Sowing Stories

By Leanne Thompson

On Saturday, March 3, Big Fag Press hosted Sowing Stories, a workshop in social media strategies for ethically engaged creatives by Kirsten Bradley of Milkwood Permaculture fame. The event sold out straight away and on the day an interesting bunch of people walked through the door. Along with KSCA members Alex, Laura, Lucas and Kim, were a couple of dozen participants, some from groups or businesses including NAVA, Frontyard, Lush and Feather and Bone. The common thread was a desire to build the social potential in communities and share actions that hinged on care, generosity and enthusiasm. Kirsten describes this energy as a wonderful sharing of ethical lives to invigorate connections.

Kirsten’s discussion was far ranging in all things that constituted online communication; from platforms, mission statements, time management, livelihoods and advocacy to technical details, big data, and conflict negotiation. There was a robust conversation about the knowledge present in the room regarding social media and Kirsten offered an enlightening glimpse into Milkwood’s remarkable achievement transforming from a farm into a ‘state of mind’ that is able to tap into an invisible but like-minded community.
Kirsten honed the morning’s dialogue down to some great insights and skills we could take away.
Words to savour are the linchpin for crafting a compelling blog which she holds central to any online communication. A website blog can act as a long term archive and also the hub from which you can schedule frequent updates and feeds to other platforms such as Facebook, twitter and u-tube creating an efficient use of time and energy. Creating clear, effective and delicious content is also the cornerstone of newsletters that offer a direct link to your community’s email inbox.

Beautiful visuals encourage your audience through the gate. Using the skills of a designer to create a great looking website and autonomous information/advertising panels will be enticing and really help easy navigation around your content and archive. A well framed image can boost text and is the key to great Instagram posts and Kirsten advised it was worthwhile to build up your photographic skills and always take lots of images while things are happening, it’s great for quick instant feeds and as a reminder and resource to draw on later.
Honest voices are inviting and real. Kirsten acknowledged that there are a few tensions present in negotiating the online terrain. Telling the story as a project unfolds will often straddle boundaries; between personal and professional, community and commercial and agreement and discord and she had some great insights about each.

Determining the voice to use before you begin will clarify parameters around personal narrative and objectivity from a project perspective. Is that thing you consider a fascinating intricacy to be explored in detail really that interesting to others or have you disappeared down the rabbit burrow?
Sharing the highs and lows along a project’s journey recognises that knowledge isn’t settled and processes can be open to experimentation and discussion. Kirsten spoke of authentic storytelling with little pretence, creating a flow in the journey that is engaging and avoids getting caught up in those eureka moments of success which lead to an definitive ‘this is how you do it’ attitude. This approach allows the story to zoom in and out between specific detail and general ideas.

A great strategy to get people talking can be to ask a really good question. If the question is well formed it can build a discussion that informs both your project and audience and means that you’re solving problems together. A good tip was to trial ideas and content on some trusted friends to test the water on potential responses before posting it online!
Milkwood’s activities also need to support Kirsten’s family and the crew involved. Her approach to an ethical and sustaining livelihood is to be upfront about their marketing and advertising. She promotes those activities as the deeper and hands-on engagements that lead on from the freely offered education, insight and advocacy.

Kirsten’s easy and approachable character infuses Milkwood’s online presence. It is understandable that she also transfers this approach to negotiating conflict when it pops up in a comment or conversation. She calls this a ‘non-defending’ style and said her aim was to model best practice as it was incredibly influential to the wider network. Her hint is to stay on your own page (don’t take the battle to other people’s pages where you don’t have control), be cool and look for something positive in the comment as an entry point to respond. Pushback can be positive, it shows that a raw nerve has been exposed and that tension can be useful to question if a concept is understood or to widen the discussion to consider different perspectives. Rather than unravelling, common threads and values are woven together through Kirsten’s considered negotiations and this in turn consolidates the Milkwood community.

The workshop was packed with information and strategies relevant to the community initiatives and ethical businesses present, fostering skills and a connective network for their projects. Big Fag Press was a great venue and Marnie’s morning tea both beautiful and delicious. Kirsten clearly pointed to the social potential of storytelling. Create a package that unfolds: if you can tempt others to look here with an intriguing tale, a chunk of research can be uncovered in the documentation of an activity, great photos make it visible, people are drawn into conversation and by having a go themselves, a bigger picture of alternatives comes into view, and then you have seeded a real community and growing resource.

