OR LET’S TRY RETURNING TO NATURE
The Bush Against Laundromat
(adapted from a paper given at the conference ‘Man and the Biosphere’ in Canberra in 1973)
I want to outline impressions and information I have about how people are reorganising themselves both in the city and the country, and to look analytically at the back-to-the-earth movement.
If we had the beatniks of the fifties, the hippies of the sixties, then we have the greenies of the seventies – the back-to-the-earth movement, the ecological action groups, and those people campaigning against modern city development.
Hooked up to the greenies are movements of social reorganisation within the big cities, especially in Melbourne and Sydney, with internal migration, a sorting out into cohesive homogeneous groupings, and a weak, but related, emotional communalist movement in both the city and the country.
To identify the back-to-the-earth movement as a radical fashion is to give it perspective, but not necessarily to denigrate it. To classify it as symbolic behaviour still leaves it valuable as a sign or signal of perhaps permanent changes ahead for society. Neurotic radicalism, ‘youth rebellion’ or ‘novelty radicalism’ is often a dramatisation of valid issues or ills which in the wider society are either accommodated or unarticulated. It is true that neurotic radicalism also carries anxiety – unjustified fear – along with perhaps sensitivity to real threats, that maybe some people see things earlier, or have an earlier breaking point under growing city stress, which others will respond to at a later point.
The city against the country is, of course, one of the great polarities of civilised times. Just about every thinker has stated a position on it, in literature and in politics. A friend pointed out that Juvenal nearly 2000 years ago wrote about it. In his Satires (III) he says, ‘Myself, I would value a barren offshore island more than Rome’s urban heart.’ Juvenal then listed the problems of living in Rome – traffic, bad planning and corruption (the last has also been a recurring item in Australian political history).
Symbolically, the country has been mother, ‘mother nature’, and the city has been a denial of nature, at variance with the natural order. The country has symbolised innocence and purity; the city artificiality, decadence and pestilence. The country is claimed as organically the true community, the small village, while the city is described as anonymous, the lonely crowd.
The values can be reversed in literature and song, with the city being the heartbeat, the pulse of civilisation and the arts, while the country is stagnant, a backwater of hicks and yokels. As Samuel Johnson said in 1777, ‘No, sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life: for there is in London all that life can afford.’
The bohemian fashion of the fifties and sixties and of other decades was to boast that one had never left the city limits – to be the ultimate city man with a distaste for the rural life. But the fashion is now anti-urban, anti-city. The songs don’t go ‘How you going to keep them down on the farm now that they’ve seen Paree?’; they go ‘People call me country but I don’t care’. In Thoreau’s formulation the city was mindless and conformist while the country was individualist, meditative, philosophical – deep, a dialogue with nature, a seminar with God.
I dug out my adolescent copy of Walden – one of those cult books which in a complicated and mysterious way you find your way to when young, one of those that seem to come to your attention at just the right time. I dug out my old copy and found that as a seventeen-year-old I’d marked sentences which I considered terribly important.
I had heavily underlined ‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer’. In the margin I’d written ‘very true’.
Our society lives out the city/country polarity both ritualistically and earnestly. At its strongest we have Thoreaus in the outskirts of our cities and in the bush – hermits whom as a child in the country I remember watching and persecuting. I remember with others stoning their camps and it remains a humiliating guilt. I guess we were instruments of the town’s own restrained fear of deviation.
Again, at its strongest we have the current phenomenon of rural communalism and the flight from the city. At its weakest, mildest, we have the symbolic return to nature – the weekend drive, the Sunday driver, drinking a thermos of tea around a drum of rubbish at a roadside rest stop.
The weekender dream
The five-or five-and-a-half-day week created a new leisure period known as the ‘weekend’ – an expanded Sunday – towards the end of the last century, and the railways promoted the trip to the country. In Australia, the popularity of motoring in the thirties, abundant land and the urge to be with nature produced the dream of having a ‘weekender’, a second dwelling. Weekend pioneers cut roads and found virgin beaches, built huts known as a ‘place’. The newly found areas were known as ‘spots’ – a good fishing spot, a good camping spot. You or a real-estate agent shared the dream with others and soon, imperceptibly, a township sprang up with a milkbar-general store and a petrol pump; and then a hall, then a camping ground, and then, by gradual ‘improvements’, a replica of a city suburb with mown lawns. The escapees rebuilt the prison around them; they were back in the city. The weekenders often became ‘life enders’ – retirement houses – and the retirement is seen as an extended weekend.
