Undergrowth #2 > TERRA POETICA

/In the early 21st century, the War on Terror was a billion dollar spectacle conceived by the military- entertainment complex which served to distract humanity from the more widespread and dangerous War On Terra.

/ In the human zoo we stand somewhere between monoculture and wilderness/ / shaping our mental ecologies from the debris of empire + revolution/

/ resisting the fictions broadcast by crude television satellites and saturated by tabloid media/

/ on the street poetic terrorists paint the rumour of some new indigenous struggle / earth magicians retrofit the urban ecology /

/ new paradigms mingle with archaic lores in the interzones of the information war /

/ we are all natives remembering the language of Terra Poetica//

undergrowth # 2 terra poetica // / 3-8 / editorial 10 / the story so far / tim parish 11 /my darling race / damien huxtable 12 / zone one / tom civil 14 / land of the long white sock / graham st. john 24/ the tree by lou smith 26 / in earths defense / jo fairley 36 / tree totem and oracle excerpts by tim parish 38 / world war 3 / rak razam 44 / you are walking / words by tim parish 47 / whose land are you on? / nick chesterfield 56/ andreas anatomy / damien huxtable 58 / freedom / words by rak razam / 62 / the city, i / miles allinson 71 -81 / wildlife / street art gallery / words: tim parish / 84 / creating permanent culture / david holmgren interview by adam grubb / 96 / pantheist astronomy /tim parish 98 / credits /

The story so far: Spaceship earth was hurtling through the stars shadow like it knew destiny was its friend. On the surface its passengers were playing the game of life and evolution blindly, inventing reality through their senses, witnessing time and calling it names.

Spirits like tourists passed through the suns gaze and drank the liquor of their dreams before deciding on the dedication of reincarnation again. This time it was to be.

A small big bang passes like orgasm, and yin seduces yang once more. The train doors open every heartbeat. All aboard.

Nine moon cycles later pain of motherhood christens a grand entrance into the biodome of physicality. Love is automatic as instinct. Growth as natural as decay.

Many years later the newcomer begins to learn the local dialect. It is brainwashed with the spell of alphabet and vocabulary. System begins to structure the organism but imagination fights back, sometimes‌ Last episode our central character was deep within his phase of global planetary citizenry awakening. Everything became apart of this cause and affect.

He realized: Basic psychology maps the emergence of minds relationship to the cosmos, starting from egocentric child and progressing to shaman elf avatar. A walk down the street illustrates that many do not evolve this far. Decades on the planet creates a sense of home and recognizing patterns in the plan. Politics becomes a matter of education. Philosophy a code of conduct.

Religion a fanatical cause. Civilisation a myth amongst barely evolved apes. Freedom an ideal worth living up to. Art a worthy pastime. Future rescue a purpose. Love an answer and a question in itself.

I walk the narrow streets my heart thumping, an omnipotent streetlight casting shadows across the piss soaked alleyway of non-existent doorways and nauseating corners, where you know you’ll find a fit or two, or three.

Is this the city I know?

The city of fold up cafes of ultrastylish coffee drinkers and cobbled uneven edges where my bike refuses to go.

This is a time of war, they say. The words chase round narrow bends, catapult me into a state of uneasy queasiness. I remember months ago stealing headlines from a newsstand. They declared in bold black font the war on terror and the pursuit of freedom. Buzzwords for the wealthy and their hidden agendas. The headlines are silent now or they proclaim Aserial Elvis Madness whatever the fuck that means, but hey, it keeps the masses happy. I return home pissed. The city is still. Strange for a city. As I roll a cigarette I look across at my neighbours, twenty floors of life in an architectural monstrosity, and watch the synchronising blue of tv screens, flashing morse code into the black of night.

Tom Civil

matter vs spirit

OK,

so I arrived back in Brisban after a 5 week adventurealin the south east of the co And if you’ll permit, I’ll wind back to late Decem ber…

ntinent.

It began with a Space Tribe erlude out the back of Tabulamintfor Summer Solstice.

Not a particularly memorab le event, but it was almost fre e, and wasn’t a bad way to sta rt a journey. Except for one element - the Vanstone (my Dad’s old Ford Spectron). In the afternoon following the party, I headed tow ards Tenterfield and was soo n forced off the Bruxner Highway in swelteri ng heat with fuel line concern s.

I’ve come to realise that there’s no true route across this country without ordeal by motor vehicle.

g the road ahead sun, hoping for a CDMA signal, scopin bile Cursing over a hot engine in the baking just wouldn’t be the same. OK, the mo mer sum the ts spli e hos r iato rad ther for shade if ano girl can be n the Vanstone (so called since the old whe but rig, my to n itio add new a is phone to have it around.

70 Kms short of Parkes, I was happy quite a bitch) took a turn for the worse ing a or Inn, I started mak ot M es rk Pa ry en H tural life? put me up at the e beast beyond its na th So when the NRMA g in rid en be ve e ha . Should I ternoon? Would I mak af w ro or few internal inquiries m to by or once unblock my radiat here Meaghan Morris w el Would the mechanic ot m e m sa e th is tmas? Was th ft home yet. it to mum’s for Chris ation that I hadn’t le ns se y nn ca un e th ep with stayed? I went to sle Near midnight the following

day, I made Geelong.

But let me tell you a tale about bogans. They aren’t what they used to be. I drove to ConFest with Callum on New Years (after we’d realised that he, I and the Donker brothers had travelled there for the first time one decade prior - when he’d leaped into the main fire, blistered his arse, and had his corduroy trousers mailed home c/o DTE). I’d been on holiday from ConFest for several years. It was disappointing when compared to the early years of the post Cas & Lance Era, with its radical-almost-anything-goes atmospherics, the mounting authenticity war over music and the techno-feral. And it was hot and dry - outback NSW - 45 degrees most days - we camped in a tinderbox. But something pulled me and Callum back. He’s been writing the great Australian bogan novel, or so he says (and probably will). And at an event downstream from the Yob incursions of the mid-to-late nineties, he copped plenty of material.

Back then, mates with fortified eskies would navigate the Murray on board monikered motor boats (‘Krak-A-Fat’ was my favourite), disembarking upon the ConFest beach head, stumbling inland onto a New Year’s Eve from which there would be no return.

With fire manipulated in dizzying displays, torsos naked and gesticulating in the guttering light, and the abject feral looming out of the night, they’d belly-whack upon a smooth surface of tattooed skin and body piercings - a can of VB in one hand, a falafel clutched in the other.

The bush carnivalesque was at once terrifying and fascinating. And all the shrewdness, bravado and cockwise gambit of the Great Aussie Legend wasn’t going to earn points (let alone score them a root) on this bend of the river. Yet, by the next morning, or the morning after, or the one after that, when lone strangers had lost their mates, strayed from the paths of predictability, copped some mud, smiles and random acts of kindness, they got closer to the Other they’d feared ... yet desired. Next year they’d be in a sarong down by the Art Village on acid... and they might even have done a workshop.

And so it came to pass that the Yobbo flaneur made transit to the New Age Bogan. But on the prowl for a Reiki massage and a mull, this was an uncertain transit. Displaying the hallmarks of an aggregated cultural shift, it’s difficult to determine exactly where. I want to be cynical. Will it make an impact on the climate of fear and prejudice that constitutes our national (and global) mood?

Hardly. And what does it speak of ConFest? That it has long become a normalised mall-ised communitas where a kind of radical acquiescence occupies the menu - and this constitutes the ‘alternative lifestyle’ that is cautiously nurtured by the event’s current guardians - a swarm of bloated, albeit shrinking, naturists (the ‘ConFest Negator Tribe’ or ‘CNTs’ as Kurt Svendsen had them so eloquently acronymated). Yet, since this cultural telos seems to mark the point where the Self-spirituality of the New Age meets the sobering realities of the suburbs, where the expressive and individualistic drive of the new spiritual Seeker interfaces with the expressionless communion of working class tradition, I cannot but grant the blue collar hippy (the Skippy) an intriguing spectacle.

From scorched outback NSW, to cool-temperate rainforest. I was happy to leave Deniliquin behind for a seven day trek operated by Geco in the rainforests of East Gippsland. This was a key node on the tour. My van was happy with the prospect of a week long rest in the Goongerah Campground, where, having made the long haul out to and up the Bonang Highway without mechanical misshap, I was greeted by my old friend Laurie. Not long after that, I was surprised to find myself in the company of the theatrical-activist, Rusty Far Eye, who’d become ‘custodian’ of the Peace Bus (in a new paint job). I quickly knew this thing was gonna get interesting.

In a series of walks over the next week, it was an unforgetable journey. With 50 others, from the southern edges of Errinundra Plateau to the site of the ‘Historic Goolengook Fort’, I experienced rainforest sites of significance, ancient Mountain Plum Pine, Sassafras, towering Slender Tree Ferns, and the majestic Goolengook River - the site of the worlds longest running forest blockade where the infamous fortress (complete with rampart, moat, tunnels and drawbridge) had been constructed to protect the forest and its guardians from the desperate ‘menfolk’ of Orbost.

The fort was busted in Mach 2002.

A nascent exercise in eco-tourism, this was no mere adventure tour through exhilarating country, but, guided through scheduled coupes, logging breaches and failed regrowth by those who know the terrain, and the score, it was a potted history of blockading in that region and a sombre reminder of the remaining threat to country. Out there, telling stories were committed to my Sony Digital Voice Recorder.

Near Sassafrass Basin on day three of this feral safari, I was treated to an unexpected turn of events. Near our camp at dusk, in a logged coupe just off the road, a giant granite egg rock was found on a stump skirted by two trees on either side. Ever get the feeling someone’s been there before, and you wish they hadn’t? Who said forestry workers are bereft of aesthetic sensibilities? We’d located a log-loader’s tag – an effort at ‘getting up’ in the regrowth to use graff slang. The trees might have represented goal posts and the rock, a Sherrin sailing through. But my interpretation of redneck sculpture was amateur speculation. I’d need confirmation from the proper cultural authorities down at the DSE.

post. The fact that some of the finest people I’ve ever met had been occupying forests and mounting blockades around the edges of the Errinundra National Park for up to a decade, defending our natural heritage, was worth celebrating.

And that’s what was on the cards. So when the walk was over, I stumbled into Geco’s 10 year anniversary party. A decade of heritage defence and a Moratorium on logging in Goolengook for the present - time to absail down from the tree-sits.

Having placed a front wheel in a hole in Jamie’s paddock down the valley (and at that stage panicking over my misplaced voice recorder!), I paced the final leg of the walk 6-8 km up the Bonang Highway to GECO HQ. It was after midnight, and the newly renovated Centre was swarming with old warriors and ablaze with a revived anarcho-punk aesthetic. When Steve Herman told me someone found my recorder, and I hadn’t lost all my interviews after all, I produced a bottle of Laurie’s blackberry wine from my backpack and joined the party.

Many stories were recounted, embellished and crooned that night, but perhaps none as clear and emphatic as that by MCee Izzy laying down activist anthems and some of the latest Combat Wombat material. With Monkey Marc at the wheels, Tony Spanos once told me that the Labrats were the Bonnie and Clyde of Australian activism.

