Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum
You have to travel a long way up river to find him.
So far above the headwaters there’s barely a trickle. Under the withering south-eastern Australian sun in January, under the direct pressure of quality sound, in that primal real estate between the speaker stacks on Monday afternoon, on the Market Floor, Rainbow Serpent Festival. It doesn’t get much better than this. And somewhere, amid all that optimising, under all that tweaking of sophisticated hardware, in a vibrant undergrowth of bronzed bodies and baked wet ware, the Colonel is getting his freak on. This is not the bird-frying Colonel of take-out restaurant fame. He’s not your rank and file denizen of the trance floor. Somewhere in this theatre of the absurd, this paddock of pizzazz, this cavalcade of crank, the highest, rankest and most de-commissioned officer in the PLA (the Psychedelic League of Australasia), Colonel Kurtz, is at large.
It’s Australia Day weekend 2009, and I’m attending the nation’s psychedelic carnival: in all likelihood the funkiest dance festival on the planet. They’d made expeditions from across the country, and around the world, for the 12th annual Rainbow. I’d driven down from Brisbane, some 2,000 kilometres north. Via Coonabarabran near the Warrumbungle Ranges, through Dubbo and Deniliquin, I rode astride the long Barren Highway, over a landscape scorched by an unprecedented heatwave. Near Parkes I made passage through Bogan Gate and somewhere near West Wyalong drove into a freak storm, lifting as quickly as it set in.
The following day, Murray River ghost gums guided me home around Echuca way as my 75 series Land Cruiser crossed into Victoria, making for the town of Beaufort, west of Ballarat, the locale of the Mother of all Doofs.
Arrived near midnight, two days before the event’s official kick-off. 500 people were already on site, so it took some effort the following morning to locate Krusty. An altered statesman and luminary of the scene, he’d found some shade and began making camp – good thing, as by 10:30 AM the heat was making my blood crawl. Beginning with a shrine Krusty set against a tree, over the next day or two, the camp became a loose network of vans and tarps, peopled by a largely Melbourne based techno-cognoscenti. Adjacent, a non-intrusive independent sound system spilled warm tunes and mashups over my daily iced fruit loops.
Over the next couple of days the festival expanded like an inflatable tropical aquarium. More than 11,000 people eventually poured on site, a flourish of vibrance, colour and sound replenishing a punished land. With five stages hosting sounds and performances from straight-up progressive psychedelic trance to dub reggae, along with a Lifestyle Village (large workshops zone), Transformational Area (natural therapy) and Kid’s Zone, Rainbow Serpent has gained respect in the global alternative dance calendar.
Mirror ball fetishes sway from the trees of countless campsites like devotions to the Age of Disco-very. Tribal ensigns, entheogenic art and black light beacons are raised on and above this temporary sonicity whose inhabitants are infected by a wicked and knowing laughter. All around the site, curious sculptures, funny lights and cool interactive installations have appeared, perhaps none more impressive than a pyramidal structure called the LightScraper (check the
video here) built by ENESS in a paddock.
While the festal ambiance is fed by popular cultural imports (a small tribe of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles among them), local origins and mythologies are respected too (the story of the Rainbow Serpent chief among them). With traditional owner Uncle Ted Lovett leading the opening ceremony with his customary Welcome to Country, there was no doubting where I was. And as indigenous music, art and culture (Dugong cooking workshops, performance) danced in strange synchronicity with non-indigenous Australiana, illuminated by the flames of Robin Mutoid's fire organ, we were living an animate mythology.
Photo: Ben Dixon
Photo: Dallas CaseyLast sighted in these parts a year ago, Kurtz was inside the animation. The man who was “banned” from ConFest, the alternative lifestyle festival started by Jim Cairns back in 1976, which, by the 1990s, evolved into Australia’s premiere alternative gathering.
I’d first attended ConFest for New Year’s 1993/94, becoming so captivated that I returned 13 times, leaving finally in 1999 having completed a PhD thesis in anthropology on ConFest (part conference and part festival) and its organizing body, the Down to Earth Co-operative Society (DTE). In those early years of my attendance the event alternated between bends on the Murray River near Moama (at New Years ) and Tocumwal (at Easter).
