Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  Motivation

  The back-to-the-earth movement is self-motivating; that is, it is not a result of government policy or economic pressure. Often those involved in it are trained for work other than farming, and voluntarily give up their jobs or transfer their work to the country. As far as I can detect, there is no classical anarchism, or socialism, apart from simple ‘co-operativism’. There are some purist christian and eastern religious (Hare Krishna and Meher Baba) communes. The Israeli kibbutzim schemes have influenced some people. I can’t find political theories or a political vocabulary in the conventional sense, and, except for Nimbin and the religious groups, the movement does not proselytise.

  There is mysticism in the movement. It goes from the formalised mysticism of Hare Krishna and Meher Baba to a low-key, non-doctrinaire form of Australian transcendentalism. This is not as total or as fierce as, say, that of Thoreau: ‘What after all does the practicalness of life amount to. The things immediate to be done are very trivial. I could postpone them all to hear this locust sing.’ But there is a recoil from the ‘artificiality’ of city life, a stress on the primary intuitions, and a belief in beneficial psychological changes from being close to plants and animals. There are traces of pantheism, belief in illimitable human potential, and anti-materialism. And basic anti-city emotion.

  But the Australian back-to-the-earth movement keeps mysticism well supported with ‘functional’ justifications for the leaving of the cities – health, advantage for the rearing of children, escape from psychological or physical dangers of city life, such as pollution and stress. The statement of aims of the magazine Earth Garden has the functional-mystical balance: ‘Earth Garden presents a range of natural life-styles. It is intended as a key to sources, practical ideas and alternatives to the nine-to-five drag. Earth Garden is concerned with the back-to-the-earth movement, surviving in the city, living in the country, organic gardening, community, outdoors, food and diet, living more with less, and the inner changes which follow when you are in tune with nature. Let us lead you up Earth’s Garden-path to the good life.’

  Earth Garden, Grass Roots and the newspapers produced for the Nimbin Festival use the jargon of technology – input, output, resources, data, tools, hardware, software, soft technology, structures – together with articles on theosophy, yoga, fasting and eastern religions.

  Apart from mystical justifications and functional advantage, an ideology of self-reliance, self-improvement, is also present. Although the context is fashionable and radical, its ideas are from small business and individualism – ‘making do with less’, ‘testing yourself’, ‘independence’, ‘being your own boss’, ‘regaining control of your own life’.

  Finally, ecological theories and data are probably the strongest single intellectual spur to the movement. This is probably the explanation for the appearance, the revival, of rural romanticism. There has been an accumulation and wide communication of data about resource deficiencies and ecological threats. The accumulation of data is probably critical enough to produce reaction and changes in people’s behaviour.

  Some of the utterances of the back-to-the-earth movement make it sound like a premature acting out of the forecasted ecological disaster. Some talk and behave as if the breakdown of the system has occurred. ‘Very shortly the corner store mightn’t have any milk.’ ‘The four foods of survival are wheat, powdered milk, honey and salt. You can pack a month’s supply for one person into a five-gallon can and bury it. It will keep for fifteen years or more …’ (The word ‘survival’ occurs frequently throughout the publications.) The spectrum of ‘natural’ ways as opposed to ‘artificial’ ways runs through organic food, special diets, vegetarianism, natural healing, anti-psychiatry, and avoidance of some manufactured items.

  Swirling around these specific motivations are the suggestions of others: disownership of one’s culture (self?) – the technological, rationalist culture as ‘spoiling’ the natural world; the symbolic dramatisation earlier mentioned of a yearning to return to the mother (earth), to the purity or innocence of the maternal relationship; search for, or return to, family in the commune structure, which often has a guru or father-figure.

  In a complicated society, in which decision-making is without consultation and often at a great distance to those affected, the new movements are sometimes a concrete attempt to regain control of the life system – to see where the food is coming from, what is happening, how the system affects the person. A group of individuals tries to be a ‘whole world’.

  Meanwhile back in the city there are other manifestations of the anti-urban movement by those who for whatever reason can’t go ‘up-country’. It is expressed through the ‘natural living’ spectrum and through some anti-city protest movements such as anti-high-rise, anti-motor-car, and anti-expressway (all symbols of the modern city). Besides reflecting social problems inherent in city living, these movements also have an emotional link with the anti-urban revival. There is also a city commune movement, the size of which I cannot estimate: families and individuals live in the same dwelling and experiment in living arrangements, food-buying co-operatives, with the symbolic return to nature at the markets every Friday. Some of it is good old traditional bohemian and student living presented in a new vocabulary. Probably more substantial is the grouping of like-minded people in the same suburb, or in fraternal precincts.

  As for the farming life, I’d like to quote from Henry Lawson’s story Settling on the Land, written at the turn of the century:

  The worst bore in Australia just now is the man who raves about getting the people on the land, and button-holes you in the street with a little scheme of his own. He generally does not know what he is talking about.