The pioneers soon had to share the beaches with vacationers who came in tents and caravans. This was resolved by creating ‘camping grounds’. The campers, shooters and fishermen acted out the polarity and, in the twenties and thirties and even through to present times, treated the farmlands and bushlands as a public domain. Before the war especially, farmers often complained of city people who used the paddocks and farmlands for camping and picnicking. Chambers of commerce sometimes urged the farmers to permit this because the city people spent money in the towns. But the signs went up, ‘Private Property’, ‘No Campers’, ‘No Shooters’, and the towns provided camping grounds where the city people were herded and policed by local government by-laws.
But the shooters were not accommodated, and today the farmers and shooters are still in conflict over land rights. The shooters continue to use the land. It is almost a carryover from the poaching of the working class. I share the sense of wrongful exclusion, which must go back to the land enclosure Acts.
The weekender people and the towns are today in conflict with the transients who won’t be put in the camping grounds and don’t want to be restricted by regulations, by-laws, ad-hoc rules of managers and rangers. They are bikies and surfers. As one distressed coastal newspaper said, ‘they use the beaches as bedrooms’. It has come close to violence along the New South Wales coast, a fight over who ‘owns’ the beaches, territorial rights and personal space.
The alienation of the national parks
The national parks were another way society tried to accommodate the need for urban man to have something of a rural existence.
But the parks do not ‘belong to the people’; they belong to those who control them – the rangers. The National Parks and Wildlife Service in New South Wales is a highly attenuated delegation stretching from the state parliament through the cabinet to the minister of lands, to the director of the Service, down to park superintendents, and eventually to the rangers and their forbidding signs.
In talking to people in the National Parks Service I was told that the signs can’t say ‘please’ because this implies an option. The legal staff want them to be legally precise so as to secure convictions and carry authority. The parks provoke remarkable vandalism and aggression. The weekenders, the Sunday drivers, the campers, the shooters and the fishermen are acting out simple and psychological urges: the simple need for variation in the pattern of life, the recreational value of physical activity and change of scene, together with a need to ‘touch base’. There is the practice of the primitive skills of fishing, hunting and survival.
I suppose there is also the imperative of technology – railways and cars demand to be used. Possessions employ their owners. There is the flight from stress; the city is the family and work arena, so the bush becomes a refuge. As Lewis Mumford points out in The City in History, early suburbia and ‘the place in the country’, represents the masses taking over the practices of the well-to-do. ‘They proposed in effect to create an asylum, in which they could, as individuals, overcome the chronic defects of civilisation while still commanding at will the privileges and benefits of urban society.’ Once it became a mass movement most of the benefits were lost.
Schemes of closer settlement
In Australian political life we had anti-urban movements which agreed on the virtues of the country and the dangers of the city but were of little success. Closer settlement policies, including the settlement schemes aiming to put returned soldiers on the land, were seen as having virtues beyond economics (they seem now to have had little economic virtue at all). Supporting closer settlement in 1905, Holman (Labor MLA, NSW state parliament) said in the Sydney Daily Telegraph:
Get the bulk of our people away from the towns and give them such conditions that young fellows can make homes for themselves and settle down in comfort as soon as they arrive at a marriageable age and there will be no real difficulty then about the declining birth rate. It is the town life and the greater or lesser degree of degeneracy – in the physical as well as the moral sense that attends it …
Since the economic disasters from the miscalculation of economic viability, the virtues of closer settlement schemes have been under-stressed in recent years, although the War Service Settlement Scheme formally terminated only in 1970. Under the Rural Reconstruction Scheme the policies are in fact reversed. The number of rural holdings has been declining as the government now pays to amalgamate small uneconomic farms.
The cry of decentralisation
There are still policies for getting people out of the city, but the reason given for doing so changes from party to party and decade to decade. It would be generous to attribute decentralisation plans to the thinking of the English nineteenth-century town planner Ebenezer Howard, who argued that every city, community or organisation had a limit of physical growth, an optimum size.
Don Aitkin, professor of politics at Macquarie University, thinks that ‘decentralisation’ began with the Royal Commission of 1911 into the drift to the cities. ‘This word, a cliché of Australian political rhetoric, has become a modern Country Party’s rallying cry. As a policy … invested with a certain mysticism … a cure for most of Australia’s ills, a panacea for problems of defence, industry, education, health and morals.’ Almost certainly, decentralisation and closer settlement schemes have some roots in historic anti-city emotion.