The Goongerah Environment Centre Office, that shack in the mountains north of Victoria’s tidy timber town, had been an appropriate place to arrive in my transition from ConFest to the forests, since that old director of the ‘wine cask theatre’, John Francis Flynn, has been hauling hippies and urban punks out to those parts fresh from ConFest for around a decade. I used to wonder from where all those gorgeous young vegan girls would appear. Of course, they were emanating from Flynny’s beard.

John ‘end of story’ Flynn. That truck of his has been importing a steady cargo of freaks and anarchists out that way for 10 years. And, in defence of old growth woodchipped for a few cents a tonne, they’d exported a defiant message back to the city: ‘old growth - fucken oath’, scrawled from pillar to

I parked up at Jamie and Laurie’s place down the valley for a few nights of ‘TV’ - a large window in the living room facing out over the Goongerah valley - screening my favourite movie: the Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoo. Following a walk-in action and banner-drop down a coupe at Black Hole, Keith (a sculptor with an urge to paint forest conflict scenes like some kind of embedded battle correspondent) came on board as we lurched back to Melbourne.

I soon found myself out at Mt Waverley where a small banner action on the head office of Paperlinx (of Reflex fame) was in progress. Sean Marlor had just completed his third Cycle for Old Growth, this time around Tasmania, and so I helped score favourable honks from passing motorists. In one of the most memorable events of the couple of hours I was there, a prize winning Ugly Australian, a great beer-gut in a blue singlet, decided to stop and chal-

lenge Sean on a number of issues. Now Sean handled this brilliantly. And so deaf and defeated in argument, the beer-gut attempted to tackle me on another matter - that it was his footpath upon which I stood, and that I should remove myself and the banner from it. He and his mate (in matching blue singlet, though a few kegs short of a gut) were soon led off by a security officer looking to keep the day incident-free. But the irony of the circumstance wasn’t lost on me. If I was to follow our heavy singlet’s logic, I could stake a claim for a greater ownership of that footpath given the high likelihood of my greater income tax contribution per annum. Good thing that kind of ‘logic’ never made any sense to me.

Rainbow Serpent Festival over Australia Day weekend was an enjoyable conclusion to my adventures in the south. Over 4,500 present. I wasn’t up for much gate work this time round (and Richard has been fine tuning that process), but the bivouac with the boys on a peninsula of the northern gully was grand, despite the all-night sonic broadsides from our neighbours (a sizeable contingent of tribal trance-heads from Cairns) across the gully.

Over the years, RSF has been a primary port of call on my R&R (research and relaxation) schedule, and, becoming a favoured international trance festival – near my hometown no less – why wouldn’t it be? The festival is an absorbing experience building on Exodus for its healing modalities/spiritual/workshop component. The Opening Ceremony with Krusty and Antara was uplifting. I was impressed by much of the music – especially that pumping out of the market stage. Robin Mutoid’s technoorganic gateway and flame towers provided a great backdrop for fire art that went beyond anything I’ve seen. And there were antics unlooked for – like the fishermen (one of whom turned out to be Mouse, who I’d met on the Geco Walk) showing off freshly netted catches.

The Country Fire Authority. Now there’s a curious presence grown out of proportion to the event. The sight of hardened Raglan fire officers toting clipboards and exchanging data down by the Chai Tent and the freak circus is an amusing sight. But an Australian summer dance floor wouldn’t be the same without a tanker pumping water on annihilated occupants in the late morning session, transforming the floor into a mud plane, rejuvenating waning gesticulants, and rendering barefoot contact with the clay a sensual and therapeutic experience. Though I’m not sure the latter, together with the Psychedelic Iron John experience that eventually transpired on the Monday afternoon, is in the CFA’s service provision contract.

After a brief interlude back at my Mum’s in Geelong, attempting to erase the doof clay from my exterior, I was back on the road home.

But not until I stopped briefly at my Dad’s at Coomba Park on the North Central Coast – a place where the Aussie Legend archetype, re-appearing throughout my adventure, would return with a vengeance.

It was the old boy’s 65th birthday. Mercifully, he’d had the big gathering last week – in junction with what he called a “piss off party” for fellow State Emergency Service workers retiring and heading off round the continent with their wives and caravans in tow. In fact, minus the wife, that’s the old man’s idea too. Nearly ready to “rock and roll” he reckoned as I was taken through his own vessel, a two wheeler decked out with mod cons. I can see him now, under the annex of his twelve-volt RSL, parked up on freshly mown lawns in other parts of the country.

Just him…and Big Col Elliot. Around Wallace Lake from Forster in The Great Lakes Shire, this is National Party heartland. So bugger the motel rooms, when Aussie retirees from The Land of the Long White Sock will drag their mod cons, their pride and their prejudice all round the country.

And so my summer adventure wasn’t going to be complete without my encounter with Richard Edwards, apparently of Mohawk/Welsh ancestry, a proud veteran of the Vietnam/Cambodia war, a fellow SES officer, a Mason, and Dad’s neighbour. You see, Richo knows the score, and in his seasoned view, having done many “hard days’ work” (such as firing on the enemy and suffering their payload in return I suppose), he’s in a legitimate position to hold an opinion – the right opinion, or so he would have it. He fought for the freedoms I enjoy – like sitting in a comfortable office at a university, or so he would have it. That John Howard’s posturing poses a greater threat to the safety of Australians than does Indonesia is not an opinion worth arguing in the home of the King Gee drill shorts and the Holden Statesman. That those he once fought were ‘enemies’ whose character had been manufactured to suit the interests of Empire, and that Australia’s deputised and illegitimate role in that war has been replicated in more recent times, was a train of thought wisely kept to myself. After all, it was Dad’s birthday. While I am not indebted to this “freedom-fighter” for the rights I have as an Australian citizen, it is the actions of his father, who may very well have fought for the annihilating jouissance I experienced with my Japanese friends on a CFA-approved dance floor near Beaufort, that I respectfully remember. And with that thought, I broke into a smile...and another Carlton Draught.

Fantasising about how Richo might look in a sarong fingering a chillum by the Murray, I stole for home.

The End

words by lou smith

the quiet destruction of the natural world is the narrative of our time. A story that needs to be told and retold, in ways to compelling to ignore.

Sheaves of rainforest palm fronds litter the ground The body we found is stripped of flesh, blue and bloating; eyelids are peeled away There are no birds, only engorged hairless animals The choking roar of machinery Rain.

In Earth’s Defence I have never spoken your tongue But I see you burning I see ‘war to end all war’s” written in deaths ink soldiers wrapping the dead as paper empty of words cover you

i emerge desperate like a flame for oxygen the poisoned quoll has poisoned the goshawk tanks charred black and silent wait.

by Jo Fairley

Terraism/ Terrorism/ Eco-Terrorism Ecocide is the killing of an ecosystem, which includes consuming it and using it to feed some other process or system. - www.enclyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/ecocide

Dolcie stood at the gate/ her hands rolled her third Champion Ruby cigarette / as the tanks filed past/ their large and obtuse forms/ silhouetted /against the dawn bluish light at Ferntree.

She pulled her black cap down/ over her face/ stilted with a look of incredulity. Men piled out and surveyed the scene/ weaponry loaded/ soldiers working for an empire with a pyramid for its head/ who’s owners sign papers of war /and spout verbose propaganda /yet never carry weapons themselves.

She waited for the familiar noise/ the far cry of fear and pain/ the screech / of structures of beauty/ falling at a quickened pace/ the deafening silence that always followed. Corpses laid on the ground/ skin flayed open and peeling/ revealing wounds that trickled with honeyed blood/ announcing a war/ a war on the earth…

A War on Terra is occurring. Only 5% of native forests remain in Australia, and endangered flora and fauna continue to grow like a child’s Christmas wish list. We look on as finite and irreplaceable fuel resources such as coal, oil and natural gas are used up with reckless abandon. War is perpetrated when tropical rain forests, which help clean the air and regulate climate, are rapidly stripped away - they will be completely eradicated within 50 years if the current rate of deforestation continues. And the most violent testament to war is seen in our race towards atomic bomb technology, which has the capacity to wipe out the human species and destroy the planet upon which we live. War all around us, in the human and the natural ecology. War the color of our coral turning ghost white, in the sky clouded with ominous grey pollution.

The War on Terra stems from our dangerously anthropocentric worldview, under the misguided belief that human needs and interests are of greater overriding moral and philosophical importance than all other life. This began in the 17th century when scientists and philosophers began to think of and portray the earth as a machine, an organism that can be broken into segmented parts and analysed, adapted, repaired and even replaced – a clockwork universe.

Science has since evolved to become the universal religion, dominating all forms of intellectual discovery into the natural world - yet this has come at a great cost. We do not engage with a holistic view of nature, but rather a utilitarian view that enables us to see paddocks of gold coins, seas of the finest tuna, forests of quality toilet paper and terrorists amongst the trees.

She wore a large kidney shaped burn mark/a symbol of the scars in earth’s defense. A burn from the exhaust pipe of a tank she was attempting to stop/ that momentarily did stop/ till once she was unchained from the machinery/ the tank continued/ down the veined corridor of trees.

1 k down the road was the red Subaru/ it’s engine running.

A yellow sticker plastered to its windscreen /announced it’s newly labeled illegality. The car was loaded with four adults/ a small boy / and a black and white Kelpie that barked at passing cars/ wildlife / and street signs. *** Terror: From Latin /To frighten.

What is eco-terrorism? Eco terrorism is a term used to describe activists and revolutionaries committing ‘crimes’ in the service of ecological integrity, and to prevent the process of ecocide occurring. The term has accredited a political currency and is used to vilify environmentalists in mainstream media. According to the FBI, the crime must have the characteristics of terrorism as defined as: Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

- FBI Terrorist Research and Analytical Centre, Terrorism in the United States: 1994,

Yet are not nearly all governments responsible for acts of terrorism in relation to force or violence against persons or property of the civilian population? Are not giant multinational organisations also criminals and terrorists due to their insatiable growth that continues to lead to violence, displacement and even death to native populations?

Why isn’t terrorism against the earth, which is committed with such continual ferocity, seen as terrorist activity? If governments and multinationals are not seen as violent, then are violence and terror only terms that are subjectively used to discriminate and quieten civil unrest and disorder? Now, in a time of ‘terrorist’ frenzy which is wreaking fear and paranoia on a global scale, is the term ‘terrorist’ going to continue be exploited and used on all who hold a placard in defence to the saturation of lies, inequality and injustices that plague our earth? Well, that’s what happened to Future Rescue. *We who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with... Injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience, before it can be cured.* - Martin Luther King Jr

WE’RE CHEEKY! www.futurerescue.org Future Rescue began in 2000 as a skill share group of forest activists, which were based in Melbourne. Our philosophy was one of Non Violent Direct Action and we promoted skills to engage citizens in constructive civil disobedience. The collective was an eclectic mix of students, workers and artists who were opposed to the current environmental situation in Victoria, yet who didn’t want to be affiliated to any mainstream, membership based environmental organisation. We did not conduct blockades as a single cell, nor did we participate in any form of action as a unified front but rather held skill shares to allow individuals to feel empowered to act upon

there emotive response to the current political climate.

Skill shares were diverse events with workshops ranging from tree climbing and tripod construction, all the way through to knitting, clowning and sustainable bush survival skills. As a collective we obtained funding from grant applications and fundraising but did not act or take orders from any organisation that allocated funding.

