Nevertheless, such idealised veneration of 'tribal life' is infused in the ConFest imagination. According to Cockatoo, ConFest is a 'celebration of tribal archetypes, with multiple options for expressing it'. As for Les:

ConFest is tribal in the sense of a closeness - a return, as the name says, down to earth. Some of the best aspects of the indigenous way of life are present at ConFest. It is tribal also in the sense of a respect for the Earth and the whole notion of nurturing everything.

I've never experienced tribal life other than ConFest ... If we take tribalness to mean belonging ... entitlement ... then this is part of the personal journey of ConFest ... of getting to the point where you can lock into the tribal process of being a human ... ConFest is just a big tribal gathering.

Coming Home: the ConFest Family

It is thus a most familiar environment. Michael intimates this in reference to his first ConFest: 'it was just like coming home ... It was all my friends in one place'. Indeed, as Cedar imparts, 'a lot of people feel like it's their home, that they are coming home when they come to ConFest, and that they are leaving home when they leave'. Paralleling the experience of the Carnaval participant, for the ConFester, it is likely that 'the whole world around him is turned into his house' (Da Matta 1984:238). And the domestication of public space, this licensed extension of the private sphere, sanctions, amongst other intimate behaviours, 'clothing optional' pursuits.

It is worth drawing attention to one of Turner's comparative insights at this point. In both counterculture and in tribal ritual, Turner thought sexual rules and the laws and vows of marriage may be 'liquidated' in two ways: they may be replaced by a kind of 'primitive promiscuity' or 'group marriage', or routine sexual behaviour may be prohibited, suppressed or altered by an extension of the sibling bond giving over to temporary abstinence or celibacy (1974:246). Newton (1988) argues that the Nimbin Lifestyle Celebration approximated the latter route. Contemporary sensitive attitudes and awareness of AIDS and other STDs increases the likelihood of abstinence or monogamy at such events. Though, I am uncertain as to whether ConFest 'sets asexual rules ... and greatly increases the number of people deemed to be within an incest taboo relationship' (Newton 1988:63),15 it at least seems probable that increased public nudity and tactility - the familiarity associated with the extension of the private sphere - correspond with a reduction in the occurrence of sexual harassment and abuse. Permitted carnality and sexual harassment seem to be inversely related.

Going Neo-Tribal: the Village People

These groups can then be conceived as band-like or 'tribal' in the Maffesolian sense of dispersed micro-groups, possessing a distinct system of values and ethics. By contrast to the relative fixity and longevity of pre-modern or 'traditional' tribes, postmodern or 'neo-tribes' are temporary, internally diverse, unstable, and organised to fulfil the desire to be together. For Maffesoli, neo-tribes reflect a populist movement tending toward rediscovering 'mutual aid, conviviality, commensality [and] professional support' (1996:69). They are 'less disposed to master the world, nature and society than collectively to achieve societies founded above all on quality of life' (ibid:62).

It is clearly the case that ConFest is attractive to the disaffected who search for security and meaning in 'elective centres' (Cohen et al. 1987), becoming affiliates of precarious but affectual tribal or Bund-like forms of sociation (Hetherington 1994). To maintain their self-identity and internal cohesion, these neo-tribes often engage in subterfuge, are tactically duplicitous, or remain aloof (Maffesoli 1996:96). However, neo-tribes gravitating to and forming at ConFest are characteristically alternate (perhaps counter-tribes). While some are characteristically hedonist, others (including eco-tribes like GECO) display the kind of political strategies ostensibly foundering in 'the time of the tribes'. This environ, then, incubates a heteroglossia of alternate lifestyle tribes: feral, pagan, anarchist, queer, New Ager, Margy, raver, bikie, itinerant trader etc. Such tribes, ephemeral and tragic, practise the 'forbidden', and the secret aesthetic and ideals that their members share is felt to be non-replicable, resisting imposition. Such is the internal resolve of 'underground centrality', one example of which I now discuss.