Mutoid Waste Co Beetle Mantice at ConFest’s Teknow Village doof, New Year 1996/97
This was pre-invasion, according to the stalwarts of authenticity defending their beachhead from raving interlopers and the possibility of the newspaper headline "Five young teenagers dead at 'Go to Heaven in 1997 Spiritual Festival'". The pre-emptive headline expressed the fears and the fantasies of Les Spencer who distributed a document around DTE in 1996 instructing Confesters on the neo-sonic demonics of techno music. It all started with the arch-nemesis of old farts, none other than DJ Krusty, who in Easter 1995 teamed up with the Ci-Cada sound system detonating Goa Trance down town ConFest to the chagrin of inhabitants unsettled by the Vooor Vooor Vooor Vooor propagating across the billabong and upending their asanas. The following year, Krusty attempted to shift the doof to the DTE Winter Solstice Gathering. But his efforts to obtain approval (and funding) were hampered by DTE, which, under the ministrations of defender of "the ConFest spirit" David Cruise, ruled that the event's postered image of psilocybin compromised ConFest's reputation as a "family" event.
The doof that never was
For those seeking a place for the doof outside the ConFest city-limits, the negation was disingenuous. The oldies appeared to be behaving more like over-sized children than wise elders. It was Krusty vs Crusty. And the cultural war would begin with earnest. By Easter 1997, the Doof at the Murray river site near Moama, a collaboration of Krusty's TeKnow village and the Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Company's Labyrinth, took place on the most elevated part of the site, where all were subjugated by the beats. When, with horn honking, director-turned-vigilante, Laurie Campbell, drove onto the dance floor intending to tow away the generator, the theatre was in full swing. But when someone reached in, snatched his car keys and chucked them into the Murray River, the doofers declared that they weren’t going quietly.
When, in the next act, Laurie returned holding a hatchet with which he intended to stab the beast (the generator) in the belly, he was gang-tackled, brought to ground, and dispossessed of his prop (by none other than Robin Mutoid - who then lobbed it in the river). But while Laurie was prevented from hacking into the 3-phase generator cable (and likely electrocuting himself), under Cruise control, with the support of Spencer and an anarcho-gerontocracy, DTE would oversee the axing of the doof menace, despite efforts by the likes of Joe Stojsic, another of my Rainbow campmates, to augment a compromise in a techno-acoustic "village" he called "Hybrid". With more than an echo of Nancy Reagan, as the signature file of one detractor had it: “Just Say No to Techno”. In this climate, voting blocks of those identified as ConFest Negator Tribalists (or CNTs) slashed funding to techno digital arts, psychedelic culture and forest activism. Amid the boundary maintenance was Kurtz, who once held a series of unobtrusive Psychedelic Spirituality workshops at ConFest, becoming the subsequent target of a bizarre hate campaign. Public enemy numero uno.
With his photo pinned at the entrance over successive ConFests, the gossip moved faster than a fire front on Back Saturday, and even more toxic. Amid dark fantasies of village water supplies spiked with acid, sexual abuse, and innocents abducted by techno-terrorists, a scapegoat for all the imagined dangers bedeviling their retirement village, Kurtz was bound, packed with the community’s nightmares, and driven off into the Never Never. A flaccid Cruise was seen parading at subsequent ConFests in a body painted flight suit under a banner which could have read "Mission Accomplished".
But what’s this? Surviving the Department of Justice (who had appointed an administrator to DTE in 2001), here they were, Cruisy and Les - out here in Never Never Land. The two most responsible for "saving ConFest" by carefully manufacturing, and leading crusades against, its enemies, stepping into the land of nod, nod, nod, nod. Over ten years later, I guess they came to see where everyone went. I meet Dave and Les in the workshop area late Sunday. The former sitting quietly nursing a video camera and carrying the kind of weariness I imagine one acquires scanning the horizon for spooks. Wearing earplugs, with no music amplified within the proverbial Coooeeeeeeee, Les delivers a 20 minute monologue on his recently completed PhD on what he calls the Laceweb. What are they seeing here, I wonder. And what are they hearing?
