LUCY, aka Lucy Aura, lives in a tent in the Australian rainforest with her two kids, seven-year-old Alana and five-year-old Asa. Despite the judgement she’s faced for her alternative lifestyle and parenting, Lucy says she’s “just being really comfortable with my choices, you may call me homeless but I’m at home with myself." Fed up of living in a tiny, confined apartment in the city and struggling to pay rent, Lucy decided to take the plunge and pursue tent-based living in 2022. The family now enjoy a more simplistic, stripped back way of life surrounded by trees and wildlife. Alana goes to nature school while Asa is homeschooled, and they spend most of their time barefoot. Lucy hasn’t been to the doctors in five years and doesn’t take her kids, preferring plant medicine instead. She’s passionate about urine therapy, which involves collecting her urine, drinking, and using it as a cleanser. Lucy has received no end of criticism for her controversial way of life with people saying she’s “crazy, mad, saying that it’s really extreme”. But despite what others may say Lucy has no plans to leave her tent home. She wants to instil in her children a free spirited way of thinking and teach them “you are free to live the life that you chose, if you want to go off and live in the woods, you can go off and live in the woods.”
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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]