The back-to-the-earth movement
There has been a spectacular revival of rural romanticism in the seventies. It is in contradiction to present government policies of farm amalgamation and is occurring now when small farmers are giving up. It is a non-commercial ‘new peasantry’ with a communalist and cooperative ideology running through it. I’m not aware of any significant earlier movement like it in Australian history, although it has been a recurring theme in American history. Depressions, especially that of the thirties, caused evicted tenants and unemployed persons in some places to form ‘happy valley’ shanty and tent communities along the New South Wales coast, in Queensland, and around Sydney at La Perouse, Lidcombe and Sutherland. There were people who tried subsistence and backyard farming. In the United States there was something of a subsistence farming movement, with Ralph Borsodi, author of This Ugly Civilisation and Flight from the City, as one of the main proponents. The latter is one of the cult books of the new back-to-the-earth movement both here and in America.
But the phenomenon of economically unmotivated, middle-class city-dwellers turning to experiments in subsistence farming, barter, mutual aid and communalism is new. Although statistical accuracy is difficult, the editors of Earth Garden, one of the magazines of the movement, estimate that 30 000 Australians have left the cities to ‘return to the earth’ since 1970, for a combination of motives other than commercial farming.
In talking with some of the people involved in this movement and analysing written material, I found motives more elaborate than those of countryside recreation. The back-to-the-earth movement breaks into:
(a) People who’ve bought small farms and go to them at weekends, working in the city, and who intend to, or dream of, living on the farm eventually for non-commercial purposes.
(b) Families living on small farms from one hectare upwards, trying for a degree of self-sufficiency.
(c) More than one family living together on a farm with a variety of communal arrangements.
(d) Clusters of families in one area with a similar ideological approach for farm and country living – as at Kangaroo Ground and Castlemaine in Victoria.
(e) Loners, hermits, vegetarians and others with a nature ideology and self-sufficiency ideals.
(f) Communes of individuals and families, and sometimes joint purchase of land, with pooling of resources and labour, as at Cairns, Nambour, Atherton and Cedar Bay in Queensland, Bega and Nimbin in New South Wales, and Shalam in Western Australia.
The Alternate Pink Pages lists about a dozen communes, but the editors of Earth Garden said that the number is unknown. I’ve heard of about thirty communes, some with up to fifty members. Two publications give the movement some cohesion and visibility. Both still receive letters from new readers which express surprise that other people are doing the same thing as they are; that is, leaving the city. Earth Garden has published eight issues since 1972, going from a sale of 2000 to 10 000 and still climbing. Grass Roots – ‘a magazine for down-to-earth people’ has a smaller circulation. Organisations have formed in the movement, but are for service and information rather than political purposes, for example the Organic Gardening and Farming Society of Tasmania, the Consumers Co-operative Society; and the Communal Living Information Centre.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 lost 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.
That is the end of a very long sentence, which I no doubt deserved, but which did little to reform me. I will continue to be a pun gent ode-r only interested in pedalling my wheres, why fors and bicycles along the high road of life to which I have become a custom.
So I have killed myself a wallaby which only leaves an emu and a coat of arms and then my job as Reserve Bank, old currency liquidator will be finished because my mission – the eradication of all florin influences, will have been achieved.
Somewhere in this Aboriginal scheme I would like to fit an explanation for my killing of a beautiful wallaby (an Australian buffalo) but it’s useless. A fortnight later I had dinner at the ‘Malaya’ with an American who was out here teaching in the country at South Dubbo High School – he was in Sydney for the weekend – we ate Chinese food – a week later he was dead too – probably while I was writing about the wallaby. He, too, died in the early morning, run over by a car – while taking an early morning jog – just like the wallaby but only in my limited context and yours.
I hope the Aboriginal housing scheme is a successful return to ‘something of a dreamtime’ – their existence has been pounded by many more contradictions of tone and subject matter than have occurred here.
I’m too young to think about death. The American died – age twenty-two.
Enter, Cosmos
(editorial from the first issue of Cosmos, 1973)
With the first edition of Cosmos something new and unique has entered the fields of Australian magazine publishing. Newspapermen and Francis II could no doubt have given us many invaluable hints on its creation. But lacking such royal advice has proved no handicap, and our first production proceeded smoothly.
We must ensure it continues to be so. We place ourselves under the guidance and protection of the Trans-Himalayan Lokanatha, Lord of the World – pious friends, take note – although, for all His power, Cosmos does not expect to escape controversy, and we shall welcome it as a tangible sign of public interest in our periodical’s contents.
Admittedly Cosmos is no threat to Queenslandic civilisation, nor is it ever likely to arouse the sensitive passions of the Victorian Vice Squad.
Its ‘sin’ will be that it is the other side of the Counter-Culture, the alternative way of life for those dissatisfied with society’s soul-destroying materialism and general indifference to the feelings of the individual.
