Once we were seated in the plush leather office chairs the mayor addressed us from behind his imposing desk. He began positively, by stating that the local council were “broadly sympathetic” to our cause, and of course he “respected the human rights and cultural heritage of our indigenous cousins.” (Mandu guffawed loudly at this.) He added that they were “fully committed to protecting Aboriginal traditions at a local and state level.”
I nodded my gratitude for these platitudes, but before I could ask him for more concrete support the dishevelled elder butted in:
“Yeah, OK, let’s cut the crap. What about our land, mate?” he demanded.
“Well, Mr Mandu, as you know it’s a delicate situation” the mayor replied. Then, choosing his words carefully, he explained:
“There are market forces at work, political pressures, and the March Of Progress to be taken into account ...”
Mandu angrily interrupted him again:
“Yeah, that sounds just like the bullshit that other smooth bastard told my people. I guess he’s one of yer mates then?”
The mayor shuffled some papers, avoided looking us in the eye and replied, warily:
“Ahem. Yes, I am aware that a colleague recently visited you on-site ... but I have to say that he’s a member of the opposition rather than being in a position of authority, as, ahem, I am.”
He looked at us directly now, as if to reinforce the power he had over our future.
I nodded, cautiously. Mandu shook his head in frustration. The mayor went on, in an increasingly oily tone:
“In fact, I would like to put on record, given your high profile in the media Mr Fraser ... (he gave me that smarmy smile politicians do so well) ... that I distance myself from my opposition colleague’s opinions, methods, and especially his, ahem, business associates.”
More cautious nods from me and exasperated shrugs from Mandu. The mayor gave us his ‘serious, thoughtful, and concerned’ look as he continued:
“There is, however, the difficult issue of this psychoactive cactus plant that’s apparently growing in the region. Some of my colleagues have concerns that it might be used as a recreational drug ... (he stared accusingly at Mandu) instead of for its medicinal properties.”
Mandu guffawed so violently he almost fell out of the fancy leather office chair. The mayor tried to ignore him, and ploughed on:
“I have it on good authority that a Swiss pharmaceutical company are interested in trialling this, ahem, ‘herb’, with a view to licensing it as a treatment for various mental conditions. Of course, we would do everything we could to facilitate this project, given the exciting business opportunities it might offer to a relatively deprived region of the state.”
The mayor looked straight at me as he said this and gave me a little wink, as if he was offering me a piece of these “exciting business opportunities”. I gave him the faintest of nods in return, and as they say: ‘a nod’s as good as a wink’. It seemed like we’d tacitly agreed some kind of deal. But Mandu wasn’t so easily fobbed off:
“Look mate, it might be ‘a relatively deprived region of the state’ t’you lot, but those hills have been our home for centuries. In fact, the Ancestors have lived up in the Bungle Bungles for thousands of years! Ever since the Dreamtime.”
He paused to allow the gravity of this to sink in. Then he leant forward in the fancy leather chair, put his elbows on the mayor’s desk, looked him straight in the eye and whispered:
“And I’ll tell ya somethin’ else ... (his eyes drilled holes into the politician) ... not many people know this ... (pause, enigmatic smile) ... some of ‘em weren’t from this planet!”
He paused, for a beat. Then he winked at the mayor.
For a moment Broom’s Head Honcho was lost for words. He looked at us, shrugged, and stuttered nervously:
“Well thank you, ahem, g-g-gentlemen. I can assure you I’ll do everything in my, umm, my power ... to f-f-facilitate things ... at a local, state, and possible even n-n-national level.”
I nodded. Mandu shrugged. And, with that, our meeting was over.
The next morning we got together again in my camper-van to discuss tactics. Following the previous day’s media and political engagements, Mandu wanted to know about the other two aspects of the campaign: legal and commercial.
I explained how, in my opinion, saving their land and protecting the Plant from the bad guys were linked. I’d already had a meeting with a lawyer who specialised in land rights and he’d suggested that we also try to get the Plant recognised as a religious sacrament in the tribe’s traditional rituals.