Tek Know Trance Dance

Attracting bohemians and activists alike, participants are united by their opposition to the parent culture.16 Located at the edge of 'the movement of the dancefloor' (Jordan 1995:125), ConFest Trance Dance is remote from the excessive commercialisation that characterises techno, and the style restrictions and exclusivity of 'club culture' or 'clubbing' (Thornton 1995; Malbon 1998). If there is a haute couture, it is detectably anticonsumerist. Yet, this is not to suggest that display is unconsidered, for participants ascribe to the most sartorially insane body-rigs and outlandish adornments (often using fluoro colours, wigs, face paint, layered leggings and trousers fashioned from the most ridiculously juxtaposed fabrics and colours), bad-taste artefacts and insurgent t-shirt slogans (like 'ungovernable entity'). Deploying a manifestly 'retro' style, these bricoleurs display a nostalgia for a panoply of past youth cultures (e.g. hippy and punk) with the homological conveyance of a neo-sixties ethos foremost.

Despite this conspicuous display, the Trance Dance floor is a space where participants can dissolve into the body - one's own, and that of others. One can be induced into an ecstasy of selflessness and feel profoundly connected to those who are on the same 'track', who share the experience. Surrendering to the music (and other effects such as the lights, smoke, installations) occasions the dissolution of ego, or the disassemblage of otherwise requisite egoic proclivities among dancers. In this 'democratic dance movement' (Richard and Kruger 1998:167), where 'the body moves beyond the spectacle of "the pose"' (Melechi 1993:33), where the penchant for 'whole body vibrations ... allow no hierarchising or privileging of any given body part' (Gore 1997:64), and where females are infrequently constituted as dancing subjects by the male gaze, a quality of safe anonymity is experienced (although New Years Eve's high 'yob' count jeopardises this). And, in sharing such an experience, an intimate fellowship is potentiated between dancers whereby standard markers of separation based on gender, class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, become insignificant. Being 'alone together' (Moore 1995:207) is an appropriate expression for the experience. The phrase signifies the unique 'passional logic' of Trance Dance - where participants share the experience of 'emigrating inwards' (Goffman in Malbon 1998:275), each desiring the intercorporeal17 estate of the dance floor and the inviolable 'space' it offers them.

This dissolution into a temporary trance-community is implicit in Krusty's Rainbow Dreaming promotion. In a workshop envisioning revived Trance Dance, initiates would join together as one new tribe: 'The Rainbow Tribe': 'all colours, all races, all as one'. This was an inclusive Dionysian 'ritual of disappearance' wherein, as Melechi (1993:37) narrates, one can 'disaccumulate culture' and 'hide from the spectre of a former self'. In this 'wild revolution' of 'escape' from self identity, 'nobody is, but everybody belongs' (ibid). As participants merge into a collective body, they approximate Deleuze and Guattari's 'Body without Organs' (Jordan 1995:125). Yet this wider 'body' is not, as Pini (1997:124-5) suggests, just a collection of human bodies, but a 'mind/body/technology assemblage'. With the use of smoke, strobe-lights, slides, Mutoid Waste Co. fire sculptures and industrial waste art installations, an instance of 'an erosion of the limits between the corporeal and the technological' is realised. Where 'cyborgians' enjoy 'an ongoing inducement into a desubjectified state of something like rapture ... a communal state of euphoria' (Jordan 1995:129), the Trance Dance TAZ can be envisioned as a 'deterritorialising' assemblage, and therefore testament to the unlimited and unblocked productivity of desire.

Trance Dance is a typically non-verbal experience - though ambient 'chill spaces' are usually provided for low level conversation. Consciousness altering drugs, ecstasy and acid, are often used to enhance the experience. An 'entactogenic', ecstasy heightens sensory awareness, yet the shared intensity of the dance floor already conditions empathy between co-trancers. Acid often produces auditory and visual hallucinations that amplify the sensory stimuli of the assemblage. Drug use, however, is not compulsory. Quenda, for instance, says she doesn't 'go tripping' to 'trance out' these days: 'usually there's heaps of people just out there and I can just vibe on and start tripping more than they are and I'm not doing it to my body ... I like to mingle around the crowd like a bit of a spideress and just bring everybody all into that motion'.