AFS Project launch dinner and theatre event!

AN ARTIST, A FARMER AND A SCIENTIST WALK INTO A BAR… [A SERIOUS COMEDY IN ONE ACT]

“In every true artist, or farmer, or scientist there is a spark, as precious as that first tiny spark with which life itself began…” Louis Bromfield, 1951

Sparks flew last year when Rick Hutton from The Living Classroom in Bingara proposed to stage a play inspired by KSCA’s AFS Project at Bingara’s dazzling Roxy Theatre. Rick’s vision was to use theatre to introduce the project to the community in the New England region of NSW.

What a rollicking good idea we said!

We are delighted to announce that this spark ignited some very creative work. In just a few weeks, the North West Theatre Company will host the launch dinner for our project. Their production will be complemented by a locavore’s feast fit for carnivore and herbivore alike. Dinner and a show!

KSCA wild foods guru Diego Bonetto will work with stylist Marnie Fox, local caterers Friends of Touriandi, and farmer Glenn Morris of Figtree Organic Farms to feed the multitudes. Several of the AFS Project artists will be there to share their brand new collaborative projects with the audience. We can’t wait! Come join us – tickets are limited!

Where: The Roxy Theatre, 74 Maitland street, Bingara, NSW

When: 7.00pm, Saturday 5th May 2018.

How much: $50 per person for “dinner and a show”. BYO Drinks.

Click HERE to buy tickets.

Read more about the AFS Project HERE. And click HERE to read an ABC story about The Roxy Theatre, only recently restored to its 1930s glory and reopened!

STOP PRESS: KSCA is likely to be able to offer free accommodation at The Living Classroom’s bunkhouse to a few punters between May 4th-6th. But get in quick! To register your interest email info@ksca.land

The Foragers' Feast at Futurelands2, Kandos, 2016.

Notes from a comms meeting

By Alex Wisser

The propitious beginning to “An Artist, A Farmer and A Scientist walked into a bar” was a communications strategy meeting at Big Fag Press. Sexy. I am quite happy that this humble beginning wouldn’t sustain being called cutting edge, advanced practice, avant guard or any other arts-specific descriptors within the fading paradigms of high culture. I much prefer the appropriated dag of business speak, forged in the honest hearts of self-described ‘entrepreneurs’ and applied without irony to a realm of value they have never suspected exists.

The meeting was more than just a fuck you to the status quo, but actually represents the priority that communication will take in this project. This results from several considerations. The first is that most of the activity we will be engaged in will take place in a paddock somewhere, making it difficult to reach audiences and communicate our message more broadly. The second is that the project itself has developed in part as a means of addressing the sense of isolation, and perceived exclusion from the social and political dialogues around land use and care experienced by our farmer-partners. Their lives are lived in intimate and daily engagement with both the care for and use of land. Their work to change the culture and methods of modern farming is compelled by the material dependence of their livelihood and shaped by a direct experience of both the positive and negative consequences of the farming methods applied to it. It seems to me that the perspective of these farmers should be central to the national discussion we have about our relationship to land, and yet they feel themselves excluded.

A further reason we are placing our communications strategy at the heart of the project is the sense of isolation that innovative and regenerative farmers feel in relationship to their own community. Laura Fisher and Imogen Semmler reported on their conversations with farmers about the social consequences of their choice to pursue alternative farming methods. This experience is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that as soon as a farmer ceases to rely on the products of the agrochemical industry, they no longer have much excuse to visit the local Ag shop. They thus lose an important social connection to this hub of the farming community in which they live, but also it means that they have detached themselves somewhat from the economy that sustains the local community. Conventional farmers tend to feel that what a regenerative farmer is doing isn’t just different from the traditional mode but is directly threatening to it. This leads often to a very understandable sense of ostracism. It has been our experience though that regenerative farming is a growing movement though its advocates are often isolated geographically. One of the many aspirations of AFS is to provide an opportunity to consolidate the disparate elements of this emergent movement into a community of support with the potential to build into something substantial and sustained.

