The Place

Cuttawah sits on the southeastern coast of Australia, where the escarpment comes down to meet the sea. The Yuin people have lived along this coast for tens of thousands of years. European settlers arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, cleared the land for dairy farming, and named the town.

The town has about eight hundred permanent residents and swells during the holiday periods. For the past six years or so, the people who live here have been working out how to stay. Things are getting harder everywhere. This community stepped into that difficulty together and started building something. They don’t have a name for what it is.

This one is about what it feels like when a place has already thought of you before you arrive.

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The fence was the first thing Wei-Lin noticed, which surprised her, because she had not meant to be noticing fences at all. She had meant to be watching Felix, who had his hand wrapped tight in hers and was walking the particular stiff-legged walk he did when he was not sure about something but was not going to say so.

It was a good fence. It was solid and child-height-plus, the kind of paling you could not see through and could not easily climb, with a gate that still had the old high handle on it: the one built for hands taller than a three-year-old’s, the one every centre she had ever taken Felix to had needed before anyone would let them in the door. She let herself feel the small, specific relief of seeing it. Whatever else this place was going to turn out to be, someone had still bothered to build the boring part properly.

The gate latch was old iron, the kind that lifted by hand, worn smooth from years of the same grip. She reached for it and it gave before she touched it — something higher up the post had already done its work and the door swung open on its own.

Somewhere above the gatepost, something had already taken in her face, and Felix’s, matched them against whatever had been filed away the week she had uploaded the enrolment forms, and decided, in whatever way these things decided anything now, that they were who they said they were. There was no beep and no screen asking her to confirm, only the latch giving, the way a door gives when someone on the other side has already seen you coming and is glad of it.

Felix did not notice the gate at all. He was looking past it, at the yard.

It was not really one yard. That was the first thing Wei-Lin understood about it once her eyes adjusted to the scale of the place. A huge old fig held most of the middle distance, its roots buckled up out of the ground in a way no insurer in any centre she had been to before would have allowed near small children, and underneath and around it the space had been quietly carved into a dozen different countries. She saw a patch of raked sand near the fence, a proper cubby built into the roots of the fig, timber-framed, with a door low enough that an adult would have to crouch, and a mud kitchen that was properly muddy. Somewhere off to the left, half-hidden by a stand of grass trees, was the particular busy hush of children doing something they had decided themselves was important.

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You could still see the bones of the old place underneath all of it. This had been a council centre once, the kind built in a hurry sometime in the 2020s when somebody finally admitted there were not enough places for the kids who needed them. She could still see the original perimeter fence, the same low brick building behind it all, the same fire door with the push bar, and the same laminated room names on the same doors, EXPLORERS and WANDERERS, with fonts gone slightly yellow with age. But someone had been adding to the outside of it for a long time without taking anything away, the way lichen adds to concrete rather than replacing it.

A small group of children had already broken off from whatever they had been doing under the trees and were coming across the grass at something between a walk and a run, the particular gait of kids who had been told often enough not to run near the gate but had not entirely absorbed it.

A woman came around the side of the building behind them, not hurrying. She crouched while she was still a good few metres off, so that by the time she arrived she was already at Felix’s height.

“They knew you were coming,” she said, following Wei-Lin’s glance toward the children, who had now arrived and were arranging themselves at a slight, uncertain distance from Felix. “The gate tells the room when someone new’s on the way in. Mostly the big ones just like an excuse to abandon whatever they were meant to be doing.”

One of the children, a girl who could not have been more than five, took a half-step forward.

“Are you Felix?” she said, with enormous seriousness. “We made you something.”

Felix’s hand loosened in Wei-Lin’s fractionally; not all the way, but enough that Wei-Lin felt it. She had watched for the opposite of it so many mornings at the last place: the rushed good morning aimed somewhere over the children’s heads at the parent doing the signing-in, the educator already turning away before the handover was finished, and Felix’s hand going tighter, not looser, every single time.

“You must be Felix,” the woman said, properly, and nothing else for a moment, just looking at him with genuine curiosity. “I hear from your mum you’re partial to dinosaurs.”

“We know,” the girl said, before Felix could answer. “Come on. It’s this way.”

She held out her hand. Felix looked at it, then up at Wei-Lin, then back at the hand, working through some private calculation, and then, without ceremony, without looking back, took it, and let himself be led off across the grass toward the trees, two more children falling in behind him like an honour guard.

“The big ones put a dinosaur garden in last night,” the woman said, watching them go, not particularly to Wei-Lin, more just narrating it to herself. “Heard a new little one was coming who liked them. Took some old fence palings and the wood scraps from the maintenance shed and made themselves busy after pack-up. Nobody asked them to. I just mentioned it was happening, somebody put a hand up, and then there were six of them out there with torches at half past five.”