Mandu wasn’t convinced. His people had never considered themselves ‘religious’ in the sense of believing in a supernatural being, heaven, hell, and all the other paraphernalia of a ‘faith’.
“Look mate, Dreamtime ain’t some kind of religious mumbo-jumbo. It’s real, Nick—like I showed ya in the cave.”
To experience this reality all you had to do was to smoke some Plant—and that wasn’t a religious ritual, like munching some bread and pretending it was the body of your guru …
“Na mate, it’s what y’do to get stoned and chat to the Ancestors.”
I told him I understood all that, but it didn’t matter—this was a legal tactic, not an accurate description of the ‘truth’. He shrugged and said he didn’t understand the distinction. So I tried, again, to explain what the lawyer was advocating: that making the Plant legally integral to the tribe’s ceremonies would hopefully pre-empt any attempt by the government to make it an illegal drug. It would, however, require expert anthropological evidence and possibly Mandu himself to testify at the hearing.
He was sceptical and thinking it through, so was I. Not only would he need convincing, but also some coaching. It was hard to imagine him in the witness box without a mix of trepidation and hilarity, so I told him I’d give evidence myself in his place if it was at all possible. Unfortunately, this didn’t go down well either. He took my suggestion completely the wrong way, accusing me of disrespecting him, his people, and of seeking fame on the back of their struggle:
“Y’like playin’ at being one of us blackfellas, Nick, but really yer just like the rest of ‘em white bastards—out t’make a quick buck.”
I blushed. There was an uncomfortable silence, the start of a rift between us. The two sides of my mixed race genes were pulling me in opposite directions. A voice in my head was shouting: “Fuck that for gratitude! If that’s all the thanks I get for trying to save his patch of dirt from some seriously heavy dudes, then he can fuck off back to the Bungle Bungles and wait for the shit to hit the fan!”
Our standoff lasted several tense seconds, then he mimicked my trademarked shrug and smiled his marvellous Mandu smile. I tell you: that smile would melt the heart of the most frigid ice queen.
“OK, we’ll do it yer way mate” he agreed. “But y’know, them lawyer buggers don’t come cheap.”
I nodded and suggested that he contact the Master to request his financial support for the campaign. I thought this was more likely to succeed coming from him since his relationship with the wealthy philanthropist went back a lot further than mine. I added that I’d be organising some fundraising events.
Mandu was happy enough with these suggestions, but my next idea was more problematic. I told him we had to take control of the commercial opportunities offered by the Plant and bring it to a wider market responsibly, before the Mob got their hands on it:
“We have to control the marketing and distribution ourselves, Mandu; educate consumers about the cultural context—where it fits in your people’s traditions; tell people how to take it safely. At the same time, we should be talking to the pharmaceutical companies about licensing the Plant as a medicine.”
Mandu nodded, reluctantly. He understood all this and agreed with me, up to a point. Of course it was better to be proactive, rather than wait for the bad guys to grab their land and crush them, but for him marketing the Plant was the lesser of two evils, ra
ther than a positive choice. He’d never agreed with the Whitefella’s ways of doing business:
“It’s all just greed, Nick. Like the song says: ‘this land is our land’ but he can’t share it peacefully, he’s gotta grab it and own it.”
Mandu had no desire to bring the Plant to a ‘wider world’ let alone make money from it. All he’d ever wanted for his people was to be left alone to live their lives as they’d been doing for centuries, in harmony with what was around them. Now I was telling him we must follow White Man’s rules, argue our case in his courts, go into business together …
I tried to reassure him, told him he wouldn’t need to compromise his beliefs, his traditions, his culture—I could handle all the White Man stuff myself ... but deep down there was an issue of trust, and it was splitting us just as his people used fire and water to split rocks.
