William Ricketts Sanctuary

As my time in Melbourne, and Australia, draws to a close I have been making the most of my days with those close friends who's company I am soon to be separated from. R and I took to the hills this weekend as she showed me a magical place in the Dandenongs full of art and nature and wonder.

The William Ricketts Sanctuary is about an hours drive from Melbourne up winding country roads and small towns. The sanctuary itself is not large but its impact is huge. nestled amongst giant gum trees and ferns that look like something out of Jurassic park are sculptures that embody the essence of Aboriginal spirituality and Australian nature.

William Ricketts was himself something of an eccentric and an amateur mystic who lived as a part time hermit, full time artist in the woods. Early in his life he spent much of his time integrating himself with the local aboriginal people and had come to respect and revere their way of life. It was his duty, as he saw it, to help their philosophy of being live on and to make it accessible to others. To this end he was inspired to create sculptures that meld man and trees, woman and rock, plant and animal.

The sanctuary is not just a place to view art but to experience it. The pathways, the water ways, the little nooks are all thought out. I felt like I was walking around a permaculture art installation until I realized that I was. William may have passed on before the word came into vogue but the idea behind it, sensing and mimicking patterns in nature, incorporating the land and animals all into one system could well be applied to his sanctuary.

It was raining and cold but the gums soaring upwards i the mists were a good reward for braving the late autumn weather and the undergrowth of ferns acted as a kind of giant ferny umbrella. We took our time, and froze our fingers off taking photos and enjoying the energy. Staggering half frozen back to the car only when our memory cards were full and are hands no longer functional.

Royal Doof

 

Doof n. an electronic- pystrace party in the bush, lasting in duration from 1 to 4 nights. Sometimes small and invite only sometimes large with tickets sold. origin an onomatopoeia from the noise the bass makes 

 Royal Doof is the king of the Doof, taking place in the waning light of autumn it is a Melbourne based Doof that just barely manages to get its shit together for Queen’s Birthday weekend. Sometimes its doesn’t and there’s just a big warehouse party. This year the site was moved three times, the last of those times being on the opening day of the festival. So I wasn’t the only one feeling a bit curfluffled and in need of some relaxation by the time we arrived.

My friend K had flown over form New Zealand and in her best up for anything attitude, accepted my invitation to come to Royal. She had no idea what she was in for and as we drove into the bush I began to wonder if this was really such a great idea. It was cold, for one, and wet for another. I had scrounged a sleeping bag and tent form my roommate and pegs and food from T and R. It was a last minuet decision to go and as we scrambled into T’s truck with the psy-trance already blasting I looked at my ashram going permaculture friend and hoped she wouldn’t hate me by Monday.

There was traffic, there was road rage, there was pulling an old van halfway to the site up dirt hills in the dense bush. But we arrived.

The weekend was a beautiful one, despite the cold and sometimes dreary weather. Most things were covered in mud but there was a fire and a dance floor and friends and music. It was I realized, my last real party in Australia.

It was a full circle moment. We met T and R at Rainbow Serpent back in January. They were out camp neighbors and T loaned us an axe. “ He seems cool,” I told Fiz, “ He has an axe.” We all became friends, faster than I would have imagined. When Rainbow ended I stayed in touch, we ended up visiting a few times over the course of our stay I Tatura and when Fiz went back to the States I lived on T and R’s floor for 16 days or so. It was wonderful.

Where Rainbow was hot, Royal was cold, where Rainbow was big, Royal was small, where Rainbow was a high budget production with sound and lights and 6 dance floors, Royal had about as much money as ten people could throw at making and awesome weekend, there was one stage. Where Rainbow started right on time Royal didn’t even get the main stage up until Saturday night. Yet, there was a closeness and a warmth at Royal that rainbow in it’s massiveness lacked. It was a small gathering of 500 where people wandered freely into each others camps for a smoke and a chat. Where we made new friends every day. K loved it. She danced like a mystic in rapture and brought joy to the campfire.

I danced out all the stress of the last few weeks, let got of all my expectations and just floated on the sound and swam in the rhythm. Sound can cleanse and music can heal and as I stood in the waves of the beats I couldn’t help but feel purified by the pulsating, like all my chakras and all my cells were getting sandblasted, the gunk getting flushed out, the rot falling off.

These are Jaffles, they are a "traditional Australian camping food"

I wrote and took photos and was surrounded by big gums and pines. I smelt their heady mixture, so like home so like Australia. I felt in balance with both. I didn’t realize how long I had been here until I realized I had stopped smelling the gum trees. When I first got here I smelled them all the time and then somehow I stopped noticing.

