Happy Trails
Truth is no stranger to friction
Encapsulated Lives 3
The seventeenth annual Nimbin Mardi Grass was swiftly approaching, and less than two days remained if this heretic hermetic hermit was to make it to the Rainbow Region – a thousand kilometres to the tropical north of the
Emerald City - and beat the police roadblocks.
Sniffer dogs, road patrols and a recreational drug-testing Winnebago have provided a traditional gauntlet over the last few years, and it’s become wise to arrive a few days before the squadrons of corrupt petty officials who would just love to rip off your stash. In the cases of minors and tourists, on-the-spot confiscation of drugs – and letting the offender walk - is not only common but often mandatory; pointless incarceration and paperwork’s an expensive bitch for all concerned.
When more than half the nation is committing victimless so-called ‘crimes’ every day, it becomes harder and harder to respect authority figures who are mostly doing the same themselves. The law is the crime, and lawyers and cops make very efficient criminals, as any who have been ripped off by them can readily attest. It could be worse; we could be living in Amerika (where almost one citizen in a hundred is currently behind bars, mainly the victims of ‘victimless crimes’) or some even more hopeless dictatorship, instead of enjoying life in the freest country on a huge blue-green prison planet.
As you doubtless know, Oz was founded as a penal colony. It may be less obvious that many of the ‘criminals’ transported to the Great Southland by Britannia were, in fact, political prisoners. Many were rebellious Irish revolutionaries - like the Tolepuddle Martyrs – and they soon mixed in with indigenous native people, who have fought various forms of guerrilla war against the invaders for more than two centuries. Many locals are still highly volatile, and a large number of inveterate change agents have congregated in the most easterly region on the island continent – the hippy havens of the Rainbow Region of northern New South Wales.
For many millennia, anyone wishing to enter the traditional initiatory centre of the Bundjalung tribe has had to make it past various forms of protectors and guardians. To broach the borders of the current age’s legalisms – set up by a rigidly sclerotic, superannuated and hypocritical young society of boat people - one must also pass through the filters of newer boundaries have been emplaced to test or accost those who would attempt to reach the Nirvana of Nimbin, where Bundjalung clever men once learned how to fly. Yes, fly; believe it or not, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in robotic philosophies, and truth is no stranger to friction.
When you see a person fly it tends to change your worldview. You come to question all the tenets of a half-awake species of competitive struggling primates. If a single person can levitate then the whole crummy basis of our dogmatised scientific worldview is hopelessly inadequate to explain the universe or our selves, little better than the outworn regional lies and absurdities of man-made religions. If you keep your eyes open, you soon learn that the truth can, indeed, set you free and that literally everything is possible.
Raising one’s consciousness (or outright levitation) isn’t a course that’s encouraged in today’s mechanistic and materialistic world, but a passage can always be found by those with a heart, a brain, courage and the inner sense of innocence – just like in Oz, except dogs like Toto are no longer allowed. Carnivorous pets are not encouraged in this ancient endangered species habitat, a separate Creation that never knew the knife-like embrace of prolifically breeding and ever-rapacious Old World carnivores. Most otherwise tolerant hippy communes and environmentally aware landholders don’t tolerate domesticated wildcats or wolves at all – let alone enjoy the presence of drug sniffing dogs.
Wonder Boy and I bid farewell to his grandfather Genius and somehow caught every green light to the Harbour Bridge, where toll booth operators have been replaced by an electronic tag system since last we visited. Naturally, coming from a remote rainforest we had no electronic tag, unlike those permanent residents who use the old grey coat hanger every day.
Doubtless the government will attempt to bill me for a bridge that my parents’ and grandparents’ generations have already paid off many times over. Of course, the Magna Carta ensures that I have right of free passage on any public thoroughfare or carriageway, but many seem to be unaware of the Common Law rights and provisions enshrined in the basis of all Western law. I wonder whether the magistrate will be equally ignorant and uphold the imposts of posturing impostors when the inconsequential matter finally comes to court.
Highway One rings much of the continent in ribbons of concrete and bitumen. Travelling north makes for a truly great drive and the Jackaroo Deva fairly flies along the piecemeal freeways that bypass most coastal towns and villages. The road cuts through some primordial-looking rainforest remnants between slash-and-burn cow and cane fields, which have so recently replaced a once monumental forest with tracts of bucolic-looking toxic wasteland. If we started replanting and weeding today, it might only take four or five thousand years for these hundreds of miles of continuous forests to recover the full majesty of their former glory. If we don’t, the last of the remaining degraded soils will wash away into the sea and it will take much, much longer.
In a thousand kilometres there’s not a single hybrid vehicle to be seen; the road is still completely ruled by antique rustbucket technologies. Why don’t I drive a hybrid, you ask? Well, in this country having different young children with different stay-at-home women whom you don’t live with means that you can’t actually work and end up with any money at all. The government extracts all your cash from a pay check before you see it; fair enough. My current weekly income of around a hundred dollars (the kid’s school fees and the council rates and charges are pre-emptively extracted) won’t even cover the trip to Nimbin from the Emerald City. This is about one-fifth of the official local poverty line. If a tyre blows, I’ll eat exclusively from the orchard and vege garden for a couple of weeks and keep the larder for the kids (It’s just as well I don’t pay any rent).
