00:00 I live in a tent with two kids and they love it.
00:03 I hope.
00:05 Do you love living in a tent, Nani?
00:07 Yeah.
00:07 I like drinking my own urine.
00:09 Mmm.
00:12 Yummy.
00:13 People have criticised my parenting style.
00:16 Calling me crazy, mad, extreme.
00:18 Can you sit down now?
00:20 So no regrets?
00:21 So this is where we live.
00:26 This is our tent home.
00:28 This is my son Asa.
00:30 And Asa is five.
00:32 And my daughter Alana.
00:34 And Alana is seven.
00:36 Okay, you guys want to go sit back there then?
00:38 Because he's going to ask me a few more questions.
00:40 Thank you, Asa.
00:43 We've been living in this way for about a year.
00:45 We first started living in a tent because of the rental crisis.
00:49 I didn't want a small unit.
00:50 And that's pretty much all we could afford
00:52 with the state of the rental market at the moment.
00:54 I was also working as a marine biologist
00:56 and I realised I was not happy.
00:58 I didn't have the energy that I really wanted
01:02 and the capacity to spend with my children.
01:04 Hey!
01:06 Mummy!
01:07 And so we moved into a tent
01:09 and I really love this way of life.
01:12 Can we have a group kiss?
01:15 Group kiss?
01:16 I love being connected to nature.
01:19 I love having the trees as my walls.
01:23 Just be gentle.
01:25 So this is Asa and Alana's room.
01:27 They've got all their toys.
01:29 So my kids sleep in the same room here
01:32 and I just sleep right next to them.
01:34 I think it's really important for good attachment
01:37 for us to be together and to feel safe.
01:39 It's how we've always been living in tribe.
01:43 I don't have lots and lots of rooms to clean.
01:46 I used to live in a four bedroom house with a swimming pool.
01:50 You know, I spend so much of my time
01:52 sweeping leaves out of the swimming pool.
01:54 This is literally all that I own in the world now
01:57 and I feel really grateful to have this simple existence.
02:02 My two children started the year at the Steiner together.
02:08 My son started there and hasn't really been enjoying it.
02:13 Hey!
02:15 You scared me!
02:16 Okay.
02:19 Oh, that's good.
02:20 Go on and then put it straight onto those firelighters.
02:23 And so I've taken him out and we're now,
02:26 I guess you would call it unschooling for the moment.
02:30 It's nice to be outside a lot, isn't it?
02:32 Do you like being outside?
02:33 Yeah.
02:34 You like collecting bugs?
02:35 Yeah.
02:36 Yeah?
02:36 And so I'm kind of exploring that with Asa at the moment,
02:39 just following what he wants to do.
02:41 And it seems like a lot of the time
02:43 he just really enjoys just chilling out,
02:45 reading books, listening to music.
02:48 He just really likes to kind of relax.
02:51 What do you like the most to do with the family?
02:55 What do you like most doing with me and Lani?
02:58 Being together.
02:59 Aw.
03:00 You want to come in?
03:02 Do you love living in a tent, Lani?
03:04 Yeah.
03:05 What do you like about being barefoot, Lani?
03:06 So then I can feel the grass.
03:09 Yeah.
03:09 Does it feel nice under your feet?
03:11 Yes.
03:12 Yeah.
03:13 Me and my kids are usually barefoot all the time.
03:16 Apart from in the wet season,
03:18 when it got really, really muddy,
03:19 we got a staph infection.
03:21 So you have to have a respect for nature.
03:24 So this is my Zen meditation medicine plant garden.
03:29 And the kids love the space too.
03:31 Yay!
03:32 To be surrounded by nature, in nature,
03:34 bare feet is the most important thing
03:36 for our health and for our happiness.
03:38 I don't take my children to the doctors for small things.
03:42 It would have to be something really major.
03:44 I believe what doctors can do is they can diagnose
03:47 from a physical perspective.
03:49 And that's really helpful some of the time.
03:51 We've got the lucky bamboo.
03:53 Lucky bamboo!
03:54 To bring us good luck.
03:55 And then what's this, Lani?
03:57 It's wild raspberry.
03:58 And wild raspberry is...
04:01 For kindness.
04:01 It's for kindness, and it's also for motherhood.
04:06 And I do urine therapy.
04:09 The whole idea of the urine therapy for me,
04:12 it's a self-love practice.
04:13 This is a fresh urine.
