A friend of a friend asked Frank and I the other day.... "how do you do it?" How do we manage to work so little? He followed this up by asking us what we were having for dinner (slow cooked kangaroo shank stew), when we last went to Maccas or KFC (we guessed about 10 years), and when we last went to Coles or Woolworths.... He was quite disbelieving when we answered about 4 years... but where do you get your food?!?!?!.
Back to the main question - firstly, define work. We work hard for our food, water and comfortable shelter and for our entertainment and community but we do not do much work in exchange for money. We choose to work more directly than that, providing for ourselves as much as possible - growing, foraging and preserving food, collecting wood for cooking and heating, using salvaged materials to creatively make what we are in need of. We also trade whenever we can - exchanging time and labour for food, labour for materials, food for food etc etc. Generally, exchanging what we have, directly for what we need rather than exchanging our time for money and then money for what we need. This requires relationships, our community connections have become such an important part of our currency. We could not do half as much as what we do without our diverse community.
We find that it makes us MUCH more connected to all of the food around us and all of the stuff around us too. Everything ends up with a story. Seriously - our main kitchen bench - we pulled the stainless benchtop out of a skip, we salvaged the shelf and the base from the tip, Frank made a gorgeous end and handle from an old axe handle and other piece of timber that he found in his stash. Our kitchen shelves are made of silky oak, they're very grand. Frank was offered the timber if he did the job - felling a 3m tall, 40cm diameter silky oak tree in town. So he did, it sat here drying for a couple of years with no intended purpose, then we took it to a friends place and milled it into slabs with their Lucas Mill, and another year later we brought it back and finally had a use for it, so thicknessed, oiled and attached it to the wall, we even made the brackets, they're pretty flash shelves, even if we must say so ourselves!
It has been an important journey for us to redefine what it is that we need and be creative with what we have available. In that same conversation with the friend - we mentioned that we were on our way to pick olives that would not otherwise be eaten. We pick, slice, brine and store these olives to provide for ourselves later, they are possibly our favourite snack so we try to do about 30L each year, giving us enough to eat, share and sometimes swap.
We do have the HUUUUGE headstart of living with Frank's parents, in two houses, but this is a choice too. We acknowledge this privilege (that we have this opportunity!), but we also acknowledge that we would live the same way elsewhere. We did for a while, on our friends farm, in a tiny house we built with salvaged materials, also exchanging our labour for the privilege of living on that piece of land.
Instead, we are living on land with Frank's parents that they bought 25 years ago, just half an hour from Canberra. We spend most of our time here, working on the place, the water systems, food growing, preserving and storing, the chicken and compost systems, the shelter, the human systems - working together.
I would suggest that "how we do it" is a sum of shifting our own expectations and building relationships. With huge thanks to our privilege of place and the skills we have gained over the years.
We honestly say that our life is MUCH richer now than it has ever been. Our bank accounts may not be wealthy, but our lives are full of richness and meaning. Our relationships mean everything to us, they are what allows us to nurture ourselves, be that with tangible things like food or materials, or the intangible magic that is friendship and family. There is pride and pleasure in our work and we'll never look back.
