Autobiographical essay 1
Saving the World
Before the bucolic, feel-good, spirit-addled cult of self had settled on the title New Age, it fell under the rubric of ‘alternative lifestyles’. In 1973, in my first undergraduate year, intrigued by the promise of a socially and environmentally gentler society, I attended the alternative lifestyle ‘Aquarius Festival’ at Nimbin in northern NSW, organised by the Australian Union of Students. I got there by responding to an unmissable ad of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet stripes, the most vivid poster in a monochrome agitation of fliers on the University of Melbourne student union noticeboard. It was an invitation to join others with extra cheap tickets bulk purchased to travel and tent together. Late April in the union buildings’ graduate lounge, I met up with the other respondents, a packed room of men and women, mostly older than me: post-graduates who seemed already acquainted. I felt like a stranger, but the low cost and convenience won me over.
On the appointed afternoon in May, we boarded the festival train the student union had hired at Spencer Street station. I found a place on one of the facing bench seats in the six-person compartment with five of the men who had been at that uni meeting. I ate my pre-packed dinner cold and roamed the kaleidoscope of couture, jabber, luggage and anatomies jammed into every carriage before settling back into my place. To sleep upright, we rested our feet on the bench seat next to the person across. I was nodding off when a dark-haired girl about my age opened the sliding glass door of our compartment, poked her head in from the corridor and asked in a shout: “Anyone in here wanna root?” The opportunity appealed, but losing my virginity in a very public place to someone I had never met didn’t. In any case, I was too shy to squeak a word. I expected a parry of takers among the men, but none showed the slightest interest. I thought they must be so experienced they couldn’t be bothered. How cool. She returned twenty minutes later with a muscled high schooler from another compartment, rolled out a mat and blanket on the floor between our seats, ducked beneath us with her beau and commenced what became an intermittent nocturne of humping. I managed to keep my mind off the goings on under my legs and navigated to sleep reviewing past conversations and mentally overflying favourite topographies (a lifelong habit).
Arriving at Sydney’s Central Station in the middle of the night, we were woken by a crash and jarring as the harbour city’s festive carriages were shunted into and added to our own. What I remember most of that long, lumbering day train of counterculturalists snaking up the NSW north coast was the acrid bouquet of dope and never quite being able to reach out the window far enough to grab a banana hanging from one of the trees lining the track.
My carriage companions had arranged their own transport from the Lismore railhead, so I took the bus to the festival grounds, where I was met by one of the organisers. Escorting me through the tent, marquee and tepee-speckled fields, my naiveté must have been apparent because he turned and asked: “You know it’s the gay tent?” Instantly, I realised the chromatic poster on the uni noticeboard was not, as I had assumed, a symbol for what AUS was promoting as the countercultural ‘rainbow region’ of northeast NSW. Those five men weren’t playing cool. But I had nowhere else to go.
On the first morning, I woke to the noise of crinkling sleeping bags and a whispered argument. Sprawled next to me on a one-person camping mat, two women parted their embrace. I pretended to be asleep. I could hear them stand and dress, opening an eye as they left the tent barefoot, still feuding. Troubled by my presence, that night and often thereafter, my lack of attraction to my own sex was diagnosed by the men as either bourgeois socialisation or neurotic inhibition. I told them I’d think about it. I was also privy to hearing about my tent companions’ lives and politics. Clandestine hookups. Parties. Orgies. Coming-outs. Police assaults. Rent boys. Law reform. Rainbow activism. Gay rights (‘queer’ and LGBT et al were not then de rigeuer). In the Nimbin pub, two fellows from my tent performed a very theatrical and passionate kiss. The busy venue instantly went quiet. Old locals gaped. I thought the men were brave.