“I’m Yindi,” the woman said, straightening up at last to address Wei-Lin properly. She said it like she expected Wei-Lin already knew, which she did from the enrolment pack, though it was different hearing it said in the actual yard with the actual person attached. “I run things here, more or less. Nobody’s really in charge, but somebody’s got to make the coffee.”

“He’s done this before,” Yindi said, and it was not a question.

“Two centres. The first one didn’t...” Wei-Lin stopped, not sure how to finish it without sounding like she was complaining about somewhere she would never see again. “It was fine. It just wasn’t this.”

“Mm.” Yindi did not push for more, which Wei-Lin noticed, braced as she was for the next question. “Come in for a tick. Couple of bits of info, and then you can go to work without thinking about us for the rest of the day.”

There was a sign by the door, the laminated kind every centre had, the kind Wei-Lin had stopped reading months ago at the last place because they all said the same three things in the same stern font. This one did not. WHAT’S HAPPENING IN YOUR BODY RIGHT NOW? it said, and under that, in smaller writing, was a short column: big feeling, small feeling, need a hug, need a minute, need to run. There was no rule under any of it, no consequence; just the question, asked plainly, as you might ask it of an adult.

“That one’s mostly for us,” Yindi said, catching her looking. “Staff read it as often as the kids do, probably more.”

The office had not changed much from whatever it had been twenty years ago: the same narrow window, the same wall of pigeonholes, though half of them now held things that were not paperwork, such as a jar of seed pods, a child’s drawing of what was unmistakably the chook pen, and a roster on the wall.

Yindi handed her an actual sheet of paper, slightly warm from the printer.

“That’s you for the year,” she said. “Stick it on the fridge, that’s mostly what people do with it. You’re down for garden duty in spring, weeding, mulching, nothing that needs you to put your back into it, and we’ve already worked out you’re better placed there than excursion driving, given Daniel’s hours. No good both of you being away the same day.”

Wei-Lin looked at the page. Her name. A date in October. Someone, or something, had already known her husband’s name and his shifts before she had said a word about either.

“You don’t have to love it,” Yindi added, catching her face. “Nobody loves weeding. But everyone does some of it. That’s sort of the deal.”

“Right,” Wei-Lin said. It came out smaller than she meant it to.

“One more thing.” Yindi was already moving toward the door, conversations concluding themselves whenever she decided they had. “Tomorrow’s ten years since the supermarket went co-op. Big shared lunch for the kids. The co-op’s sorting the food this year, not the families, so nobody’s up at five doing party pies before drop-off. Sun cakes came up for the kitchen roster. You’re from Taiwan, is that right?”

Wei-Lin nodded.

“You’ll see a few parents in tomorrow morning helping plate up. Didn’t put your name on the list, though. I wouldn’t dob you in for your first week.”

“Thank you,” Wei-Lin said, and meant the specific thing more than the general one: not the lunch, but the not-asking.

“If you ever want to actually cook for one of these, put your hand up. Nobody’s stopping you. Just didn’t want it landing on you before you’ve even found the toilets.” Yindi paused at the door, hand on the frame, and looked back at Wei-Lin properly for the first time since they had come inside.

“If you ever want to know more about how this place runs, not the forms, the actual running of it, there’s a collective meeting every second Thursday. You’re welcome at it from day one, no waiting period, no probation. It’ll be in your portal. Most people take a few months to find their feet before they come. We do need people to show up eventually. That’s how it stays everyone’s place, not just ours. But the door’s open from now.”

She walked Wei-Lin back toward the gate, past the yard where Felix’s hat, the ridiculous dinosaur-spiked one he had insisted on that morning, bobbed in and out of view among the grass trees, surrounded by the same small, serious committee of children who had claimed him at the gate. He did not look up. He did not wave. He was entirely, gloriously absorbed in whatever they had found to do, and it did not occur to him, even slightly, that his mother might be leaving.

Yindi did not call out a reminder, or a goodbye, or check that Wei-Lin had everything she needed. She just let her go, the way the gate had let her in.

Wei-Lin reached the gate and put her hand on the high, cold handle. She found she was smiling, and found, almost at the same moment, that her eyes had filled, the two things arriving together the way they sometimes do when something turns out better than you had let yourself hope for. He had not said goodbye. He had not needed to. Somewhere behind her, her son was already busy being exactly where he was.

She let herself out and did not look back.

What we already know

There are hundreds of models of early childhood education around the world that centre belonging, agency, and the child’s own curiosity rather than compliance and curriculum readiness. Reggio Emilia in northern Italy is one of the most documented. There are others in Scandinavia, in Indigenous communities across Australia and the Pacific, in small cooperative centres that have been running for decades on not very much money.