“A SECRET group of militant, professional greenies is being used as “hired guns” to lead protests across the country. Sunday Herald Sun investigations revealed the commando-style organisation, known as Future Rescue, has been contracted to lead several recent protests” - Nick Papps Herald Sun Jan 20th 2002 In the beginning of 2002, Herald Sun journalist Nick Papps arrived at a blockade in the Thompson Catchment in the Central Highlands of Melbourne to write an article. The blockade was stopping the construction of a road that would allow for the destruction of several of Melbourne’s water catchment coupes and the spectacular mountain ash forest. Papps arrived and obtained an interview with Gavin McFadgen from the Wilderness Society and then climbed the enormous eucalypt to sit in the tree sit for a photo shoot. A few days later the Herald Sun reported on the presence of the blockade with an article entitled “Enviro Commando’s”. This article went on to make inflated and ridiculous claims that Melbourne based Future Rescue was a militant network of highly trained green commandoes. The article vilified Future Rescue and created a mythological cloud that was simply errone-

ous. We waited with baited breaths for the interrogation of the collective, yet nothing seemed to eventuate. For a while there were no further lies or negative publicity, and we started to believe the article was merely a one off. We were wrong.

Civil disobedience is a form of law breaking employed to demonstrate the injustice or unfairness of a particular law and indulged in deliberately to focus attention on the allegedly undesirable law.

- Black*s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, page 245

In March 2002 the furore erupted again, this time in connection with vandalism and destruction of four million dollars worth of logging machinery in Tasmania. With the identity of the culprits unknown, blame and fierce allegations began. Paul Lennon, Deputy Tasmanian Premiere at the time, was on the case to pinpoint the suspects. He immediately spoke on the 7.30 report about the Herald Sun article and subsequently stated that “this elite and highly trained group of terrorists had been involved in specialist direct action against logging operations in Victoria”, and could have been in Tasmania during the time of the vandalism. This was the first description of Future Rescue as a terrorist organisation. It had, through exaggeration gone from a group of ‘militant greenies used as hired guns’ to become a terrorist organisation as spouted by Paul Lennon.

“I would say to Paul Lennon that he needs to do a bit more research than rely on one article in the Herald Sun.’’ - Amelia Young, Future Rescue spokesperson Media pounced trying to find a spokesperson or member of future rescue to interrogate, phone calls from media poured into The Wilderness Society to get a direct contact for the group. Our household was inundated with pleas from media, and internal discussions of whether to front the accusations or to dissolve instantaneously. A high level of fractions formed in the group on what course of action to take. Amelia Young (Meels) as a spokesperson for Future Rescue decided with support of those collective members present in Melbourne to speak on the 7.30 report as well as to numerous radio programs, refuting claims of Future

Rescue being a terrorist organisation or having links to the vandalism and sabotage of the Tasmanian logging machinery.

“Future Rescue is about a philosophy of non-violence at all times.

Engaging in the sort of behaviour that destroys machinery or seeks to engage in a disrespectful manner towards workers, police, government and other parties that are involved in the forest debate is not advocated.” Amelia Young 7.30 report, Broadcast: 19/03/2002 After the furore died down, a long, drawn out meeting decided to disband the group, close the bank account and any affiliated individual names attached to the group. Fear of being interrogated, of having stigmas and unwanted media attention attached to the group’s future activities was a fierce and undesired reality. The group could always be thrust into the spotlight. To get some perspective, Future Rescue is but one small group in Victoria, which has had ongoing forest blockades for the past ten years. Other states such as Western Australia, New South Wales and Tasmania also continue protest movements that involve direct action to prevent the destruction of our native forests. In comparison to other regions of the world, eco-terrorism in Australia is very scant; there has however been a number of cases of large scale logging machinery vandalism, yet with an intriguing explanation.

Bob Burton is a consultant to environmental groups.

He’s investigated hoaxes attributed to conservationists and vandalism of logging machinery, and says: “In evidence before an Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Victoria, a CIB officer revealed under cross-examination that of 12 instances of damage to machinery, up until 1997, there’d been six prosecutions and

that was either other contractors, general vandalism, or in one case it was the wife of a contractor getting back at her husband.” Eco terrorism is not really an applicable terminology for civil disobedience in Australia, and this term is different to activities performed on a global scale in the name of earth’s defence by various organisations. *** Dolcie fixated her gaze on the patches of forest that lined the road/ small and mostly monoculture trees planted last harvest/ struggling for the limited sunshine. Behind /large expanses of old growth /untouched since the arrival of the white man. Giraffe sized myrtles/ and ferns / scattered between dogwoods / and strands of sassafras/ with its musty smell / and silvery hair/ a crowned peak of regality/ holding secrets of a time lost /and/ unknown.

They arrived at the environment centre/ the car doors opened to allow the spillage /of passengers/ belongings /and defeated faces/ painted with the defeat that no dissent /or civil disobedience/ can the stop the war machine…

Later/ as Dolcie approached the fringe of the city/ her body tensed/ as the dense bushland slowly gave way/ to endless paddocks and suburban sprawl/ old growth trees /to skyscrapers/ endless elephant vines/ to power lines and billboards/ contoured valleys and meandering streams into channelled waterways/ decorated with coloured pieces of rubbish and algal blooms.

Dusk was fading to night / as the city’s lights bloomed a neon haze/ that never allowed for darkness.

Dolcie was in a land/ where the sky was always the colour of an off TV. The human race enclosed into a system/ a ferrous wheel/which melts freedom/and spawns industrialism.

The city smelt pungently /of car exhaust/ urine/ and/

most potent of all/ human exhaustion and apathy.

When she arrived at her friend’s squat in Northcote/ she knew she couldn’t wait to return/ return to the earth/ ***

*advocates W e are unapologetic for the natural world* Earth First! www.earthfirstjournal.org Take, for instance, Earth First, which was founded in 1979 in response to a “lethargic, compromising, and increasingly corporate environmental community”.

Earth First is not an organisation but a movement that utilises multiple tactics, ranging from grassroots organizing and involvement in the legal process, to civil disobedience. It does not advocate sabotage, ecotage or any form of violence, as they believe this reduces public support and alliances with workers and the community. Yet nor does it condone this activity.

Monkey Wrench this! www.earthliberationfront.com The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) was founded in Brighton, England in 1992, out of members of Earth First who refused to abandon criminal acts as a tactic of civil disobedience. The Earth Liberation Front has become “an international underground movement consisting of autonomous groups.” It is also the FBI’s number one domestic terrorist network. The definitions of ELF’s activities have included civil disobedience, civil disorder, economic sabotage (ecotage), and the often-occurring definition of eco-terrorism. “ELF has carried out dozens of

ent worth. They maintain that all natural things have intrinsic value and its value cannot be politicized or seen as a mere capitalist resource.

We as humans have rejected the notion of holism, which is the belief that the natural world can only be understood in its totality and not through segmentation.

“Development = Destruction.

Stop raping nature”.

The ELFs are angry

*Civil disobedience is the inherent right of a citizen. Criminal disobedience can lead to violence and anarchy but civil disobedience never will. Every state puts down criminal disobedience by force. It perishes if it does not. But to put down civil disobedience is an attempt to imprison conscience.* * GHANDI When the Earth Liberation Front diverged from Earth First they decided to concentrate their direct action in the form of ‘ecotage’.

ELF believes ecotage, which is sabotage in defence of nature, is the most effective form of eco defence direct action as it directly inflicts economic damage on those capitalist machines that are profiting and exploiting the earth. The theory being that by making the destruction of life and cost of industrialisation more expensive in economic terms, it becomes an unsustainable project and costs more than it is worth, therefore slowing or halting habitat destruction.

ELF has ‘strict non-violence’ guidelines that are used in performing direct actions. This includes the need to take all necessary precaution against harming any animal, human and non human. On the Earth Liberation Front’s website, spokesperson Pete Spina addresses the

definition of violence, explaining that their actions are only targeted to inanimate objects, and are therefore not violent acts. Property is not life, though it is the blood which Capitalism feeds on. As Mahatma Gandhi said, when asked if it was violent to blow up a train that was used in the occupation of India - “if it was not a passenger train then the action was not violent.”

ELF has, since formation, performed and claimed responsibility via the Internet for numerous crimes, including the arson of a meat packing plant, the release of four hundred horses, 171 minks and ferrets and numerous accounts of vandalism to construction machinery, development sites and houses. On October 19, 1998 in Colorado, ELF performed an act of ecotage that was hailed as “the largest act of ecoterrorism in US history”. This involved arson to three buildings and four ski lifts all burnt to ash with an estimate cost of 12-24 million dollars.

The reason for the ecotage was that the largest ski resort in the US - ‘Vail’ - was expanding 885 acres into the nation’s last threatened Lynx habitat.

The overzealous use of the world ‘terrorist’ to refer to anyone who is directly opposed to destructive government policies around the world is a crime against the people. We must speak up now, lest the lingua franca of terror define and control us all. It’s not the future that needs rescuing, it’s we, the people.

*** The night air was clammy against Dolcie’s bare arms as she surveyed the scene/thirty meters above ground. The creek bubbled below her/ a cacophony of night noises and creatures stirring into harvest. She was siting on a triangular aluminium platform/ covered in thick netting/ swaying gently in the night wind.

The sit was attached to a branch above by a polyprop / and at ground level to a log loader. By moonlight/ the machinery at night/ cast great shadows onto the upheaved earth/ they seemed/ like sleeping beasts/ so peaceful and docile.

She looked up/ through the crown of the great old shinning gum/ to the stars/ the lanterns of the night.

And for now the earth was quiet/ And at peace *** All quotes on Earth First! Are taken from their website: www.earthfirstjournal.org All quotes on Earth Liberation Front are from their website: www.earthliberationfront.com Future Rescue has re-emerged and is conducting skill shares over this winter in Melbourne. www.futurerescue.org

Rak Razam

At the midnight beat the Renegade Poundwave soundsystem started layering the tekno vibe.

A crew of psyberdadists were swarming over the urban TAZ like spiders running from a fire, dressed in the finest black gorilla skins overlaid with Safari suits, wide lapels and flares, grey, oversized paws and feet - all the better to dance in, I suppose. I’d heard of them before - the ACID RADICALS. Guerilla Ontologists whose dancefloor mantra was “The Love of Art Shall Save the Earth”. If those kulture jammers were in on this Reclaim the Streets gig then things were really going to get interesting. “This isn’t just a demonstration,” one of the gorillas said, handing me a leaflet with a black, furry paw. “It’s an international conspiracy to liberate the media through acts of guerilla information warfare. Have fun - and don’t forget to smile for the cameras.” And with that he was off, cartwheeling across the street and camping it up with the other pleazure terrorists.

“Okay. Run this by me again. Just what the fuck are we doing here about to get our heads busted?”

Krusty smiled and pass ed the joint. “What we’re practising here is frees tyle liberationist anarchist politics, TAZ style.

Or if that’s too much for you, think of it this way, mate: World War Thre e is a party. Elongating ba ss and heavy combat tekno sounds, Apocaly pse Now sampled in on a dark psy-trance warsc ape,” he said, exhaling a thin stream of sm oke in the cold night air .