There was much to delight in. The rustic village sat (and sits) in a green vale enclosed by steep hills, luxuriating in sub-tropical rainforest punctured by fingers of volcanic stone and waterfall gullies, and, everywhere between, lush valley flats and rolling meadows dotted with farmhouses, dairy cows and banana patches. Throughout the festive zone, there were stalls displaying delectable fresh produce from the region’s growing band of organic farmer new settlers. Longhaired, kaftan-attired meditators could be seen seated cross-legged somewhere on just about every grassy verge. On Nimbin’s main drag, Cullin Street, revellers swarmed, painter Benny Zable was at his easel, and the alluring din of reverberating instruments and voices saturated the air. Most nights, the fog was so dense our torches wouldn’t penetrate more than arm’s length. Like bats, we navigated by sound, approaching, greeting and passing each other unseen or as ghostly apparitions with talk, humming, calling and song, tinkling bells, drum beats, guitar strumming, hand clapping, and stomped footfalls. Exploring Nimbin in the dark was eerie and uncannily sociable.
The Aquarians I encountered uttered a smorgasbord of contrarian polemics, some of it innocuous. Love the one you are with. Eat organic. Grow your own. Think holistically. Meditate. Aromatic essential oils are calming. But many more ideas struck me as misguided. Cities cause every social problem. Clothes are oppressive. Crystals are magical. Chemicals are bad. Aging is curable. Our minds create all illness. The stars predetermine our destinies. Bad parenting causes all psychosis. Drinking urine is a prophylactic. Re-living birth cures trauma. Eating meat makes you aggressive and sick. Conventional medicine is a scam. Try any drug. Use intuition, not reason. Feelings are truer than logic. Technology is bad. Everyone needs a guru. People have past lives. No government is lawful. War has never achieved anything. Nothing is worth dying for.
And there was the rage. I expressed admiration for an isolated old tree in the jungly Tuntable valley outside the festival precinct, to which a woman wearing a peace sign necklace reacted: “Don’t be an idiot. It’s an ugly feral that’s out of place here. It should be cut down. Every non-indigenous tree in this country has to be got rid of”. I didn’t say so, but the species wasn’t what she thought it was – a weedy camphor laurel – but a native blue quandong (Elaeocarpus grandis). On another occasion, I watched a mother take an ice cream cone from her toddler after a dog licked and gulped it half off. When the child cried, another woman called out that the mother was “a fucking dog-hating witch”. At dusk one evening and in apparent contravention of a tacit agreement with the organisers to not do drug searches, a police car drove into the festival grounds. Within seconds, the vehicle was surrounded by hundreds of people pouring in from all directions, hollering invectives. The mass pressed against the trapped car was rocking and hammering it hard with their fists. I was close enough to make out terror in the faces of the two officers inside. After a loud and tense few minutes, somehow an agreement was reached between the police and a festival representative, who then asked people to step back so the constabulary could leave.
A week in, rambling in a cloud of loneliness and fatigue, I came across a marquee hyping spiritual massage. In the doorway, a sylph-like lass introduced herself as a spiritual massage therapist. She invited me to lie down on my back on a spongy dhurrie. Kneeling over me at my side, she asked what was troubling me. I blacked out. For how long, I don’t know. I came too with her green eyes staring at me tenderly and speaking in a low soothing voice, “You are stressed, you need to rest, you’ll be OK”, her cool hands cupping my ears and jaw. She then massaged my scalp. I returned the next day but was told the person I described had gone home to Sydney. I never knew her name.
I was enthralled by the energy, the creativity, the music and the Edenic setting of the Aquarius Festival but repelled by the decadence, anti-intellectualism and self-righteousness of many of those I met and observed. I realised I couldn’t be a hippie or even a hippie sympathiser. My disillusionment with the counter culture was devastating, but, fortuitously, assuaged by the wisdom, friendship and mettle of four people I met later.
