motorised death (as in gas chambers). It may seem very hysterical to present it like that, but the more you unpack the logic of industrial agriculture, the more it’s apparent that a dominant food system is man-made mass death. Deborah Bird Rose makes the distinction between ecological death and killing and man-made mass death.

The latter is just the product of industrialism. But these things also happened in the time of bows and arrows as well, though ‘technological ruptures’ (to site Bertrand Gille) were not so advanced that one culture could totally annihilate another.

I think of the bioregionalism throughout the three hundred language groups of the Australian Indigenous people, where there were spearings and border confrontations, but there wasn’t one group building a certain technological prowess and then using that

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to empire-build and move in and kill and take over their regions.

There were definitely tribal differences in terms of architecture and gardening practices (such as yam daisy cultivation) and even in terms of general tools, so I don’t think it’s an accident.

I think Aboriginal people really understood homeostasis. The local mob here—the Dja Dja Wurrung—have this ceremony called the Tanderrum (or, freedom of the bush) that allows neighboring tribes to come in and use their hunting and foraging lands for a certain period of time. So there were these sorts of checks and balances—there was territorialism, sometimes extremely violent and fierce, but none of them fenced or border-guarded and if you were found on someone else’s country or territory you could be subjected to being speared and you would know that as a neighboring tribe.

However, you could also come onto this land as a party or delegation and ask to share its resources. The same privileges were offered to your tribe, especially with those of other Kulin nation people, when you travelled into other tribal lands.

So the typical racist stories today like the recent slaughterhouse issue in Indonesia, is just another example of pointing the finger away from our own abstracted, veiled-violent resource systems. So that is how we’ve arrived at hunting. We don’t eat much meat. Meat isn’t a big part of our lives. When you become a locavore, probably 70% of our food is either grown or foraged or hunted. That last 30% we’re finding very hard to find.

JW: What do you think about the academic parallel? I remember hearing someone at a conference who asked a panel member whether, if we all study at universities and do PhDs, we don’t all come out thinking the same? I guess he was trying to draw attention to a possible academic “fencing-in” of thought.

PJ: The same question could be asked of a bureaucracy. Does every bureaucrat come out the same after 10 years? There’s more chance of being like everyone else in a bureaucracy than in a university

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because universities actively look to capitalise on difference and newness whereas bureaucracies try to get conformity. This is obviously a conflicting issue for university bureaucracies. On the one hand newness is sought to drive the progress-capital paradigm, on the other conformity, sameness is desired because it makes for very manageable institutions.

While Western thought continues to be fueled by an abstracted food system then our thought will remain abstracted, or the abstract foregrounded. So that’s the thing I feel increasingly certain about—that the fuel for poeisis is fuelled by a certain…

[Zero interrupts] PJ: The rawer the food…the days that we only eat the fish that we catch or the gleaned or nicked apples or pears or purely eat only the mushrooms that we find, they definitely affect the way that I then come at thought. I mean this in both a metaphorical and metabolical sense.

Meg: Have you ever tried to live just from the food that you grew yourself ? That’s really hard.

JW: Can you describe how your thought changes?

PJ: There’s a vulnerability. Because we’re only novices at eating like this, and as we keep saying, this is a transition, we’re five years into it and we’re at a point where we’re separating our urine to put back into the garden, but not necessarily our shit (just yet). We haven’t quite worked out how to process that on such a small suburban block. So there have been literally thousands of little steps of stepping off from pollution culture. It’s the vulnerability—feeling hungry—is something I think Western thought could benefit from. Not totally, not always—I don’t wish that on anyone. But understanding what hunger is helps you to understand the incredible affluence in which we’re living, and the incredible complexity that is being allowed under such affluence. You see the gorging on of cheap and non-renewable resources… Vulnerability kicks in, 142

and you can’t rely on what I call ‘allopoetical strangers.’ When you start to feel hungry and you’re transitioning to a locavore ethic, the autopoetical local is where you need to build your resilience from because, as a culture, I would say we have no resilience whatsoever and we seemingly don’t need to. Our grandparents were probably the last generation of people who experienced any kind of resilience or hardiness.

This is the thing about the tribe that I’m obsessing over at the moment. When we work in isolation, we’re vulnerable for so many reasons (we’re vulnerable from the attack of advertisers, of the dominant religion). Even the way that our schools operate, it’s this parent-teacher system, where the parents bring up the values in the household and the kids go to school and get subjected to the value systems of the schools which, as we see in our schools, are proliferated by brand labels, celebrity culture, caffeinated drinks for primary school kids—total junk culture—strategically targeted at young people from an increasingly early age—selling padded bras to seven year-old girls, for example. Because we don’t have that village or tribal system where all the elders are conversing around a camp fire about what these issues are and collectively and strategically attending to a potential dominant culture who’s forcing their value systems in, we’re doing it alone and so we’re very vulnerable.