“Now c’mon, I dunno ab out you, but I’m here to dance.”

real old skool crowd have bought It’s just after midnight , May 1st. M1 Day. The f-In, reclaiming the street for the peotheir kids and even a few wrinklies to the Doo tes are fighting a hostile takeover ple and their right to party. Says, the nation-sta the global ghetto are caught in the from the corporate barons, and the people of New World Order’s top nations band crossfire. Isn’t it always the way? When the tion as a means of economic rationalitogether as trading partners to push globaliza e of the people and the planet, well, zation, putting corporate concerns above thos to fight for our right to party. Except fuck it, something’s got to give. We’re going building every month and drawing that these urban blitzkrieg doofs have been Paris. S21. Fuck, I lost some good heavy fire from the NATO POLs, ever since friends at that one.

And y’know, no matter what anyone said later, I still reckon we could’ve got away with tonight, y’know, if the party hadn’t’ve been next to the McDonalds. The Repetitive Beats Squad are real friendly with the CORPS, yeh, that was our one mistake. Dozens of gherkins stuck to the giant golden arches like birdshit as the crowd cut loose on the concrete dancefloor, a wild energy rippling through. And then I’m lost in the dance, a whirling dervish caught in the MIX as sonic big top sounds break the night and ripping tekno wails drill into my head and

I’m riding in sounds that shouldn’t even exist, rupturing into a higher phreakquency> harmonic transmissions downloading. It’s the sound of a nu generation: neo-tek.

Music so good it has to be illegal. And up there on the decks they’re transmitting the party in live streaming footage to other renegades all across the globe, power to the people right on:

“We’ve got One Tribe on line in Ottawa.

“Dream Collective in SF.”

“Vibe Tribe is still alive in Sydney.”

“Equinox is in the House, Tokyo.”

“Ja. Spirit Zone, Germany.”

“Confirm. Xperiment from Belgrade: We have joined forces for a co-production tekno peace party in simultaneous net-linkage against the war on the people. While our leaderships are engaged in violent reactions, we will be undermining their war by dancing together in peace. We aim to raise global awareness that all tribes can dance together as one.”

Which is when the cops came and told us to turn down the music, their style.

The NATO POLs were bunched together like insects in their new blueblack riot gear, cybernetic facemasks and aerogel padded armour, thick enough to stop a bazooka at close range and easily able to withstand a few hundred BPMs of pure unadulterated neo-tek. Suddenly they broke ranks and scattered across the concrete terrain in perfect motion to the beat, making way for the real hitek crowd control: the RCCVs. You could hear that tank’s droning bass hummmmmmm before it even turned the corner. It was about the size of a midrange automobile with a matt black polymer coating that absorbed all light. Any kinetic force directed against it slid off like butter in a teflon frypan. And man, could it sing - ultra high vibrational waves rang out and hit us in our tracks. We were caught in a sonic web that rattled down into the bones and emptied your bowels at the same time, guaranteed. The shit was hitting the fan, man, and blood, feces, paradigms and chunks of the ceiling were all going into hyperdrive as it fell. Around us the musik was building to a climax, cutting through the mayhem like flashing dreamlit memories of a night drowned in sound, all the dancers down on the ground, busted... the with love and venom at d te ra igo inv el fe t bu “I can’t help trooper ’s shouted as a blue storm ty us Kr ,” rld wo e th of state down hard nowhere and crashed Ls baton appeared out of d shit and blood: the PO an it sh d an d oo Bl . ad on his he old days when I remember the good e?

M s. ep ke r fo d ye r. pla ys from your generato ke e th al ste s wa did all the cops into my ground a padded knee L PO TO NA t en sil a astThen eech software broadc sp ic at m to au e, m d s over back and cuffe P rights in coded pulse OR -C DA AN IR M ed vis ing my re his armour’s DOLBY tm sound speakers. His boots were dark with that new polymer shine and the wickedest monster treads I’d ever seen. They’d be perfect to dance in, I thought.

And then a guy in a gorilla safari suit, covered in shit and piss and blood, “Great party, or what?” he laughed.

looked over at me and smiled.

You are walking.

Drifting amoeba in the ocean. Awash.

The brisk innercity streetscape passes as if chromakeyed in through your movies car window. Sunglass shields protection from uncomfortable eye contact in morning light after late night recovery from lack of sleeptime.

You are navigating human traffic and commercial push media. On screen data billboards connect you to the sphere, everywhere. Digital text displayed teleprompter style updates your mindspace to the latest newsfeed novelty. Three minute cycles of newsbytes. Fast food information, no nutritious thought.

Your in pocket micro-phone keeps you mobile but connected to the satellites orbit. A network of voices at the end of numbers. You look at its video-display, empty of message or tv it sits on its GPS screensaver, visualizing coordinates of your geo-position in case you ever happen to feel lost‌.

Your ears are wearing sound muffler/ amps. Subtle orb like earphones that fit softly into your lobes, playing audio from your mobile’s in built digital radio.

The street is a motion graphic to this soundtrack of electronic beats, chosen by dj anonymous in another country.

Every surface is a media. Business signage and graffiti artistry decorate the avenue. Logos and neon attractors steal your involuntary visioning. On the pavement chalk drawn poetry talks of earth beneath the concrete. Clothes of all fashioning float past carrying words and phrases. Faces blend. Pretty girls and busy consumers. Homies in groups and hippies on bikes. Corporate uniforms and homeless rags waiting for trams.

Midriffs and piercings. Multiculture and monoculture side by side. A million dimensions interacting in the form of individuals pass by like strings of culture personified. Brainstems and memories, inhabiting bodies over lifetimes. Organisms of intelligence. You are one too.

Immersed in human ecology.

Last night you surfed codeworlds of binary, a sea of information.

You are still there, even as you walk. Your mind is still wading through the data it downloaded via retina scans from cathode screen to synapse node. Memory sorted internally. Your consciousness floating in and out of thought overflows. Virtual reality travels with you even away from the machines that were made to host it.

They say time is shortened with every space conquered. Speed is power. Information is weaponry for and against your intellect.

Love is healing. But time is shorter and shorter. Hypercapitalism stole it. We bought it back, not even realizing the swindle. Eager for experiences sold to us as commodity. Hungry for distractions from our real work life. There are so many jobs to do on this planet. The ones that are worthless are paid. The ones that seem meaningful only voluntary. Is that inevitable?

Now you are in body, in clothes, travelling pavement in the physicality. The world is pressing up against your bubble, sliding off and around. Light curls. You pass through it, elsewhere, caught up in stories and mediabytes of another land. Another world of earthlings. A war fought in your countries name. Collective disembodied representation of your region, community and history.

A political entity armed with votes and military firepower. Led by a man you didn’t vote for, and whose regime you fight with every act of evolution. ‘The Dirty War’ they call it in the mainstream feedlinks, propoganda voice for the Empire. But every war is dirty. That’s another reality. Mediation separates but also transport you there.

Camera’s owned by corporate journalist copyrights send you 3D video feed from the reality tv show they made about invasion and promoted like an action movie premiere. Tanks and Metal birds have become the stars of the spectacle performance. The machinery of warfare overtakes the debate as to whether or why they must be used at all. Last month the world came together against this, and it didn’t change anything. Now all the protests seem hollow. I heard someone call it ‘compassion fatigue’ as the audience sits back in to its role. In the marketplace of novelty the machinery of atrocity has become commonplace. Another headline amidst celebrity gossip and sporting persona soundbytes. But you don’t want to be desensitized to reality. You want to be conscious, even though it hurts.

Today the ink is still drying on the paper that will describe it.

Blood is still being spilt, but you can’t see it. You know it is happening, but must concentrate on the here and now as well. Money is short. Your hungry stomach calls for work and concentration. In the back of your mind you remember your father is sick, dying of cancersticks abusive. You want to be with him too, but can’t put your life on hold either. You are missing the luxury of your lover’s limbs. She is elsewhere too. An absence of gravity. Leaves you groundless.

Suddenly the idea of tears escape you. You rub dry eyelids and forehead like you are trying to push out the thoughts. Tiring of this uncomfortable feeling. Somehow you are implicated and you don’t like it. So you erect shields against these thoughts to concentrate. The now. The here. You project a psychic bubble to protect you from the constancy of overload, from the barrage of

the information feed, from your own thoughts and ditractions. You desensitize yourself.

Train your eyes to ignore.

But in doing so, you miss the sublime details too…

You don’t want to just walk through this avenue of spectacle for the sake of it, but that is all it seems to want you to do. Billboard big brothers don’t encourage our spiritual selves. Why would they?

You keep walking. From every angle information hits you like distraction from the places you need to be in your mindfulness.

You balloon your psychic bubble.

Toughened with experience and resolve. Push these thoughts away from the forefront of minds eye.

Trying to find a direction.

A purpose for this journey of time, besides the process of aging.

The clearmind.

--

i know how they feel

By Nick Chesterfield

Another day in the corporate heart of the Matrix. Nothing but grey suits, grey skies and grey lives all around. Face downcast, I’m trying to maintain my little bubble of reality, scanning the concrete for a sign of life, surrounded by Niketown, the big Visiscreens ordering conformity and hordes of wageslaves trying to remember the last time they had real fun, a glimmer of hope, a dream of what was before. Then I see it – the smallest Eucalypt seedling, less than a finger-length high, poking through a crack in the concrete. I stand in the middle of the pavement, smiling, trying to protect this little fella and all it represents. No matter how much the greedy society digs, bulldozes, concretes, poisons and covers this ancient earth with petrochemicals, the seed bank is strong. Like the Law that runs through every part of this Land, it will always be here, until the ancient rocks are no more. It is our strength, our truth, our knowledge, our wisdom, our power and the spirit of the Ancestors, as it has been since the beginning. And now it is breaking through the concrete to go on teaching the true essence of this Land: Respect.

“Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770” , E. Phillips Fox - 1902 In the town of my “birth” - the spirit’s entry into this body - lies the place of some of my Ancestors, the Kaurna mob. To them this was Tandarnyangga – Red Kangaroo dreaming, a place where the Kaurna lived, loved, and hosted big gatherings with people from all over. Today it’s called Adelaide. Walking with a big old piece of gnarled snowgum through Tandarnyangga, I begin to feel in my heart the powerful weapon in our arsenal to fight for what is right on our planet. Certain events have forced me into situations where I, and the people I walk with, get called (and occasionally charged as) terrorists, by the terrorists themselves. But in

my place of Truth I know, as a warrior in the tradition of non-violence in our Land, that I am a Terra-ist, one of many that fight for the Earth, not against it. And the fight-back of our country has just begun, in ways that cannot be fathomed by those that refuse to look. Our Land has been so damaged by 216 years of whitefella mismanagement that all the elements that have been messed with are now messing with the mess-makers. Chop down the forests – well you don’t get any rain. You also don’t grow any food, you don’t operate mines, and your artificial construct of an economy collapses. You learn to recognise who your Mama is, or you get sent to your room without any dinner, until you eat some humble pie. In fact, you’d better hope she doesn’t pull out the wooden spoon!

This Land is facing an imminent, if temporary, ecological collapse, yet it doesn’t have to be this way. One look at the current situation facing the planet makes you wonder if those who control the whitefella system have ever listened to anyone but themselves, if they are actually capable of understanding the Lands they think they conquer. Time after time, by demonstrating their arrogance, they are in fact demonstrating their own weaknesses.