Col Kurtz and the Gesticulations
Photo: SensesmaybenumbedA Kingswood ute reverses slowly towards the Market floor. In its tray, couches hold raucous team-mates barracking for spirit. And their view? It's nothing short of sensational. Early afternoon and six thousand people are being dumped by long swells of funk. My woggle fully toggled, I bob across the sparkling sea on this longest of Mondays. That outfit from Cairns sharing their fleshy membrane with this crew from Doncaster East. Those bogans from Ballarat merging with these travelers from Israel, and those two recurring cute girls from Japan ... they are eternal. I make mid-floor interception with a cluster of marijuana plants offering the most organic decor in memory.
Familiar faces emerge from the deep. Rusty, I haven't seen for years, his scout uniform bristling with activist and esoteric insignia. Nano, a real life Drop Bear hunting action figure, lounges on his game, finding patterns in the chaos. A Norwegian goddess whose name I knew not but whose smile I knew well shouts stories of some other event on another continent. The illustrious gonzoloid Rak Razam, who with artivist-at-large, Tim Parish, had launched
The Journeybook, a collection of entheogen-inspired narratives and imagery, on site. Holding an umbrella against the sun, under crown and in familiar tie-died uniform, the resplendent King Richard holds court in this federation of fedoras. And abandoning his command on the heights above the Market Floor, the Colonel himself now draws up among us, raising his side arms with uncanny precision, grinning under bass pressure, gesticulating in tongues.
And as I gaze to the right of stage ... there they are. A short squat figure and a taller man with grey beard. It's Cruisy and Leso, standing back beyond the stage, thin lipped at the spectacle. I imagine that they are staring directly at me. They
are staring at me.
At us! I wave, gesturing that they join me, join
us, in this rare place under the sun.
Vooooooor Voooor Vooooooor Voooor.......
But like zoo patrons populating the safety margins beyond the primate enclosure,
flâneur inspecting the contents of a terrarium, they are standing outside the vibe. They weren't intending to dive into these exotic waters off the Cape of Good Vibes. They were having none of it. Perhaps this is a case, as George Carlin once observed, that "those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music". Perhaps they're archonic inspectors searching for the WMDs they're certain are here. Sappers acquiring co-ordinates for a fire-strike? I don’t know, but the grooveless armada vanish into the haze as we warm to the synaesthetic currents in which we're immersed. And as I come about to an electronic funk quaking with tremors, turns and bombastic vocal samples, I know this isn't ConFest anymore. And, incidentally, it also isn't a European psytrance festival where intrepid adventurers are tasked to scale the summit of the progression. Under the relentless southern sun, amid techno-ferals and raving mates heir to a thousand backyard BBQs and a million corroborees, we are mounting a progression all of our own.
Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum
Photo: Beautiful WwworldCanadian puppet master Mathew Jonson is now conjuring a tech-tonic storm, the platform built throughout the morning by the likes of Reality Pixie, Sun Control Species, and Sensient, the salviated aural animatronics of the former (Darren Smith) benchmarked by his driving Schnickschnick which caused a sensation if for nothing more than the carefully crafted samples evoking psychedelic bogans of the third kind descending among, and getting up, us. Saddled up, and divining the spirit amid a groove intoxication that was growing phatter by the hour, the man of stainless steel, the Swedish Chef, held his Nangerator - the Whipped Meme Dispenser - aloft. Repurposed widely as a means of inhaling the compressed contents of nitrous oxide bulbs (or nangs), the gourmet whipped cream machine is a tool for assisting the gnosis, accessing the mysteries, downloading the shit.
Out here, the Nangerator is in high demand, for the mysteries are nigh and the Pope of Nitrous is calling in the reserves. On this Aussie Day weekend, in the strange wake of the NO2 assaying of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William James, and Ken Kesey, the dance floor might be a football field, the footie a nang drop-punted through the posts ... and the Rainbow dream team captain? Why, it's Kurtz.