The first part of our morning was spent discussing the “why”, before our guide, Kirsten Bradley deftly guided the discussion around to the “what” and “how” of our communication strategy. The what of “An Artist, a Farmer and a Scientist walk into a bar” emerged as a many legged insect, with eight independent projects all flailing about on their own. How we pull these disparate limbs into a single body walking in a particular direction and munching on a particular leaf of grass was going to be the challenge. Through discussion, we decided that we would allow the eight stories to unfold on their own, and from these threads we would pull together a core narrative about the moment of history we are attempting to participate in. This point of cultural change in which farmers and fellow travellers have begun to drift away from established ways of seeing, thinking about, and working in relationship to land. This story will include the perspectives of scientists grappling with shifting paradigms and the struggle to change and resist change which is, no matter how frustrating, the process by which science advances. It will also include the story of some very well-meaning artists who thought they could help. Personally, I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Video for Hyper Rural Symposium, November 2017.

Members of KSCA were invited to contribute to the Hyper Rural: the end of Urbanism? Symposium at Manchester Metropolitan University in November 2017. We prepared this video, which discusses KSCA's approach to art, as well as the 'Sugar vs. the Reef?' project which is led by KSCA members Lucas Ihlein and Kim Williams. 

Sowing Stories Workshop

Sowing Stories: a workshop on communications and storytelling for ethically engaged creativity.
With Kirsten Bradley from Milkwood Permaculture

Cost: $20 Places are limited, so if you’re keen then book straight away!
BOOK YOUR PLACE HERE
Date: Saturday March 3, 2018.
Time: 10am-1pm
Location: Big Fag Press, Archway 4 Jubilee Park Oval, Chapman Road, Annandale.

Fruit and nibbles will be provided.

About the Workshop:
Are you involved in or thinking about starting up a food co-op, an artist run initiative, a free store, a tool library or an urban agriculture project? Are you working to build a community, a cooperative or a project around the ethical issues and social potentials that drive your curiosity, care and enthusiasm? Then read on!!

On Saturday 3 March Big Fag Press will open its doors for a rare workshop with Kirsten Bradley, co-founder of Milkwood Permaculture. Over the last 11 years Milkwood have shown that it is indeed possible to create ethical, affordable and regenerative food systems from the ground up. While face-to-face teaching is a big part of what they do, they have been able to engage a much larger community because of the compelling way they publicly share their own experiences of risk, experiment and discovery online and through social media.

In this workshop, Kirsten will share how Milkwood approaches communications and storytelling. She will share some of the lessons Milkwood have learnt along the way and engage in a discussion on the implications of marketing ethics-based activity. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop their own ideas and receive expert feedback.

This event represents a collaboration between Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, Cementa Inc., Big Fag Press and Milkwood Permaculture.

This workshop marks the beginning of KSCA’s latest project, ‘An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar…’, exploring the differences and commonalities generated by practitioners from distinct disciplines addressing the common theme of land. Read more about it here

If you want to stay up to date about other events, return to the KSCA website, or write to info@ksca.land to be added to our mailing list.

This event has received support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.

An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar…

Yikes, it’s begun! KSCA is now working on an exciting multi-partner project for 2018-2019 in regional NSW, for which we have been awarded funding through the Regional Partnerships scheme of Create NSW.

We are partnering with:
– Cementa Inc. (Kandos)
– The Living Classroom (Bingara)
– Starfish Initatives
– Arts North West (New England NSW)

The project title started out as a joke without a punchline:
what would happen if we brought together artists, farmers and scientists for an open ended collaborative process?

After our successful public forum Futurelands2 in Kandos in November 2016, we decided to connect to Bingara, our “sister city” in rural NSW. Bingara is home to The Living Classroom (TLC), a community run space which hosts workshops and incubates innovation in regenerative agriculture (pictured above). Importantly, TLC has 26 beds, a workshop and seminar space, and over 150 hectares of land set aside for agricultural experimentation. An exciting focus of this experimentation is carbon sequestration in soil – for which they now have a dedicated site called The Carbon Farm.

The resources of the TLC led us to imagine what it would be like to run an “artist-in-residency” style program there, expanded to include not just artists but also farmers and scientists.

