Because of inbuilt uncertainty ... a community lives under the condition of constant anxiety and thus shows a sinister but thinly masked tendency to aggression and intolerance ... [It is] therefore, bound to remain endemically precarious and hence bellicose and intolerant, neurotic about matters of security and paranoic about hostility and ill intentions of environment. (Bauman in Evans 1997:238)Strategies, such as isolating and excluding 'foreign' elements, and concentrated enmity, generate and maintain a community consciousness - an 'imagined community' (Anderson 1983).
Within DTE's ConFest Committee, there is a preoccupation with identifying, containing and/or expelling potential dangers (symbolic and physical) believed to violate the 'Spirit' of ConFest, or otherwise threaten its virtue or sacrality. Those reacting to perceived threats often warn of the denudation of 'traditions' that such incursions may occasion. The community must be protected from the threat of the 'mainstream'. Many threats are seen to be associated with the festival atmosphere of the summer event. Thus, for Sparrow, ConFest is at a 'turning point'. It risks being 'swallowed up by the mainstream and essentially lose its essence' unless 'a drastic change and step away from this party that its turning into at New Year's Eve is made'. Otherwise, the people who are 'the heart of ConFest ... the gypsies, the ferals ... the people who actually live an alternative lifestyle 24 hours a day, every day of the year, will be less inclined to come'. For Ranji, ConFest used to be like an 'ashram', a 'refuge'.
I used to go to the ConFest and it was like ... a sort of a spiritual holiday. Then I would have to go back into town where all the shit was happening, and it was very hard to adjust, and I could get depressed, 'cause the difference was so pronounced. [But today] the difference isn't so pronounced. Some people really lament that.Others, such as Lorikeet, bemoan the presence of vast numbers of recreational and diversionary 'tourists' who come 'for a holiday', to consume, rather than commit to a 'tribe'. He observes the incessant movement of people on the paths, 'always moving as if they're looking for something that is really gonna [reward] them ... [They're] like speed freaks, always going somewhere and never getting there'. Ranji regards today's ConFest as an ailing microcosm of society: it has become 'a little bit like Torquay or Lorne on a New Year's Eve ... People come away from the cities ... and find that they've still got to deal with the problems that they have with society'. Indeed, according to Wirilda, 'pollutions of the dominant culture/mind set infiltrate [and] ... sexism and addictions riddle ConFest polluting it like the piles of VB cans at the bases of trees'. Therefore ConFest's distinct status as a counter-community is perceived to be under threat.
There are four basic threats.
This circumstance has occasioned a series of bizarre and sometimes unsettling incidents between ConFesters and interlopers. There have been many reports of groups of 'other' males 'fishing' close to shore, late night spotlighters and gate runners. At Moama III, in a rather dangerous manifestation of 'pelting',26dozens of frozen oranges were launched from a home made 'canon' set up on the Victorian bank of the Murray. In regular incidences of offense-ive disrobement, buttocks and genitals are exposed from the river's opposite bank and from passing speed boats. In a counter-offensive, Kokako recalls how participants at Moama I decommissioned a paddle steamer, that, full of passengers, had navigated up to view 'the nudist camp' every day:
One fella ... he got about fifty or sixty people in a row and as the paddle steamer went passed they all dropped their drawers and turned 'round and brown-eyed them. [We] didn't see the paddle steamer again.Another species of 'space invader' are the 'bludgers' who stay on-site after the final day of the event. These are participants who have not achieved 'worker' status. As one perceptive ConFester wrote, a successful way 'of generating surface camaraderie and familial communion is for a group of people to have a scapegoating "other", which they can all loath & resent' (Svendsen 1999:62). A manufactured 'other' himself, Kurt Svendsen points out that the active devalorisation of post-ConFest participants as 'bums', 'bludgers' and 'parasites', serves the purpose of galvanising internal solidarity.
women are really outspoken, because alcohol just doesn't support the women at all. It's just abuse and we don't need it, like people can go and get pissed anywhere. It's very rare these days where people can come to a place ... and celebrate, dance and do all sorts of amazing things without the presence of alcohol or drugs ... I see ConFest heading in that direction.Birdlands exemplified the way mind alterants are perceived to injure the community. For one TAZ emailer: 'I've never known so much booze at a ConFest ... A drunk yobbo woman collapsed and spewed up near us on New Year's and we didn't even feel like helping her'. According to Angela Palmer, alcohol 'attracts negative energy to what was once a spiritual celebration' (letter to DTE). For Ranji, concerned with more illicit substances, 'drug pushing' and use is a little 'out of control':
A lot of young people go to ConFest now. I mean young people are very impressionable ... There's some pretty powerful people that get around and push drugs on to just about anybody. I'm really dead against that. I always was dead against that all my life, even when I was taking drugs myself.DTE has responded to these defilements by creating a drug and alcohol free zone from Moama IV, an area comprising about a third of the site: 'Get high on the spirit of ConFest' (DTE News 91, Dec 1996:3).
DTE has waged its own micro 'campaign against drugs', a process possessing all the characteristics of a witch hunt. A campaign conducted by ill-informed and puritanical elements within DTE saw a Psychedelic Spirituality (or 'conscious tripping') workshop facilitator subject to a host of egregious rumours and accusations (ranging from spiking the Spiral water supply with acid to child molesting). The mood was set at Toc III where a 'counter workshop', whose co-convenor had presided over a gnostic celebration of the Eucharist at a previous Easter, took place in response to the visibility of Psychedelic Spirituality. The facilitator of the practical 'conscious tripping' workshop was aligned with the likes of Timothy Leary and denounced for engaging in 'false spiritual teaching'. As one observer remarked: '[q]uite frankly, I felt like I was back in Sunday school, with the next person eager to outdo the last with a description of the devil' (Pipit). Over several years, the same facilitator became a target of the Society's enmity, a scapegoat for the community's fears. His workshops (on Shame Healing) were 'sabotaged' (rubbed off the blackboard) at Toc IV, even though they had nothing to do with psychedelics (Svendsen 1999:61, 85). Kurt Svendsen eventually suffered an irregular banishment from ConFest (ibid:73) and was apparently struck off the shareholder's register and mailing list.28
It is obvious that the two threats above are related. Though many ConFesters put the sentiment of accepting all 'strangers' into practice, extolling tolerance as one of ConFest's principal legacies, and though 'yobbos' sometimes metamorphose into regular workshoppers and site crew,29 as Cedar remarks, what is really at issue is 'the question of how much ConFest can carry, because people don't feel safe any more'. In a space where difference is celebrated, some differences remain intolerable. The following poem captures the mood ranging against the space invading drunk:
Here's a woman and man carrying their gear with a struggle. Somebody comes up and takes a load from each of them & walks behind. Heres an old man walking with a stick carrying a pack upon his spine, bent over like a half moon. Somebody walks up, takes his weight off & and walks beside him. Here's a young man in shorts and short hair, carrying two slabs of beer in his hard arms. He keeps resting and swearing. Nobody helps him. (Lysenko 1996:4)
[t]he shopping mall came to ConFest ... under the Sun the Stars and the Trees, we had a full scale replica of a modern shopping town. Complete! Fast food. Trinkets, baubles, bangles and beads. Just the thing for browsing and impulse buying. And to complete the replication, a band playing in the centre to amuse the shoppers. (DTE 83 June 1995:5)