  There is in Sydney a man named Tom Hopkins who settled on the land once, and sometimes you can get him to talk about it …

  Tom was discharged a few years since … He says his one great regret is that he wasn’t found to be of unsound mind before he went up-country.

  Fighting It Out with the Locals

  (letters to the Northern Star, Lismore, November 1979)

  An ‘alien culture’

  Sir. – In view of the very conflicting opinions regarding the alternative society, it is most urgent that the people of Lismore and the surrounding district come to grips with this alien culture in their midst before it finally splits our society with its cunning propaganda of idealism.

  There is a perfectly rational psychological interpretation of this mysterious new culture which can only be found in the textbooks on fanatical secret societies, hypnotic drug cults, black magic, brainwashing, mysticism, esoteric religion and bloody revolution – all of which are based on the mental disease of schizophrenia.

  Modern environmentalism is a revolutionary pseudo-scientific politico-religio-socio brainwashing cult thriving on the gullibility of western governments, for this fanatical lazy cult would never be accepted through a referendum of the people when the facts are understood.

  This is the danger in our present system of thought where the silent majority is forced to remain silent forever, while the ignorant governments are softened up to gradually surrender our peace-loving culture to the psychological terrorists whose interpretation of peace is psychological warfare.

  Today’s environmentalism, together with the anti-uranium lobby, are delusions produced by the mental disorder of schizophrenia which is caused by self-hypnosis and hypnotic drugs like marijuana, etc.

  Hypnosis knocks out the rational in man, allowing the primitive instincts to predominate which is known as ‘atavistic regression’ where remote ancestors are resembled rather than parents. The new convert or drug addict is usually projected into the next dimension of life which is the spiritual world of fanatical religious and political cults where the new supernatural and supercharged mind – vastly superior to the norm at the argumentative level – is automatically programmed for hate and revolution – while professing love!

  Deep hypnosis produces the ‘ultra-paradoxical
phase of brain activity’, causing them to hate what they previously loved, and love what they previously hated.

  Their entire values are now diametrically opposed to normal law and order, and they project their mental reversal by calling the straight society everything they are themselves.

  Total destruction of everything the silent majority stands for, is the one and only ultimate aim of all schizophrenics whether in the political, religious, social, industrial or environmental fields.

  Today, all these cults have combined in lawless demonstrations, and their contagious mental illness has adversely affected government policies over the past fifteen years to bring Australia to its present state of socialist chaos.

  The up-and-coming compulsory new religion of pseudo-environmentalism is the last straw.

  I challenge any doctor or psychiatrist anywhere to refute the contents of this letter which is the result of twenty years research into hypnotic cults.

  ‘Anti-Terrorist’

  Woolgoolga

  Reports differ

  Sir. – Concerning the present controversy over multiple occupancy of rural properties (Crystal, Tuntable Falls, Bodhi Farm), I have noticed a vast discrepancy between the reports on this development by people such as Geraldine Brooks (Sydney Morning Herald) and Kelvin Frost (Richmond Shire health surveyor).

  In the Northern Star of 26/10/79, Mr Frost claimed ‘the shacks exposed the occupants and their children to serious illnesses, chronic disabilities, gastric and respiratory diseases, stress and communicable diseases and the resultant high infant mortality rates’.

  He further projects that ‘these zones would become areas in which living conditions could deteriorate to those found in Asian and South American slums’.

  Compare this with the report by Geraldine Brooks in the Sydney Morning Herald, 12/11/79: ‘Some of the settlers have been there for six years. Their houses have a degree of finish and amenity that would not be out of place in the best city suburbs … the Tuntable people have generally been meticulous about building regulations. Most of their dwellings have been approved.’

  The reason for these different views is simple. Geraldine Brooks stayed two days at Tuntable Falls co-op, to make a first-hand report.

  Mr Frost, however, is less qualified to make an unbiased well-informed report – he has never even visited any of the hamlets whose standard of living he claims to know so much about.

  Amanda Gittus

  Tuntable Falls

  Hamlet ‘prejudice’

  Sir. – On a recent ABC Radio news program it was reported that a government inquiry had found evidence of increasing prejudice and discrimination against immigrants in Australia.

  In view of Lismore City council’s decision against hamlet development etc., I submit that there is evidence of increasing prejudice and discrimination against any one whose ideas on life are slightly different from the fictitious Mr and Mrs Average.

  John Allan

  The Channon

  Breakfast

  for Ranald and Julie Allan

  to wake up & throw

  two bowls of muesli

  at the wall miss &

  crack a louvre is no

  way to start married

  life in Coffs Harbor

  but it makes you laugh

  which is better than

  not & helps to clean

  the marvellous organs

  of the lungs & muscle

  we are more than our

  names / air & blood

  flowing inside us

  like currents that

  travel up & down the

  coast shifting the

  beaches around & we go

  after them as though

  swimming & golf are

  what we’re ‘made for’.