What might farmers and scientists come up with if they start behaving like artists? And how might artists’ practices expand when faced with the deep knowledge of farmers and scientists? 

That’s what we’re trying to find out.

This project also taps into a set of relationships already developing in Kandos. Thus, several of our collaborative residencies with be hosted by farmers and local community members in the mid-west of NSW. The outcomes of all of this blue-sky experimentation will be presented at a public forum at the beautifully restored Roxy Theatre in Bingara, and as an integral part of the Cementa 19 festival in Kandos.

We will launch the project in style on Saturday May 5, 2018 in Bingara, when the North West Theatre Company will present  ‘An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar’ as a theatrical performance! The play will be accompanied by a bountiful feast of locally foraged and organic produce, and an informal discussion with some of our artists and collaborators. All in the magical setting of Bingara’s Roxy Theatre (built in 1936 and restored to its former glory in 2011). It’s going to be a ripper evening – come back to this page, follow KSCA on facebook, or sign up to the newsletter (bottom of this page) for updates.

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KSCA sleepover

Every couple months, the KSCA gang come together for a sleepover at Ian Milliss’ house.  Because we live across the state and communicate most often via electronic media, these sleepovers are a precious time for us to get together in veritable reality and remind each other that we are all still embodied beings and that for the most part we like each other.  It also gives us an opportunity to look into the bellybuttons we all have on those bodies.

It was another great sleepover event with a lot of really rich conversation and discussion and some pretty tasty pizza and a couple drops of not bad wine to boot.

Lucas Ihlein talks about infrastructure within a vanitas tableaux.

Gilbert Grace presented on The Sydney Green Ring, his long term ambitious proposal to connect 34 kilometers of green space and bicycle paths to create a single continuous, safe and beautiful bicycle path describing a circle through 13 council areas across Sydney.

If that sounds impossible, the good news is that 95% of the infrastructure is already in place and the work necessary would need to be in getting councils to cooperate in connecting and signposting the infrastructure already in place.  This promotes the project into the realm of almost impossible, which is where KSCA seems to find itself at home.

We discussed a number of strategies about how we might begin the mammoth task of raising awareness and initiating momentum that might eventually build into something of the scale necessary to achieve such an ambitious undertaking.  There were a number of suggestions that all held to the theme of ‘start small stupid’ – events and projects that might be achievable at strategic points along the green ring,  in cooperation with one or two of the more ‘friendly’ councils and then use these to accrue support and generate discussion with councils and other levels of government etc.

There was also some discussion around how we might be able to gain access to certain movers and decision makers that are working toward a more unified approach to Sydney’s sprawling and disconnected infrastructure.

The Green Ring 2017, dimensions: 34 kilometers. medium: liveable infrastructure. Artist Statement: Eat your heart out Christo

Behind or even in front of this discussion was another quite exciting conversation around KSCA adopting an infrastructure policy and advocating for placing an ‘artist’s’ perspective into infrastructure policy production.  And you thought The Green Ring was ambitious.  Its an exciting idea for a bunch of artists trying to escape the white cube and one that was much encouraged by the thorough and concise policy document that Gilbert had produced in preparation for our meeting.  If you haven’t read the document yet, I’ve attached it for your policy document delectation.
Infrastructure Proposition brief

After that was some sleeping in preparation for the next day.

First on the agenda for the 2nd day was a mission statement for KSCA discussed over breakfast.  We came up with a lot of words that seemed to apply but had less success in putting them together.  There seemed to be two main concerns.

The first was the role or place that land held in relation to the overall scope of KSCA.  To date, all of our activity has been land-centric and yet there is nothing inherently land dependent about the idea of cultural adaptation.  KSCA’s relationship to land, I believe, arises from the praxis lead nature of the school – that we start with doing stuff and the thinking and learning evolves from there.  For a number of reasons, this praxis has been tied exclusively to land and thus land has dominated our concern.

This is not a practical problem, if you consider that KSCA is determined by the context or circumstances in which it operates.  It has no abstract essential identity, but morphs according to circumstances and in part at least can be said to be whatever it practices.  You can see why this is an issue for a thing like devising a mission statement that is meant to encapsulate the total describable activity of an organisation.  How do we hold onto the centrality that land has played in the material history of the group’s formation without reducing the scope of our future activity to the terms of this history?  Cultural adaptation, according to our definition, should be capable of including any activity in which culture is changed.