Quenda's remark also touches on the broad safety margins and permissive parameters of this 'rave-derived' experience, and the possibilities it holds for 'unfixing identity categories' (Pini 1997:126), for safely exploring alternate identities (such as androgyny, mythical characters or personal 'totems') or even non-identities. For this is a highly charged exploratory zone of sometimes grotesque embodiment. By comparison with the predatory sexuality associated with disco, Trance Dance can be said to leave participants 'suspended between ascension and climax, between childhood and adulthood' (Tomlinson 1998:201). The rave-associated component of regression is apparent - that is, with an abundance of fluffy toys, and even pacifier sucking, a temporary idyll approximating that of childhood is achieved. Though the experience may approximate what McRobbie calls the 'pre-sexual' and 'pre-oedipal' playground of raves (1993:419), since 'virtual' sex characterises these 'plateauz of intensity' (Gore 1997:62),18 it is perhaps more accurate to refer to the 'tacit sexuality' of the experience replacing sexual contact (Tomlinson 1998:201).19

The Organic Network and Nomadism

Various spaces, organs and cultures of sentiment are interlaced forming the 'ambient' mass that is ConFest. The ConFest Committee and its several subcommittees, the key event zones and villages are inter-reliant. The successful operation of the festival, and the realisation of communality often deemed 'the ConFest Spirit' depend upon this delicate alignment.

Performing a subtle 'governing' role, the ConFest Committee facilitates the distribution of resources to multiple tribes and sites. Consisting of various impermanent subcommittees or satellite crews, the Committee enables basic infrastructural amenities, including the provision of food and cooking facilities to some village based kitchen communal-network centres (Maps). These 'services' effectively reward and encourage volunteers to perform roles for the community. Via the ConFest Committee, DTE reproduces a local 'de-individualising' puissance. There is thus an implicit reciprocal relationship between part (tribe) and whole (community 'ambience'). Performing site work (e.g. separating garbage for recycling, Pt'chang peacekeeping, Front Gate duties, digging toilet pits) is a means by which individuals or groups - subcommittees, crews, villages ('diversified polarities') - become attached to the community (the 'undifferentiated mass'). Taking 'the co-operative path', individuals, often strangers to one another, share responsibilities (such as child minding, waste management, community safety and hygiene, healing and first aid) and provide free education (workshops). While some volunteers may strive for or seek to maintain 'true worker status' - the acme of DTE elitism and source of differentiation - most volunteers are satisfied with little more than their ownership of an equal share in the community: they 'work' for ConFest. A profound sense of satisfaction and belonging is derived from the collective effort required to 'pull off' a festival.

In addition to the essential tension of part and whole, the event encourages cross-membership, a promiscuous inter-village fluidity (or a poly-centredness), which is what Maffesoli has in mind with the 'network' (1996:145): a 'unicity' or matrix in which individuals have multiple sites of belonging. The contemporary topography promotes such networking by inviting people to wander, to be peripatetic. Village distribution permits participants to 'go through a little gap to another zone which has its own ethic, or thoughts or process' (David Cruise). With this arrangement, they are constantly straying into unfamiliar territory. Furthermore, such nomadism may activate one's connection to numerous locales of intimacy and a multiplicity of overlapping identity clusters. One participant may become involved, for example, in the ConFest Committee, Pt'chang, the Front Gate, Spontaneous Choir, Spiral and Tek Know, and/or may oscillate between the lifestyle nodes of the 'diversionary' bohemian, 'experimentalist' workshopper and 'existential' volunteer; between 'tourist' and 'local'. Traversing the paths between such 'polycentric nebulae' (Maffesoli 1996:152), quite literally a network of networks, an individual may acquire numerous identifications and roles.

