Alternative Australia
Sample from this book:
Bill had exchanged e-mail correspondence with me about this book
for about six months, and I had already read his books, Social
characteristics of alternative lifestyle participants in Australia
(with Frank Vanclay) and From Utopian dreaming to Communal reality.
Bill is a nice mix of human warmth and intellectual monolith.
Some of our e-mail exchanges had been a shade tetchy. Bill expected
me to have a stronger set of expectations of what I wanted as
contributions for the book. "What will make it into saleable
book, rather than a string of interesting stories?" he politely
enquired. I was busy describing myself in terms of helms-person,
rather than editor. Neither did I want to write an Alan's adventures
in alternative Australia. Though, as you can see,
there is a bit of that!
Alternative and Communal Australia?
Or
The Education of Young Bill
Dr Bill Metcalf
Is there an alternative Australia?
That was the burning question for me when I arrived in Australia
as an immigrant from Canada in late 1970. I had completed an Honours
Degree in Agricultural Economics at University of Guelph, Canada,
and worked unhappily for a financial firm, then spent a couple
of years as a 'hippie' roaming North America and Europe. I experienced
much of the communal, countercultural fervour of the late sixties
- and I then saw the rot of hard drugs, sexism and violence set
in and subsequently destroy the so-called 'Summer of Peace and
Flowers'.
Australia in 1970 seemed to me like North America of five or
ten years earlier. I soon became re-enthused about the possibility
of developing a radically different society, of avoiding the moral
abyss of serial monogamy, of overcoming loneliness and selfishness,
of living within loving, communal families rather than as isolated
nuclear families or singles, and of moving past rampant consumerism
through learning to share.
In the lead-up to the general election of late 1972, Australia
was still a profoundly conservative place; still with military
conscription, still involved in the Vietnam War, and still acting
politically like a poor cousin to USA, following an earlier Prime
Minister's sycophantic promise to go 'All the Way with LBJ'. The
Australian Labor Party, under the simple slogan 'It's Time', won
that election with an overwhelming mandate for radical change,
and Gough Whitlam became our Prime Minister.
Like most of my friends, I worked hard for the '72 Labor victory.
That night, December 2, 1972, it really seemed as if Australia
was fundamentally changing. I recorded in my diary simply, "Exhausted
but very happy and content". A new and brighter day appeared
to be dawning, and the dreams to which so many of 'my sort of
people' clung, seemed to be about to be realised. John F. Kennedy's
election as US President in 1960, and Pierre Trudeau's election
as Canadian Prime Minister in 1967, both had the same impact on
me and on others of my generation. We naively thought that dramatic
social change could and would come from the top down. It did not
because it can not!
As an intellectual, I have always operated first and foremost
through my head. I therefore enrolled in a Master's Degree in
sociology at University of Queensland, in order to study the social
change movements of environmentalism and communalism, of which
I was, of course, already very involved. I slowly started to uncover
my naive, blinkered eyes, and to see countercultural social change,
and my own and my friends' communal experimentation, within a
far wider historical and theoretical context. On the personal
front, I had developed an urban commune here in Brisbane in which
I lived with a number of other brave social experimenters. I fully
appreciated and implemented the idea that social thinkers must
live their altered reality - not just theorise about it. Like
most communards, however, I soon found that day-to-day communal
practice was much harder than the theorising. In spite of our
purest intentions, jealousy, possessiveness and pettiness crept
into our naively idealistic communal hearts and hearth.
In May 1973, I temporarily left the secure academic world to
become part of the famous Aquarius Festival, at Nimbin in northern
New South Wales. Here is part of what I wrote about this experience
in my subsequent PhD Thesis (yes, Virginia, one can write about
these things in academic works!).
My first view of the 1973 Aquarius Festival was when I arrived
late on the afternoon of the first day. Car parks were organised
on each side of Nimbin, and a regular shuttle bus service provided
surprisingly efficient transport. The main (and almost only) street
of Nimbin was packed with colourful people, dancing, singing and
playing. The paddocks to the north and east were filled with tents,
domes and assorted experimental housing forms. The whole area
was covered by a haze of smoke from hundreds of small cooking
fires. Music from exotic, unknown instruments wafted over the
hills, and as I walked to our pre-arranged 'tribal site', the
acrid odour of marijuana was frequently encountered. For ten days,
we participants (estimated from 5,000 to 10,000) took part in
serious workshops and discussions, swam and paraded in the nude
(much to the consternation of townsfolk), smoked dope, listened
to music, and talked incessantly of new social experiments.
By the end of the Aquarius Festival, we participants had learned
that we were not alone in our dreams and faltering social experimentations.
Far from being alone, participants began to recognise that we
were part of a new, utopian social movement. A 'Full Moon Celebration'
was held. This semi-structured event saw perhaps 1,000 people
on a barren knob of a hill, and as the sun went down we took part
in a pageant or dance. With hands linked, we chanted and sang
as the moon suddenly appeared over the Nightcap Range. A sense
of social solidarity seemed to develop within the crowd who had
taken part. This intense feeling of one-ness, … [or] 'we
consciousness', seemed all-pervasive. Because of the affective
nature of this event it was only interpretable to a full participant
like myself, with no ulterior motives, who became fully involved,
then later in reflecting on the experience analysed its social
significance.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the 1973 Aquarius Festival
was its symbolism. It came to symbolise the alternative lifestyle
movement, to provide a geographical focus, and, over time, it
became an important aspect of the collective mythology of that
movement. To have been at Nimbin in '73 came to be a source of
pride for participants. Even today, I am frequently asked to describe
the sensation of the Aquarius Festival by new participants who
appear to regard it with a degree of awe.
Before the Aquarius Festival finished, posters appeared, asking,
'After Nimbin: What?'. A meeting to answer this question was convened
on the final Sunday of the festival, and several hundred people
(including myself) attended. There was a strong sentiment that
the spirit of the festival must live on, and find expression in
a continuing, living alternative lifestyle community. Several
people volunteered to seek suitable land which would provide a
permanent home base in the area, for participants in the alternative
lifestyle movement. As we retreated from Nimbin in late May 1973,
many participants must have felt (as I did) that it was only a
temporary retreat, and that we were now part of a 'new' alternative
lifestyle movement - with a utopian vision of the world in which
we wished to live.
Other samples from Alternative Australia:
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