I arrive at an oasis at a bend in the creek. The gully rises to a stand of eucalypts on the far bank as a perfect glade rolls out under my feet. It’s an isolated camp ground, and in most circumstances more than suitable. But this is no ordinary circumstance.
I need elevation. Stumbling forward, I climb out of the gully and pick out a crest at the base of a ridgeline leading further up the mountain. Here, a wide branched acacia sheds long black seed-pods on a green ledge overlooking the Goomburra Valley. After the recent rains, it’s a luscious promontory about two clicks from the dance floor, the bass emanating from somewhere below, an overture to a darkening mood.
As I scuttle to the deck, incensed crows open up with a fusillade of invective. Blue patches flash through an oppressive grey, winds accelerate and recede, mirroring my internal undulations. Dried leaves on a fallen branch chatter like bearers of uncertain tidings. Sounds from a system rise through the trees, sunlight and breeze remastering melodies en route to my ears on this solitary mount under a non-ordinary tree. Its swollen trunk possessing unusual waistline markings, the acacia’s generous boughs offer its leaves all the sunlight they need on this day.
But on this day, the clouds do not hang idle. Forming a restless roof, they offer protection from sun exposure and dehydration. Yet blustery winds show me no quarter, scattering thoughts and voiding my stomach in accompaniment to the wind-warped bass. Carrot and chickpeas splutter forth in cannonades of bitter fluid. Coughing up my spleen so close to the sky, I give chunderous applause to the performances in the valley below, even while I remain, myself, a pathetic spectacle to the birds.
It’s mid February and I’ve ranged a long way up stream. This is Main Range National Park in Southern Queensland toward the end of a long wet subtropical summer. I am at the far boundary of Earthfreq, an electronic music festival in its third year operated by the elf-like Paul Abad, DJ/producer and founder of Subterran. How I arrived in this valley, in this condition, requires some backswinging.
Photo: Chris JenkinsSeveral days before I was in Collingwood, Melbourne. Keele St to be precise, staying with my old friend Callum. A crossbreeding of SPECTRE’s Blofeld (minus the eyepatch) with Larry David, Callum is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne researching working class masculine narratives in film and literature. A local authority on “bogans”, “wogans” and “vogans”. But was he down with the entheogan? It was a haven in the tempest, the repartee welcome respite from the rigours of life at sea. But a storm front had been building. For two weeks I would throw lines at the bollards on Keele, sleeping no more than 4-5 hours a night in a front bedroom belonging to an absent housemate. In that time I imagined the room a cabin balanced on an unstable pier, lashed by howling winds and threatened by breakers. I also imagined one of the tenants, Kevin, a stealthy Korean IT worker who rarely left his room, performing a perverse sorcery deep into the night. I would become engulfed by a high-pressure system, mounting the ramparts, sweeping me off deck, setting me adrift.
From the Keele St pier, I cut the narrows of Smith St daily. With treacherous reefs and a weird rip, a confusion of TAB-centred desperation and Apology Week sentimentality, Smith St offered uncertain waters for the en-spirited voyager. A week passes into the next. Sometimes running errands, more frequently knowing no purpose, I cross into a subterranean delirium inhabited by dark archetypes, the dispossessed, and the disappeared. Its an inner city underworld populated by the shades of our selves, and other entities besides.
Gliding among shadows, one day I face off with a restless aya outside the Black Cat Café on Brunswick St, Fitzroy. Bearing rotten teeth and black eyes, a blemished-faced male about mid-twenties sat opposite cursing at some interference on an old Windows laptop. Unidentified hand gestures are performed in the space before him, and at me. Carving patterns in the air, it’s as though, a demiurge, he moves to conduct an unseen legion of shades through the device. Vulnerable, I feel host to an unusual presence. Would I disappear into the vortex opening before me? I bail before learning the answer.
The next day I enter Safeway at Smith and Hodgson. Several months before, at dusk in Friedrichstadt, Berlin, I descended the dark, cold and lonely grid of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”. Down there, after dark, camera-flashes illuminate specters inhabiting this field of concrete stelae testifying to a monstrous humanity. Specters or not, the truly frightful significance of this five acre work is that the boundary between the monument and the city around it is imperceptible. As paths descend in an undulating grid, stones on the sidewalk become low benches, then deeper slabs, and finally, the further one descends into the chilling complex, towering tombs, smooth and anonymous, leaning this way and that. Revealing how dehumanisation and horror are normalised via faint increments, pedestrians traverse the monument only seconds away.But now, I was caught in the unforgiving glare of a modern supermarket, savings-seekers fated to stalk the aisles for the terms of their natural lives, and be doomed by their choices for eternity. This was but a minor excursion across the insidious architectonic of supermarkets. But hunkering down over an acre of cheese, stalking a gallery of slaughtered animals, withering in a clinic of commodity fetishism, I wondered if I had merely turned a corner in the concrete grid near the Brandenburg Gate. Rounding the aisle, shadow bands disfigure shelves pitching forward in a terrifying blur. I clutch my trolley against the compression. Feeling numb now, I descend the aisle and stand at the edge of the abyss. The horror! … The horror!