On the whole, these are not the models that governments fund at scale.

The evidence for what works in early childhood is not really in dispute. What is curious is why we keep building systems that deliver something else. What would it take to start moving serious money behind the models that have shown they work?

The future has already arrived. It is just not evenly distributed.

Cooperative childcare, Reggio Emilia-inspired early childhood practice, community governance open to new families from day one, and older children building something for a younger one they haven’t met yet. None of this is invented. It all exists somewhere today.

We have everything we need.

Thank you for your support of The Art of Unravelling, I really appreciate you being here. I am keen to hear your thoughts on this place and what happens in it, I would like to know whether these images of 2037 help you face into the reality we find around us.

Leave a comment

The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.

Buy me a coffee

The Place

Cuttawah sits on the southeastern coast of Australia, where the escarpment comes down to meet the sea. The Yuin people have lived along this coast for tens of thousands of years. European settlers arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, cleared the land for dairy farming, and named the town.

The town has about eight hundred permanent residents and swells during the holiday periods. For the past six years or so, the people who live here have been working out how to stay. Things are getting harder everywhere. This community stepped into that difficulty together and started building something. They don’t have a name for what it is.

This one is about what happens when something is returned broken.

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David was in the shed before seven, the way he always was, oiling the chain on the brush cutter nobody had asked him to oil. The tool library ran better if somebody just did the unglamorous maintenance without being rostered for it, and David had decided some years ago that the unglamorous maintenance might as well be the thing he was good at.

He heard the gate before he saw who it was. He knew it was Oscar Pham’s bike by the particular tick of the back wheel, a spoke gone slightly out of true, a tick he’d long associated with the boy’s arrivals and departures.

Oscar came in holding the rasp out in front of him the way you would hold something you were hoping might be forgiven before it was even properly looked at.

“It’s broken,” he said, by way of greeting.

David took it from him and turned it over once. The handle had split clean along the grain a hand’s width back from the tang. It was the kind of split that does not happen from ordinary use; somebody had given it a fair whack against something solid.

“Bench?” David asked, not looking up.

“Yeah.” Oscar’s ears had gone pink. “I was trying to get the sawdust out of the teeth. I might’ve hit it harder than...”

“Mm.” David set it on the bench under the window, the one reserved for things waiting their turn, next to a drill with a frayed cord and a wheelbarrow missing a tyre. He did not ask what Oscar had been frustrated about. He had learned, slowly, over years of running this shed, that the tool itself rarely had much to do with it. “The kettle’s just gone off. Sit down a minute.”

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Oscar sat on the upturned crate that had been there as long as David could remember, the one with someone’s initials burned into the side from some long-forgotten working bee. He did not seem in any hurry to leave. David recognised the hesitation of a boy who had come with a purpose he hadn’t yet found the words for.

“How’s Denmarsh,” David said. It was not really a question.

Oscar shrugged with his whole upper body, the particular shrug of someone trying to compress a great deal into a small gesture. “It’s a school.”

“That bad?”

“It’s not bad.” He picked at a splinter on the crate’s edge. “On Wednesday, Mr Pavlou puts a kid’s woodwork project up the front of the room because it’s good. Within about ten seconds you can feel everyone deciding if that’s a problem for them or not, whether it makes theirs look worse.” He glanced up. “Nobody says anything. You can just feel the room doing it.”

“And here?”

Oscar thought about it properly, like he had not been asked to put it into words before. “Macca, who runs the bushcare crew on Thursdays, if somebody stuffs up a planting or snaps a tool or whatever, he just looks at what actually happened. Was the ground too hard, was the tool wrong for the job, did you not know yet? It stays about the thing. At Denmarsh it turns into something about you. Like it follows you around after.”

“Mm,” David said, which was as much agreement as he tended to give to anything out loud.

Oscar turned the tea in his hands without drinking it, working up to something.

“Is there boat work here? Actual work, not just mucking around.”

“Depends what you mean by work.”

“I don’t know. Building them. Fixing them. Whatever it is that means I don’t have to leave to do it.” He said it fast, like he had been holding the question a while and wanted it out before he lost his nerve. “Everyone talks about Garnock TAFE like it’s the only place that does boats properly. I just... I don’t actually want to go anywhere. I just didn’t think there was another way of doing it.”

David thought about Callum, who had gone to Sydney at seventeen for a course that turned out to suit him about as well as a wetsuit suits a cat, and stayed anyway, because by the time he had worked that out he had already half-built a life around the going. He thought about Renee, in Brisbane now, who rang on Sundays and sounded like someone calling from very far away even when the signal was perfect.

He did not say any of that to Oscar. The boy’s path was his own to walk, unburdened by the ghosts of other people’s journeys.

