Four Days of Hippie-bliss

Hidden deep in the bushland of country New South Wales, is an area of private land where a community of about a thousand merry revellers gather, twice a year (during Easter and Christmas) to celebrate and to share. The event, called Confest (formed from the union of the words conference and festival), was started as an “alternative living” festival 29 years ago to encourage a confluence of ideas and ideals from people from diverse backgrounds, and it was at this festival that I found myself for 4 days, during the change of guard from the year 2005 to 2006.

The word alternative (according to Dictionary.com) means a choice between two mutually exclusive possibilities, and when used as an adjective, embraces values that differ from those of the establishment or mainstream. It is a means of bringing change to society from the bottom up. This change could be religious like the Osho movement, founded by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who claimed to have attained spiritual enlightenment and ordained that the greatest values in life are (in no specific order) love, meditation and laughter, and that the sole goal of human life was to reach spiritual enlightenment. It could also involve an alternative to violent revolution, and in the context of the Indian freedom movement, Gandhi’s non-violent resistance involving the making of salt and the adoption of home-spun khadi as a means of providing alternative services to those provided by the British establishment could be seen as an example of “alternativism”.

The flavour of alternativism at Confest turned out to be a mix of a “Hippie-style” communal lifestyle and a desire for living a sustainable existence in close proximity to one’s environmental roots. There was a central market place where Confesters gathered for food, made new friends and attended workshops on everything from Tai-chi to Tan-trik sex, surrounded by tent-lined villages along the Murray river which meandered along the outer periphery of the property. Confesters wandered about stark naked, or with minimalist clothing, which in addition to being part of the culture there, was really a compulsion, given the record daytime temperatures of forty-plus degrees Celsius sustained for most of the camp. One of the guys I was camping with described seeing nothing but an orgy of breasts as soon as he lay down to sleep each night.

The sounds of the wind screaming through tall eucalypt trees, and multi-coloured cries of birdsong permeated our campsite during the day. A steady rhythm of the drums endured till late in the night, interspersed with the occasional scream from what appeared to be part of a ritual sacrifice at a make-shift Kali temple.
I was there with a mate of mine from university, along with his Jewish friends, who seemed to form their own community within the Confest community, so much so that it appeared to me that a fair proportion of the thousand or so Confesters were Jewish. Most of these guys had been back to Israel to participate in kibbutzim and youth camps, and I sensed a real community spirit among them, where everybody knew almost everyone else. I have myself partaken, albeit for a short period of time in a youth movement of the Chinmaya Mission earlier, and being Indian, I was able to appreciate their culture and sense of community. I was invited to celebrate Hanukkah with them, which is a Jewish festival during which candles are lit, one each night over a period of eight nights to commemorate the victory of the Macabees against the ancient Greeks. For eight nights at the end of the victory, oil at the Temple of eternal flame miraculously lasted, just enough time to consecrate new oil. By the end of the camp, I felt a definite affinity to the Jewish community (in no small means due to the abundance of delightful Jewish women) and was christened “Hin-Jew”.

We’d set up camp by the river and spent most of the days either swimming in it, or lounging by its sides, playing shesh besh or backgammon. I had taken along Kingsley Amis’ comic novel Lucky Jim to read, as a break from the singularly depressing A Fine Balance, a book I had been reading earlier, about the chance meeting and successive bonding of four characters from varied backgrounds, who come together in Mumbai during the turmoil of the Emergency. I hardly read four pages of Lucky Jim though, and need not have worried about the easing of my depression (owing not only to the book, but other events prior) because the guys at my camp set up a laugh-a-minute riot which scarcely afforded breathing time between successive jokes and guffaws.

New Years’ Eve turned out to be a scorcher, with the mercury touching 50 degrees. Even I, who had been showing off my natural sunburn protection (I'd never been sunburnt before in my life owing to my brown skin) developed pinkish-red patches on my back and shoulders. We kept ourselves from going insane by spending most of the day in the river. Fortunately, we had a cool change, accompanied by slight drizzle by the evening, and the temperature dropped to a more manageable level. The sharp fall of temperature triggered a few gum (read eucalypt) tree collapses, including one which decimated one of our pit-toilets. A Confester using the facility at the time had a fortuitous escape when, on hearing ominous creaking, he came out to investigate and the falling gum missed him by a few seconds.

Our celebrations for the New Year began in the evening, by gathering around to watch one of our friends take up a challenge (from a Middle-Eastern shopkeeper) to down 14 baklavas. The baklava is an extremely rich dessert of Middle-Eastern origin, made with paper thin sheets of buttered dough, layered and rolled with finely ground pistachios, into a high-density log, which is then baked and soaked in a solution of honey, spices and rosewater (think of the richest Indian sweet-meat you’ve had, and then raise it to the power of ten). Down them he did, and not only did he break the record, he set up his own record of 16! The same guy had earlier in the week, cycled the 400-odd kms from Melbourne to Confest and with that precedence, I had no doubt in my mind that he would break the baklava record. By midnight, our group had made it back to our camp-site and huddled around our repository of alcohol (smuggled from Melbourne in ice-filled eskies and kept cool by dunking in the river). Over the next few hours, the spirits flowed through our bodies as freely as the Beatles wafted through our guitars. Our unrestrained festivities continued till the wee hours of the morning and I have got to admit that I have never gotten so drunk before in my life, and I think it was the heat-induced dehydration that contributed to my fast-paced inebriation.

We were due to leave early the next morning, but that turned out to be impossible, given the state we were in after the previous night, and spent the next day by the river again. The high-point of the following day turned out to be an encounter with a snake “the size of a small anaconda” who had, like us, stepped into the river to cool-off. He’d been spotted by one of the guys just as he was slithering his slimy silver belly over the plank that moments earlier, we had used to get into the water. There was much shouting, and screaming, and we swam away as fast as possible, got onto the bank from another point further downstream, and decided to pack our tents and leave Confest immediately.