The charts had blown overboard. The captain’s logbook had vanished. And the needles in the systems gauges whirred. I had become a misshapen brigantine, a ship of the dark line. A phantom vessel named Lunacy ploughing the shopping lanes off Smith, disturbing the warning bells in the 12 Items or Less sluiceway. Jostling my trolley out into the lane, I arrive at a confluence. From here, I could become exiled to the high streets, plunder the trade routes of the inner city, sail into uncharted silence.What spirit was abroad? What had gotten into my hold? An adequate answer may not ultimately arrive, but I will trace my wake back to late January, to the Rainbow Serpent Festival, the psychedelic trance and alternative lifestyle carnival in its 11th year near Beaufort outside Melbourne.
I caught a ride in back of a white Defender with John-Paris and his tall outrider Jules, neither of whom short of a smile and good humour, Paris a bloke George Johnston would have known as an “eternal barman”, Jules drawing back on a well crafted tube of Heavenly Music.
It's the tail end of January, and after two years on distant shores I returned to Australia, unloading from a Qantas airbus into the Rainbow Serpent festival. Head swimming in multiple time zones, I would enjoy the company of compatriots old and new, among them Alan “bags” Bamford, turning 50 on the dance floor, and travelling like someone half that age. Old ravers never die, they just ... never die.
A seasonal congress of all those knowing nods, smiles and infectious gestures, Rainbow is that rare symphony which makes an impression without too much pretension. Evoking an aesthetic combining larrikin with feralia, its population removed from the contessas of clubland or the alpha male posturing of the European trance circuit (e.g. German "Goa"). An avuncular topography, familiar but rarely short of surprises. While I’d travelled and lived in over a dozen countries in the previous two years, and while, as a Scout - and, what’s more, a patrol leader in the First Highton Rosellas - I’d learned to “Be Prepared”, I was ill-equipped for the foreign terrain I would soon enter.
Demolishing a single cone ice cream in front of a Mr Whippy van in the festival market, Martin was an unlikely shaman. Just down from us on this Sunday, 3,000 people were emptying their remnant sprite on the dance floor of the Market Stage, where my mate Shane was cutting shapes in the turf, a ribbon of his great grandfather’s service medals pinned to his jacket. It was Australia Day weekend, and, surrendering to the rhythms performed by local legend Andrew Till, a legion of trance troopers, these baked and bronzed diggers of dance, were earning their decorations.
Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum
A Song - Tim Parish
Around dusk the evening before, thousands gathered to witness an Opening Ceremony unparalleled in the history of Australian outdoor dance events. It was an elaborate Welcome to Country evolving considerably from former events to become a popular interactive spectacular. With a sand mandala on the dance floor (a serpent encircled earth depicting the Australian landmass), Uncle Ted’s welcome to country, a smoke cleansing ceremony, ochre-caked Koorie women and men performing dance, and a parade of honour, the event featured the kind of spiritually charged and cheese-injected flamboyance that Australians manage so well. At one point the crowd was singing the “I am/We are Australian” song at the behest of one of the older aunties present. Even the Japanese onlookers were lip-synching the Telstra anthem. Later, the MC’s had us all touching earth and sky and blessing the dance ground for a serious stomp.Photo: Tom Andrews
Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum
A variety of the scenes endogenous to Rainbow, along with various luminaries, were applauded as they paraded the outer circumference of the sand mandala. In costume, waving flags, raising cheers, they were introduced by the MCs. The parade of honour featured pagans, eco-warriors, peace activists, stilt walkers, fluffy ravers, and a woman in blue knee-length satin, her dress patchworked with countless Union Jacks and Southern Crosses, an ostentatious Aussie flaggette. This flourish struck me. It was an enfreaked version of the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony in Sydney 2000, which itself featured a smoking ceremony, Central Desert women performing a segment of the Seven Sisters dance, and, of course, a pageant parade. Like that event, the current proceedings were crowded with variety show entertainment. Hey Hey It’s Rainbow. But lets not forget that this intercultural ceremony evolved from the same commitment to legitimacy and belonging that filtered into the Olympics ceremonies, a desire building through decades of resistance and now apparently blooming at a time when even the most power-charged building on the continent – Parliament House – gets a smoking (on 13th February 2008 when in-coming Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, delivered the long-awaited apology to members and descendents of the Stolen Generations). But we were a long way from Stadium Australia, and Canberra. The guy in front of me was more likely on mushies than Fosters.