"Wally Drummond's still doing repairs and small refits down at the slipway," he said instead. "He has been for thirty years. He put his name down with the Mutual eighteen months back because he wants someone to take it over before his hands give out properly. Can't carry an apprentice's wage on slipway takings alone, not with insurance the way it's gone."

David nodded toward the shelf of spare tools without quite meaning to, an old habit of looking at something steady while he said something that mattered. "The Mutual matches half. The town meets the rest, if the trades roundtable reckons the slipway's worth keeping here, which they would." He paused. "Your Mum does the fibreglass work down there when Wally needs it. A Pham wanting to learn boats isn't going to be a hard sell."

Oscar looked up properly for the first time since he had sat down.

“I didn’t know that was a thing.”

“It’s not much of a thing yet. That’s rather the point of it: it’s not finished being built, the way Garnock’s course is already finished and just waiting for someone to fit into it. You'd be making this version up as you went, more or less, alongside Wally.” David shrugged. “Nobody's ever put a sign out the front of that slipway saying career pathway. Doesn't mean it isn't one."

“What about the rasp?”

“I’ll see if Liesl’s husband can re-handle it. If not, we’ve got two spares.” David nodded toward the shelf, where the spares lived in a row, dulled and dependable. “Nobody’s going without a rasp over this.”

Oscar stood, suddenly a little awkward again now that the actual reason for his visit had been so thoroughly set aside.

David was already turning back to the brush cutter, the chain still half-oiled. “Tell your Mum the slipway’s there whenever. There’s no rush on it. These things don’t need deciding by Friday.”

Oscar wheeled his bike back out through the gate, the spoke still ticking, the same fault as on the way in. Nothing about him was visibly different, except that David noticed, watching him go, that he was sitting a little straighter on the bike than he had been an hour ago, like someone carrying one thing fewer than they’d arrived with.

What gets held

Most of us have been in rooms where something fails or is broken and the response is really about something else entirely. The account that needs settling. The blame that needs shifting. The status that needs restoring.

What David does is put the rasp on the bench and put the kettle on. The thing that needs fixing will get fixed. The thing Oscar actually came with gets the time it needs.

What would it take for more rooms to work like that shed?

The future has already arrived, it is just not evenly distributed.

Neighbourhood tool libraries, mutual aid apprenticeship funding, and the practice of meeting the person before the problem. None of this is invented. It all exists somewhere today.

We have everything we need.

Thank you for your support of The Art of Unravelling, I really appreciate you being here. I am keen to hear your thoughts on this place and what happens in it, I would like to know whether these images of 2037 help you face into the reality we find around us.

Leave a comment

The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.

Buy me a coffee

The Place

Cuttawah sits on the southeastern coast of Australia, where the escarpment comes down to meet the sea. The Yuin people have lived along this coast for tens of thousands of years. European settlers arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, cleared the land for dairy farming, and named the town.

The town has about eight hundred permanent residents and swells during the holiday periods. For the past six years or so, the people who live here have been working out how to stay. Things are getting harder everywhere. This community stepped into that difficulty together and started building something. They don’t have a name for what it is.

Most of us know what it feels like to say the wrong thing and to wake up the next morning still carrying it. In Cuttawah, the community's decision-making process can't move forward while harm between two people sits unrepaired. It’s not a formal rule, it is what becomes true when the process is actually working.

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The noticeboard outside the old supermarket still had Monday’s flyer pinned up, curling slightly at one corner where the staple had given way. FINDING NEW GROUND: BUSHFIRE READINESS, MEETING 4, it said, with the date and the time and nothing at all about what had actually happened in that room.

Mariana stood in front of it longer than she meant to. Four meetings. She did the maths without wanting to, two and a half hours each, near enough, plus the one that ran past eleven, and felt the total settle somewhere behind her ribs. All those hours the room had spent getting people to a place where nobody walked out outvoted, and how little of that she had managed to hold onto by hour four.

The cold found her properly then, the way it had not on the walk over. It went straight through her coat, down into her spine; the kind of cold that has nothing to do with the actual temperature and everything to do with what you are remembering while it lands on you.

She kept walking.

The Bush Food Garden, officially the Tattersalls Foundation Native Foods Garden, though nobody had called it that since the sign went up and most people suspected nobody ever would, sat behind the old butter factory. Three terraced beds, a shade house, a falling-down chook pen nobody had gotten around to fixing. Mariana let herself in through the side gate. She had brought the thermos out unopened and it sat on the edge of the raised bed, lid screwed on tight, doing nothing for anyone.

