The Maleny Fire Event

Lowell Lewis and Paul Dowsey-Magog (1993) provide a detailed exegesis on the fate of the Fire Event taking place within the context of the Maleny Folk Festival between New Year 90/91 and 93/94. The Fire Event is perhaps Australia's most popular and renowned incidence of 'ritual theatre', with up to 20,000 people in attendence in the period researched. Special attention is accorded the 91/92 Event, considered to be an exemplary 'totalising integrative force'.32 The authors argue that the Event's power as an engaging transformative performance was weakened in the later Events where 'art' had apparently triumphed over 'ritual'. This occurred in two ways: the dominance of linear time over cyclical time (the Event's transference from New Year's eve to the last night of the festival), and of individualism over communal processes (Western art, such as ritual theatre, is not so much a 'deeply communal process' as a domain of 'individual genius') (ibid:207). The Event's shift away from New Year's eve replaced collective engagement and resolution with passive spectatorship to an experience controlled by artists. At the same time, an indigenous people's night replaced the Fire Event on New Year's Eve. This event 'stole some fire' from the Fire Event as the largely non-Aboriginal crowd attracted were able to participate as spectators only. The authors claim that, here, indigenous people:

have sometimes constructed themselves as groups with ritual, as opposed to (Euro) others who had lost it. The implicit effect was to disallow or delegitimate the possibility of the popular recreation of ritual and to put indigenous people in the position of 'standing for' the sacred. (Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993:216)

Ultimately, this encouraged people 'to watch the performance of the sacred at the Fire Event' too (ibid).

Relying upon detailed ethnographic data,33 Lewis and Dowsey-Magog offer a tight analysis of the Fire Event and its participants. Like the Nimbin festivals, the Fire Event is said to have been an example of ritual's revitalisation in the (post)modern world - a liminal event. In an integrated approach, the authors use the ideas of Turner and MacAloon (1984), to argue that, 'at best' (when they were held on New Year), the Fire Events 'constitute a neo-liminal framework within which participants can achieve a consensus of belief and action' (1993:198). Here, they use MacAloon's 'neo-liminal' (1984:269) in place of 'liminal' since, due to 'the degree of individual variation, no special performance framework in a large scale society can be as integral to general daily life as similar frameworks can be among small-scale groups' (Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993:217). They argue that, ideally, Fire Events elicit the kind of 'totalising integrative force ... central to many kinds of ritual practice' (ibid:198-9). Therefore, it is 'grounded in transcendental, fundamental, or "ultimate concerns"' - engaging people by embodying their most important concerns (green politics and New Age spirituality). Consonant with the earlier approaches to Stonehenge and the Nimbin Celebration, prior to the triumph of art over ritual, the Fire Event occasioned 'communitas' - 'an experience of egalitarian solidarity and spiritual integration' (ibid:201).

While the authors imply that Aboriginal spectacle took the place of non-indigenous communitas, and while they speculate that the separation of Aborigines (the Murri stage and camp) and non-indigenes on site may reflect the 'difficulty of social reconciliation in the outside society' (ibid:217), I am left wondering about possible, but undisclosed, disharmony between indigenous and non-indigenous organisers and participants.

It should be clear that I am indebted to all of the above research projects. Variably rich in ethnographic data on, and analyses of, a diversity of ALEs, they represent the key texts drawn upon for comparative purposes throughout the thesis. They have furnished appropriate conceptual tools and the identification of various theoretical and methodological shortcomings has helped clarify my project. Hetherington's elucidation of the Stonehenge solstice free festivals as heterotopic has been particularly useful in formulating my own interpretation of ALEs in general, and ConFest in particular. It is clear to me that all of the four events above are ACHs.

My reading of past approaches has given rise a certain degree of dissatisfaction. I have been especially concerned that, although three of the projects are inspired by the writing of Turner, a critical deconstruction of his project has not been undertaken. For instance, what does the concept of heterotopia and its implied heterogeneity and conflict, reveal about liminality and its ostensible consensuality? Or, if these events are elevated moments of excess and intercorporeality, a celebration of the body, will a non-revisionist Turnerian perspective be appropriate for their study? If the popular Turnerian paradigm restricts the inquiry of contemporary ACEs, then what directions should we take?

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