We’re also very vulnerable because we rely on others for the fundamental resources we need to live on as human beings.

JW: Do you have any desire to develop into a larger community?

PJ: Yes, our artists-in-residence is designed to encourage the idea that we are what we eat; that the work we create comes via the resources we consume. A stewardship ethic as a kind of artist-inresidency still relies on transporting people here but though there is movement I think it’s really acceptable at this point. I don’t deny people in their twenties using cars or planes to get around. I’ve stopped flying, and I got rid of my car. I really resent baby boomers going to Italy every year, or my own generation needing to fulfill more indulgence tourism in Asia…

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NW-H: Can you describe the set-up here (with the artist-in-residence cabin) and what it involves for both parties?

PJ: Sure. About four hours a day the people who come here to stay work in the garden or hunt, forage, bring back mulch or leaflitter from the forest, or go down and collect mineral water. We go down to the tip and recycle stuff that we might need—any kind of work that involves the running of the house and energy and food systems.

NW-H: How do you transport things to and from?

PJ: We’ve got these push bikes with long tails called utes. Otherwise we just walk it. We do a lot of walking. Not having a car now for a year, what would have seemed like a long walk a year ago is just like a walk to the end of the street—your whole relationship with space changes.

JW: Your conception of nearness has changed?

PJ: Yes, it’s not a big deal for us to walk over two or three kilometres, pick something up and walk back and see that as an hour and half where we’re picking up food and medicine along the way.

That’s the other thing: we haven’t been sick in our household for the last two winters. That’s the first time ever in my life I’ve never been sick during a winter.

JW: Do you feel physically fit?

PJ: Yes. Some of the best medicinal weeds are abundant in winter.

So when things start to die down in our produce garden, the weeds are kicking goals outside. Weeds have this incredible loving nature where they just turn up where they need to be treating the soil in a particular way, and so any disturbed soil is a place for weeds to colonise and pioneer. Basically what they’re doing is preparing disturbed ground for reforestation. So they’re the first layer along with

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fungi or mycelial networks, and they have medicine for the soil as well as for us.

I think that the Hippocrates dictum ‘let food be your medicine and medicine be your food’ reflects such clarity—even though it’s a Greek ethic it’s very close to a Dja Dja Wurrung logic of wellness from the ground. And so, we’ve been walking and bike-riding here throughout the winters and eating all these medicinal herbs and vegetables—things like dock and chickweed and groundsel and wild fennel, wild lettuce—the bitterness in these plants is the medicinal property, what a high sugar supermarket diet takes out.

So because everything is full of sugar or glucose or corn syrup the medicinal qualities of foods is nullified or overwritten. Having too sweet a diet not only cancels out the taste—the interesting part of food—it also puts the body into a stress. All our kind of Western pathologies through our food system is based on high sugar, too many ingredients, and nutrients already dissolved or, by the time they enter our mouths, so aged, they lack directness.

NW-H: And that directness is what comes out when you create things?

PJ: Yes. There’s an ecologist who has also come through literature circles—Timothy Morton—who critiques the whole ‘romantic nature’ problem in Western literature. He gave this lecture at Melbourne Uni recently and I listened to this incredibly brilliant rant and rave and intellectualizing and then I said, ‘So really what you mean is this is ecology without mediations,’ and he said ‘No, no, no, it’s the opposite’ and so, I have no idea what he’s talking about now!

I mean I’ve read his books but… he’s an ecological theorist who is completely brilliant across science and maths but comes up with this incredibly convoluted logic that isn’t clear and doesn’t arrive with any clarity—what I would call hand-to-earth clarity—that sort of thinking is totally calibrated to high affluence, high complexity brilliantness afforded by fossil fuels and the food systems they have created.

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NW-H: Would you be able to talk a little bit about your experience at art school?

