With civil wars and economic depressions raging across the planet it was a joy to head out of the hustle of Sydney up to the town of Nimbin for their Mardi Grass ganjha protest rally and festival where peace, love and getting high were the ruling ethos. Never mind that, for a city boy like myself, going into the wilds of the Aussie countryside can be like a “Wake In Fright” movie: road kill, drunken buggery, kangaroo-shooting, beer swilling mate-ship will wear you down mighty fast if you’ve not got your wits about you.
I was with the guitarist from
my performance act, The Deadbeats. We got off the bus in Lismore after dark,
the town had shut down, the streets ghostly silent, empty except for the
schizos wandering barefoot, wrapped in ragged blankets, staring like aliens
from Mars at me as if I was from Venus; schizo town at night but in the bright
day-light full of farmers, shop-keepers, govt. service personnel, hippies,
junkies, Kooris, cripples pushed in wheel-chairs and blind people tap tap
tapping with their white canes.
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We made the mistake of
getting a lift with Sylvia the wood nymph’s latest boyfriend, Dan, an ICE
addict who’d promised us he’d dried out but who in fact had had a shot that
morning and drove like a maniac escaping from a psyche ward so that we feared
for our lives. Just as a storm broke over our heads, the cops stopped us at a
roadblock halfway to Nimbin and breathalized our driver, his eyes spinning with
angst. They were determined to fuck the ganjha festival and bust as many
potheads as possible before the fun could even begin, announcing to our shock
that Dan had tested for an illegal substance, was under arrest and had to come
into the Pig-van for a second test.
The rain pelted down as Paul
and I shat our pants, he had pot on him, we were stuck in the middle of nowhere
and the cops could strip us naked if they felt mean enough. They took forever
to test Dan, us wondering how in Hell we were going to escape from this
quandary. A cop suddenly pulled the driver’s door open and jumped into the car,
we kept cool, non-committal, no trembling or giving unwanted hysterical
information; the cop looked into my eyes and seemed abashed, as if he were
thinking, “Oh oohhh, an elder statesman of Freakdom, I better be cool in return.”
He quickly drove the car across the road, parked it and jumped out, leaving us
smiling vacantly.
Dan eventually rushed into
his car and yelled, “The test was inconclusive, but they’ve taken my license
and I’ve got to leave the car here. Fuck ‘em, I’m getting out of here!” As the
cops looked on, he tried to turn the keys in the ignition and I envisioned a
car-chase with us careening around country bends, cops wailing on our ass,
crashing through barriers and into hapless local yokels, all very exciting for
Bonnie and Clyde types but for cosmic Toby One Kenobi a disastrous
smash-em-up derby. Paul and I shrieked our disapproval and leaped from the car,
dragging our baggage from the back and encouraging a wild-eyed Dan to “Chill!”
He seemed mollified for a few
minutes but when we turned our backs to bitch with another hitch-hiker whose
driver had also been busted, Dan had sneaked back to his car and shot off into
the wild blue yonder without anyone, us or the cops, noticing. I rang Sylvia
and she came out to rescue us; we drove into Nimbin, past the prehistoric five
sacred rocks, with sighs of relief, for we’d survived and made it safely to the
festival, as if our guardian animals were looking after us, and we blew a joint
in celebration, to calm our jangled spirits.
From then on Nimbin rocked,
the festival a three day extravaganza of fun, freaks and frolics that made me
so happy I’d gone to all the trouble to be there, though the organizers insist
it’s actually a protest rally against the unjust, mean, downright stupid laws
criminalizing marijuana use. There were many discussions on the politics of the
fascistic “war on drugs”, the most infuriating being the strictures against the
medical use, for example as a tincture for the cure of diseases such as cancer,
epilepsy and multiple sclerosis, a local therapist getting arrested and jailed
for his efforts in helping sick people; THEY dare to respond with, “Maijuana is
dangerous for the terminally ill!”.
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| We still got plenty of thugs in Auz! |
About 7000 pot-heads marched up and down the
main street of Nimbin shouting “Change the Law!” and “Free the Weed!” while a
posse of uniformed cops looked on grumpy, with the sweet tang of ganjha
drifting like mango lassi up the street and tantalizing the hungry crowd. One
of my favorite pastimes, sitting by a camp-fire listening to soft guitar and
folk-singing while sharing a joint, would be rudely interrupted when a pig, dressed
like a surfer gronk hippie, would materialize from the crowd and grab the poor
soul who happened to have the joint in his mouth. (It being such a small amount
he would get off with a warning so there was no point in us getting all riled
up and rioting.)
