1. For Turner, play is basically transcendent and reflexive. It involves Csikszentmihalyi's 'flow state' (1974), yet also provides a 'metalanguage' (Bateson 1958) for commentaries on self and society (Turner 1985e:263-64). In Turner's view, the inherent sacred and 'instrumental potency' of playing, inspires the imagination. Play is then elusive (a term derived from the Latin ex for 'away' plus ludere meaning 'to play'). From the point of view of neurology, it cannot be pinned down by left brain 'thinking' nor is it fully of right brain 'arationality'. Taking another tack, play is described as a slippery 'Trickster', 'a Puck between the day world of Theseus and the night world of Oberon' (ibid:268). The 'supreme bricoleur of frail transient constructions', it is an incongruous potpourri of 'mimicry and mockery' (ibid:264) paralleling the indivisibly transcendent and dialogical cultural mode of Bakhtin's (1968) carnivalesque.

2. As Bey remarked, 'real art is play and play is one of the most immediate of all experiences' (1994a:4). ConFest is an immediate micro-social topos where barriers between artists and 'users' of art are removed. It thus approximates the TAZ which, for Bey, is 'the only possible "time" and "place" for art to happen, for the sheer pleasure of creative play' - where art is not a commodity but 'a condition of life'. In this democraticisation of artistry (music making, singing, healing arts etc.) the artist is not celebrated as a special sort of person, but every person is celebrated as a special sort of artist (Bey 1991a:70).

3. Note that 'ludic' is not synonymous with carefree frivolity. For Huizinga, 'we might call [play] a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary life" as being "not serious", but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly' (Huizinga 1950:13).

4. Of course, participants also desire the immediate sociality of communitas - being with others. I give special attention to this in Chapter 8.

5. For example, in a workshop at Cotter, The Farm's James Prescott endorsed the view that 'the more physical touching shared by people for the purpose of pleasure and understanding, the less the tendency toward violence in their society' (DTE Canberra 3, Dec. 1979:14-15).

6. Other strategies include piercing and innovative body painting.

7. For Butler, gender is not an 'expression' of an inner 'essence' or 'substance' - it is performed, it is produced. Therefore, to follow her argument, gender discontinuities such as those 'performed' at ConFest expose the fiction of an interior gender 'essence', dramatising the performative construction of an original or true 'sex': 'In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself - as well as its contingency' (Butler 1990:36).

8. Of course, one might regress as far as the womb (e.g. The Labyrinth) or even past lives (Dr Fu's popular 'past life regression' workshops).

9. In my own experience, such taboo-breaking 'modifications' were ultimately satisfying - even liberating. I discovered at my first ConFest (Moama I) that, following anxieties about going around, as a friend deemed it, 'tackle out', being naked in the presence of strangers was not as difficult as I had been conditioned to believe.

10. According to Trev, Australia is 'a country that's been nudist for 99.9% of its inhabited history - 40,000 to 100,000 years ... The Americas, South Pacific, Australia, S.E. Asia, and Africa were all inhabited by naked people, living in respect for their land and people'. Acacia provides a rather different insight however, stating that Aboriginal people are often 'shocked and are really angry about the nudity', which she says is 'kind of interesting in terms of the fact that that's really been appropriated from indigenous cultures'.

11. That which is variously perceived to be: timeless (a source of spirit, wisdom and moral teaching - keepers of 'the dreaming'); primordial (possessing animal instinct); autochthonous (from the land); conservationist (the 'ecologically noble savage': Redford 1990; cf. Sackett 1991:242); and nomadic.

12. In 'didge healing', or 'didjeridu resonance therapy', the subject's body, or afflicted region, is offered up to the didjeriduist who provides a methodical 'sonic massage'. See Sherwood (1997:148-9) and Neuenfeldt (1998a:35-40) for discussions of alternative lifestylers' use of the didjeridu in therapeutic contexts.

13. American participation in 'the occult power' and 'mythic radiance' of the Indian, of 'Caliban the Wild Man', has, however, a long history - in fact traced back to the first English colony at Roanoake who had 'Gone to Croatan', who deserted civilisation and 'went native' (Bey 1991a:116-23; cf. Wilson 1993), and more recently clearly apparent in films like Dances With Wolves (Alexeyeff 1994).

14. As evidenced in the Tipi village at Toc III, as well as a pervasion of old, new or mock tipis locally fashioned from logs, bark, scrub and corrugated iron.

15. ConFest 'sweat lodges' are really just wood fired steam tents, though serious purificatory rituals of this type are becoming more popular amongst non-American Indians (Lindquist 1995).

16. Daricha, who takes workshops at ConFest including 'the modern shaman's journey', was spurned by the Anangu Pitjantjatjara for attempting to harness local initiatory themes (the Wanampi Dreaming) in a ten day workshop in Central Australia in 1994.

17. In cultural mining strategies, indigenes are consigned to the status of essential difference - they are reified as 'wholly other'. This denies a people's capacity for innovation and change, to absorb 'elements' from the outside in the continual development of their 'traditions'. It denies their agency. It also disadvantages those who deviate from the 'real' or 'authentic'.

18. Tactics include what Hetherington (1998b:71) calls a 'politics of metonymy', whereby 'those not in a subaltern position identify with one or more such positions as a means of valorising their own identity as real and significant'. However, the approach is somewhat diminished as the cultural politics involved in the transference of marginality, where 'the idea of ethnicity and the idea of Otherness become important symbolic resources', is overlooked.

19. Though the New Age too, does not receive adequate definition here.

20. The authors seem to conspire in a strangely familiar invective, albeit dressed up in a legitimate academic tongue. A tiresome feral as pest discourse is adopted as ferals become invasive New Age pests.

21. Also see Taylor (1995b). For accounts of radical ecology movement alliances with other cultures deemed to possess a nature beneficent spirituality, see Taylor (1995a).

22. And there are further complexities. Demystifying a process routinely associated with 'distortion, inequality, theft, repression and coercion', Morton refigures appropriation as an 'aspect of exchange', ideally involving mutual agency (1996:133). Appropriation is here assigned an unusually positive value given the conviction that an 'equivalence of agency' is impossible (Johnson 1995:164) or that 'appropriation goes hand in hand with colonialism' (Root 1996:102). The economy of appropriated signs - the system of imports and exports - is a subject worthy of further research. As agents, 'others' may be involved in 'selling' (e.g. Aborigines as producers of New Age artefacts), 'spending', (e.g. strategic disclosures of secret land/business [Jacobs 1994]); or 'giving away' (e.g. the Krishna movement founded by Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada offered to the west as a form of 'consciousness expansion' [Ziguras 1996:74]) their 'cultural capital'. They may also be themselves consumers of the New Age (Mulcock 1997a:6). Conklin (1997) complicates matters further. Addressing the new face of Amazonian identity politics, she discusses the tactical deployment of an embodied 'eco-semiotics' (723) by indigenes. Though effecting political and cultural benefits, this is a strategic claim to an authenticity which is defined by non-Indians.