She worked along the warrigal greens, pulling out whatever was not warrigal greens. Winter weeds were sparse this time of year, but stubborn, the deep-rooted ones that had decided, against all reasonable seasonal logic, that this was their moment to show up. Her hands knew the difference between something that would come cleanly and something that would fight her. This morning she went looking for the ones that would fight.

A thistle, low and vicious, was hidden under a leaf twice its size. She got two fingers around the base and pulled. It did not come. She pulled harder, felt the small tear of root somewhere underground giving way, and there, in the half-second between effort and release, was Monday night.

Graeme had said the thing about volunteer hours being finite first, the way he always did, just put it plainly so nobody else had to be the one to say triage out loud. David, sixty-something David, who owned four houses he rented to people who came for a fortnight every January and never once in July, had said something about not wanting blood on his hands, about needing the brigade to commit to defending every property that paid its rates. His voice had done the thing voices do when a man is frightened and does not have the words for frightened, so it comes out as something closer to entitlement.

And Mariana had felt the old heat come up through her sternum, the specific heat of I have done the work and you have not, and she had said it flat, almost bored, like she was reading out a fact rather than aiming a blow: “Maybe if your kids actually wanted to be near you, you’d have help defending your own places.”

The thistle root let go all at once. She nearly overbalanced.

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Diane’s hand had gone up first, not pointing, just rising the way it did. We don’t do that here. It was not unkind, almost gentle, which had somehow been worse.

Then Graeme, who had been running the meeting all night with the particular tirelessness of a man who had done this before and would do it again, "Let's stop here a minute," in a voice that was not asking permission. Chairs scraped back. Someone went to refill the urn without being asked. Nobody looked at Mariana, which was somehow worse than if they had.

When the room came back, Graeme did not go straight to the agenda. He looked at her, and then at David, and said, “Do you two want to sit with this now, while we’re all here? We can hold the space for it.”

It was a real offer. She had understood that even then, underneath the heat still sitting in her chest. The room would have stayed. David would have said something, probably something stiff and furious and true. She might have said something back that actually meant sorry, instead of the thing she had said instead.

“No,” she had said. “I’m fine.”

She was not asked again. That was its own kind of mercy, and she had hated it.

She had crossed her arms and looked at the laminate table for the rest of the meeting, while the room worked its way toward something like a plan: defend the town centre and the two roads in, let the outlying shacks take their chances this year, and get word to absentee owners that this was finally the season to believe the warnings.

She had nodded along to all of it from somewhere behind her own face.

“That one giving you trouble?”

Mariana looked up. Diane was two beds over, secateurs in one hand, not really pruning anything, as there was not much worth pruning in July. She had come in through the side gate at some point without Mariana hearing her, which Mariana supposed she should have expected.

“It came eventually,” Mariana said, and held up the thistle, root and all, as evidence of something.

Diane looked at it the way she looked at most things: without hurry. “Mm,” she said. “They do, in the end.”

Neither of them said anything else for a while. Mariana went back to the bed. Diane went back to not-pruning the dianella along the fence line.

It was Diane who broke it eventually, sideways, the way she did most things.

“David’s roof’s needed doing for years,” she said, to no one in particular. “Ron Castles was meant to get to it before he died. Never did.”

Mariana’s hands stilled on the next weed.

“He’s not wrong about the houses,” Diane went on. “If they go up, that’s his whole...” she made a small gesture, encompassing without specifying. “He’s not building anything else at his age. You know that.”

“I know that.”

“And he said it ugly. Wanting the brigade to promise something they haven’t got the bodies to promise.” Diane shrugged, economical. “Fear does that to a voice. Comes out the wrong door.”

Mariana pulled another weed. This one came easily, and she did not feel any better for it.

“What I said wasn’t about the houses,” she said.

“No.” Diane did not soften it, and did not sharpen it either. “It wasn’t.”

There was no comfort in the way she said it, and somehow that was the thing Mariana had been bracing against without knowing it. She had expected either absolution or a lecture, and Diane offered neither. She just set the plain shape of it down between them, like a tool returned to its place on the bench, with no fuss made of the returning.

“Graeme would have held it for you that night, you know,” Diane said, not unkindly. “Whole room right there. David too worked up to do much more than splutter at you, probably, and then it would’ve been said and done with.”

Mariana did not answer that.

“Now you’ve got to walk up his drive on your own. Knock. Stand there while he decides whether to let you say it.” Diane shrugged, the same economical shrug as before. “It’s a harder version, but the same job.”

Mariana sat back on her heels. Her knees, on the cold ground this long, had gone past uncomfortable into something that would ache properly by afternoon.

“I should go and see him.”

“You could.” Diane was already moving toward the compost bins, the conversation apparently concluded as far as she was concerned. “Or you ask me to hold a proper sit-down with the both of you, if you’re not ready to do it on your own legs yet. Either’s allowed.”