Being Together: the ConFest Spirit(uality)

I often say during a ConFest 'Oh God, Never Again'. It's all too much, too raw - too young, too juvenile. But I usually return. It's my one experience in the year when I can take off the mask of persona, let down my hair, get real dirty, rub shoulders with all age groups and all socio levels. A sort of melange of common denominator humanity.

Ostensibly opposed to closed, intolerant attitudes, DTE propagates the celebration of open sociality, an ethos of universal acceptance condensed in a bannered slogan 'strangers are friends you have not yet met'.21 This openness is also deemed to be indicative of 'the ConFest Spirit', 'the spirit of people leaving judgement behind, opening their arms and their hearts and embracing and welcoming connections with other people ... challenging [their] fears, [and] belief systems' (Cheryl). The 'Spirit' had its genesis in 1976 at Cotter after which it was given expression in the original 'manifesto':

We have in a few, short days, broken through into a consciousness that is so powerful in its newness that it is, as yet, difficult to describe ... The Down to Earth Movement has found, here at the Cotter River, that we can live in wholeness, in harmony with ourselves, the Earth and all around us. This sharing has shown us to be so diverse, and from so many walks of life, that we are obviously not an alternative but the possessors of a new and greater consciousness of human potential ... We are the seeds of change that will ultimately transform mankind. (DTE Community News 1977, no 1:1)

the creation of extended families as single-parents joined with others of the same or opposite gender, homosexual and heterosexual often joining together; and [by spontaneous] meetings, the wonderful life-enriching joy of knowing one could go up and embrace anyone regardless of gender. (Rawlins 1982:31)

After more than twenty years of events, 'the ConFest Spirit' continues to manifest in a zone which, according to Svendsen (1999:39) - who likens ConFest to India's Khumb-Mela (the world's largest gathering of Hindu ascetics) - has become 'the pre-eminent Spiritual Convergence in Australia, if not the Western World'; a zone where social divisions (based on role, status, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age) are variously suspended. The associated numinosity is perennial. Following Moama II, for example, one novice wrote:

[U]pon dropping my scepticism like an old skin I had outgrown, I entered a new space ... I was overcome with emotion ... I passed through the eye of a needle into a blossoming new reality, a lucid dreaming in bliss. With that came an increasing lightness of heart which allowed my eyes to witness a living miracle on a grand scale ... I was witnessing the grounding of earth of the heavenly fourth dimension, the descending of the era of the new paradigm, city of the new Jerusalem ... I was witnessing miracles. (Andrew Elksin 1995:9)

there was nothing to mark time but the passage of the sun and the ritual morning swim - after several days the thought of returning to the world I had left with the incessant regimes of time and timekeeping, appointments and schedules seemed appalling ... I felt like I had discovered the right way to live, timeless, among this calm, and welcoming community. (Simon K)

THE greatest experience of my life! ... I learnt that society is not solely consistent of superficial ... commodities and that there are genuine people in this world ... ConFest has taught me that the material world counts for very little (something that I always knew but had never truly believed until it was put into practise) and that emphasis on the internal spirit and beliefs are what fashions a good person ... [M]y faith in the 'Human Spirit' has been restored through the countless acts of genuine kindness and humanity I was witness to. (Katya)

People come into ConFest at the level of the groin, the animal sexual level, searching for a fuck, friendship, a companion. After two or three days, as the natural human comes out and they go up from the groin, they come out at the level of the eyes and you get a lot of people unafraid to look back at you and not fearing the consequences of simply saying 'hello'. And so after two or three days, to me, the magic comes out. And everywhere you look you see postures, you see ... little magic cameos, you see archetypal conversations ... [people] being in connection with something different from the normal regular mode that we operate in.

greatest healing done at the Confest was the opportunity to drop all those mainstream facades and communicate with each other from the heart. Walking around naked to the world without having to justify or classify - sharing and communing openly and environmentally, finding strength in the networks created. (Wendy 1984)

one of the most powerful, useful forces on earth ... part of a global model for building wellbeing that is not utopian but is based on practical action. Unique in the world, it is a context for possibilities.