PJ: Art school was good for my sensing of what community could be. In terms of the institution itself, however, all but one teacher were bureaucrats, people who were not lovingly imparting their world with their students in order to expand or open their students to other worlds. I’ve always had what I perceive as a healthy skepticism of authoritative systems.The origin of the modern school system lies in the German military as a place for conforming (which came about because the German officers were thinking too much on their own and that’s not what a good soldier should do). We can track our modern school system back to a militarised system: we see rows and chairs lined up, kids conform to bell-ringing and being told to sit up and put their hands up; it’s the kind of conformity that’s required in order to control a class because there isn’t the generational diversity that we’re learning traditionally in a tribal sense and that comes together in that sort of social diversity. Again it’s the vulnerability thing; everyone of the same age group is put in this space and you have an ‘us and them’ scenario. Great teachers can obviously break that down but most aren’t interested or encouraged to think in terms of social diversity and diverse knowledges.

I’ve never believed in the dominant culture or what it stands for.

I’ve lived an incredibly privileged life. To have been born in 1970 in Australia, one of the most privileged countries in the world, there is, obviously, a kind of contradiction in my critique of Australian colonization and this incredibly privileged existence. A majority of humans have an extremely tough existence.

NW-H: What about Zeph’s education?

Zeph goes to the closest school to where we live. The school takes place in the clubhouse of the local tennis club and it’s Australia’s first Buddhist school—not that we’re Buddhists—but it has a really big focus on ecological learning and many of us parents go up and do things like take the kids out for weed walks and gardening

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projects and we try to get them out of the classroom as much as possible. Because there are three of us parenting Zeph, we don’t have the option of home schooling, although Meg and I would if it were up to us. There is actually a growing home-school community locally. Without home schooling in a community context, when you get a kind of isolation happening, I don’t think it’s that great for the child. But there’s a sort of bush home school which parents take, say, a day a week and each of the parents have different skills, some are practical or physical or academic, most have a good mixture. Should Meg and I have a child together, we would probably go more down that track.

JW: It’s nice that parents are encouraged to take an active responsibility in the way their children are raised.

PJ: It’s a really ideal school. The school’s principles and philosophies are really well grounded. But getting teachers that aren’t trained by the state, so to speak, to educate our kids, to break that mould, the classroom can just end up looking like every other classroom in the country. This is not a form of learning that I think is ecological or social and again you get this lack of diversity in the classroom.

With home school communities you get older kids, younger kids, young adults, older adults, grandparents, other community friends who get involved. Activities are centered on what actually happens in life. You get more friendly and creative versions of what adults do. Most of these adults are doing unusual things, whether artisan stuff like dry-stone walling, or more traditional forms of food production.

JW: So what sort of creative projects have you been working on recently?

PJ: Our creative projects are mostly how we live. So we’ve just finished the first planting of a half-acre community garden just up the road.

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JW: That’s on your blog isn’t it (http://permapoesis.blogspot.com/)?

PJ: Yes, so that’s stage one. It’s really the project of life. Some things are really formalised and appear much more like art in a traditional sense and then other things are other things, which we call ‘art’ but don’t really care if other people call ‘art.’ We come at it from an art framework, but Meg and I have a practice of art that includes everything, whether it be making t-shirts or…

JW: So how do you define an art framework?

PJ: I’ve given up. Not because I’m lazy. The art framework that I’m particularly interested in is the relationship between the Latin word for culture which is ‘cultura’ which means ‘to cultivate the earth’ and not from a grazer, farmer’s perspective but from a gardener’s perspective. So art, like corroboree, is an intensification of and a multi-dimensional art form. A corroboree has painting, dance, performance, narrative, fire, lighting techniques, drama—it’s one of the most intense multifarious art forms I know yet it’s so low-tech.

In a way, without having our own corroborree, which is much more intensified, all these multiple aspects appear in the way I plant out a line of garlic, or graft different apple or quince or pear onto wild hawthorns. In that way, creating gardens in places where we’re not supposed to create gardens, in what are called marginal ecologies or wild urban spaces, can materialise as a poem. Walking as an art form can emerge as poems as much as the walk itself.

The body or performing the poem is what I’ve been interested in exploring—the poem as a biophysical thing. Doing bodywork, going into an environment (a city environment or a forest or any environment) and playing with the body as the instrument for the poem-making. Climbing up things. That’s what I was interested in with A Free-dragging Manifesto2 is what the body could do as a writing tool, so the walk is an extension of that without necessarily 2

Patrick Jones, A Free Dragging Manifesto in Patrick Jones and Peter O’Mara How To Do Words With Things, Tree-Elbow Publishing, 2008).

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a specific audience. That a walk might appear as an essay or poem becomes something else other than just a document of the walk.