Yet in old times, and still today in this Land of 500 Sovereign Aboriginal nations, we have a

system that cares for the future – the Law. Traditional Law has a complex kinship system, of which I can only just touch on here.

To quote a strong grandmother, Aunty Wadjularbinna: “If the Ocean were made of ink, it would run dry trying to write down The System.”

The System of Law governs everything in the

universe, and shows how everything will interact, and how we must maintain that balance. In our system, the complexity of intertwined forces are such that humans must not interfere even at the smallest level. Our system recognises that we have a special place in the scheme of things – most of us have cognitive capacity, but we must be one with the Land around us. We can never have dominion over what we are a part of.

It also provides an understanding of the interconnectedness of all things, extending to all life in this Land, not just human life. It shows you that the lizard over there is your brother; that big old red gum is your grandfather; that river, your grandmother; your sister, the dingo; the mountain, your mother. The kangaroo and emu are not just symbols, but family. It shows you the whole Land is your family whom you must protect and look after, but which also looks after you, gives you strength and sustenance and guides you in where you walk, because your family loves you. It is about understanding this connection on deeper levels.

We can never change the Law, as it is not ours to change – it has been handed down from the beginning, to the first ancestors to walk the Land.

Even if you don’t want to notice, the Law is strong.

Law is the air, the fire, the water, the sky, it is all around. Law has not been “swept away by the tide of history”; it will be paramount as long as the rocks exist. Understanding and practicing the Law is really quite simple. This system is underpinned by three basic principles: respect for our Mother Earth; respect for one another; and not

taking more than one needs. By following this Law, we have the keys to humanity’s survival on Planet Earth.

I must put this discussion into some cultural context, however. At the time of invasion, there were over 500 distinct and sovereign Aboriginal nations in this Land, not one homogenous Blackfella. Every one had a different language, customs and interpretations of local and regional peculiarities and needs, but the 500 nations were united by a commonality of Law, song lines, kinship and language relations. Each mob had its own ways of passing on knowledge.

The Aboriginal map of Australia, shows over 500 nations on this land.

It is a whitefella myth that there were no permanent, non-verbal forms of communication in Aboriginal societies. All around us were paintings, artefacts, etchings and other signs that were used to communicate, in addition to the non-verbal first person ways, and to record events and places. Still, the written word is a poor means of communicating Law, and I don’t have an ocean of ink of my disposal. There is significance about the way that understanding is transmitted. To transmit something orally, one is told the story word for word. If one hasn’t learnt to tell the true story, more stories aren’t told until they are learned properly. If the wrong story is told, one can cop a flogging, so one learns to tell the right story! This eliminates semiotic degradation and ensures the message is passed on intact in a Land where ecosystems move in millennial cycles. Our word is our deed. We cannot make new Law, and we have to honour any agreement entered into. Language relates to the Land around us, and the word forms are particular to the Land forms. Western culture can’t understand this indigenous language as the spirit of the Land IS the language. Land is connection, Land is where we come from, it is what we go back to, and it is from where our knowledge, our unbreakable Law, comes from.

This is the fundamental difference between the proper way of this Land and the duplicitous hypocrisy of the whitefella system. Written law can be changed, bent, manipulated, loopholed, pigeonholed, bastardised and corrupted by whoever holds the biggest pen. Pieces of paper get lost (ever tried to find the receipt for the purchase of Melbourne, Mr John Batman?), and new ones get made up out of thin air – like the “Australian” constitution. Australia does not even legally exist, never has, and never will until people in this Land today become mature enough to deal with 216 years of lies. Since 1788, the three crucial documents – treaty, declaration of war, and/or bill of sale (& receipt!!) that make annexation of a territory legal – under their written law – have never been drawn up. They are so proud of their writing – yet they cannot even sign a treaty. Writing in the sand? Nothing exists.

The whitefella calls our Law ‘lore’, yet they’re the ones been telling stories, we been telling our Law! Whitefella laws are made to suit the rulers of the day and the dictates of the moment. A person’s deed becomes the piece of paper it is written on, not the spoken word in the original utterance.

Pieces of paper which one day somebody says is worth X are suddenly worth zero. With a thousand pieces of paper conflicting with a million others, there is no certainty, no consistency, no clarity. This is why the whitefella became known across all the Lands as the one that spoke with the forked tongue. His word is worthless, not worth the paper it is written on. Much better to write your word, truth, knowledge - your Law in the Land that never changes, on the wind, in the trees and call of the birds, in the seasons across the millennia. It ensures a future when the Land knows to take the humans’ word.

As I become closer to my Ancestors of this Land, I become bound by their Law. I am bound to not recognise the Law of the invader, and tend to get cases chucked out of court when I plead “No Jurisdiction”. “Please show me the foundation documents that prove your system exists, Mr Prosecutor – oh you don’t have them – what a pity, seeya (and give us back our Kangaroo and Emu, you pack of thieves)!” They cannot force me to vote in an election, nor can they force me to pay tax to a system that does not legally exist. I am one of the many who contributes to the community in tangible ways, so I certainly earn my (very modest) keep. The spirit that runs through one’s veins is powerful when one realises there is nothing that a government and corporation can do to harm the Law; not even killing a person will help their cause.

The Dreamtime is a wonderful thing!

The historical bark petition from the people of Arnhem kland, and the somwhat less creative Commonwealth Govt.’s Aboriginal Land Rights Act.

Kevin Buzzacot, an elder of the Arabunna people of Lake Eyre region stands his ground in opposition to the Breverly Uranium Mine.

Of course, as with everyone, the Law was always in my being – it is a case of remembering: to come back to being a part of something. Re-membering helps me to exercise true Response-ability – having the ability to have the appropriate response to Law. Still, I cannot reveal all aspects of Law that I know, as it is not appropriate for a mixed audience. And until I know the whole, I cannot begin to say more than I am meant to. I am not a Lawman, and even if I was, I could not talk about it unless I was with others of the same level. We have strong penalties for those who break the Law, even in ignorance of it. It is usually something to make you remember not to do it again, like a spear through your leg. In some mobs, including my own, if a child is misbehaving seriously, they may be pushed into an ant’s nest after two warnings.

The child learns instantly what is acceptable behaviour.

To most whitefellas, some aspects of Law may seem harsh, and spearings are seen as barbaric (this from a culture that has enslaved half the planet!). However, it is there for a reason. The old people understand that time is not linear; it is all around us, all the time. We are not here just for ourselves - our spirit has come into our bodies so that we can maintain the Land in the strongest and most correct way possible. When we die, we - the current collection of flesh, blood and spirit and knowledge - cease to exist. The spirit that creates us survives, and goes back to the Source, taking the experience back to the Dreamtime. If we commit a minor crime, usually a flogging or ritual spearing is in order, and that is it – punishment done, get on with your life. If we commit a crime that removes our right to walk with fellow humans, we are sent back to the Source by the end of a spear, so that spirit will come back in a form that will walk the right way. This is not an act of hate, but of great love. It is sending something back so it can do a better job next time.

It is understanding that death is not something to be feared. Life does not end with the body, it is absorbed back into the All.

The Dreamtime is all around us. It is before us, it is after us, it is alongside us. It is in an infinite number of dimensions everywhere all the time (the old people knew about multiple universe theory a long time before anybody heard the term “quantum physics”). Nowadays – finally – the top physicists and other scientists have realised where the knowledge lies.

“The closer one gets to finding an all encompassing theory of Everything, the closer we must acknowledge our reliance on traditional Law from indigenous peoples,” was a comment

by Nobel prize winner Dr Michio Kaku, former US chief nuclear physicist (and now peace activist), at an international peace conference last year in Melbourne. 3D is boring, people – try ∞D instead!

All the knowledge being “discovered” by Western science is not new, as any elder from any indigenous culture on Earth will tell you.

Elders might also tell you where the oldest of the old mob come from, at a time when many archaeological discoveries are also continually re-writing whitefella “understanding” of our origins (“Out of Africa” is just another theory made up by lazy Europeans who couldn’t be bothered travelling too far, and couldn’t be bothered asking the locals where they came from). Indigenous creation stories tell of the unity of all things, and have a constant motif of seven stars known by whitefellas as Pleiades (it is also known as kristos in pre-Athenian Greek – the Source). However, this is women’s business, so as a man I cannot tell you more on this one. This time around, I have the wrong set of fixtures to tell that story, even though I know it from another time.

Today there are so many whitefellas, and more of good heart and spirit, that I dare say the majority of people reading this fit into that category. We share the pain and shame of the history of genocide, and some of us share the experience of dispossession from other Lands (by the same people). Many of us can also identify our blood heritage from the old time in this Land. More and more are coming out every day, unsurprisingly, considering that over 70 per cent of Aussies who had family here before 1940 are said to have Aboriginal blood. Those who wanted genocide weren’t very good at it – they shouldn’t have slept with the women if they wanted it to work – and they failed to take into account the Land around them.

Irati Wanti is the name of the campaign to prevent a nuclear waste dump in the central desert of South Australia. for more info see: www.iratwanti.org

It is not about saying whitefellas themselves are evil, it is just the whitefella system. Our Elders do not engage in, and forbid, racism – they recognise spirit within all people, not by the colour of their skin. We do not want to have people kicked out of the country; all we are saying is you have to start listening to the old country. We want people to be brothers and sisters, walking together in this Land.

All of us who are fighting for genuine self-determination, white and black, are truly starting to walk together. We are engaging in the pursuit of truth, not just window-dressing whitefella feel-good “reconciliation”. As Aunty Isabel Coe once said, “Reconciliation implies there was a marriage.

If there was one, it must have been a shotgun marriage, because we were never invited!”

We need to all, together, start addressing the fundamental lies behind the invasion and colonisation, and the fundamental reality behind any chance of living into the future.

We need a return to traditional Law, with real justice, so that we can walk the Land with knowledge and wisdom.

The question now is – are whitefellas ready to swallow some of their self-importance to ensure all of humanity can walk together through that door of Survival? Our old mob can do it, but do whitefellas want to embrace the future, or are they going to continue destroying it? Do you not want to experience the real world? You are also the children of the ancestors of this Land, if one goes back far enough.

Isn’t it time to start acting like family?

By knowing and understanding the ways of the Land on which we walk, by knowing our Ancestors of this Land, we begin to know ourselves. We know how to recognise the signs all around for the journey we must take through

life, like the tracker. We see our allies at every step, and we know how to recognise those with whom we must walk. With every small piece of work in the fight for justice, the Land connects with us, and puts together all those little bits that make up the whole. We understand we are never alone, and connect to the true power of what we are all fighting for – the Earth, our mother, which is infinitely stronger than anything capitalism can ever even manufacture. Understanding the Dreamtime, we understand that we cannot lose, because we have already realised a better world.

A seed is breaking through a crack in the concrete.

The Law is all around us.

Always was, and Always Will Be.

one side of melbourne, city 2004

“Listen, man, you seem like a solid kinda guy – can I come in and talk to you for a bit? My lips are going numb and I’m starting to peak, y’know. There’s these ammaaaazzzing shapes when I close my eyes, and if I don’t keep talking I think my mouth might melt away…

Is that okay? Listen…”

freedom

by Rak Razam

It’s raining, it’s pouring, the Old Man is snoring and fireworks are exploding in acid trails in the dark, pyrotechnic flares from the world outside the car.

