Life works in relationships. Tarkind invites people to feel that truth in place. Born in 2022 from a mum and son, a field biologist, and a palawa artist, our Hobart-based collective weaves science, story, and art so care becomes culture. Inspired by living-systems thinking (Capra) and design for regeneration (Wahl), we walk and notice with iNaturalist, paint what we find so the insight lands, then plant and repair so places grow more resilient. This head, heart, and hand practice, echoed by Orr and Satish Kumar, builds tolerance, everyday care, and quiet reverence. We partner with the Great Southern BioBlitz each spring. Join us Sunday 26 October 2025 at Magical Farm and Allens Rivulet. Bring curiosity, a notebook or phone, and something to paint on.

Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne argues that communities don’t fail because people disagree; they fail when disagreement has nowhere useful to go. Drawing on Con Viv (head–heart–hand alignment), Jung’s idea of the “Third,” and Anthroposophy’s threefold social order, she reframes conflict as a constant input that can be metabolised into capacity. The article outlines practical containers, listening spaces that surface facts, rights processes with visible decision rhythms, and small, time-boxed pilot projects, that turn heat into shared work. Rather than “being nicer,” it proposes love as infrastructure: clear lanes between cultural freedom, equal rights, and mutual economy, plus simple cycles of notice → propose → trial → review. The result is a pattern language for civic care where friction becomes fuel and culture grows through practice.

This essay argues that Australia’s resilience work is over-documented and under-practiced. Drawing on a database of thousands of local food policies and current state/federal funding streams, it proposes a shift from writing strategies to funding “patterns”: small, hosted experiments that turn one policy clause into a safe, repeatable practice, seed libraries and crop-swaps, cool-evening street meals with tree-watering rosters, neighbourhood preparedness walk-throughs, and similar low-overhead trials. Framed by Con Viv (“with life”) and threefold social theory, the piece outlines how councils and communities can run micro-trials with clear edges, light measures, and a one-page “how we did it” so others can copy. It closes by asking governments to reserve a modest slice of existing budgets for facilitation, prototyping, insurance templates, and pattern-writing, so resilience moves from paper to everyday life.

In an era dominated by viral outrage and moral clarity, progressive leaders face a critical choice: remain commentators or become architects of the future. This article argues that beyond calling out injustice, whether in situations of War, Tasmania’s salmon farms, or threatened forests there lies a responsibility to foster convivial governance. By inviting communities into genuine, participatory conversations, and using imagination as a core democratic organ, movements can co-create sustainable, inclusive futures. Drawing on global examples like Barcelona’s Decidim and EcoPeace Middle East, the piece calls on platformed activists to move from critique to collaborative scenario-building, ensuring that the “day after” belongs to those who build it.

About the Author
Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne (also known as Dr. Demeter) is an eco-philosopher, farmer, and author of the forthcoming series The Spiral Shelves: Living Library of Magical Farm Tasmania. Her work bridges policy design, ecological healing, and the spiritual-cultural renewal of place. She works at the intersection of community resilience, regenerative governance, and embodied stewardship, inviting new myths and models for living well together in times of great change.

This piece by Dr Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne) explores the urgent need to redefine who counts as a farmer in Australia’s evolving agricultural landscape. It highlights how current government support programs like the Farm Household Allowance largely exclude small-scale, regenerative, and community-based farmers, many of whom are young people building resilient regional economies through diverse, place-based food systems. The article calls for policy reform that values ecological health, social wellbeing, and cultural vitality alongside traditional economic measures, urging recognition and support for the farmers shaping a reenerative future.

In this timely and provocative essay, What Is Your Business Model, Local Government?, Emily Samuels-Ballantyne invites a bold reimagining of the role and purpose of local government in the face of ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and bureaucratic drift. Drawing from lived experience in regenerative projects, from community harvests to Indigenous land care, she argues that local councils are too often locked into transactional models that fail to nourish the communities they claim to serve.

The essay challenges the obsession with “rates, roads, and rubbish” and calls for a cultural and functional transformation: from gatekeeping to stewardship, from abstraction to grounded care. It critiques the superficial focus on structural reform, how councils are carved up, while ignoring the deeper dysfunctions of waste, performance management, and disconnection from place.