04:16 So I loop my urine, which means whenever I need the toilet,
04:19 I'll pee into a jar and I'll drink it.
04:22 There should be no part of us that disgusts us.
04:26 Mm, yummy.
04:28 I started off just putting it on my face.
04:30 It's really good for acne and skin conditions,
04:32 any eczemas or things like that.
04:34 When I first started doing the urine therapy,
04:36 my kids found it absolutely hilarious
04:39 that mommy was drinking her own wee.
04:41 But my kids, they're pretty light
04:44 and they're pretty funny.
04:46 And so now it's become very much more normalised to them.
04:50 They just see me doing it
04:51 and they don't really question it anymore.
04:54 OK, so hey, guys.
04:55 It's a really beautiful time of the day.
04:58 So I've been working on social media
05:01 for probably the last five years.
05:03 TikTok really just kind of took off.
05:05 When I moved into the tent,
05:06 I think people were just really interested
05:08 in living an alternative lifestyle.
05:12 Horse, cow, sheep, pig and cockerel.
05:17 I love a cockerel.
05:18 I put up a video of us in the tent.
05:21 Somebody commented, "Oh, it looks lovely,
05:23 "but I would be so scared that someone would come
05:25 "and snatch my children out of the tent."
05:28 And I literally commented underneath,
05:29 "Wow, that thought never entered my mind."
05:32 You know, "What about the snakes?"
05:33 Well, I feel blessed if I see a snake.
05:36 Can you recall some of the negative comments?
05:38 I've had lots of people say how disgusting it is
05:41 that I'm drinking my own urine.
05:42 Just woken up, I collected my first pee.
05:45 I've had lots of people just calling me crazy, mad,
05:49 saying that it's really extreme.
05:50 I can see from the responses and the reactions
05:54 how people are feeling this fear within themselves
05:57 of choosing another way of being able to live in nature.
06:00 Well, the day that I met Lucy,
06:05 and she told me that she had been living in a tent
06:08 at a local place here.
06:10 So my first thought was, "Well, if you've got two children,
06:13 "you better come here because I'll help you
06:15 "and I'll keep you safe."
06:17 The threat of being kicked out was, you know,
06:19 hanging over us in quite a few places.
06:21 So, and it happened three times.
06:24 So, I'm really grateful.
06:26 Hooray for me.
06:28 How has the community supported Lucy
06:30 through the judgement she's received about her parenting?
06:33 People say that I'm a bad parent.
06:36 I think living in a tent has been quite confronting
06:39 for a lot of people who want to project onto me
06:41 that I'm homeless, who want to project their fear onto me.
06:45 I don't have children.
06:46 I don't know what I'd do if I had children.
06:48 I'd be homeschooling them.
06:50 I wouldn't have them in the system at all.
06:52 Well, that's how I feel as well now,
06:54 but I'm also listening to my children
06:57 and following what they want.
06:59 So they seem happy and they seem a good family.
07:02 And I applaud Lucy's mothering technique.
07:04 I feel like, for me, because I think I haven't really lived
07:08 with people who are so aligned with me.
07:10 So it's really nice to come here and feel like,
07:14 like I'm a good mother.
07:16 Well, I think you are.
07:17 'Cause I kind of knew that I was,
07:18 but I had all these people telling me that I wasn't.
07:20 No, you're fine.
07:21 Hi.
07:24 Hello.
07:26 So, putting it out there and just being really
07:28 kind of comfortable with my own choices and saying,
07:31 hey, I'm a single mom living in a tent.
07:33 You might call me homeless, but I'm at home within myself.
07:38 What's Ace's destiny?
07:40 Climbing trees.
07:42 I want to be like a fish.
07:44 But you're not a fish.
07:46 I'm not a fish.
07:48 You're a human being.
07:49 Yeah.
07:50 In life.
07:51 I would love to teach my children similar values
07:54 to what I have and feeling like you are free
07:58 to live the life that you choose.
08:01 If you want to go off and live in the woods,
08:02 you can go off and live in the woods.
08:04 There's no limits.
08:06 So, no regrets?
08:08 No, I feel I could always go back to living in a house
08:13 if I wanted to.
08:15 Clearly, I don't want to at this time.
08:17 I was really enjoying living in this little kind of
08:19 fairy land space that we've created.
08:23 That's gonna make me sound really crazy.
08:27 (gentle music)
08:30 (gunshot)
08:33 (silence)
08:35 (silence)
08:37 (silence)
08:39 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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