Unlike the noisy, politically orientated forces of the Counter-Culture, which the public mind takes to be the Counter-Culture in its entirety, the other side, as taken up by Cosmos, has largely gone unnoticed. It makes no noise; it is not violent. It seeks to change society, not by forcibly ramming its ideas down into unwilling minds, but by peacefully stressing the need for change in each and every individual as a prescription for the world’s ills. It has captured no headlines, but it is there – and its numbers must be reckoned in the growing thousands.
It is not to an anthropomorphic God or ideological word-monger that the gentler side of the Counter-Culture looks for guidance and support, but to that creative Higher Consciousness in every individual which, in their collectivity, form one unity to which Emerson gave the name – The Oversoul.
As all on this side of the Counter-Culture know, this creative aspect in man, the true source of his being, remains largely dormant throughout the lifetime of the average individual who is trained from birth to obey all forms of outward authority, whether secular, religious or social. The sons and daughters of convention have no need to seek any inner guidance or inspiration from within while it is all done for them without. Yet we say that such people are only half alive, rarely knowing anything of true freedom, true happiness, or anything of their capabilities – and weaknesses – while living in constant danger of being misled by selfish interests.
Such people, observed Phillip Adams in the Australian, must be held responsible for disasters like Vietnam.
Let us delineate our position. We do not demand revolution, but seek peace through equable justice. We preach no dogmas, but quest for wisdom through enquiry assisted by intuition. We do not support callous authoritarianism, but work to gain for men that Self-responsible freedom which, once realised by the many in all its ramifications, can alone lead to a real and genuine state of Universal Brotherhood, with all its fruits thereof: joy, liberty, equality.
This Cause – to free the consciences of mankind from harmful conditioning – is not only in its incipient stages. If H. G. Wells is right, that Universal Brotherhood is the goal of history, then the Counter-Culture as a whole is moving in this general direction and must, one day, and hopefully in its more altruistic aspects, triumph. Before that longed-for day, there are problems of the past which have to be faced, solved and overcome.
It is here that the Counter-Culture divides and negates itself. On one side of it stand political activists who think society’s problems can be solved through political action, and, on the other, people who agree with them on what is wrong, but disagree with their means.
The apolitical Counter-Culture upholds the freedom of the individual, and, for all that, it may be more in the stream of history than its politically orientated side.
The political activists of the Counter-Culture organise themselves. The apolitical side is a social phenomenon manifesting on all levels of society. It is unorganised. In fact it is doubtful if it will ever be organised beyond, say, periodicals like Cosmos, though it may inspire sociopolitical movements in the years ahead, once it has worked out where it is going and how. But this is only a possible future development. The point to note is that the gentler side of the Counter-Culture is a living, growing happening because it is an individual thing, making no demands upon anyone except those which the individual places upon him or herself.
It does not gravitate towards passivity, towards that utter paralysis of the human soul, quietism, as the pot-smokers and acid-heads so fatally do, the latter especially bonding themselves to a master more furious and demanding than the irrational regimen of that society they originally sought to escape from. It is an active movement within the individual and in the mass holds the best promise for positive change.
It does not fling excreta at the crumbling walls of The Establishment for failings which are really within the individual, failings which the individual refuses to recognise and overcome within, by, and through himself, for its members know very well that the average man has never been taught how to recognise and deal with them, much less taught why he should question the fitness of things. Nor does it flail society, bad as it is, to achieve selfish ends inspired by pique or born of frustration, no matter how justifiable any such feelings of outrage may be.
It works for change in society through the individual for the good of the many. There is neither subtle force nor brutal violence. Only individual struggle and effort to overcome error within and without it. It is the most unselfish movement of a spontaneous kind in the annals of history, the nearest parallel, perhaps, being the great reform movement initiated by the Lord Gautama Buddha, from whose teachings the apolitical Counter-Culture draws so much of its strength.
We leave others to explain why this movement has sprung up. Our purpose in publishing Cosmos is to bind together the foremost thinkers in Australia of the gentler side of the Counter-Culture. The diversity of their opinions may be as bewildering to some as the political shades of the Counter-Culture, but close examination will show a certain uniformity. Their writings contain the seeds for a future, better society, one which some of us, young as we are, may not live to see fully realised. But it is there. It is as if the Counter-Culture had glimpsed a vision of Plato’s ‘ideal society laid up in Heaven’ and, having seen it, are working towards it for the good of man, and not so much for the advancement of their own particular creed or interest, whatever it may be.
In the misery, despair, and anguish surrounding us, the result of centuries of ignorance, selfishness, and insensitivity of man towards sentient life, we believe this to be a Cause worthy of support.