It was my first time out of the city since I arrived and I came to the woods shattered by the urban energy.  I have come to love the sleek and cold beauty of the city, it is intriguing and inspiring and frustratingly unknowable but it is also a place that is covered I concrete and as the bush approached I couldn't help but feel a sense of ease, a presence of something distinctly other that is utterly lacking in the city.

Trees! Trees! How could I have ever thought I could live without you? How could I have traded the stars and moon for neon signs and lights? The sound of the breeze and the river for the train and tram?

Seductive though you may be Melbourne, you are not for me, at least not all the time. Let us visit from time to time, but let me go, away from this urbanity, this concrete insanity, back to the place where fireflies glow.

Party Animal

By Kathleen

When life gives you lemons sometimes the only thing to do is swallow the bitter shit, realize you’re the one who grew the damn lemons in the first place, and then shoot things with nerf guns.

It’s the only sane thing to do.

And so this weekend, in order to process some of my own lemons I teamed up with a friend and hit Melbourne’s party scene.

Stop One: Nerf Core

Don’t think about what it is, you know what it is. Nerf guns, music, disco lights, fog. It was Cambodia’s Heart of Darkness meets tiki torches and Apocalypse Now. The first thing of course, the essential thing in any Nerf based war game is to have a Nerf gun. 

My friend armed me with a sleek steam-punk nerf gun that made me look and feel like a guerrilla out of the Congo/Venezuela/Iraq. With my purple  keffiyeh tied around my face and my hood up I felt truly revolutionary. I’d post pictures but you never know who would accuse me of being involved with some sort of underground Occupy training program.

The Nerf gun was light in my hand, the lights spinning out of control, then through the fog, gorillas! No! Man down, back to the line, “we need more ammo! My gun is jammed! Medic!”.

I strutted around the bar like I was back form assignment in Hanoi recovering in Phnom Phen. It was rad.

Stop Two: Warehouse Party

Ah the mythical warehouse party. Often alluded to, religiously talked up, surprisingly elusive. I’ve been to four warehouses since being in Brunswick, the whole area is rent with them, they fill the lane ways and have funny names. They have themes and décor and better sound systems then some clubs I’ve been to. Of course, when I was invited to one, one where the location and date and time were known, I accepted.

Fabulous letdown. From the jungles of South East Asia/ Congo to the Frat boy jungle full of drunk bros in animal print togas it took about point three seconds for me and my friends to realize "this is so not our scene".

Then the cops showed up.

So much for wild rave party it was more like drunken dorm party, freshman year.

Stop Three: My Aeon

Never heard of a pys-trance club? Well don’t worry I didn’t realize they existed either. For those urbanites who can’t make it to the woods for a doof or just can’t wait until the net one, My Aeon fills a needed hole. Nothing like a friendly not grope crowd that just wants to hang and dance and has a fireplace outside.

It was at this point in the evening that conversation turned serious and I began to look at some of the major issues in my life. Namely I’m exactly where I said I wanted to be and it’s not what I want at all. Be careful what you wish for and be careful what you say.

I took a cab home, drunk and alone, thinking about how my life has changed in the last year and seriously questioning what I wanted to come in the next year. Despite all my friends here, and all that is going on, it’s just not worth anything without my love. It’s just not home.

Travel can take you many places, there is always someplace new on the horizon. The world is so huge that it is impossible to see every place or every time. When I was a child I dreamed of having a watch that would show me what was happening all around the world at any given moment so I would never miss anything.

My favorite place to go is always the place I haven’t been yet. I realize now that travel is a way of life but it is also an addiction. There will never be enough time or money to see it all. There will always be one more place. You need to know when to stop, when to set the course for home.

That isn’t to say I have sworn travel off, but I need to find a way to travel that is more sustainable for the three bottom lines (emotional, financial, social). I need to find a way to integrate myself into this world without losing what I love.

Keep your heart at the center and set sail.

Photos of Brunswick

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This was a weekend of firsts.

Traveling alone is not something that comes as naturally to me as it dose to others. There are aspects of it which I prefer, I can be say, be as cheap as I want, I don’t need to confirm an idea with somebody else and I can linger in bookstores as long as I want. Honestly the enjoyment stops there.

While I believe that there is character-building merit in traveling alone, it simply is not as enjoyable as traveling with somebody. There is nobody with whom to share those special moments when you see something amazing, or silly or sad. Nobody to point out simple joys to, nobody to convince you that ‘yes’ you really do want to buy the cheese, and nobody who is seeing the new culture through the same lens as you.