The second problematic revolves around that word ‘Art’, and to a lesser degree the word ‘artist’.  KSCA was established as a vehicle for exploring the idea of art as cultural change and challenging the conventional notion that this is an activity that is somehow exclusive to the rarified preserves of high culture.  On the contrary, it is our view that cultural change takes place outside of these arenas, in the world or worlds in which culture is practiced.  It is our endeavour to discover modes and practices through which we might participate and contribute to those points of every day cultural change.  It is the challenge to the conventional definition of Art through a non-art conception of practice that has in part drawn us together.

How then do we treat Art in our mission statement?  Do we enshrine it in the very heart of the project or do we exile it?  The question is whether, in this mode, are we still making art, or are we just making life?  At stake, amongst other things, is the capacity for our work to eventually be co-opted back into the art world we are attempting to leave behind.  On the other side, we risk loosing the specific conception of our activity, and deny the material fact that it has emerged and is emerging out of art in a gesture that would dissolve the tension this very problematic describes.  It seems to me that what is compelling about KSCA relies on the distortion of the Art concept to include a content that has hitherto been alien or other to it.  The dream, I suppose, is that our action might draw the former out of its white walled cul de sac into the world.  The risk is that it might withdraw our activity back into the cul de sac without significant result.

I will not argue for a decision on either of these two points here, but only want to note that it is the point of decision that resolved an existing differential tension into an irreconcilable polarity.  Again, there is nothing in practice that insists we resolve these contradictions and in fact, they seem to define if not compel what we do.  It is only when we come to the point of decision that these differences resolve themselves into polarities and we enter the either/or of binary thinking.

If I reflect on the broader ‘soft structure’ that KSCA has taken on, I believe I could argue that making such decisions has been something we have assiduously avoided throughout.  I also acknowledge that there are obvious consequences to our agnostic approach that have yet to unfold – and that the failure to make decisions can be as dire a decision as making bad decisions.  But no need to decide on that now.

It was also acknowledged that KSCA is a school and that at the heart of what we are doing is learning.  It was also acknowledged that as a whole, we were all more interested in being students than teachers or professors (some of us already suffering this fate).

Here is the time someone said something funny

For our final foray, we gathered in the hunting lodge for a brisk 2 hours of brainstorming and consultation led by Sarah Breen Lovett and David Kroll from Sydney University School of Architecture.  The subject is another pipe dream project – a purpose built facility to house artist residencies and facilitate community engaged creativity in Kandos.  To make things more difficult, we decided to make the building project artist-led.

To my surprise, the architects were actually excited by the prospect of working with artists to design and build the facility.  I tried to explain how artists pride themselves on their capacity to generate unreasonable objects but this didn’t seem to discourage them.

more serious now

So I don’t have to explain everything we talked about, here is a picture.

I also learned that Lucas Ihlein is an excellant draftsman. I didn’t know. I’m not sure why but I thought his sketches of the tupperware and serving ware were somehow important documents of our adventure.

Confronting petrochemical culture

Gilbert Grace writes:

As a painter, with an interest in the sustainable use of materials and resources, I see common threads linking traditional painting methods, agriculture, housing, and food production.

The painting ‘supports’ – canvas, timber and the natural size used to prime and glue the them together, are sourced from the land. Canvas is the word the Dutch gave to hemp based cloth, and comes from the Dutch pronunciation of cannabis, long before the introduction of cotton ‘duck’ from the Dutch ‘doek’. Both are types of canvas that have origins as sail cloth, and were to the age of sail what oil was to the 20th century internal combustion engine. The HMS Challenger, seen in this painting by William Frederick Mitchell (circa 1880, wikipedia commons), had hemp sails. The history of sail extends to early trading and colonising efforts. Vikings used hemp as a sail cloth for light winds. More robust sails made of wool and sized with animal glue were developed to tolerate gusting winds, as they were more elastic and resilient to gales. Animal hides, like seal and some land animals, were the basis of rigging because they were so resilient to water, salt and ice.

Gilbert Grace at Cementa 17, displaying hemp-based textiles made by weaver Kelly Leonard.