It’s a curious juncture, that place where the carnival (the place and time where truths are ruptured, authorities are lampooned and hierarchies inverted) and the ceremony (where religious and cultural authorities are propitiated and reaffirmed) collide. Where excess and abandonment rub up against ethos and law. Where parody penetrates pride. The RSF Opening Ceremony was that confluence, its atmosphere drawing from a mixture of laughter rippling across the crowd, and solemnity, a dutiful commitment to perform what is right. This mixture of joy and duty was also apparent at the Green Energy Stage operated by the Red Bus crew which was powered by 100% renewable energy (solar panels, wind turbines and bio-diesel) and evoked a desire for sustainable living practices as illustrated by carbon credit initiatives, composting toilets, recycling bins and the commitment to composting around site and in the market (where stall holders were obliged to use biodegradable plates, cups, bowls and cutlery). And somewhere in the conflation there’s theatre, like the Nomadic Nymphs who wandered the festival "in search of their lost love and life source", water. Pleasure cross-fading with drama, for its scale (maybe 7,500 people in 2008), Rainbow Serpent is at the leading global edge of alternative dance festivals.
Photo: sensesmaybenumbed
Photo: Chris JenkinsBut down in the market, I’m preoccupied with other matters. For one thing, I’d been invited to my old friend Phil’s place in Keilor East where Martin was holding a small ayahuasca circle.
Two days after the festival I find Martin grinning mischievously over the stove in Phil’s kitchen under a flight path of Tullamarine airport. Pieces of a fat Banisteriopsis caapi vine containing harmala alkaloids are bubbling away in a pot. Experienced with entheogens, Phil knows a smile himself. Decorated with statues, hand paintings, and wood carvings of varying spiritual traditions, the house is a suburban temple. The mood is calm, and there is no agenda, though it’s conveyed that going in with a personal intention is normal practice. I bring to mind the endeavour to “stay the course”, to remain committed to the role of storytelling, to document the lives and works of others, to contribute to the collective canvas, or some such. We had boarded, were taxiing for departure, the climb angle and destination unknown. Cushions, blankets, jugs of water, candles, and buckets … deep buckets … lined the apron.
Having fasted for a day, that night in Keilor East I drain off a cup of freshly prepared syrup. It’s nauseatingly bitter. Now night, the door to the backyard open, I lay back into the cushions and close my eyes. Over the next hour or so, foregrounding the ambient notes of Don Peyote, Ishq, and Pete Namlock, in the periphery of my vision there appear bust-like forms, some strangely familiar, glissading to meet my gaze, then vanishing as my mind pursues them. About an hour later, critical to the ritual, the potion is chased down with 200 mgs of DMT prepared from Australian wattle (Acacia). Sometime afterwards, I sense liquids snaking about my stomach and intestines, scanning my internal architecture. A sinuous sentience coursing through my body, hairline cracks forming on the lining of my guts. I form a sensation that wisdom, a perennial gnosis, is present, yet remains occulted, locked in an impenetrable black box. What was this device, and, more to the point, what lay inside? Could it be cranked like a phonograph? Would my ears interpret its frequencies? I seem to have become a caricature grinding this esoteric hardware. Sometime later, staggering with uncanny precision, I find the toilet. Rushing to unbuckle my belt, my backside smacks the seat and I perform a powerful liquid evacuation.
The others present vomit throughout the night, some spectacularly, poking fingers back to force the purge, up-ending to the accompaniment of Adham Shaikh. It was a savage soundbath. And amid the chorus, I detect Martin whispering to someone/something. The flight controller perhaps? While not joining the spontaneous acoustic bucket band, I’d overseen the spirit’s discharge astern. An end to the occupation. Anchorage in a calm harbour. Touch down. Or so I imagined. But I was unaware that the incursion was far from over. To remain at sea for weeks to come.
That morning, I departed the western suburbs for Collingwood, drifting, as it transpired, into a hypnagogic fugue. Afflicted by abdominal pressure, broadsided by dark influences, nauseated in the inner suburbs, I was swept into a lunar maelstrom, directed by a power stranger than fiction. In Collingwood, I developed an acute awareness of a hinge complaining ceaselessly on the door to the otherworld. At once, a dark recess formerly unobserved, and an arc from a lantern swinging there. A warning? A beckoning? I couldn’t be certain. But if ayahuasca holds a torch to the shadows, dispatches rangers into forgotten places, rendering inviolability history, its tendrils also reach out to compatriots in and of the Other, compelling one to seek both the Other and “the others", or indeed the Othering others.