“Which would you do?”

Diane stopped at that, considered it with the same unhurried attention she gave the weeds, the roof, and Mariana’s knees. “I’d take him something,” she said at last. “Doesn’t fix the roof. But you don’t walk in empty-handed to a man who thinks he’s about to lose the last thing he’s got.”

She did not say what to bring. She did not need to.

“Graeme wants to call meeting five before the long weekend,” Diane added, almost as an afterthought, though Mariana doubted anything Diane said was really an afterthought. “Can’t ask everyone to agree on who’s defending what while this is still sitting between the two of you. It wouldn’t be fair to either of you, going in with it unfinished.”

It was not pressure, exactly. Diane did not say it like pressure. She said it the way she had mentioned the roof: just another true thing, lying there next to the rest of them, for Mariana to pick up or not.

She went back to the compost, and after a while Mariana heard the slow tumble of the bin turning, and under that the gulls going over toward the point, and under that, finally, something in her chest that had been clenched tight since Monday night loosening by some small unmeasured degree. It was not gone, just loose enough to stand, brush the dirt from her knees, and find out whether the coffee in the thermos was still worth drinking.

It was not, particularly.

She drank it anyway.

The moment between knowing and doing

Mariana knows what she needs to do before Diane says a word. That’s not the problem.

Most of us do. We know when we’ve caused harm. We know, roughly, what repair would look like. What gets in the way is rarely ignorance. It is the moment between knowing and doing, which can stretch out for days, or years, or a lifetime.

What Cuttawah has built is not a system that makes people better at knowing. It is one that makes the next action a little more available. The room holds the offer. The elder names the shape of it plainly. The path to the door is not cleared, exactly, but it is not blocked either.

The future has already arrived. It is just not evenly distributed.

Facilitated consensus processes, community fire preparedness, bush food gardens, and the idea that collective decisions cannot hold while unrepaired harm sits between people. None of this is invented. It all exists somewhere today.

We have everything we need.

Thank you for your support of The Art of Unravelling, I really appreciate you being here. I am keen to hear your thoughts on this place and what happens in it, I would like to know whether these images of 2037 help you face into the reality we find around us.

Leave a comment

The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.

Buy me a coffee

The Place

Cuttawah sits on the southeastern coast of Australia, where the escarpment comes down to meet the sea. The Yuin people have lived along this coast for tens of thousands of years. European settlers arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, cleared the land for dairy farming, and named the town.

The town has about eight hundred permanent residents and swells during the holiday periods. For the past six years or so, the people who live here have been working out how to stay. Things are getting harder everywhere. This community stepped into that difficulty together and started building something. They don’t have a name for what it is.

On this ordinary Tuesday, a young farmer comes to sell his crop to the cooperative supermarket and finds out the cooperative doesn’t work that way.

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Toby had practised the numbers in the ute on the way down, out loud, the way he had not practised anything since his Year 12 oral presentation, which Mrs Brandt had given him a B-minus for and a comment about speaking to the room, not the floor. He had not spoken to a room since. He had been speaking to cattle, mostly, and lately to a spreadsheet, and now apparently he was going to have to speak to Mrs Brandt herself, because someone had told him, with what he suspected was real cheerfulness, that she sat on the Purchasing Circle.

He came down off the escarpment the way he always did, across the bridge, the inlet opening up on his left with the campground beyond it and the mangroves thick along the tidal flat, thirteen years of growth doing what they were planted to do. The strip came up on his right as he crossed the bridge: the supermarket, a couple of cafes, the fish and chip shop, all of it facing the water it couldn’t quite see from here. The rest of the town was over the hill, tucked around the inlet, but you wouldn’t know it from this angle. You had to know it was there.

The printout in his good shirt pocket, already soft from being checked twice on the drive, detailed the estimated yield, both conservative and optimistic. It also included a drone photo of the trellis rows taken on Sunday, showing the plants just starting to set fruit, the small green berries barely visible against the foliage but there if you knew where to look. It was months off ripe, but you could already see the shape of the crop coming.

After three days of what still felt like unseasonable heat, the supermarket was a relief and it smelled like it always had, more or less: bread, and the particular cold breath from the dairy cabinet. The dairy cabinet itself, however, looked different to how he remembered it. It was less full, with more handwritten labels, and somebody’s name on a card under the yoghurt: Liesl’s. Mondays.

The woman at the front register clocked him before he had worked out who to ask for.

“You’ll be the muntries,” she said. It was not a question. She was already coming around the counter. “Toby, is it? I’m Mariana. I do Tuesdays.”

He had not told anyone his name was attached to muntries yet, as far as he knew, which meant someone already had. The size of the town had not changed, even if the supermarket had.