The “children” are gyrating and dancing, and jesuspaghetti! It’s really pouring down, thunder and lightning and all things frightening - we’re being played like kids in the rain... ‘Bout all it does here on the Big Island this time of year; rains and nurtures. Ya gotta be protected, mind you; hailstones bounce off these new full body envirosuits like rubber balls - you’ll be battered black and blue without them. At least it stops the normal folk coming out into these jungles – apart from those bloody annoying extreme weather tourists in their rented Kevlar armour, a thin exoskeleton between them and nature. It’s funny because humanity itself is just the latest in a long line of fashions that the planet has been trying on, after all.

I’ve heard it said that the plants invented us higher mammals to carry around their seeds

and burrs more efficiently, which is perfectly ironic considering what we’re doing to the plants these days, isn’t it?

It’s hard to remember when you’re out here dancing in the jungle that there’s a War On, even harder to remember what it’s really about or why it all started. Though at the moment that’s probably less to do with Old Lady Gaia and more to do with the powdered shrooms I took when the rain started falling in perfect staccato bullets outside, with my envirosuit all nice and warm and the smell of wet socks creeping up from the floor. Kaleidoscoping mandalas and imagery melts through my brain, pulling me along with it, becoming me becoming it…

“Are you still with me, man? Look like you’re dozing off there. Shit, sorry, I’m a rude sonofabitch sometimes, aren’t I? My name’s Nathan, but if it’s drugs you’re after, then you’d probably know me better as Freedom. I don’t go by that handle much anymore, too many people in the Rainbow Family were getting to know me, yeah? Spent six months in prison in Oregon because of that gig, but hey, you live and learn. Just another prisoner of war, I guess.”

“What’s that? You only do chips, eh? Get high on data, all that stuff? Fucking crazy if you ask me, but it’s your head, dude, you can jack whatever you want into it, eh, that’s what we’re all fighting for out here.

Me, I like the oldskool stuff, homegrown by the planet… Did you know ‘planet’ means wanderer? Or that the plot we’ve all lost is the land, you dig? I can tell you do, you’re a pretty solid kinda guy. Did I say that already?” Mitrochondria cells glistening in the ether, pulsing with life, mixing with the Black Madonna statue on the dashboard. Starfish. Sets overlapping.

Liquid sky and other worlds pushing out of my head to become real; jewels.

In the wheelyhome next to us bedspreaded Urban Disco Ferals are passed out along the walls - the whoosh of breaking bulbs and laughter mixes with the rain. It’s probably the shrooms talking, but it feels like there’s something going on, a power struggle between two opposing forces, Yin and Yang, Control and Kaos. Makes me think of my Granddaddy and his old tv set, classic analogue model, back in the days of culture war. Cantankerous old bastard, he was. He loved that old tv show, Get Smarts, something like that, with hidden doors slamming together one after another, invisible panels sliding into new configurations, walls lifting, Rubiking, shifting colour and here I am right now trapped in my own Cone of Silence, melting in my little beshroomed bubble. It’s all so comical, isn’t it? A War on Drugs.

A War on Chemicals and Plants. A War on Evolution and a War on Change. Who the fuck gave them the right to say I can’t change my state of mind as often as I change fashion? It’s all Kontrol versus Kaos - the GAME. “Anyway, back on the farm my Granddaddy used to bitch and moan about the government, Old Man Snoring he called it, and he should know – he fought in two Gulf Wars to keep us in our way of life. For all the good it did in the end. Got corrupted by power, Grandaddy said. No government wants to give up the reins and they tried everything to keep kontrol, even changing the human race, force us away from the plants and the connection they had given us. One Nation under God, dying and imprisoned, estranged from the planet. If you’ve ever seen those new black ops helicopters buzzing through the sky like vultures, heat-sensing

‘illicit’ crops and spraying the earth with GM pesticides, people too, then maybe you’d believe him. Don’t have them round your way yet? Don’t worry, you will.”

“I’m not trying to make out I’ve got all the answers here, dude, no siree. I’ve only read eight books, print ones that is, but people tell me things, y’know, and I piece stuff together. Like, this dude I gave some DMT to that was just growing on my lawn. He called it “Dominator Culture”. Oh, he had lots of interesting stuff to say.

Like, how the body of a nomadic tribesman was found in the Austrian Alps when the peaks all started to melt. The guy had traces of psilocybin mushrooms and cannabis on him, can you believe it? Even the cavemen partied! And, apparently, while the Egyptians are famous for inventing beer, they’re less well-known for their cocaine habits, though traces have been found on mummified Pharaohs as offerings to get high in the next life. I tell ya, man, one thing I’ve learned out here in the jungles is that plants are part of the original religious sacrament. Like, peyote and the Indians, Rastas and their herb, the British and their tea, it’s medicine for the people, isn’t it?”

“Hey, thanks for listening to me rant, man, it’s pretty wet out there.

You’re beautiful, you know that? No, you really are. I feel like I want to share all this with you, tell you my deepest secrets.”

“Nggghhuuhhh… whoah, it’s coming on pretty strong now, can you hear it? Can you hear the voice? It’s speaking to me right now, better than television it is, a direct line to the Source… Holy shiiiitttt…

I feel like I have to channel it, don’t mind the crap I’m spouting, it just feels good to make words, to feel the sound, do you mind?”

“It’s saying something about the Earth… like my momma, like she loves me… She’s alive, y’now, no doubt about it… Alive and tuning us in, back to the green nipple, to the right way of doing things.

Shit, she’s none too pleased with what most of her lil’ children have been doing lately, either. A hard rain’s gonna fall – but what’s new?

It’s been raining for as long as I can remember, washing away the old world. Time is coming, dude, but for now, I think I might just dance in the rain and let go of kontrol, get down and dirty in the kaos, let it heal me... Are you coming? Um, do you think you could like, hold my hand, I’m really mashed…”

.God... this is so - so...pure...

“You’re in the wrong, car, dude. Piss off.”

And then it suddenly occurs to me that Maxwell Smart was the perfect double agent in Control because he was pure Kaos, too, bumbling, stumbling kaos, that’s how he always succeeded. And I’m trapped here in my Shroom of Silence, looking out at the rain and everything’s getting lighter and turning inwards like at liftoff, invisible veils falling backwards into a warm space, something settles behind my eyes, balloons out and fills my head like fairy floss just as a Neotek trak builds on the Ethernet connection we’re all plugged into, angels wings, butterfly soft notes brushing against each other and I’m cocooned in bliss, and help me...I’m melting, melting into..

There’s a war on, alright.

And I’ve just been conscripted.

Car parks have always struck me as the saddest of places.

Returning from cinemas, with our eyes attuned to the process of perceiving a two dimensional image, we are struck by the presence of the third dimension, by the real. Everything is heightened. We become characters and directors ourselves. Sites are wonderful with their own existence; the very strangeness of life is powerfully apparent.

Entering the car park in this state is like stepping inside a dream. The car park is how the city dreams of a desert.

The stairwells smell of concrete and piss. The air buzzes with fluorescent light. We are suddenly disorientated by the similarity of this place, to itself or to a memory, by an empty sense of déjà vu. Foreign noises echo, as if someone else is dreaming them in a sleep nearby.

The car park does not welcome pedestrians. They are naked there, less than naked. They are non-entities, almost invisible and vulnerable in the dim light. As a pedestrian the car park is a non-space. We go to the car park to put our skin back on, to remember ourselves as separate and distinct again.

Moving across it by foot is to exist with no agency.

What place has dream in today’s city and what part might it play within this particular landscape? I am interested in art objects that might act as dream pieces, as if that distinction between dreaming and waking has suddenly been upset. To dream is to sense the possible.

I wake up dreaming of a new art to live by.

My intention is to create an art that seeks to empower the footed individual, the human being within the city. That we have created for ourselves a system of living wholly inhospitable to our own humanity, a home for ourselves from which we are each intrinsically alienated, is the most massive indictment of capitalism, and of all its protectors and cowards, those “men

The car park seems to me a landscape particularly symbolic of the city’s intentions.

Firstly, to be a great beholder. We must begin with this.

The only revolution left is the desire to perceive differently.

Our job is to find the wonder.

Art is life remembering magic. It is being. It is activism.

It is ritual and prayer. It is play. It is the first word. It is the antidote. It is futile. There is only the dull hum of air-conditioning units without it.

The city is the site of our collective dreaming, the soup of popular conspiracy. We must dream it alive again. Places of memory are being replaced by replicas, 7-11’s, identicals.

These are dead spaces.

Places in which it is impossible to believe in anything.

I choose, beyond fashion, to believe.

Car parks appear to me as examples of these new dead spaces.

I am shocked within them. Such a cold beauty!

I wish for an art whose explicit job is to enliven space.

In the city, we lack a sense of orientation and a sureness of instinct. We are numb to the subtle. We are dazed and bombarded, drawn irreversibly in. There is to be no answer, no response. We are not required or permitted to speak, though we are constantly spoken to. Our movement is directed along lines of consumption.

Therefore, we must remember our bodies, our movements in space, where we are. Our voices and our dreams. The sense that places us in space, creates us.

We must remember. We must seek tirelessly, an alternative. We must imagine existence other than the one imposed upon us. Every excuse is a death.

We are each here to fill our own small silence with dancing.

we are so lonely together because birds are our only animals and they require nothing of us except for those things which, left behind on tables in the spilling wind we have already forgotten

I propose an art that calls to the human condition directly where it is most under threat, in the cities.

An art that is disruptive, interventionist, disobedient, which speaks back. Which creates rather than kills space. Which cuts holes in the fabric of a city’s given reality, which lets light in. Which proposes difference, confronts the death march of economic progress, which denies commodification. Which is transitory and transformative.

Objects are powerful containers. If the red plastic Coke chairs could speak they would scream.

My objects are intended to act as beacons in the dark.

The door’s place in surrealist painting is significant. It stands alone in a desolate dreamscape.

It is transition, opportunity, travel, transcendence, mystery. It invites and forbids, conceals and protects. It stands between the inside and the outside, between public and private. It seems to me symbolic not only of the way the city by its very nature forbids and accepts, but also of the transition necessary in order to step from the banal to the magical. The city is so full of rooms.

Who knows what goes on in them all? They are the rooms of the mind too, each a dream, waiting to be stepped into.

This project is only to dream small moments of life, and to breath them tentatively into existence.

Moments of life or magic, the opportunity for an unconditioned or unexpected thought, the presence of the moment, a feeling of loss or mystery, the unknown, the inexplicable, the random, the useless, the beautiful, the human, the space instead of a car.

Art cannot change the world. But we cannot live without it. It has the eternal job of protecting tomorrow. Art testifies against complacency. Art is the process of imaging the away forward, a way of proceeding, and a way of receiving.

I am for an art that can heal, which must. Art is the final religion, before both art and religion are finally eclipsed by life itself. All other religions are conclusions. Art is never final, never known, it is the reaching for something ungraspable.

It arrives forever.

Art is dream. The function of its objects adhere to a separate system. It values ambiguous ulterior qualities. It is perhaps the most human of undertakings. It cherishes confusion because what is most essential is the incredible mystery at the centre of which we all stand. As in theatre, the art I want creates the space to dream.