And so, I waxed for an afternoon with Eamon “Jungle” Wyss, in the backyard atrium on Keele, under a lemon tree. Foregrounding a slanted sky, he sat on a bench transferring data. Jungle co-founded Melbourne’s Psycorroboree, whose sonic outlands, the Gaian Thump festivals, evolved into the Mythopoeia Gathering held at Opoeia, an Eco-Arts Retreat operating in the Angahook State Forest until 2007. These were formative gatherings in Melbourne underculture and its many afterparties. An unassuming and expansive weaver of threads, Jungle is also an unofficial doorman. Caretaker of the threshold. A midwife to the event horizon. After all, Opoiea means “to make open”.
The sun pierced the waters, washing me in a new light. Under these refractions, one afternoon in the narrows of Smith, my prow broke the surface and made toward anchorage. Churning in the shallows on an uneven keel, that day, during a partial solar eclipse, I made interception with the Kent St pub, a perfect bucket shop for a disembodied seaman. Seated el fresco with Undergrowth’s Tim Parish, Sarah McDonald, and Order of ChAOS magickian Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule, we poured over Orryelle’s “esoterotic” sketches, a magickal union of opposites sprouting from a sketch-pad, and to be reproduced in hir new "Graphic Grimmoire"
Conjunctio. I’d met Orryelle back in the mid-1990s at ConFest, back when s/he and, Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Co and The Mutation Parlour had mounted the unforgettable interactive ritual The Labyrinth. Drawing on Greek and other mythologies, the ritual theatre had Theseus slaying the Minotaur, the beast within. It struck me that the re-convergence with this trickster of myth, language, gender and transformation, this tireless chthonic syncretist, was, at this time, no small coincidence.And so it was like this, bobbing on the surface, plummeting to unusual depths and rocketing through the clouds, waning and waxing in an occult odyssey, that I spent two weeks in Collingwood.
My weary rig approached a critical horizon twelve moons from drinking the “vine of the souls”. I’d spent several hours that day in the Edinburgh Gardens off the shores of tranquility, but the winds were again picking up, the seas had grown menacing, and shadow bands raced towards the horizon. Earlier that night, in despair, I phoned friends seeking solutions to worsening spells of nausea, and imagined organ failure. I was vacillating. The pier had collapsed. Memories drowned in rapid review as I plunged into darkness. Dragged by turbulence along the seabed, disturbed sediment rose in clouds. The waters turned overcast, and ... I needed to vomit. I opened my eyes, lifted my head above the surface and sucked in a deep breath. I began heaving, violently. Dry-reaching, for the first time since that night under the flight path.
And thus, it commenced. That night, ascending, I floated subsurface, riding warm numinous currents, passing into unmeasured ecstasy. Beaching at high tide, I was saturated by wave upon wave of hallucinations. The convulsions triggered a euphoric surge through my systems equipment, precipitating a long rapturous duration. The floodgates opened, the flight data had been accessed, and although I’d not a processor capable of handling this raw information deluge, these were the most overwhelming readouts on record. Surfacing repeatedly, I found myself blowing like a whale. I came about, and the experience was unparalleled.
The Night Doctors - Tim ParishThough many have it that a saturation point may be achieved around 6 hours from consumption, two weeks from ground zero I seemed to have acquired what some call the “ayahuasca afterglow”. But in the calm waters of the following day, questions mounted. Principally this: had I located my Kurtz, and taken him out, before becoming him? Had I defeated the Minotaur? Willard had hacked down the Colonel with a machete. Theseus finished the beast with Ariadne’s sword and returned using a ball of thread. I hadn’t even a Leatherman Micra. A miraculous reversal had occurred, a tidal transit. Yet, like buckled flotsam, I lay ashore, foundering, without definition or clarity.
Loading my pack, I knew that I should leave these metropolitan shores and journey up river. To the headwaters, if necessary.
Photo: Ronnie SimulacrumIt was necessary. And so, two days later, having arranged a cheap flight to Dr Dave’s place, I washed ashore at Sunrise Beach near Noosa Heads on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. In the land of the gated golfing estate and doggie hydro-bathing services, heavy-bassed havens of dissent shelter by storm-wracked beaches. But, I was compelled to see a mountain range rise between myself and Golf Country. And so, nauseated in the tropics, I applied the wax and goofyfooted the estuary to Earthfreq, a “tribal” outpost 300 kilometers south up the Goomburra Valley.
Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum
It was a four hour drive from the coast. I arrived late Saturday, and crashed.
With Sun Control Species, Antix, Spoonbill and Abad himself on the Sunday bill, the day held much promise... But there’s nothing like well-made plans gone south. And magnetic south they went. Around midmorning, I wandered to the floor greeting a few old friends en route, among them wise and delightful zine queen and Earthdream veteran Kathleen Williamson. On the dancefloor brothers Tetrameth and Shadow FX were collaborating in the mix, with doofers performing vertical re-entries on the lip of a fierce rhythm. But I was floored by the vocal sample amplified at the moment I entered the dancescape. It was from, as I later discerned, Tron's bowl-quaking "Amasonic" : "ayaaaa... huasca...... this is the other psychoactive beverage," which in that moment evoked an extreme state of duende consequent to consumption. It wasn’t so unusual. After all, an entheogenic sensibility has proliferated within this scene, an encounter with otherness promoted from its foundations through sonic, visual, and textual media. But, it struck me as ominous, a perceptual cue hailing me like a harbour beacon rocking in a gale, a signal becoming visceral as my guts churned, ears thumped, and the music grew inaudible. I was stranded beachside on a sea of nausea. And it was king tide.
Agoraphobic mid-dance floor. Perhaps I shouldn’t have had those space laced fruit loops for breakfast. Nor the Boags I cracked afterwards. It was as if the sentient Bar Keep had looked the intruders square in the eyes and, pointing to the exit, demanded “YOU… OUT”. And so, marooned, still, I was compelled to show the nuisance the door. Wasn’t going quietly. But this was Bar Keep’s orders.
I had to evacuate myself from the area, before total immobilization. Fleeing up the valley, I traced the winding creek bed away from the party.
And so it was, meandering, in search of elevation, that I found the promontory and its acacia, under which I’d collapsed. The handle had been wound to its limit. Jeers erupted from the bush balconies. And my terrible cache would finally exhaust. If La Purge was a one-man circus staged above the headwaters, this may have been its dismal finale. A murder of critics hectoring the clown to the death, as rain squalls over a distant range…. And what was that slithering away into the undergrowth?
Sun Control Species was playing now, I imagined, drifting. Hours pass, and at some point the tide must have turned. The pall had lifted, the winds softened and a new light angled through the branches. The show over, the crows had grown satisfied, and the acacia bore a curious elegance. This was no ordinary tree, and I felt sheepish in its presence. I held it for a duration and stepped gingerly about my ridgeline station absorbing surrounding views through the eyes of a neophyte. It was as if I'd dwelt there for years, committing minute details to memory.
As distant kookaburras break their silence I descend from my mount through the long incline of sclerophyll. Upon the final approach to the gully at the familiar bend in the creek, I lurch sideways to avoid a large spider’s web. But then, a commotion freezes me in my tracks. I turn to look. A eucalypt is set in the gully wall. Like an angled chimney, its thick roots are visible as the wall drops to a serene rock pool and a green glade beyond. On the tree’s trunk in full repose and with neck and chest flared, there emerges the finest goanna I've ever set eyes on. Having jumped from its blocks further up the tree, its bulk now progressed in slow motion with the thinnest of heads falling slowly in my direction. It is an enormous Lace Monitor, maybe 1.3m in length. The guardian of the gully. A keeper to the mysteries. The sitter. And it is as if he is stating: “Go now … but remember, you are not alone”.
Painting: Natalie Bateman“I understand”, I whisper, stepping across the creek to the glade beyond. I move to the bank opposite the serpent, his elevated eyes tracking every step. Forming an S on the trunk above, he gradually re-assimilates into the tree. Crouching, I dip a head cloth in the pool and wash my face. Glancing about the glade, I feel like I’ve been leveled by a cosmic steamroller.
It was three weeks since the intervention in Keilor East. I’d skippered my rig round the Horn in violent seas, emerging, finally, under watchful eyes. Out there, at the furthest edge of the dance floor, I’d given my black box a crank. Kurtz had received a decent hiding, though I knew implicitly that he lurks, still, in the hinterlands.
And so, as the sun meets the horizon, awakening from this trance, I wander back to face the music…
Photo: JamardThanks to Tim Parish, Shiptu Shaboo and Natalie Bateman for their art reproduced here; to Ronnie Simulacrum, Chris Jenkins, Andrew Ford, Tom Andrews, Sensesmaybenumbed and Jamard for their great photos. And big thanks also to Callum Scott for sound advice on the narrative.
