Many participants are attracted by the sense of return ConFest evokes - a return to a desired space, to nature, manifested as the 'natural' environment, 'natural' healing, diet or even immediate, 'natural', sociality. Liminaries celebrate their distance from the parent culture and their affinity with one another. As local authenticity par excellence, ferality is championed and performed at ConFest. At a space on the edge and time in-between, participants are permitted to be, or quite literally go, feral.

Therefore, there are several ways in which we can conceptualise ConFestian ferality. First, ConFest is a temporary juncture for ferals, a haven accommodating various semi-nomadic tribes. Rarely subjected to prejudice at this populous marginal centre, 'the ferals, the gypsies, the people on the fringes of society, seem to be quite comfortable' (Yallara). For itinerant activists it is a transhumant 'gathering of the tribes'. Yet, perhaps more than this, ConFest, says Spinifex, 'is a kind of a link for city based people to have that connection with the Earth and to rub shoulders with the very few that are actually living with the Earth'. In their open defiance of a mass-consumerist mentality and the apathetic disposition upon which economic rationalism relies, in resisting and ridiculing bureaucratic structures and 'power over' processes, ferals are like beacons. With their integration of living theatre, Earthen spirituality and anarchist social and political projects, they are, to use Banyalla's phrase, 'fucken stunners'. Adherents of an expressive and conscientious youth culture, they represent an attractive subcultural career for the disenchanted.

As a result of its conferencing dimension, ConFest is a significant point of accessibility. Dominant culture expatriates encounter eco-radical alternatives and may become enlisted in 'the volunteer earth army'. As a recruitment centre for contemporaneous campaigns (e.g. protests at the WMC uranium mine at Roxby Downs SA in 1983/84 and 1997 [Roxstop], the Errinundra forest blockade in 1984, and the protest at ERA's Jabiluka uranium mine in 1998), ConFest has featured in Australia's feral emergence. From Moama IV, activists from GECO (in receipt of grants and donations from DTE for equipment for blockades and educational tours) and other ecotribes (FOE and OREN), formed Forest (see Chapter 4). An 'outpost for the forests' (Bandicoot), the village has functioned as a fund raiser and rallying centre for native logging blockades mounted at Goolengook. With the precedent already set back in 1984, Banyalla makes no bones about the possibilities:

If we get down to East Gippsland we can lock off the whole of the logging industry, right. A thousand people the coppers can't deal with. It takes 20-30 coppers to do one blockade, so it's impossible for them to knock out six or seven.

At a further level, ferality is nearest to that which might approximate a 'dominant symbol' at ConFest. For participants, ferality is an archetypal mode of otherness, 'natural' corporeality, a most authentic condition of human being. Ferality is freedom - a freedom embodied in those who have 'cut loose from common or garden varieties of human' (Nelumbo). At ConFest, such freedom is given root and permitted to flower. In an organic autonomous zone, where other 'truths' are enacted and alternate forms of sociality are (re)discovered, one is free to take a risk - to stray from the paths.

The fragile, eruptive character of this permissive topos is laid bare when participants spill over its perimeter. Transitory occupancy of immediate locales is often threatening to locals. Outside opinion on ConFest and its inhabitants is mixed. Since ConFest is a financial boon for small towns like Tocumwal and Moama, and ConFesters are usually friendly, locals are most often favourable. However this is not always the case. As Spain earlier reported, from the first moment of the DTE movement alternative lifestylers have encountered hostility:

The Establishment authorities treat us like a load of excrement. They are not even concerned to consider our usefulness for composting a garden ... the media show little interest in relating our positive attributes, preferring to exploit our sensationalist image of being dirty, useless, irresponsible, drug-addicted, ratbag, ragtag dropouts. (Spain 1976)

In 1985, DTE withdrew continued permit applications for the Baringa event near Wangaratta following objections from local property owners and residents. Apart from the alarm generated by the proximity of a 'nude camp', locals took exception to the abject feral body 'loitering and hitch-hiking in the area'. One couple even discovered someone 'asleep under their mailbox' (Wangaratta Chronicle 1985:1). In 1991, after Walwa III, a town resident wrote to DTE reporting cases of 'people sleeping in the streets and in various front gardens around town. In fact we were a bit concerned at the number of people who lingered on after ConFest had finished, in some cases for weeks' (DTE News 67, Aug 1991:5).

Outside the festive atmosphere, the freedoms sought and assimilated by participants presents a potential threat to privileged order, propriety and property. But inside, transhumant participants - distanced from routine social life, outside the confines of suburban enclaves, centres of learning and business districts - are provided the opportunity to experience an immediate communion with 'the natural' and 'fellow travellers': they are safe to get and be 'dirty', to assume wildness, to cultivate 'crustiness'. Ferality is an authentic transitional/edge identity (re)constituted via ConFest's liminal/marginal coincidence. In Chapters 6-8, I investigate a triad of liminal modalities (outlined in Chapter 2) which respectively condition key aspects of ferality: embodied alterity, eco-spirituality and neo-tribal sociations.

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