Despite these drawbacks I’ve been making the best of the experience. I’ve been taking on new challenges and overcoming fears. This Saturday for example, I was in a bit of quandary. There was a show I wanted to see downtown, for a band I had only just discovered, while my dear friends wanted to go out of the city and into the woods to dance all night at a bush doof (underground outdoor music/dance party).

Now I have never been to a doof, not a proper Aussie one at least, but neither had I ever been to a show alone. I was torn. Somewhere deep inside me there was a little voice that urged me to do the scary thing. While a doof is new in many ways it is not new in its fundamentals and considering that soon I will have a friend visiting and then soon after that Fiz will be returning I saw that this was perhaps my unique opportunity to experience standing awkwardly alone in a crowd. I chose the show.

Down to the CBD I went, riding the tram, so different late at night than early in the morning. Crowds of gaggling girls and slightly drunken dudes all headed down for a big adventure, and me.

The show, as it happened, was sold out. So much for my experience. But on my way back up to the street from the club below I caught out of the corner of my eye, the sight of a friend I had not expected to see again. One of the women from the Permaculture course was there with her date. They didn’t get tickets either. We exchanged remarks and hugs and then the three of us spent the evening walking around the city and talking. I discovered that there is an upcoming writer’s festival (they are both writers) the Melbourne’s Emerging Writer’s Festival, starting this week. So sometimes that little voice knows something you don’t.

The next morning, feeling groggy after my late night, I did something I haven’t done in years. I went to church. Now, I’m not much in the way for Christianity, I had a long period where we were at odds, but as I’ve gotten older my dislike has mellowed and eventually turned friendly. There is something comforting in the rituals, and strangely something exotic.

After traveling the world and praying in temples and pagodas and mosques to deities of every shape size and color I found that the rituals of the Anglican Church were new and different. I was raised a Catholic, or well, it was attempted, I resisted the whole time but some of it seeped in, I love frankincense and chanting and have a strong affinity for the Virgin Mary. The Anglican service (not mass!) seemed strangely devoid of all the little Catholic things I liked, but the singing was nice and the priest gave a good sermon. Melbourne’s St.Paul’s Cathedral is lovely, a beautiful piece of Victorian Victorian Architecture.

I could not help but notice as I sat in my pew waiting to take part in the Ancient Egyptian God Eating ritual that the congregation was dying. I don’t mean in front of my eyes, but just about. A full 90% were grey, and the list of the ill and the recently passed was long. There was one child there, making himself known only occasionally. It felt as though the whole giant space, designed to hold so many was now filled with a few old men trying to stay warm.

As I walked outside into the sunlight I heard chanting. Across the street at Federation Square the Asian community was celebrating Buddha’s birthday. (As the Pentecost is upon us I find it interesting that Buddha’ Birthday is so close on the calendar.) Buddhist chants were piped onto the square and people were milling about joyfully scattered, holding incense and orchids. And there were children. Heaps of children, not just from Melbourne’s growing Asian population, Anglo children, mixed race children of every colour. Children brought there by parents who had decided at some point that they no longer wanted to sit in a pew and pray to the Lord but instead were clumsily teaching foreign rituals to a new generation of seekers.

Why? Christianity in comparison to Buddhism is in fact quite young, so it should be thriving, but instead people have turned the cathedrals and churches of the world into museums, mausoleums to a dying faith. While I know that Christianity is growing rapidly in those parts of the world that are staved for learning or starved in general, willing to accept help from anywhere, I can’t help but think that they join so they can break literal bread and thereby gain salvation, in a physical rather than a theological way.

Perhaps it is the slow decay of a way of life that asked too much of its people or that makes too little sense to many these days. Pedophilia was certainly the last straw in many places. Nothing like a bit of molestation to keep the next generation coming back for more, no wonder it’s destroyed the parishes from the inside out.

It is an interesting thing to watch, this juxtaposition of faith across the street from one another, another reason to love the urban environment, even as I find myself starting to seriously miss the smell of trees.

I am a country girl after all and I worship dirt, and wind and sun and rain. My cathedral is as always the forest and I find that no tower of stone nor any beautifully build pagoda can compare to the simple experience of a mountain or a river or a plain.

 But it gives me hope for the future, as multiple muti-cultural spaces continue to grow and flourish and we manage to live within them, surely we can learn to work out our differences elsewhere. So I bowed my head at the alter of Christ and Buddha and prayed to the One for peace and justice for all.

Working Girl

By Kathleen Broadhurst

My alarm goes off at 5am and there is a nothing but darkness and a 20min walk to the train. I get to café and sit and write with the lights off for a half and hour before I open. I’m looking forward to moving into my new place this weekend, the train is closer and the it’s a shorter trip. There is a solid hour where I think that I’m crazy for getting back into this world of caffeine addicts and barista artists.