There is a British artist called Richard Long who would walk the same path again and again, actually marking or making the path, wearing it down with his body. Then he would write the walk, so there would be a photograph of those lines. That sort of work really appeals to us—the practice of everyday life becoming the art form—and the majority of it isn’t shared. It’s not because we don’t want to share it or we’re stingy, it’s just like life is a creative act unto itself and some things just pop out that are then considered because there’s a potential for an audience.

NW-H: Can you talk a little bit about your concept of free-dragging?

PJ: Free-dragging is an extension of some of the graffiti work I was doing in the early 2000s, and then being, as I am as a poet, very excited about what the body can do. Though this is non-dance, it is performance. How can one write a poem with the body, like a physical graffiti? And so free-dragging really came (with Jason Workman) through that inquiry into how one can write a graffiti and a graffiti that can’t be legislated against, so trying to create an art form that is ambiguous and a little more poetic than a lot of graffiti which is static. Like the garden, which is a living changing thing, the body is a living, biophysical thing and so the question becomes how can one write graffiti or write the poem with the body?

NW-H: It’s an interesting analogy you draw between graffiti and poetry; one exists in a very public space while the other often exists in a more private literary space, a space that is more exclusive.

PJ: That’s the other thing. The love affair with graffiti is exactly what you’re saying. It’s an art of the everyday; it can’t be capitalised upon though some wanker in London paid millions of dollars for a building with a wall with one of Banksy’s works on it…

NW-H: The desire to root a poetic in the body is not new. Frank O’Hara wrote a poem called ‘Biotherm’ whose lines were determined 149

by the movement of the poet’s tongue; Olson placed a huge emphasis on breath… What sort of relationship do you see between Beat poetics and your own?

PJ: I think Ginsberg’s Howl is an incredibly performed physical poem. You can’t do a passive read of Howl. It has to be active. But my own relationship to page-based poetry and to free-dragging— returning to the page and seeing that the page has an intimacy you don’t get in public space, the book form has another form of publicness which I think is really beautiful and quiet so that reacquaintance led me to develop the next phase of free-dragging which are my slow-text mesostics, which is creating a physicality for the reader’s eye. This means the reader’s eye is slowed or there’s resistance so that the eye can’t just skim across and consume the text like we’re taught to do.

NW-H: And that was based on a technique by Cage?

PJ: The mesostics, definitely. Cage would get a whole set of fonts and font sizes and roll dice to determine what each letter would be.

I’m just doing variations of that sort of stuff. But at the same time, I’ve got this return to what I was writing in my twenties, which is music—lyrical poetry—so I’m treading on eggshells, really, because I’m almost writing songs, sometimes raps. I slow it down so that the rhythm or the song is not accessed unless the poem is read many, many times. The reader of these slow-text mesostics can hear quite conventional poems often with rhymes so that on the page there’s a sort of physical difficulty, but when heard orally (I think the oral tradition is physical and less mediated) they appear like folk songs. A lot of them are very conservative, conventional forms in that sense. Sort of like fessing up to the abstraction or mediations of books and maybe that’s where I’m starting to understand Morton…

So the poems that are either recipes, or that remind myself or the reader what foraged weeds are around, are using rhyme as a memory tool for a post-book or post-online era. In that sense there’s a 150

return to song because they’re easier to remember. So we use these for the more obscure weeds that we don’t use everyday and need some kind of recall once or twice a year.

[We go for a walk through the forest to get some water from the spring. Zephyr brings his small soccer ball] PJ: The other thing about not just creating an expansion of Commons but a community around locavore ethics is that we’ve just secured two public spaces on which to grow. We’ve been able to convince the local council that local parks can be community orchards or vegetable growing spaces and the culture that’s changing just around those two gardens is very dramatic locally, just in that short space of time. When people have access to common ground for food, whether it be a foraging commons or community garden space—and our community garden space is purposefully not built on the private property model—people come and plant seedlings and we have monthly working bees and no one owns that food outright. There’s just a simple system of take but return and that’s really the only principle. Return can be in the form of other seeds, compost or labor. People are basically just going to that garden throughout that month between the working bees—and people who aren’t even affiliated with the group—and taking stuff and other people are bringing things back. It’s not policed. It’s just the spirit of take but return.

We’ve had no issue of people abusing the system. We want people to get engaged in the idea of feeding outside of commercial zones and so that even if people are thinking in self-interested ways and take and take and take year after year, I think eventually something will click. There’s going to be a point where they think it’s time to put in. I think most people are generous. To have a policing system or private plot system would just be more of the same culture we already have with the private property model. This little bit of ground we’re walking on now is a thoroughfare; a public road that was never built, and all this here is common ground. Here we

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have radiata pine, which has self-seeded. Birds feed on it. The other thing about eating birds is that we’re also growing food for them.