*
I had taken a year off town planning studies, only to return, in 1975, to a peasant student house of twelve, a converted two-story pub, in North Melbourne, raging with personality conflicts. A day or two after moving in, I marshalled a student demonstration against native forest woodchipping in Melbourne’s city square. I accepted a fellow protesters offer to create a ten-metre banner, only to twig to my dire embarrassment when it was unfurled for The Age newspaper reporter’s camera that my co-conspirators had spelt ‘forest’ with two r’s. Anxiety and melancholy rebounded. Sensing my despondency, Gregory Roberts, a blonde pony-tailed, wiry, straight-backed, thin-faced, square-jawed co-tenant noted for wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt in all weather, took me aside to enquire into my well-being. He welcomed me into his black-curtained lodgings where he held court daily with a circle of friends, family and guests discussing ideas, literature and the personal. I overlooked the presence of drugs, grateful to be allowed a place in his world. He encouraged confidence in my own judgement and recommended readings that would help me come to terms with my experiences, among them, the writings of Karl Marx. Greg helped bestow me a materialist perspective on my own and other people’s lives, the fortitude to finish my studies, and the courage to imagine what became, years later, my truer vocation. It was impossible not to be dazzled by Greg’s vigour, self-confidence, generosity and intellect. Some of his lecturers in Melbourne University’s English Department were touting him as a “future Hemingway”. Not long after the household broke up, Greg was jailed for armed robbery to fund his addiction. In 1980, he escaped Pentridge prison. Twenty-three years later, the publication of Shantaram, recounting the exploits of a life on the run, confirmed the literary promise derailed by heroin.
The next year, 1976, in the library of the Australian Conservation Foundation, researching a paper for my course I met a humanities student, Anne Doble. Our interests overlapped, but unlike me she was witty, self-assured, had an incisive political mind and an uncompromising moral compass. At the time, many on the left vigorously opposed allowing refugees, the so-called South Vietnamese ‘boat people’, into Australia because of their purported complicity with the despised pro-American regime. Dozens were dying at sea in leaky vessels escaping persecution by Hanoi. While I vacillated, Anne was appalled. To her, it was irrelevant what these refugees’ political beliefs might be or what some of them might have done; our own government supported their side in the war; in any case, the majority were women and children; they are fellow human beings first and foremost; they will die without our help; we have an obligation to care for them on that basis alone. Anne argued far too many supposed ‘progressives’ were blinded to reason, compassion and moral clarity by their political (or other) identity. This produced attitudes indistinguishable from the worst bigots on the right. She contended this cognitive and moral confusion was due in no small part to the corrupting effect of rampant individualism, American historian Christopher Lasch called The Culture of Narcissism. Over the course of several years and many conversations, Anne overturned the way I thought about personal responsibility, social change and ethics. It was no surprise when she eventually partnered with her equal in the brilliant public intellectual, Robert Manne.
It was in that third year as a student of planning that I shared a sea-grass floored terrace house in Canning Street, Carlton, with mellow, bearded, vegetarian, environmentally conscious architecture student, Graham Bolton. We acquired our clothes, household appliances and furniture pre-loved as much to undercut our ecological impact as to save money. We both had driving licences, and Graham owned a car, but we shopped and commuted by bike. Our retail purchases were packed and carted in perpetually re-rinsed and re-used plastic shopping bags. From Graham I learnt about passive solar design, rammed earth construction, vegetable composting, the culinary pleasures of meatless cooking and jazz: hearing his Keith Jarrett Koln Concert vinyl LP was a revelation. I, in turn, alerted him to the menace of low-density suburbanization, car dependency, freeways and the delights of challah (braided egg bread) and mohntaschen (poppy seed cake). For half a year, we sublet the spare room to a slender, reticent, tender-hearted American expatriate, Emma Moodie. In 1973, she and her husband, David, skipper of their yacht, Fri, risked their lives voyaging to Mururoa atoll in French Polynesia to protest French nuclear weapons testing. Their courageous act of civil disobedience was headline news around the world for weeks. Emma still hadn’t recovered from that ordeal. Like Emma, Graham and most of the other young environmentalists in our circle, I had faith that low-consumption, low-impact lifestyles, peaceful resistance, unfeigned goodwill, true participatory democracy, and (for me) evidence-based reason could and would save the world. Sadly, Graham passed away in 2012.