The Kernel of TruthTo speak of progression is to speak of mystery - that which compels action, which motivates the sacrifice of energy in the pursuit of spirit. Gathering strength, we're at a significant site of the mysteries provoking and channeling spirit in all of its forms. And I say "we" since it is inside the optimised vibe where a multitude of individuals holding unique life stories, and pathways into this day, onto this space, may transcend their uniqueness by the most historically evolved means – that is, by dancing with others in a space-time which is remote, temporary and vertical. Such logistics enable a simultaneity of singularity and theatricality, evident in the rites of the Dionysian Mystery cults of Ancient Greece, and in the corroborees performed for scores of millennia in these lands by the Wathurwurrung and Djarwarrung. Since at least the 1960s and 1970s, alternative festivals have offered a means by which this logic (edge + brief + high = wow) has been adopted, resurrected, and, more recently, remixed.
Photo: Ronnie SimulacrumAnd so you once had ConFest, an event whose cooperative framework, whose grassroots anarchist principles, enabled its social organicism and its "spirit". ConFest's spiritual ethos reveals a desire to remain free from possessive materialism, at the same time enabling experimentation with a multitude of alternative discourse and practice within its borders. This was a serious alternative cultural investment since 1976, and in the early to mid 1990s ConFest was a hot-house of ideas: permissive, exciting, diverse. But with nepotism, bigotry and CNTs characterising and populating Down to Earth, its event grew insular and, to the frustration of many, pointless.
Commentators have held that DTE's cooperative ethos made for a more open, virtuous and authentic event. But early in the new millennium, ConFest had transformed into a remarkably closed phenomenon, many of its innovators and activists ran out of town by possessive sheriffs. The Colonel was only one of these outlaws, although perhaps the most spectacular. With an early incarnation at the Tocumwal ConFest at Easter 1996 - where Krusty dubbed the doof village "Rainbow Dreaming" - The Rainbow Serpent Festival is a commercial enterprise. But it has evolved into an alternative carnival unparalleled in Australia, save perhaps for the Exodus festival. Its roots in electronic music, specifically psychedelic trance, colours its trajectory, as does its capacity to accommodate outlaws, the outraged, and the outrageous. Rainbow Serpent is much more than an electronic music festival. For one thing, music styles are diversifying. More widely, a commitment to support a local alternative arts scene, and host sustainable practices and indigenous culture within its precincts reveals a growing vision. More importantly, Rainbow Serpent, and a variety of smaller local event-crews, are vehicles for the evolution of a hybridized doof arts scene that, from its inception, has been sensitive to ecology and indigeneity, ceremony and celebration. And with support given for the augmentaton of its Opening and Closing Ceremonies, ConFest never had such an indigenous spirit.
Opening Ceremony Parade. Photo: Alicia Flanders
Closing Ceremony
Writing on West African possession cults, anthropologist Steven Friedson comments that in Africa "who you are often has as much to do with how you dance.” The statement offers some insight for Rainbows, but it may not be how you dance by comparison to others but that you dance
with others. Here “possession” seems more intersubjective despite the fact that there are no universally identifiable deities or spirits of "possession". This is the terrain of
the vibe, and it seems fair to say that, however you may struggle to describe it, the vibe cannot be experienced at home alone. At the thick end of the Rainbow, vibrating in its refracted hues, an optimised state of being together with others enables our encounter with the Other, including our other selves. These transpersonal states may provoke revelations about the universe and questions about our place in it, or they may confirm a spectrum of visions.
Yes, we were seeking answers and finding questions in this open classroom under the Southern Cross. And if there was a clear affirmation resonating as the orange disk slid beneath the western horizon, as traditional owners closed the festival under didj, drums and burning eucalyptus, in response to the Hendrixian question remixed in Sphongle's debut release
Are You Shpongled?, it was as if we were declaring …. “yes, we are”.
And yes we are. The words I heard escape from the lips of the good Colonel as he was being shredded by electronic machetes.
"the colours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the colours"
Tim and Rak strapped in on the launch pad of The Journeybook .... This is Houston, come in 13..... 
Photo: Dallas Casey