Sulfur-crested cockatoos have grown up in this area because there are so many fruit and nut trees and we’re expanding that—you’ll see the grafting that I’ve been doing. And spreading seeds and making more food available, it maintains their numbers.

[We stop by mushrooms that have come up overnight] PJ: If I don’t know what they are I stay away from them. There are about eight or nine species we eat that are abundant throughout autumn. In terms of managing these areas, the government only knows how to come in with large-scale equipment and poison with herbicides all these autonomous floras. We usually avoid this by carrying cutting implements on us and by standing on things like blackberry bushes to suppress them. In so doing, it becomes a groundcover and still produces food, improves the soil, is not highly flammable. When blackberries are allowed to grow up, all this dead stuff in here makes it a real firetrap and so government agencies cut it back using the cheapest form of management, which is heavy diesel-fuelled machinery and poison. With just a little bit of work in each area you reduce the fuel-loading in the bush while also protecting your homes and making this area a garden for food and fuel resources. It’s just entering a stewardship relationship. There’s no authority as well. If you use simple techniques—hand tools—the lightness that you have on a forest ecology is not radical. So things change in a gradual way. It’s not a particularly healthy forest. The dominant parasitical fungi, the honey fungus, in much of this forest have thrived because of government burning programs—which are way too hot for many other species to cope. Trees are falling down all the time as the honey fungus eats the tree from the inside out.

NW-H: Where have you acquired this knowledge?

PJ: Through local knowledges. There are weed experts and fungi experts; there are texts, lots of workshops. Almost every week there is someone taking some walk or workshop on something to do with 152

the land, whether it be permaculture, nature walks or identifying weeds or Indigenous grasses. Some are really specific and others are more general. Meg has worked at our local neighborhood centre, which is a really amazing resource centre. A whole lot of different workshops take place there. People with any knowledge can conduct a course there, which people can take very cheaply. Courses only run if a certain amount of students enroll so each term there might be two hundred courses offered and only seventy get up.

The edible weeds course is another indicator of energy descent.

It is the most popular course at the neighbourhood centre. With the 1973-4 oil crisis that brought down the American stock market and triggered a global recession, that was the first indication that there was a limit to growth and that was terribly troubling for progress-capitalism. By the end of 70s all these texts on eating wild foods and edible weeds came out. It’s the same thing now as oil peaks: all these texts keep appearing or re-appearing and people’s interests are re-opened.

NW-H: Do you think the development or increased adoption and practice of locavorism is going to force supermarkets to change their mode of operation?

PJ: This is borrowing from David Holmgren’s work, which deals a lot with energy descent scenarios, basically there will come a time, while we’re alive, where one or two supermarkets—Woolies and Coles—will have so many vouchers and… If you are going to have a centralised food system then choice and options won’t be a thing of future supermarkets.

To take energy descent and power-down out of the equation, and just look at it from a climate perspective, the agricultural system is very vulnerable. Agriculture developed in stable climate over the last ten thousand years and requires stable climate to orientate its systems. Farmers can only go three or four bad years before they need a bumper year. With increased intense weather events and drying and warming not only is there a constant need to move where your farm should be, your fixed stable climate system isn’t

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going to cut it. So just in terms of climate change, the dominant food system is incredibly vulnerable. Then you throw energy powerdown into the equation—fossil fuel depletion—and crude oil is the most dominant ingredient in supermarket food, and this is what permaculturalists have been doing is looking at the convergence of climate change and energy power-down scenarios as a kind of combined double-Helix really.

JW: On your blog there is a video of you in the forest entitled ‘notes for a manifesto on free-dying.’ Can you tell us a little about free-dying?

PJ: Free-dying is the other ecological end to free-birthing. Freebirthing is a burgeoning movement where women self-birth—so it’s active, unassisted birth. Basically, free-dying is how we die without pharmaceuticals and without being boxed up or burned.

How do we die, say, the way old country dogs die? Take ourselves out into the bush and self-compost in leaf litter. I’m at a sort of a mid-way point through my biological life, preparing for the kind of death that I want. Our culture is not very mature when it comes to death, which I think has something to do with our extreme anthropocentricism. Free-dying is really just a preparation for ecological death—a preparation poetic on the kind of death I would like. I think it has broad appeal; death’s just another part of life that’s mediated, where the ecological is cancelled out. Apart from that, it’s an active, unassisted death. At this point it has no form to it; it’s just a concept. I suppose it won’t really have real form to it until I cross into it!

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