Art dignifies that lonely exhilarated cry into the void.

It is sad that those who take most from art are those that make it. This given, we should encourage all to become makers. The artist is not the divine among us, but the divine within us all. We are all free to choose it, some with greater difficulty than others. Art is the divine gasp which propels the hard climb toward an unreachable peak.

This has all been said before. What does it matter if I say it again/ the sun rises everyday, and yet it matters each time no less. I believe in these words and in the actions which must spring forth from them. It is enough and only enough that the words anyone uses , and the actions which these words compel into being are believed in.

All art says the same thing. More or less.

Who knows what that thing is?

It if for each of us to ordain what is holy.

We are all guilty of deceit. Art is the opposite of that.

Everything is rewritten in the face of unavoidable systems. In writing again we proclaim the dignity of our own revolution. We wake and wake and wake. The dire condition of Capitalism awakens new resistances, with a greater urgency we insist upon life.

Art keeps answering from the dark.

In the future, urban archeologists will peel back the layers of dust and rubble that cover their cities abandoned slums to find a museum of guerilla art galleries, walls covered in post-modern cave paintings by the young natives of the landscape.

My friend Liam once told me he saw graffiti as the natural organic growth of the city ecology. Artists obey a biological imperative of their society. The images that appear on the walls are as impossible to prevent as the weeds which grow through the cracks in the pavement. In fact to Liam, tagging was the weeds – or at least from a botanical perspective. This only meant they were the first species to take over soil ripe for plant life. The base level of the eco-system. After the first generation has grown and died, creating compost, richer nutrients, more complex ideas, other species also begin to take hold.

Larger plants. Trees. Eventually the ecology is complex enough to feed itself. The weeds are still there, but you don’t notice them as much because the jungle is too overwhelming.

Once you begin to look at the city in context of the human ecology, its hard not to lose respect for certain laws which would prevent us from using its largest untapped media – the walls, pavement and other surfaces – as canvas for our art works. Most street artists find it quite easy to point to whatever crude billboard message is taking up the bright lit skyline above us and ask the question; why should they be able to say that in public, and I cant ever be heard?

We live in colonised space. Who owns the streets if not its citizens?

/the best artists carry an energy with them that is a chaos magic, they leave a debris of half finished, yet perfectly finished creations, all loose and playful. Uncollectable yet priceless. Prolific as thought. Ego dissolves and we become conduits. Ideas move through us.

It becomes natural as breathing. Instinctive as dreaming. And the walls of the city’s urban ghetto culture we call home relaxes into the role of canvas which they bless upon it. /the victimless crimes of imagination.

V i s i o n s : A l t e r n a t i v e

creatingpermanent culture ADAM GRUBB from Melbourne Indymedia interviews DAVID HOLMGREN, cooriginator of Permaculture, on the future of agriculture, oil peak and how an energy descent culture might look..

Adam Grubb: Could you please give us your definition of permaculture and tell us a little bit about your role in its creation and evolution?

DH> Permaculture is a design system for sustainable living and land use. It came out of awareness about the limits of resources, especially the energy crises of the 1970’s. It started looking at the redesign of agriculture using ecological principles, but it extended out from that to the redesign of the whole of society using those principals. The foundation text was ‘Permaculture One’ which was published in 1978, a joint work between Bill Mollison and myself when I was a student in environmental design in Tasmania. Since then permaculture has spread around the world as a grassroots movement of activists and designers, teachers and land managers - both gardeners and farmers. It’s also connected into a very broad range of sustainable alternatives in sustainable building, alternative currency, ideas, eco-villages – many diverse areas.

The biggest development of permaculture applications was then Bill Mollison’s Designers Manual, which he published in 1988. And then more recently my new book - Permaculture Principles – has taken those ideas to a broader frame of reference, away from just land management to practical issues dealing with the underlying links to resource limits, especially energy peak.

What exactly is the ‘energy peak’? What do you mean when you employ that phrase?

DH> Well, my understanding of that comes from both an awareness of the ideas of limits to non-renewable resources and the early predictions on some of those, especially the Club of Rome limits to growth report in 1972. Which in a way, has gone down in public intellectual mythology as being failed, you know - that they got it wrong – when in fact it was remarkably on track. But more recently the work of Colin Campbell and other retired, independent oil geologists identified the fact that the numbers behind oil - arguably the most important set of numbers in the world, are in fact, largely garbage. They discovered that once you’re halfway through a resource, the decline in the availability means that is the most critical point, not when you run out. The critical peak that we’re reaching now is in relation to what’s called conventional oil. Further peaks are to come in world gas supplies that are the really important ones. Generally an energy peak is a cluster of different resources that peak and then decline.

What kind of role does your vision of permaculture play in that scenario?

DH> Well, permaculture, as I’ve said in the book – in a world of constantly rising energy and resultant affluence, permaculture is always going to be restricted to a small number of people who are committed to those ideals which have some sort of ethical or moral pursuit. It’s always going to be a fringe thing. Whereas in a world of decreasing energy, permaculture provides the best available framework for redesigning the whole way we think, the way we act, and the way we design new strategies. It doesn’t mean to say that everyone’s going to have a vegetable garden or some other permaculture technique. But the thinking behind permaculture is really based on this idea of reducing that energy availability and how you work with that in a creative way. That requires a complete overturning of a lot of our inherited culture.

What about within the broader environmental movement – do you have a problem getting this awareness about limits to growth back in that arena?

DH> Well, a lot of the current environmental activism is based on a bedrock foundation of the limits of climate and the Greenhouse effect.

what is the meaning of finite?

also blind spots that come with that awareness. Greenhouse has meant that there has perhaps been an over focus on fossil fuels being a bad thing, a primitive form of energy that we need to get past.

Whereas what the insights relating to energy peak say is that no, fossil fuels are an incredibly good source of energy, but we’ve wasted it. To some extent they’re mutually reinforcing arguments, and in other ways it’s also a difference. The need to recognise the way in which fossil fuels are really the power that create the good and the bad things in society is really important.

What do you imagine for the future of suburbia?

DH> I think it’s a mixed message. There tends to be a view that suburban development - spread out cities – is a product of the motorcar and cheap energy. And although that’s true, the suburban landscapes are no denser in human settlement than some of the denser agricultural landscapes in the world. Now admittedly people living in those suburbs consume far more resources in total than people who lived in those densely settled agricultural landscapes. Somewhere like the Red River Delta in Vietnam has a higher density of people living more or less totally self sufficient off that land than say, Australian suburbs. Of course they’re very special environments, they’re all fed by integrated water systems, it’s fertile, flat land, but similarly we can look at our suburbs and say they are an infrastructure. Our cities water system has the biggest articulated agricultural landscapes in Australia. So the water is there. We have an infrastructure of hard surfaces that actually harvests storm water, which is seen as a problem at the moment, which allows augmentation of natural rainfall to direct that water into the remaining areas that are potentially productive. We’ve got mostly individual houses that can be retrofitted to have solar access because they’re generally set far enough back from neighbouring houses to get that. Now that might involve cutting down a lot of gum trees in those leafy suburbs, but there’s a lot of ways in which the suburbs can be incrementally retrofitted in an energy descent world.

One of the things I think a lot of the urban planners miss is that they assume that any future framework will be driven by public policy and forward planning and design. Whereas, I think, given the speed with which we are approaching this energy descent world, and the paucity of any serious consideration of planning or even awareness of it, we have to take as part of the equation that the adaptive strategies will not happen by some big, sensible, long range planning approach, but will happen just organically and incrementally by people just doing things in response to immediate conditions. In practical terms what that really means is that big suburban houses that have one to three people living in them, mostly not present, will actually re-adapt to have people work from home. Home based businesses and retrofitted garages with workshops and people making things, even with food production in them, will increase. The street, which is a dead place at the moment in suburbia,

will again become an active space because people will be present rather than commuting away. Now that recreation of active urban life will be not that much different to what existed into my childhood in the 1950s. It’s not that radical a thing to envisage suburban life where there are larger households – whether that’s a family or shared households. So I’m quite optimistic about how the suburbs can adapt.

You talk about how the top down approach isn’t going to solve our problems, but do you see any problems stopping the spread of permaculture?

DH> Whether these solutions actually spread under a label of permaculture or not is less significant than their spread itself.

But the impediments are in many different forms. We can see in the global economy at the moment with the established powers in corporations, which are struggling to position themselves as to how to deal with the energy descent. Now that may not take the form of a corporate plan worked out in the boardroom, but I think somehow, there’s an understanding in some circles that the current game is a short lived one.

A lot of the big forces that are driving world politics and the global economy at the moment are very much reflecting energy descent. Essentially the global war on terrorism – as Donald Rumsfeld said, ‘“the war that will never end in our lifetimes” – is in fact their version of how to deal with energy descent. They’re trying to gather all the key productive zones under their complete control. The idea that the society as a whole is completely ignorant of this is wrong. But it may not express itself in the ways we would expect. If you look at the drift towards fascism that’s everywhere in the world at the moment, that seeks to find blame or causes for unfortunate circumstances as being the responsibility of some other group – that is actually a classic response of established authority when it’s caught with it’s pants down.

Whether we describe that as a conscious conspiracy if you like, or whether it’s a natural, organic response to energy descent, is playing out in front of our eyes now. That is actually the biggest threat to the permaculture industry now. We have an opportunity to positively engage with energy descent and to learn and to change as we’ve done in the past.

Could you talk about the idea under permaculture of energy accounting?

DH> One of the very influences on permaculture in the beginning was the work of Howard Odum. I dedicated my new book – Permaculture Principles and Pathways to Sustainability to his memory, He died in 2002. Around the world there’s a whole network of people who’ve taken his ideas of energy accounting called ‘emergy’ – embodied energy. It’s a particular method of measuring the energy that it takes to make something, whether it’s a built thing or a living thing. Whatever it is there’s actually a currency with which we can measure the human and natural worlds. This idea has got quite a long history though past attempts haven’t quite worked as energy itself and the ways of measuring the embodied energy in things have been more complicated.

A lump of wood and a book can both be put into a fire. They both have the same amount of energy given of, but commonsense tells us that’s a poor use of a book. We have in us an energetic commonsense which comes from a peasant grounded-ness connected to nature, which permaculture is trying to recreate, because we’ve mostly lost it. We actually have this energy hierarchy in our heads of energy quality and embodied energy. We understand that a lot of work one way or another went into making the book.

As energy descent becomes a public issue, one of the big questions that emerges is how do you measure this economic or social process against that one. Is it worth putting resources into that or this? Now if we think

CERES: The Centre for Education and Research into Environmental Strategies in Brunswick, Melbourne is a permaculture model for suburban food produciton. (and it serves fine coffee).

the current discussions about public policy priorities are complicated - that’s nothing compared to what happens when energy becomes scarcer. Then it becomes really important you’re not wasting resources, putting them into a process, which is actually a blind alley. You need forms of accounting that can compare very very different things. Some of the current attempts at energy accounting like the triple bottom line are actually a joke. They’re an insult to children even in terms of their intellectual content because they try and compare vague abstractions of social and environmental values against a completely financial body, which is actually doing the work. So you’ve got

two hierarchical levels – one compares with qualitative things, and the other is internal to a system like the accounts of a corporation, and yet most of the environmental and social values that will be listed in triple bottom line accounting will be actually external to the organization. You cannot add it up.

