Feral Roots

As ferals possess multi-subcultural roots, genealogical research is necessarily complicated. Here it will suffice to say that the seventies and eighties occasioned 'commerce' between, and eventual mergers of, disparate youth cultural dispositions - namely, the idealism of 'hippy' counterculturalists, the confrontationalism of punk, and the eco-spiritualism of local Pagans. As the feral milieu lies downstream from their confluence, we will likely discover a range of formative radical indices: the struggle for individual liberty and freedom of expression, a largely imported culture of dissent fermenting in the sixties which included genuine opposition and outright disengagement (militant and bohemian elements); the culture of refusal and often directionless confrontation apparent in the late seventies and eighties 'blank generation' and urban squatting scene, and; the dutiful commitment toward, and identification with, the natural environment inherent in Neo-Paganism - the 'spiritual arm' of the ecology movement (cf. Hume 1997:56). Early evidence of convergent streams, the first and third in particular, is discernible in that which Lindblad (1976) described as 'a new bush para-culture ... of geodesic domes, A-frames and Kombi vans' (32). In the mid seventies, he observed an:

eclectic religiosity which blends Zen Buddhism with the primitive tribal belief that man is essentially a part of nature. Just as nature was the basis of beliefs of the Aborigines, so you can still find mountain and mushroom worshippers among these new people of the bush, and their beliefs correspond directly with their geographical location. Children are given such names as Possum, Sunshine and Rainforest. (Lindblad 1976:34)

Shifting attention to the eighties, another factor in the feral emergence - mobile activism - became apparent as occupants of urban squats were set even further adrift. Cedar clearly remembers:

a particular type of people who were like squatters but they travelled. And they would go from action to action ... Whilst the squatting movement in Melbourne were very activist, and they were into things like resisting evictions, it was all still local and it was much more city based ... Suddenly the squatters would go feral and that was it, they'd start travelling.

Harbouring a strong cold-war survivalist mentality and transience akin to Britain's new travellers or 'rainbow punks' (Stone 1996:193), and an eco-defensive apocalypticism akin to Earth First!,11 activists mobilised throughout the eighties to form counter-development (clear-fell logging and uranium mining) protests. Many began occupying and defending those biotic contexts of identity formation - the Australian forests.

Conservation issues have had an especially radicalising influence in Australia. Threats to valued areas of natural heritage sparked an effective series of 'greenie' civil disobedience campaigns/occupations: the anti-logging campaign at Terania Creek in NSW 1979 followed by the Nightcap National Park struggle in 1982; the Wilderness Society's celebrated Gordon-below-Franklin Hydroelectric Scheme protest in Tasmania's remote southwest in 1982-3, and; the blockade of Errinundra forest in 1984 (Cohen 1996; Kendell and Buivids 1987). The latter protest, Victoria's first, was mounted by 'a multi-coloured crew of "hippies" fresh from the [Baringa I] Confest. Sarongs, headbands, and dreadlocks were their marks of distinction' (Redwood 1996:7). According to Redwood, their 'tenacity and conviction' resulted in the creation of the Errinundra National Park. The suspected danger that an aggressive growth orientated political mainstream poses to natural heritage sites, and the successes of local direct action, has had a formative impact on Australia's recent self-marginals.

Protests followed one after another. By July 1991, there was a successful blockade mounted at the Chaelundi Forest conflict in northeast New South Wales dubbed 'Feral Camp' (Cohen 1996:189). According to Cohen, it was Chaelundi which spawned 'a new generation of young, alternative environmental activists'. Amongst these he includes the 'punks for the forests':

[A] wonderfully rare breed of wild young men and women, outrageous to the extreme, who shocked everyone, from police to protesters. Wild and often drunk, they surprised all with their outlandish humour and bravery. Under the rough exterior of rags and skull earrings, nose rings, boots and beer were some of the finest people I had encountered (when they were sober). (182-3)

Terra-ists of the nineties, many came to inhabit, if only temporarily, threatened regions where strong attachments to both native landscape and co-defender/celebrants were formed.12

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