What emerges is a clear-eyed case for a regenerative model of governance, one that centres community resilience, shared meals, public trust, and the radical possibility that local government could once again be a site of hope, not just administration.

In this sharp and grounded essay, Dr. Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne) turns the common bureaucratic question, “What is your business model?” back on local government itself. Drawing on two decades of lived experience as a community builder, policy designer, and regenerative farmer, she critiques the top-heavy policy pipelines that reduce care to documents and engagement to output metrics. With references to institutional theorists like Guy Debord, Ivan Illich, Henri Lefebvre, and Helena Norberg-Hodge, the essay explores how public funding is often diverted away from tangible outcomes into layers of abstraction and consultancy. Through the lens of her own project, the Huon Valley Food Hub, Demeter offers an alternative approach: the redirection of the brief toward grounded, co-created, and regenerative public work. The piece concludes with a call for a new kind of public service, one rooted in care, participation, and a living systems worldview.

Synopsis of “An Ode to the Bread Man”
By Dr Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

Each week, a quietly steadfast figure, known simply as the Bread Man, rolls up in his supply-chain truck, his lanky frame clad in a beanie and workwear, to deliver unsold loaves for the farm. What might have gone to landfill instead becomes nourishment for Emily’s geese, ducks, and chickens, whose droppings then enrich the soil. Over years, this humble ritual knits together a living circle of trust, reciprocity, and shared care.

Yet beneath its gentle rhythm lies a troubling irony: the very policies that champion “efficiency” and large-scale job growth are squeezing out small enterprises like the Bread Man’s family delivery service. While massive corporations thrive on subsidies and armies of lawyers, this heart-driven delivery driver faces closure. Drawing on Ivan Illich’s concept of convivial tools, those scaled to human hands and rooted in relationship, the essay contrasts the warmth of community-rooted exchange with the cold grind of industrial mechanisation.

Ultimately, the piece is a call to action: to reclaim economic life as a web of stories and relationships rather than a blind pursuit of scale. It urges readers to choose convivial alternatives: garden stalls, hand-crafted wares, neighbourhood bakeries and deliery services that nourish not just bodies, but soil, trust, and the very soul of place.

The Fault Line explores the quiet violences embedded in the language of peace and the structures of power that claim to pursue it. Drawing from lived experience across institutions, activist circles, and community life, Dr. Demeter reveals how dissent is often silenced not by overt oppression but by the subtle enforcement of strategic conformity, identity politics, and credentialed authority. The essay critiques the performative binaries of left and right, calling instead for a deeper, grounded practice of peace rooted in relational repair, place-based wisdom, and regenerative imagination. It invites readers to stand in the fertile imagination, so be gardeners of a new paradigm. The essay is illustrated with striking visualisations that depict both the fractured fault lines of the present and luminous visions for a more just and life-giving future.

Tasmanians deserve more than top-down slogans. We need a genuine, strategic vision, Scenario Two: A Living Island of Renewal grounded in community ownership, climate resilience, and economic dignity. Imagine a $1 billion public interest fund (matched by the Commonwealth to $2 billion) powering food hubs, care infrastructure, and publicly owned renewable energy projects. This isn’t a boom-and-bust model: it’s about durable, locally rooted jobs: green energy technicians, regenerative farmers, care workers, and cultural craftspersons. By redefining progress beyond GDP and megaprojects, we can build a Tasmania that flourishes in body, mind, and spirit.

A Call for Justice and Regeneration in Australian Universities is both a reckoning and a renewal. Drawing on two decades within the university system and the insights of a national inquiry, Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne reveals a crisis not just of contracts, but of conscience. Behind the statistics lies something deeper: the erosion of dignity, creativity, and care in places once imagined as sanctuaries for learning.

Yet this is not only a critique…it is a vision. The article offers a pathway for transformation rooted in truthfulness, courage, and responsibility. It imagines universities not as factories of credentialism, but as living communities of knowledge and moral purpose. Here, education becomes an act of regeneration, of land, people, and the future. Tasmania, with its spirit of independence and possibility, could lead this renewal.