Accounting is not an answer but it gives some guidance because we can look at other systems that do work and use these accounting methods as a crosscheck on our commonsense. What we find generally is that using energy accounting, permaculture strategies come up trumps as the most environmental strategy. A study was done in Britain some years ago on recycled paper. They concluded it was easier to just put paper in an energy efficient furnace and use it for fuel rather than recycle it. Elements of that are true looking at a whole lifecycle process. Ironically using the permaculture strategy of using the paper as a sheet mulch technique to establish a food garden is probably light years ahead of either of those options.

Apart from energy accounting, systems ecology under Odum’s development of it, provides a big picture, top down view of systems. Whether they’re national economy and environment or a region, It provides a holistic framework to understand what’s happening in any scale of human society or nature, rather than a reductionist view which tries to pull things apart into their components to study the bits. That reductionist view has dominated science has got to the point where it’s creating more blindness than insight. The balance of that, the more holistic ways of looking at things - of which systems theory is the greatest example within the scientific tradition, has had enormous benefits in the systems of cybernetics and the computer revolution, yet the thinking behind it is virtually absent within public discussion. We need to see how things link together, what are the important flows and energy storages, etc, and how we can use an energy circuit language which describes things from a farm scale to a global scale. That way we can examine an ecosystem or an economy in the same way, down to a biological scale.

Instead of thinking of a tree as just an organism we can think of it as a set of productive units, which are the leaves, the infrastructure which is the heartwood of the tree that holds everything up, and the tree becomes a habitat for other things and living beings. Systems theory doesn’t necessarily divide things into the convenient compartments that we’re used to thinking of. A forest can be seen as an interconnectedness of roots , as one shared system and the canopy as another. Leaves dropping down into a stream add to the nutrient flows. Fish migrate up and are eaten by animals and those nutrients go out into the forest . Systems theory connects us back also to indigenous and traditional peasant peoples connected with nature - their ways of understanding things. Systems Theory, while it’s an incredible abstraction of maths and science, actually brings up more insights into the ways indigenous people think.

What do you think the world will look like in twenty or thirty years?

DH> Well, we’re actually in a change phase now which is so multileveled and inherently chaotic – our understandings of chaos theory and ecological change that suggest we’re at this big turnover point where things can go in many different directions all at once. What we should expect is that the pattern of the world becoming more globalised will continue into the future. But we can also expect a counterflow of things starting to become localised and differentiated to different outcomes in different places. At the moment the globalising forces tend to take the same set of economic solutions and ideological values and methods of production of agriculture and living and try to apply them everywhere in the world. So there’s a conformity of mono-

which is in parallel to the catastrophic loss of biodiversity.

But counter to that, as energy descent consolidates, the globalised flow of genetic material - plants, animals and people from all over the world in a particular place, responding to a particular set of social and economic, environmental and political circumstances. They are forced to develop systems which are less subject to global buffering or counterflow from elsewhere, so they go their own path. What that means is we’ll have everything from paradise to hell simultaneously in different places, that are not necessarily predictable. You can see that in the breakdown of the nation state and it’s power, from autonomous communities to feudal warlords. The pace at which that emerges will be variable – a lot of these things exist in the world already, but we have a very affluent reality view of what the world will be like in the future. What most people are really asking is what will the world be like for the billion or so middle class consumers of the world.

Sometimes people assume that engine of change has been a straight acceleration, even in the last thirty years. But thirty years ago there were the signs of this energy slowdown. When I was a child it was the general assumption that supersonic air travel was just around the corner – and it was, in the form of the Concord. Well that’s now being taken out of service – it never made a profit. We’ve already reached some energy peaks. Things like the computer revolution have enabled all these other ways for that technological engine to keep driving forward. The possibility is that some of those will continue to accelerate in the next thirty years depending on the state of the world economy and a lot of things which aren’t to do with hard numbers or facts, but concern faith. Already the world economy may be largely an article of faith. It’s like a thing projected out over the precipice by the collective belief of everyone.

After the 1987 stockmarket crash, Ronald Reagan – the most powerful man in the world said, in an amazing, naïve insight, “There won’t be an economic collapse as long as people believe there won’t.” People can bring the whole house of cards down just by losing faith. That underlies the inherent unpredictability of things. It’s not just when does this resource run out, etc. It’s to do with the people at some extent prefiguring what is actually happening through their awareness and their unconscious, They start to withdraw, individually and collectively their support for systems. Historians might end up looking back, post energy descent, and argue whether it all could have continued if people had of kept the faith. That notion of collapse and having to rebuild can happen at any multiple scales. So something that looks like a collapse at one scale is just a small adaptive, creative move when you step back. If you look at the decline of the Roman Empire, it didn’t go in a cataclysmic bang like other civilisations. It went in a slow rundown, and a lot of the knowledge and systems of value managed to be condense, repackaged and held on to, because that process of wind down into the Dark Ages was gradual.

DH> Over the last thirty years, starting with the babyboomers and the generations since, people have actually taken a different pathway to maximising material gain. In the process of going against what’s in peoples apparent economic self interest people have explored all sorts of different ways of living, skills and travel, and have built up this great collection of experience. In an energy descent world of tougher conditions most of that will go into the dustbin of history. But parts of it actually represent new ways of doing things that you can’t predict which bits will be useful. We can see this in the revival of traditional skills like blacksmithing, which is a skill bas e that is important in a low energy society. These types of skills have come out of middle class affluence that may be seeds of new ways of doing things.

How will the energy peak affect those people and environments?

DH> Well, for people very much on the treadmill, the social limits to affluence will become apparent. Clive Hamilton’s book ‘Growth Fetish’ talks about this. People are driven mad by the total continuous drive to consume and the hollowness of this sort of existence, the lack of community and identity. In an energy descent world a lot of those destructive behaviours are just set aside because there’s more important things to do. At the extreme it’s like what happens in a society where there’s a natural disaster. Community is rediscovered people set aside their differences and get working on the fundamentals. A lot of the angst about alienation and intractable problems evaporate. For a lot of people I think this would be an enormous relief.

Most people can’t get off the treadmill because of peer pressure and individual and collective addiction in society. Sometimes people want to change but they need a crisis that affects their peers so they can all change together.

Do you see some large scale planetary crisis actually occurring in the near future?

DH> Well, there’s the ‘die off’ scenario – which as a wake up call to the species is useful and can’t be discounted. A large catastrophic drop in populations, like bigger versions of what happened in Europe with the Black Plague, could be likely through infectious diseases. The evidence points to a re-emergence of infectious diseases and mutation of new strains, so the possibility of a die off is there, but it gets confabulated.

In the same way in the Third World now, AIDS in Africa could be seen as a die off scenario, but if you step back to look at previous wipe offs through history, those things on the bigger scale are relatively hiccups.

The die off scenario is actually the whole end to the development of intensive settled agriculture, civilisation and industrialisation. What goes with that is a enormous drop in human population in a relatively short time

and loss of technology, back to possibly a hunter gatherer type of organization with a much depleted resource level and without the capacity to use the resources we have now. There would be a complete regrowth of wild nature and the cycle starts again, but without the possibility of using fossil fuels.

But even that is not the end of the human story. Fossil fuels represent hundreds of millions of years of stored energy – effectively the surplus of the abundance of Gaia as a self organising organism on terrestrial surfaces. You could say that now we’ve dug it all out again, in a way we’ve done nature’s task for it – humanity’s task is now over. We’ve put it all back into the atmosphere, recycled all the biological elements and nature can now use that to develop to a higher level of energy. That’s at the God level, perhaps, that’s for the earth to decide, anyway. We can’t do anything about that, we’re not God, we’re not Gaia, yet we’re understanding systems at a scale which are well above our capacity to have any influence over.

We just have to worry about what it means to be human and to continue to attempt to live out that story.

That night, meditating on the Goddess temple silent but strong, he felt her love like benign radiation, given free as the sunlight, passed on from her father the sun. He saw her precious metals hidden by long retired demigods of time, like gifts for our symbiotic evolution. Machines like brothers of utility, tireless slaves of our creation. Minerals multiplied by Mind, making us all billionaires entrusted with her treasure. Altruistic materialism, natural and pantheist – an essential piece of the nativity play we were casting.

These are maps torn softly from the ether, translated in visions of shaman poets to language code describe secret webs hidden + beautifully uncivilized, outside of aesthetic tourism, self contained and interdependent. Oblivious as the clouds journey through reservoir and storm drain.

Revolutionary as solar winds curving atmospheric sunset aflame, feeding the clean meal of productivity everyday.

Retrofit suburbs of permaculture born futurist, dead as the past, foetal in its infancy, awoken and broadcasting the sound of acoustic ecology, bandwidth increasing naturally, protest of lifestyle evolving like modern pagans trading song for the right to be alive.

Mystic as a leaf.

Chaos fingerprint fallen and scattered carpet.

Grounding me.

undergrowth # 2 terra poetica edited by timparish and rak razam / editorial@undergrowth.org art director; tim parish / verb studios / art@undergrowth.org web design by pierce james art credits: 1 / earth mandala by Gerhard 3 / satellite imagery by NASA 4 / bulldozer suburbia / kath sou 5 / lets dance / tom civil 7 / retaliation / rachel peachey 10 / tree poem / tim parish 11 / photo / kath sou 12 / excerpt from zone one by tom civil 13, 14/ haunted (detail) / paul kalemba 16,17/ confest photos / phoebe barton 18,19,20,21 / journey photos by graham st. john 19 / fortress Goolengook/ tony hastings

23 / i miss the forest / painting by tim parish 24/ the tree by lou smith 25 / a sense of urgency / rachel peachey 29 / photo / charlotte mccabe 32-33 / echo /photo by tim parish / 34/ images from earth liberation front website 36 / tree totem and oracle excerpts by tim parish 38 / ‘same law’ / by alted 42 / war / illustration by halska serefine masash 43 / breathe / stefan duscio 44 / photo by allie richmond 52 / uncle kev /photo by bilbo 55 / no jobs on a dead planet / art by dom and gav /photo by tim 56.57 / fertility doll/halska serefine masash + illustration 58 / freedom / words by rak razam / 62 / the city, i / art and words by miles allinson 71 -81 / wildlife / words by tim parish / images from melbourne streets and empty shows. www.emptyshow.org

except 72 / in a time of decay / by rachel peachey 84 / creating permanent culture / david holmgren interview by adam grubb /diagrams reprinted from ‘permaculture: principles and pathways beyond sustainability’ by david holmgren 85,89 / suburban photos by kath sou 86 / exodus /tim parish 92 / dusk / paul kalemba 98 / mask / photo by rachel peachey pantheist words by tim.

101 / one man’s terrorist/ illustration by tim parish 102 from ground level / rachel peachey. /thanks to Raven for coffees, Foxy Afra for production assistance in park, Kelly Chandler and Express MEdia, Roz, PJ, Sean and Andrew at Plug’n’Play, Kent St, Marcus Westbury and the Next Wave Festival, Keely Macarow from Media Arts RMIT, ImPress for CD duplication. Anto Skene, Conan for peanuts, Claire for zen tram tickets and autmun inspirations,

love.

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