“I’ve got the numbers,” he said, and put the printout on the counter before she had asked for it, which he regretted as soon as he had done it. Mariana looked at it the way you would look at a kid showing you a school project: interested, unhurried, and in no rush to get to the part where she told him what was wrong with it.

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“The drone shot’s good,” she said. “Tells me more than the spreadsheet does, honestly. How many plants?”

“Twenty five trellis rows. Four years in the ground. This is the first year I’d call a real crop. They’re running about six weeks early, so we are expecting fruit by Christmas if the weather holds.”

“And that works for you? Christmas trade?”

“That’s what I am hoping.”

“And the rest of it? You’ve still got the dairy contract?”

“Coles broke that up in thirty-two. I’m with Riverina Co-op now. It’s wholesale, decent enough, but the freight’s killing me even with the truck on ethanol credits. Forty minutes each way before I’ve even joined the highway.” He heard himself getting ahead of where she had asked him to go and made himself stop. “I just thought that with Christmas and the visitors, there would be a market for somebody local doing muntries instead of trucking dried berries up from God knows where.”

“It’s a good thought.” Mariana folded the printout closed, careful with it, the way you would close a book you meant to come back to. “Here’s the bit nobody tells you on the way in, though. We don’t buy off growers. Growers join, and then we buy off members.”

Something tightened in Toby’s chest.

“Join, like...”

“Like there’s a meeting. Like you’ll need to come to a couple of things before anyone here’s spending co-op money on a crop that’s still green on the trellis.” She said it plainly, the way she would say a fact about frost. “The Purchasing Circle meets on the first Wednesday of the month. So the next one is tomorrow, you’d want to come to that one before the fruit is properly on. It will give everyone time to get used to the idea of you, not just the idea of muntries.”

“Who’s on it?”

“Helen Brandt. Graeme, you would know him, probably; he is married to Sascha.” Mariana watched something cross his face and did not comment on it, which he appreciated more than he expected to. “And me, this quarter. We rotate.”

Mrs Brandt would read the yield estimates the way she’d read his assignments, looking for the working he hadn’t shown. And Graeme he’d met exactly twice, both times at things Sascha had organised, both times with that particular awareness of knowing exactly which two people in the room used to be something to each other.

“Right,” he said.

“It’s not as bad as your face is telling me it’s going to be.” Mariana almost smiled. “Helen marks hard. Always has. She’ll ask you what happens if the fruit comes in small, what happens if it splits before you pick, whether you’ve got a plan if half of it’s not gradeable. Have an answer. That’s all marking ever wanted from you, probably.”

Toby looked at the dairy cabinet again, at Liesl’s name on the yoghurt.

“And if they say yes?”

“Then it’s not ‘yes, we’ll take the lot.’ Not year one.” Mariana was matter-of-fact about this in a way that made it easier to hear than he had expected. “We’d do a trial. Small volume, see how it grades, see how it sells, see whether visitors actually want to pay what fresh muntries at Christmas are worth, because most of them have never seen one, let alone eaten one off the plant.” She paused. “If it goes well, you come back to the Circle in the new year and we talk about next season properly. Real numbers, not drone photos.”

“And the rest of the crop? If I’ve got more than a trial’s worth?”

Mariana considered this the way Toby imagined she considered most things: without any apparent urgency, but like she was actually doing the considering rather than performing it.

“Honesty box,” she said. “A trestle table at your gate, a scale, a tin. You’d be surprised how much of the district still runs on people doing the right thing when nobody’s watching, especially around Christmas when everyone’s feeling generous and a bit guilty about something.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t replace the co-op. But it’s not nothing, either, and it costs you a trestle table and an honest sign.”

Toby picked the printout back up off the counter, the soft, much-folded shape of it suddenly looking less like evidence and more like something he had been hiding behind.

“Dad never would have done any of this,” he said, not entirely meaning to say it out loud. “He’d have just trucked the lot to Riverina and taken whatever they gave him.”

“Probably.” Mariana did not make anything of it either way; no judgment on the father, no congratulation for the son. “There’s no wrong way to get fruit to people, Toby. There’s just the way that suits you, and the way that doesn’t anymore.”

He folded the printout once more, smaller this time, and put it back in his pocket.

“Tomorrow” he said.

“Tomorrow.” She was already moving back around the counter, toward whoever had just come in behind him. “Bring the drone photo. Brandt’ll like that you measured something properly, even if she pretends she doesn’t.”

Muntries (Kunzea pomifera) are a native Australian groundcover plant that produces small berries with a spicy apple flavour. They grow naturally along the southeastern coast of Australia and have been eaten by First Peoples for thousands of years. The berries are high in antioxidants, higher than blueberries by most measures, and have a long history as both food and medicine. Commercial cultivation is still relatively new, which makes them one of those ingredients that exists between the ancient and the experimental. Fresh muntries are only available for a short season so most people outside Australia, and many inside it, have never tasted one.