The ‘rabbit skin glue’ use to seal, prime and keep the painting canvas taut, is obtained by boiling down animal hides and bones.

Timber is a valuable natural resource that must be grown and harvested with skill and care, and reused appropriately. Wasted timber is a waste of imagination. The sources of hemp for sail cloth have also been the source of timber for hulls, decking, masts and spars.

Paints are composed of natural products more commonly thought of as food. Egg tempera uses egg whites proving a fast drying, light, long lasting paint film. Casein paint come from mixing pigments with cows’ milk. Pigments are comprised of raw, cooked and burnt earths, powdered metal and their oxides, semi-precious gems stones, naturally occurring or with minimal preparation including the use of heat. Oils for painting came from edible seed crops, hemp, sunflower, linseed, that oxidise and form a hard film when exposed to air. Pigments become paint when ground to a fine paste with pestle and mortar and combined with an oil medium. The heat treatment of the oil prior to mixing starts the process of polymerisation, rapidly increasing ‘drying’ time. The addition of siccatives reduces the drying time of oils even further.

The argument for acrylics being superior to oils as a painting medium is countered by the persistence of plastics in the environment: our blindness to petroleum based plastic is, in fact, a triumph of marketing. Natural fabrics and hides have also been displaced by synthetic petrochemical “plastics” for sail and boating use.

The great floating garbage patches of the Southern and Northern Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans are composed of plastics pollution, either as cast aside drift nets or aggregated waste, killing sea life and water birds. This is due to the fact that sustainable products like hemp have been written out of history and we have been seduced into accepting the widespread use of petrochemical products with their toxic by-products and, toxic social and political impacts. Thus our manufactured reliance on petrochemicals in many of our current sailing, building and food production processes, as well as many forms of art, forces us to recognise that if we are to eliminate these products we have to acknowledge that we are confronting serious questions of culture.

Art, culture and regional collaboration

On a nippy weekend in August, KSCA hosted a weekend gathering in beautiful rugged country outside of Rylstone, to share ideas about rural futures, art and sustainability, and rural/urban interaction. Here are Laura’s recollections.

There were 17 of us, travelling from as far north as Inverell as far south as Albury (I’ve listed those who participated at the end of this post). Along with these broad themes, we wanted to talk about how we can further the collaborative relationship that is emerging between KSCA, Starfish Initiatives and The Living Classroom (and their friends), and between two regional towns: Kandos and Bingara. We were very ably and generously assisted in this by Tirriania Sahood and David Pointon who acted as facilitators over the weekend. Beyond these strategic intentions, we also wanted to simply spend time together without the pressure of a deadline or an outcome – essential for groups who are so dispersed geographically.

The question of culture was central, whether we were talking about regenerative farming, micro-enterprises in small towns or reimagining rural life through artistic practice. What forms can ‘cultural adaptation’ take in these different contexts? We all know that the obstacles to change are not just the usual political things that get us all fired up, but the “cultural imaginaries” that shape public thinking. It’s this that gets the artists among us excited about working outside the art-world, where we can learn from, and work collaboratively with people who are being creative within the cultures of agriculture, industry, governance and the like.

All of us at Rylstone’s famous Yum-Cha and Tea House. Thanks to Emma Wisser for a great photo!

As a group, we discovered that we all had an interest in modelling, though we had different ways of naming that activity. From The Living Classroom’s new Carbon Farm, to The Hemp Initiative, to small town renewable energy initiatives supported by Starfish Initiatives, we all see the value in illustrating, trialling, and doing proof-of-concept exercises. As artists like Ian Milliss have shown again and again, working with an economy of means to express big, speculative ideas keeps things playful and low risk. The Carbon Farm is a project intent on modelling forms of sustainable agriculture, so farmers can learn and observe without being burdened by the heavy costs of overhauling their farm on their own.