  At least they keep us

  on the go so that love

  arrives like dawn in

  hot climates, neither

  arse nor class, just

  there as the beach

  fills up with light &

  you swim out together

  for the morning’s first

  wave before breakfast.

  John Forbes

  (from Southerly, 4/1976)

  Death in the Early Morning: two no-bull deaths

  Ranald Allan

  (from Southerly, 3/1973)

  I had intended writing about the Aboriginal housing scheme to be established in Chippendale and what follows is connected and linked to that – even if only in my mind’s tangents.

  Ralph Ellison is a negro writer, though just because he wrote a book about them doesn’t mean we should jump to conclusions (later I will tell you about a wallaby who jumped to his conclusion and an American in Australia who ran to his). I don’t know whether Ellison ever took part in any of the riots he writes about but he’s right about one thing – the ‘boomerang theory’, which he says is how the world moves. In The Invisible Man he says:

  … but that (by contradiction I mean) is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang … (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history: they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.) I know; I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness.

  Dark-light, the world moving, like a boomerang, not the arrow of the red Indians: it’s profound stuff, but it just boomerangs me back to that childhood surreal world of the black and white and red all over … jokes? Newspapers, sunburnt zebras and nuns and magpies with cut throats have a strange connection which I only partly understand. Actually the magpie with a cut throat is probably a pre-curser of the wallaby who was boomeranged.

  For what it is worth, and what it is the hardest to explain, is that all this really happened.

  It was Good Friday. I was riding my motor bike through mountainous country between Casino and Tenterfield and there were kangaroo warning signs and I really was careful but there were many curves to this boomerang and the sun was directly in my eyes like it was in the Outsider’s when he killed the Arab (in Camus’ novel) I suppose I was blinded and there was a lurching thud or some sound and feeling which I can’t really give you a nice description of and I was ‘fish tailing’ which unfortunately doesn’t mean ‘the one that got away’ because I had run over a medium-size wallaby and caught sight of it writhing as I looked back, gaining control of the bike at the moment when I began to lose control of my feelings or whatever it was that made me go back and feel more helpless than ever before or since – ‘it’ (though ‘it’ seems wrong) was bleeding internally from the mouth and trembling then writhing and the agony point was just above the base of the tail – the spine, where an open gash revealed the backbone and I had lost all mine knowing then that I would have to kill something that was still alive though I had already killed it (or my bike had) but it was still moving and there was a stillness in the whole movement – which was whole no longer – only a hole where the life flowed out of – an unholy mess – more of these contradictions on which the world is built – but I wasn’t dealing in concepts then because there was in that moment no intervening period during which the experience could be abstracted, only the directness of that animal’s pain which I had caused and which by some weird system of ‘natural law’ – it was my duty to end and I wished for a gun I didn’t want to wring its neck or dash it with a stone and I was more pitiful than the wallaby because I was doing things like ‘catching its eye’ which I had seen an Indian do to a buffalo he’d just arrowed and worse still I had recently read Hemingway and was flirting with noble deaths and central experiences which convey dramatic innate gut-level reality and the worst thing that I can admit to is that I was crying while thinking there was a short story in it while the wallaby was out on some razor edge somewhere – but it wasn’t mercenary and I can’t explain it but my tears were genuine and you can’t change the reality of what has happened not even if people would think better of you; but now I am trying to win you back, but even if I haven’t los
t you yet I will, because you won’t like it when I use the white fluid that ran out of its arse at the instant following its death to lead back into the Aboriginal problem but there were many ways I could have exploited the situation and this is the most honest one believe it or not and I’d ask you to suspend judgement on the man who stopped after I had hailed him down – he was more concerned about me than the wallaby and our conversation ran like this:

  ‘What’s the trouble, mate?’

  ‘I hit a wallaby and he’s still alive and I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, just shaken …’

  ‘Sure? They’re bastards of things, jump right under ya – I hit one of the bastards on me own bike a couple of years back – busted me collar bone – oh a real mess. Anyway just give him a tap on the head.’

  He hasn’t got water on the brain, was my immediate reflex and I swear I’ll probably make some god-awful pun on learning the death of my mother and I can’t help it – that’s my funeral; even if it means losing the tone of the whole thing. He realised I couldn’t kill him and kindly offered to do it for me and when he got to where the wallaby was it died – stiffening and sent out the white juice dribbling pitifully out of its arse which I just looked at then but now use the frozen frame to wonder whether 5000 years ago a wallaby felled by a boomerang would have performed similarly for the Aboriginal standing over him watching his death throes little realising that in that trickling white juice was the prophetic seed of its own destruction at the hands of men like the guy who had by now said ‘We’d better make sure’ and picked up the animal by the tail and swung it against the rockface twice like a polished Babe Ruth or more appropriately like a beautifully executed Bradman cover drive and then he flung it into the bush – ‘bushwacked’ – and I said thanks not realising that I was in effect thanking him for the image – his contribution to the Aboriginal housing scheme as it exists ‘across the road’ in my mind.