The future has already arrived, it is just not evenly distributed.

Consumer cooperatives, native food cultivation and farm-gate honesty boxes feature in this Tuesday. None of this is invented, it all exists somewhere today.

We have everything we need.

Thank you for your support of The Art of Unravelling, I really appreciate you being here. I am keen to hear your thoughts on this place and what happens in it, I would like to know whether these images of 2037 help you face into the reality we find around us.

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The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.

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I have worked in futures and foresight for about 25 years now. One of the things you learn early in that field, from people like Richard Slaughter and Sohail Inayatullah, is that the images people carry of the future actually matter. They are not just decoration; they are something that shapes which way people walk. If you show someone a compelling picture of where things could go, they will move toward it. It is one of those ideas that has been around in the field for decades, and I still think it is basically true.

Here is the problem, though. Twenty-five years in, I find myself completely overwhelmed by the negative images currently on offer, such as collapse, locking the doors, and every dystopia you can name. I do not think they are wrong, necessarily. I just got tired of them being the only ones available, and tired of not having anything to reach for instead.

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So somewhere in the back of my head, I started asking what an actually positive image of the future would look like. I did not mean the naive kind where everything is fine and technology will sort it out, but something that could survive contact with how genuinely hard things are right now and still feel like something worth wanting.

I had been sitting with that question for a while when I read Samantha Sweetwater’s book True Human. There is a bit in there where she more or less dares you to imagine a world that is not organised around trauma: not a utopia where everyone is suddenly enlightened, just a world where harm is not the automatic price of belonging. I actually cried reading it, which does not happen to me much over a book, so I figured that was worth paying attention to.

After that, I did not want a model or a slide deck, as I have made plenty of those over the years and they do not move anyone. I wanted to know what that world would actually feel like to live in on the most ordinary day available, like a Tuesday. Someone dropping a kid at childcare. A meeting that runs too long. Nothing dramatic. I just wanted to know what is different, structurally, underneath a completely unremarkable day.

There is a William Gibson line futurists love: “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” I took that almost literally. Nothing here is invented. The consensus process the fictional town in these pieces uses is real. It is called Finding New Ground, originally Robert Chadwick’s work, and has been carried on for decades by Jeff Goebel, who I actually know and like a great deal. The cooperative ownership models are real. Indigenous governance has been holding things like this for far longer than any of our institutions have existed. It is all out there right now, just scattered across different places. I wanted to know what it would look like if some of it landed in the same postcode.

That postcode is a fictional town I have called Cuttawah. It gets there the unglamorous way: its one small independent supermarket closes around 2031, and the meeting they call to sort that out works well enough that they keep reaching for the same process every time the next thing breaks. By 2037, when these vignettes are set, nobody there thinks any of it is remarkable. It is just how things are done, the way nobody explains democracy to a kid who has grown up inside one.

Now, for the part I keep going back and forth on whether to mention, and have decided I should.

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I am not a fiction writer. Twenty-five years of strategy papers and scenario workshops does not exactly equip you to write a believable conversation between two people in a vegetable garden, and I found that out the hard way early on. So, I have been building these vignettes with Claude, the AI made by Anthropic, and I would rather say that plainly than leave it buried in the About page somewhere.

What that actually looks like is that I bring the world, including the characters, the friction points, the things I cannot stop turning over, and the bits that feel too neat and need pushing on harder. Claude drafts the prose. We go back and forth, sometimes a lot, until something feels lived-in rather than explained at you. I have given the project a fairly detailed brief to work inside, and a set of instructions I have come to think of as meta-relational: treat reasoning as a form of relating rather than a neutral operation; say where you are standing rather than pretending to speak from nowhere; listen for pattern rather than reaching straight for proof; and let contradictions sit as information instead of problems to be tidied away.

I tried doing some of this with ChatGPT first, for what it is worth, and it just did not take. I genuinely do not know why. Maybe it is something about how differently each system is built to hold instructions like that.

I am not going to pretend I know what that means about what is actually happening on Claude’s end of it. I just know I am one person without a writers’ room, and this turned out to be a way of actually building the images instead of just talking about why we need them. You will see these posts come out fortnightly for a while and then I will see how I go.

I have really enjoyed the process of creating the world and grappling with how to inhabit and then describe a world free of systemic trauma in a way that made sense to me, and hopefully to you.

The comments will be open, so let me know your thoughts. The first vignette will arrive tomorrow, and I hope you enjoy Cuttawah in 2037 as much as I do.

Talk soon

Rowena x

The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.

Buy me a coffee