Paper short abstract:

New farmers in Tasmania are learning how to live and how to become locals through their locally produced and distributed food. As they do so, their practices, identities, relationships to others, including state agencies, oscillate and appear contradictory as they bricolage their new lives together.

Paper long abstract:

Working with people who have started to farm in Tasmania, with no immediate farming experience, I have started to pick up on oscillations in their identities as they narrate their lives and oscillations in their relationships with others, including state supervision and surveillance.

These people can be thought of as being out-of-place, and as they are learning how to become farmers, they are learning how to become locals through the local food they produce and the local networks they are forming. As one person put it - they desire local action with no government involvement.

It has been suggested that we are transitioning from a National Age to a Network Age, where people are presented with greater opportunities for resistance. For some of these Tasmanian new farmers, that resistance is to a perceived unhealthy way of life related to mainstream food production and distribution - at a local and a global scale. Resistance is not always consistent and, like an individual's identity, it can look contradictory from the outside. And that resistance has an affect upon the things being resisted.

Our personal identities and national identities contain ambiguities and are in flux. Even our local food is rarely that local - out-of-place people are raising out-of-place plants and animals, performing a bricolage as they cobble together practices.

This paper will consider how new farmers in Tasmania are blending seemingly contradictory aspects of their own identities, their food production and distribution networks, and their relationships with other people and state agencies.