Mandu got back on his classic motorcycle and roared off back to the bush. He took the smartphone with him and I promised to keep him in the loop with regular text messages. He said he’d check it whenever he could get a signal, but reiterated that in his opinion homing pigeons or camels would be more reliable.
15
Dreamtime Plant Products
My time in Broom passed quickly. Days were filled with frenetic activity as the campaign progressed on all four fronts. Before I knew it, three months had shot by—half the windless season, and it was July already. I still grieved for my windsurfing buddy, Robo, and I was unsure how things stood with Mandu, but at least I could look forward to the reappearance of my old friend, the Fremantle Doctor.
The campaign was going well. We had the support of the local media, the story was trending on social networks, whipped up by our ‘This land is our land’ video, and our cause had been endorsed by some important pressure groups. I was on first name terms with the mayor and I was well known in the town, something of a local hero. People listened to me, and for the first time in my life what I said, and did, mattered.
With funding from the Master, we were able to proceed with the legal case and start a business selling the Plant via the internet. Every week Mandu made the arduous journey on his Enfield Bullet with a consignment of freshly harvested cactus pellets. He wasn’t too happy about the disruption to his idyllic life in the bush, and he was uncomfortable with all this Whitefella stuff, but he loved riding his motorcycle, so he didn’t grumble too much.
I rented a warehouse and assembled a team of workers to handle packaging and despatch, while I took care of the website, marketing, and finances. We called ourselves: Dreamtime Plant Products and thanks to the power of the internet the little local business soon became a surprisingly successful international enterprise.
Orders rolled in as word spread about the Plant’s psychoactive properties. Our customers bought into the indigenous cultural thing and they loved that their money was helping to support the tribe’s struggle against greedy businessmen and crooked politicians. Demand began to outstrip supply and Mandu was no longer able to provide us with enough product, so we hired a team of delivery drivers. The business grew exponentially and I became a workaholic, focussed on marketing, profits, legal issues and politics, while Mandu became increasingly distrustful of my motives. There was nothing I could say, or do, to ease his doubts, but I was simply too busy to worry about him anyway.
To my surprise, I relished my new role as an entrepreneur. When I was welcomed into Nicole’s community it felt like the Kangaroo Kid was no longer an outsider. Now it felt like I’d finally come of age and joined the grown-up world of commerce and politics. It wasn’t Mandu’s world, for sure, but it was somewhere I had some influence, responsibilities, status. I’d been avoiding stuff like that ever since my childhood in a dead-end town, with a family who convinced me I’d never achieve anything. Now I was a contender. Who could blame me for embracing this brave new world?
With Dreamtime Plant Products going from strength to strength, I began discussions with the pharmaceutical company who were interested in licensing the cactus as a medicine. With the help of our lawyer and some ‘facilitation’ by the mayor, I negotiated a contract to supply them with samples for their trials. In exchange for the sole rights they stumped up an advance of a hundred thousand dollars—a sum that was, of course, peanuts for a multinational company, but for a penniless windsurfer living in a rundown camper-van, and a bunch of Abos camped out in the bush, it was a fortune.
I never found out whether the mayor received any financial incentive for ‘facilitating’ the deal, but the council were praised for bringing an ‘exciting new business opportunity’ to this ‘relatively deprived region of the state’ (quotations from the mayor’s press release). The praise was certainly well-timed, coming just as the mayor was starting his bid to be re-elected.
I ploughed most of the money back into the campaign and the business, but I felt entitled to spend a bit on myself. After all, my newly acquired status demanded I look the part, as well as walk the walk and talk the talk. So I rented a suitable apartment and bought myself some smart clothes and a fancy Japanese motorcycle.
Mandu was predictably scornful of the bike, calling it: “a pile of Jap dingo dung”, but his misgivings went much deeper—to the heart of our joint enterprise. He was worried that fame and fortune would corrupt me, the tribe, and their traditional way of life (I noted he didn’t include himself in the list of potentially corruptible subjects). I should have listened to him, but I dismissed his anxieties as an inability to embrace change, to ‘think out of the box’, and the rift between us grew ever wider.