Then my co-workers show up. Overall they are lovely and my boss is wonderful. The head barista has changed my opinion about baristas he’s fun and friendly and after 18 years of pulling shots is a master. Watching him work is wonderful, it’s always interesting to see somebody who is really good at what they do. I’ve been learning a lot about coffee, it’s more of an applied science than an art with exact measurements affecting tiny details. For me as an American who grew up on Dunkin’ Donuts it all seems a bit much but it’s still cool.

I love this city more and more every day. Riding the train is one of my favorite parts of being a new urbanite. I like the graffiti and the grey concrete and the tall sky-scrapers in the distance. It’s like a big dystopian fantasy, gritty and real.

Melbourne itself is a lovely combination of old Victorian architecture and modern buildings. I’ll post some pictures as soon as I get to taking the camera around, but it’s such a monster and I feel a little silly looking like a tourist in a place that I’m calling home.

I noticed something the other day on the way to work as I was staring up at the glowing neon signs of the CBD. ANZ, Commonwealth, NAB, all banks. Historically when you look at cities, the taller the building the more power it had. In Italy families would vie for the tallest tower and hence the biggest show of power. For millennia kings and queens have been erecting monuments as testimony to their strength and all throughout the Old World the steeples and minarets and pagodas of religion have reached for the sky, dominating skylines as they scrambled to touch God.

Our city skylines are dominated by banks, by the symbols of trade and materialism. It’s not a metaphor. It’s worth thinking about.

I’m excited to move into my new place tomorrow, even as I fight off a cold, but I’ll be sad to leave my friends’ home. Australians are generous in general but these two may just be the most generous people I know. They have helped me find my feet and held my hand as I stumbled onto this new road. I can only hope one day that they come to visit in the Sates so I balance out the books, even a little bit.

Making new friends here makes my connection to here stronger, but I am always aware of those who are still at home. They walk with me, phantoms of my imagination. I see a shirt I think of you, I hear a song I think of you, I have an amazing time at a club I think of you. I rid the train and think of you. You are all in my thoughts. Friends make life worth living.

Now to make some dinner!

Fallin’ Into Place

By Kathleen Broadhurst

My last week has been rainy and as far as Australia is concerned, cold. I have been getting to know the inner workings of the trains and the trams and recognizing faces at the gate of Flinders’ Street. I’ve been learning the nuances of “fare evasion”, yep, I’m that person ( At $4.50 a ticket you would be too).

Meeting strangers everyday and having to tell a quick blurb about yourself is a strange exercise in the art of being concise. You quickly learn the fundamentals of your identity. “ I’m from Massachusetts, I’m a writer, I like plants.” Seemed to be the most common themes. I delight in its over simplification.

Meeting potential employees is always a bit of a theatrical déjà vu. All those classes and years of stage acting pay off in ways like being able to give a spiel without pausing or looking nervous. So much of life is acting it seems and what we wear is all costume.

Yesterday the rain got me down, as I trudged along in a too large, too blue borrowed jacket with a strangers passport, I couldn’t help but think “ What am I doing here”. None of us like to admit when we are wrong, I sure as hell stick to my guns long past the point when I should let go, but even I was looking at the cold drizzle and thinking that Melbourne was silently rejecting me.

Today I woke up feeling conflicted. I hadn’t heard back from the job or the room I wanted and I wasn’t prepared to settle for second best or start my search from scratch again.

But Alas! The gods of this city must have heard my pleas. “ I need a sign!” I told the grey streets and the concrete. Australia isn’t what I would call an easily manipulated place. It’s a touch untamed and doesn’t seem to enjoy human interference. I was missing Asia where everything can be so easy where the seething mass of humanity has left a deep impression on the land.

Then, it all came together. The house I wanted wanted me too and the rent was cheaper than I had been first told, then as I was getting ready to apply for another round of part-time-casual f*ck-off jobs I got a phone call. I had the job, starting Monday, 6:30 AM. Back to rising before dawn in the middle of winter.

I am looking at the city with new eyes. All the events that are happening are suddenly accessible. From International Permaculture Day (preserving persimmons in the Japanese style anyone?) to Melbourne Museum’s new exhibition about Mesopotamia to the hip record stores that sell vinyl and coffee to the endless lists of shows and concerts happening at my doorstep. I need a bike!

So I am becoming a real person here. I don’t get to move in until the 10th but I start work on the 7th. So here goes nothing Vicarious adventurers, this shit’s about to get real.