Calamity: The End of Days

"Every day is a good day for a mediocre man. He is always at his best."
A variation off Somerset Maughan.

"People will defend their own mediocrity to the death."
A common saying.

Henry James has a mind - a sensibility -so fine that no mere idea could ever penetrate it.
T. S. Eliot on Henry James

He is a mediocre man - and knows it, or suspects it, which is worse; he will come to no good, and in the meantime he's treated rudely by waiters and is not really admired even by the middle-class dowagers.
Lytton Strachey on E. M. Forster

Virginia Woolf s writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Dame Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf

Monsieur Zola is determined to show that if he has not genius he can at least be dull.
Oscar Wilde on Emile Zola

What a tiresome, affected sod.
Noel Coward on Oscar Wilde

The stupid person's idea of the clever person.
Elizabeth Bowen in the Spectator (1936) on Aldous Huxley

... stewed-up fragments of quotation in the sauce of a would-be dirty mind.
D. H. Lawrence on James Joyce

The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"
Bette Davis


The world was going to end in 1972. My mother kept the cupboards stocked in preparation for the end time. I grew up with an overwhelming sense of calamity; as if these truly were the end times. Work had me sitting in parks for a month meditating with the Falun Gong for a story on who they were, these funny little people sitting in parks all over the city. I said at the beginning: they're not going to run this, there's too much busines in China. No, no, we really want to know, they said; and thus it was that I came to understand their own notion that we really are living at The End of Days; that we will be enveloped in disaster and all will be nought. I remember 1972, a teenager but already well out of home; but waiting nonetheless for the end to come, partying literally in the belief that there would be no tomorrow. And if there was a tomorrow, it would resemble nothing like the days we had known.

Well so, in a sense, it came to pass. The present bears almost no resemblance to the past. Life prior to the computer is now almost impossible to imagine; and yet it's only been since the 1990s that it all really began to take off; and the world has been totally transformed. They will look back on this time just as we now look back on the Industrial Age, as a trans formative time. when the world and our social construction shifted on its axis, when things changed fundamentally for entire populations, where our understandings of who we are changed completely. Computers have done that. Social networking sites. The easy access to vast stores of information. Instant publication. Historic times. And back then, the musty water stored in bottles, get down on your knees and pray because the wrath of God is at hand; sinners, unbelievers, even the gay, the deviant, the wicked.

No wonder we sought some purity, there in the wicked light; the hippies dancing through ht e nights, whacked out on magic mushrooms. And I sat there with Henry at the tables in the main street, in the Nimbin which has changed from a tiny little picturesque dairy town on the north coast of NSW to the dope capital of Australia. And I said: I was here in 1972 for the Aquarius Festival; and he looked, interested, as if looking at a bit of history. That must have been amazing, he said; and I could remember, walking down those lanes with the mist crowding in all around, the magic mushrooms which everyone was taking adding depth and mystery to the clammy bush, the archaic tents, the little groups of gypsies and that ancient feel; that here, as we celebrated at the end of days, the world's psyche was moving into something else, becoming something else; here in Nimbin, which was one of those places like Goa and Pye and Zanzibar, I think, where all the lei lines are meant to meet and hippies come from all the world to be at.

And 30 years later, when the world hadn't ended and the calamity hadn't happened and instead we had grown into middle aged men, we sat thinking of coffee and watching the shenanigans in the street; the rapid street deals, the colourful shops; the tawdry breakdown of what had once been a universe of hope; and wondered now, what had it all meant, that festival of 1972 that was meant to change everything. For years I had been friends with one of the founding organisers Johnny Allen, and for years it really did seem as if we had changed something; as if it had all been worthwhile. I've lost touch with him, now, and sitting here, literally 35 years later, watching the tourists streaming in and out of the colourful shops, the rapid-fire deals, the plain clothes police watching events from further down the street, too clean cut to be anything else, and sitting here with Henry laughing at our own pasts, it was impossible to say we had achieved anything at all. My own kids thought hippies were some tragic stoned sub-species of losers; and as for the music of the era we had loved so much; you've got to be joking! So much for the profound legacy we had thought we were passing on.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.nimbinweb.com.au/nimbin/history/history2.htm

In 1972 scouts from the Australian Union of Students came to the village and persuaded the Nimbin Progress Association to allow a festival to be held here. Johnny Allen, Graeme Dunstan and Paul Joseph organised a celebration of the dawning of the `Consciousness' and `Protest' movements in the heady days of the Vietnam war, free love and marijuana - a festival of discovery .... It lasted 10 days and marked a watershed in Australian popular culture. Many decided to stay and bought up the cheap land available, settling in to a new lifestyle.

Although it could be said that now Nimbin is "A Living Theatre" it remains an enigma, an energy, a process that some think could be outside the normal parameters of everyday living.

The new Settlers
After the Aquarius Festival of '73, the 'alternatives' had different problems to face but many common threads were there. Left with only a portion of the original forest, they were certainly much more careful with what remained! Twice they stood up to the Police and Authorities to save what was left at Terania Creek in 1979 and Mt. Nardi in 1982 and won out substantially.
A strong contingent of local 'Greenies' have been active ever since then, helping to save our heritage in other parts of the country - not without criticism and controversy.

However, it must be said that the population of Australia (and also overseas) are now much more aware of the issues at stake, partly due to these early protests and to the general lifestyle centred on Nimbin itself.


n early September in August 1972 Johnny Allen and I, two paid organisers for the Australian Union of Students, arrived at Main Arm valley, outside of Mullumbimby in northern NSW, to talk up and find a site for a festival in the region.

We had driven directly from the August conference of AUS in Melbourne where we had won approval for the idea of presenting the 1973 biennial intervarsity arts festival as a kind of counter cultural expo.

For six years the student movement had been protesting war and conscription and we knew what we were against. The 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival was to be a celebration of the possibilities of peace in the bush and far, far away from the campus and city symbols of authority, which we had been for so long in reaction.

The festival was to be in the May and for reasons of warmth, our search was directed northward but not so far north as to cross the border into Belkje land. We had heard of the nascent hippie settlements behind Mullumbimby and the surfie idylls of Byron. We expected interest and maybe sympathy with our project. Out of sense of fraternal respect, and because it was the only address we had, Upper Main Arm was our first port of call.

Cold was our reception at the late Colin Scattergood's house. We seemed to have walked into something at once proto hippie and feudal; hackles were raised and the drawbridge drawn. Yes folks, even then.

It was my first experience with that aspect of the rural counter culture that is about hiding amongst trees in very big back yards; that is about being invisible and anonymous, and growing cannabis to pay the bills and living with the paranoia, social isolation and dysfunction that goes along with all that.

The worldview of we Aquarians was diametrically opposed. One more flood of inspired passion in the perennial traditions of utopians, we were a band of dreamers setting out to build a city on a hill. We aimed to illuminate the counter culture of the times and we had come with the experience years of public place student theatre and protest organising to do it. We wanted not only to be visible to each other, but visible to the world.

Graeme Dunstan