As Dreamtime Plant Products prospered and news of the pharmaceutical deal broke, I was portrayed in the media as a kind of mixed race Ozzie version of Richard Branson, the British billionaire entrepreneur. Like Branson, I’d started a small, local business at a relatively young age (in his case as a student, selling records and promoting rock events), but I was really more interested in spreading the word than making money. Rather than a Branson-style business magnate, I preferred to think of myself as a latter-day Timothy Leary.
Leary was a writer, academic, psychotherapist, and one of the first people to experiment with psychedelic substances, such as psilocybin (‘Magic Mushrooms’) and LSD, in the 1960s. His research for the Harvard Psilocybin Project focused on treating alcoholism and reforming criminals (the ‘Concord Prison Experiment’). Many of his research subjects told of profound mystical and spiritual experiences which they said positively altered their lives.
Leary believed that the drug itself didn’t produce the transcendent experience, it merely acted as a chemical key to open the mind and free the nervous system from its routine patterns. He argued that psychedelic substances, taken in proper doses and in a stable setting, could benefit society, urging people to: ‘Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out’.
Like him, I advocated the legal use of such powerful catalysts to raise consciousness, enhance creativity, and open the ‘Doors of Perception’. I was trying to educate people about the Plant and how to use it safely, just as he’d done with LSD back in the sixties. Leary later wrote:
We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony, we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.
I’d come across something like that before. Leary’s time-travelling anthropologists were just like Dr Ludwig Langer’s group of fellow travellers—a ‘space colony’ in a ‘time module’ stuck in the ‘dark ages’ of 1930s Germany, but far ahead of their time—looking forward to the 1960s—experimenting with psychoactive substances, alternatives to conventional morality, ‘attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art’.
Now here I was, in 2017, like one of Leary’s ‘anthropologists from the twenty-first century’, perhaps not attempting anything as grandiose as Dr Langer, or Timothy Leary, but it was still early days for Dreamtime Plant Products and I was excited to see where it would take me.
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Another couple of months raced past in frantic activity. I did my best to live up to my Branson-esque image and fulfil my role as a Leary-like advocate for the Plant. As spring replaced winter, three of my original four goals had been achieved: I’d established a significant media presence; politicians supported our cause and were cueing up to be photographed with me; our commercial projects were going well ... Only the legal battle remained to be fought and won.
It was the most difficult nut to crack because, unlike the other goals, I had no control of the labyrinthine process. We were in the hands of lawyers who were paid (excessively, in my opinion) to argue the merits of our case, rather than believe in it passionately. The outcome would be decided by supposedly knowledgeable, impartial judges who actually knew nothing about Mandu’s people, and were riddled with prejudices and bias.
Worse still, I’d become a victim of my own success. The media were so besotted with me, and Dreamtime Plant Products had expanded so quickly, that the government got wind of this new psychedelic drug and intervened in the legal process.
Stories of harmful side effects were starting to circulate. Despite my best attempts to educate our customers there were always people who ignored my warnings, played Russian roulette with their sanity, and suffered the consequences: neuroses, schizophrenic episodes, bad trips. The rumours were blown up into full-on horror stories in the tabloid press, and the bad publicity persuaded the authorities to call for the Plant to be banned.
Mandu had always maintained that white folk shouldn’t mess with the Plant because they couldn’t handle it. Robo’s death was a tragic example of how things could go horribly wrong. Now I was becoming aware of the downsides of being a user myself.
By then I was smoking it regularly—most days, and I had to keep increasing the amount to get the same effects. I was ignoring my own warnings, exceeding the safe dosage, and finding myself becoming increasingly dependent on those little cactus pellets. I started suffering memory loss, inability to concentrate, dizziness. The only way I could function was by smoking more Plant.
Too Close to the Wind Page 19