That’s how much it means to me to make it to the ancient initiation centre of Nimbin (as I have at least once every year since the inaugural Mardi Grass), where I once paid for a share in a commune where 2,500 macadamia nut trees are currently dropping their load. Maybe the hippies on the block will get around to harvesting and selling the fifty to one hundred thousand dollar crop this year; probably not. Strangely enough, money does grow on trees. As the Beatles sang into the ears of an impressionable young generation who recognised real genuine truth when they heard it, ‘I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love.’ We’ll have plenty of organic nuts to eat, anyway; that’s life on a nut farm.
There’s enough time for an overnight stopover at home on the way, in deep rainforest gullies by an ancient platypus pool. We reach the isolated wooden shack (where I’m writing this now on a twelve volt laptop) not long after nightfall, and light up the candles in time for the awakening family of house possums to present themselves.
Wonder Boy calls his mother on the ancient crusty landline, and after a short conversation announces he won’t be coming to Nimbin during these particular school holidays after all; there’s too much fun happening at his mother’s home on a nearby community, and he misses his mum and twin sisters. So after a quick visit to the river the next morning another hundred klicks are added to the northerly pilgrimage and ten year-old W.B. rushes toward the rushes of yet another pristine river for another long yearned-for swim.
We’d been staying in sight of the wide white sands of Pacific Ocean beaches in the Emerald City for a week, but the boy’s no fool, and is accustomed to swimming in water he can drink; like me, he could smell the toxic crap (and literal crap) in the seawater a mile off and looked at his grandfather with an expression of incredulity when Genius suggested he go for a swim at Bondi. I used to swim in the liquid crystal waters of Bondi Beach amongst swarming schools of fish every second day or so when I was ten – but by fourteen the water was full of crap, impossible to see through for more than a few yards and unsafe to swim in. All the fish had retreated or died and swimmers commonly caught various ailments; that was a long, long time ago.
The population has trebled since then, and the facile expedient adopted by government – simply pumping the shit further out to sea - has proven a barely cosmetic solution at best. Nowadays I’ve been spoiled by the purity of natural surrounds and my senses are sharper. The nose knows; the cities are toxic waste dumps. As you approach a city the stench of sewage is the first thing a clear human olfactory system notices, mixed in with the smell of the foul droppings of literally millions of poorly fed dogs and cats.
Then you smell the sulphur – ‘brimstone’ in the old parlance – as you get closer; about fifty kilometres from the outskirts. We have very few cities in Oz, and they’re islands of concrete in comparatively clean coastal regions of green fields and regrowth forests. In other nations where urban centres are scrunched up beside each other the distinction between poison and purity may never seem so obvious - not even to those unaccustomed to living in crap all the time.
This hermetic hermit has come a long way from the suburbs of his birth, where palm trees standing before the sun-dappled rippling waters of the harbour looked particularly pretty from the windows of the maternity hospital as my mother rocked my swaddled tiny little bod in her loving arms.
It’s better to remember everything, after all – even the biting odour of the obstetrician’s aftershave when he held me up by my ankles and slapped me; even the look of his alcoholic, watery blue eyes through his dark-rimmed glasses. Even my circumcision, eight days later. What’s the point of living, if you choose to forget? And make no mistake, all forgetfulness is a choice. Every time you crave a fresh start, a clean slate or a second chance in a moment of desperation, you’re inviting the waters of forgetfulness to wash away your memories. The easiest way to get a new start is to die, and be born anew. You have to be careful what you wish for.
I leave the isolated forested valleys whose headwaters I saved over the course of a decade - in forest camps, blockades, actions, non-violent wars of patient attrition, fauna and flora surveys and protests with the tiny handfuls of ferals, hippies and straights who were willing to leave the toxic womb of their cocooning comfort zones – and head for the Rainbow Region for a week of enlightening partying. More floods are approaching over the horizon as Antarctica melts, but it hasn’t rained on the Mardi Grass Parade since the locals learned how to tune their neo-Reichian cloudbusters…
Continues… but for now I have to move a few tons of boulders by hand…
- R.A.
See Part 1 - Parallel Realities
See Part 2 - Parallel Lives
PS – If you want to read about a particularly interesting Nimbin Mardi Grass before the next episode in this little series, see http://centraxis.blogspot.com, and open the phial of ‘Psychedelic Water’ by clicking on the link – but be aware! The Prince of Centraxis burgeons with xplicit and implicate concepts and images!
Images - author’s
For further illumination see
Enlightenment Today
Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images
The New Illuminati
Save the World from RamPage
TimeSpace
RingWood
The Prince of Centraxis
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See The Prince of Centraxis - http://centraxis.blogspot.com
From The Rainforest Home of the Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
Enlightenment Today – http://enlightenment.today.com