Ganjha freaks from around the
world gather at this May Day Rally, camping in the show-grounds, munching up
the delicious international cuisine on offer, attending the lectures and
protests, and rocking to the musicians that grooved from seven separate venues,
rock, pop, folk, reggae, rap and trance, it was a blast, I sure got off, music
to soothe the dispossessed, disgruntled soul. The wildest were the drummers,
led by a Japanese contingent, who had the whole town jumping at night on the
main street like jungle bunnies boogying with egoless abandon.
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Nimbin is a successful
attempt at counter-culture, half the buildings in the town are owned by the
hippie communes so that transient freaks have finally had a place to call their
own and put down roots to establish long-term their philosophies and
lifestyles. It’s not just a junkie lay-about town, many of the communard
hippies work very hard for drug reform, environmental protection, alternative
practices in education, health and communal sharing. At the time of the Ganjha
protest there was also a protest camp at Bentley 20 kms away, supported by the
Nimbin community, to stop a big power corporation, Metgasco, from fracking,
pouring chemical poisons into the land to release gas, thus threatening the
water-table and surrounding environment.
Of course, down on the
communal farm, there’s many a bitch-fight over space, ideology, sex, drugs and
loud rock’n’roll, not everyone can be pleased, I myself couldn’t handle the
endless committees and regulation manuals, those who don’t fit simply move on
or live by themselves. I think Nimbinites try hard to be true communards,
peaceniks and “Mother Earthers” and it beats the war mongers and money grubbers
tearing the planet to bits and stripping the skin from one’s own back. Over the
three day festival with 7000 pot-heads there was not one incident of violence
whereas with far fewer gronks on alcohol over the previous weeks there had been
much bloodletting in the town. (The Hotels Association are one of the major
lobbyists against marijuana legalization, for if you’re stoned you don’t feel
like getting drunk.)
Again, repeat, I had a great
time, especially at events like the skate-board comp and the Hemp Olympics,
bhong throwing, growers iron-person race and joint rolling. One girl in the
creative joint-rolling comp, Zebberdi, was told she was breaking the rules by
bringing to the stage a previously prepared artwork to which she was going to
attach her joint. She flipped out and refused to acknowledge the rules, abusing
the judges, screaming “Fuck you!” at the booing crowd, I felt sorry for her as
I know what it’s like to have a lynch-mob howling for one’s eviction, (as happened to me at that horrid
Melbourne Comedy Festival a few years ago.)
On the last night we sat
around a camp-fire listening to guitar music, an old koori man sang Aboriginal
folk-songs that brought tears to me eyes, it was real Aussie music and made me
euphoric that I had been born in this ancient land. One of the coolest things
about Nimbin is that it’s one of the few places I’ve found where the Aboriginals
are respected and live hand in hand with the white community, Hippies over the
moon for Dreamtime culture.
When things grew silent at
the camp-fire I attempted to talk philosophy to my fellow freaks but they
stared vacuously into the flames, stoned and uninterested, maybe just plain
pooped from all the fun. I felt stranger-danger still ruled the milieu, same as
the big city, each cut off from the other and alone, simply hoping to survive
the modern turmoil, somehow, and stay high doing it. If one lived on the
communes or out at the fracking protest camp things would be different but I was
just an old itinerant wandering through and couldn’t expect too much warmth.
Too soon the weekend was over
and it was back to the frontier town of Lismore where the wars raged on, right in
front of me a brawl broke out between two mobs of Koori women, they punched and
rolled on the ground screaming, “Cock-suckers, go back to Grafton!” The
white-man keeps the land and the Aboriginals down with alcohol, poverty and
apartheid, reducing the blacks to fighting amongst themselves instead of the
System. I could handle the hill-billy streets no longer and decided the cruel
anonymous city of Sydney was a jungle I knew how to swing through with greater
aptitude, like Tarzan in board shorts, and so I got back on the 6.30 train to Nowhere.
I’d have to wait another year
till I could come back and enjoy the madness, frivolity and political
astuteness of Nimbin; as an old man I’d simply have to stay alive. The Nimbin rocks
would always be there for me I prayed, for they were eternal, and I prayed the
freak community was also.
P.S. I just read in the Yellow Press that a young man, dying with bowel cancer in the country town of Tamworth is being given marijuana therapy by his very straight parents as it relieves his pain, nausea and lack of appetite, giving him a new lease on life. This action is supported by the town's sympathetic top cop and a petition has 26000 signatures to legalize pot for medicinal use, so maybe there's hope on the horizon that such rational and humane legislation may come about here in the penal land of Auz.
P.S. I just read in the Yellow Press that a young man, dying with bowel cancer in the country town of Tamworth is being given marijuana therapy by his very straight parents as it relieves his pain, nausea and lack of appetite, giving him a new lease on life. This action is supported by the town's sympathetic top cop and a petition has 26000 signatures to legalize pot for medicinal use, so maybe there's hope on the horizon that such rational and humane legislation may come about here in the penal land of Auz.
If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB
address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up
anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India
of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.