We also had useful conversations about how collectives like KSCA or Starfish Initiatives are connected to place. I ponder this quite a bit. Some of KSCA’s members are local to Kandos, but some of us aren’t. In the town itself, some people are interested in what we’re doing, some hostile, some don’t care, and many don’t know KSCA exists. From the small community regeneration work Bob Neville has done for 20 years, to the Cementa Festival, to farmer Glenn Morris’ climate change activismwhich bemuses his neighbours – out-of-the-ordinary activities always trigger such a mix of responses in small communities. Adam Blakester very sagely reminded us that mass extinction events and refugee movements are just two indications that this is an era of massive, global disruption – it’s just not being experienced evenly in all parts of the world. Carrying such thoughts while also responding to the predicament of a small town feels, for me, like a kind of dizzying mental table-tennis match between macro- and micro- lenses for looking at the world. Rather than simply contemplating and debating those disorienting meta-concerns and leaving them up in the ether, our activities bring those issues “to ground” in a particular place and community. Social frictions are unavoidable. A key question that arises, then, is can we work creatively with the messiness that is produced?

With that in mind, we also addressed the question of how rural communities can support each other. Kandos and Bingara are just two of many hundreds of towns in Australia (and many thousands in the world) that are vulnerable due to declining industries, scarce employment, the reduced viability of family farms, poor infrastructure and depopulation. But their size, affordability and land-based resources also means there are many latent possibilities for cultural and economic reinvention.   All of us are keen to find out how grassroots projects in these locations can draw sustenance from each other, and how a sense of solidarity that bridges vast distances can be fostered. As we discussed how to build such bridges – both face-to-face and virtual – Adam used the apt metaphor of ‘constellations’ to describe his commitment to the idea of a dispersed, networked movement for sustainable change that is driven by rural communities.

The project ‘an artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar…’ is a chance to explore all of this, and we’re crossing fingers we can make it happen in 2018/2019.

This project’s title derives from one of Alex Wisser’s late-night pontifications on how to turn the conflicts currently afoot in the world of agriculture into an art project. Serendipitously, when I got home after the weekend, I came across something very similar in an old book that Glenn Morris gave me called ‘Out of the Earth’, by Louis Bromfield (published in 1951). Bromfield was a playwright, novelist, conservationist and pioneer of sustainable agriculture, and founder of Malabar Farm in Ohio:

“‘Within every true artist or farmer or scientist there is a spark, as precious as that first tiny spark which life itself began, that is compounded of imagination and speculation, which are the handmaidens of creation. There is as well the immensely important faculty of observation…

In the long history of mankind, the tiniest observation or speculation of the most humble men (and all really great men humble in the face of Nature) has sometimes led to vast and dynamic discoveries of the utmost importance to man. Many of the greatest contributions to agriculture in our time have not come from the billion-dollar Department of agriculture nor from the countless colleges of aquaculture but from a county agent or a farmer who had the power to observe, the imagination to speculate and the logic to deduce a process from which vast benefits have developed.’”

Earnest 1950s prose aside, this passage says a lot to me about the guiding ideas of our weekend.

Catching last light at Kerry’s and Dom’s in the Capertee. 

P.S. A KSCA gathering would feel incomplete without a visit to someone’s property. On this occasion, we were lucky enough to be welcomed by Dom and Kerry at their place in the breathtaking Capertee Valley. We took a look at the regenerative tree-planting work they’ve done around the place, and their native nursery. This nursery provides seedlings to the Regent Honey Eater project, which over many years has been able to re-establish habitats for the endangered Honey Eater in the region. We know you don’t get online very much Dom and Kerry, but thanks a million!

Who attended:

Adam Blakester (Starfish Initiatives)

Pete Arkins (Starfish Initiatives)

Bob Neville (Starfish/Community Regeneration)

Christine McMillan (KSCA/Cementa)

Georgie Pollard (KSCA)

Belinda Innes (Cementa)

Alex Wisser (KSCA/Cementa)

Victoria Walker (environmental systems community collaborator and educator)

Glenn Morris (FigTree Organic Farms)

Ian Milliss (KSCA)

Lucas Ihlein (KSCA)

Eloise Lindeback (KSCA)

Gilbert Grace (KSCA)

Rick Hutton (The Living Classroom, Bingara)

Garry McDouall (The Carbon Farm/The Living Classroom, Bingara)

Tirrania Surhood (InCollaboration)

David Pointon

With especial thanks to Tirrania, David and Adam for giving so much time and energy to the organisation of the weekend. This gathering was supported by the University of Sydney, through an Industry Engagement Fund seed grant awarded to Laura Fisher.