Ben's Blog

l want to tell you all about a little surprise some of the local yokels have cooked up for you. A gathering of such immense proportions it could be bigger than the truck show, bigger even than the Monster Meeting of 1854, with similar repercussions.
The midwives of this audacious attempt to sculpt our minds, is a hardened group of seasoned activists called Local Futures. This mob have been putting on these shindigs all around the world for several years now:
Berkley and Byron Bay in 2013 (Soul Sister Cities)
Bangalore in India in 2014, Oregon, Soel and Castlemaine this year. So we are in illustrious company.
All part of a momentous global upheaval taking place before our very eyes.
So, you may be asking yourself, ‘what the fuck is it all about?
Well as far as l can gather with my limited schooling, it all revolves around this word relocalization, a buzz word that seems to mean localization that you do again.
Basically the idea is we all spend a very intense 3 days nutting out the nuts and bolts of how to run our own lives without the ‘help’ of the Corporate Megalomaniacs and Blood-thirsty War-mongering Psychopaths that run the world at this present juncture in time. People, and l use that term loosely, that think nature was put there by god for their own personal use.
At the end of the gig, we shall then send said Powers-That –Be, a terse text message informing them that their services are no longer required and recommending they go home and spend more time with their families.
(if anyone has their phone numbers that would be much appreciated)

As l said, l do believe that nothing as big as this has been accomplished in a town as small as this, by such a rag-tag bunch of rank amateurs, anywhere in the known world.
Where else would you expect to see people milling about in such multitudes, plotting the demise of the Oligarchs? The United Nations perhaps, the climate summit in Paris maybe?
With just a smidgeon of hyperbole l declare this could very well be the seed that grows into the mighty red gum that can withstand the ragging torrent and the endless drought.
This conference could very well turn out to be the founding stone of the most progressive town in Australia, if not the world.
Everyone is welcome!
Attendance is compulsory
Come along and help build a whole new paradigm, one mud brick at a time, then when your grand children ask you:
“Nona, where were you when it all began?”
You can say:
“l was right here in Castlemaine, doing my bit.”

Local Lives – Global Matters

Ben Laycock 2015