ZOOM. ZOOM.
SHROOM. SHROOM.
Arriving in Cairns, the only place that would rent the freaky hippies a room was where the local Aboriginals stayed.
The women loved Kathy’s golden hair, stroking it and plaiting it making wondrous sounds as it shone like golden gossamer in the sun.
Although we enjoyed the company of these beautiful people we hadn’t come to Cairns to be crammed into a boarding house .
We hitched further north which still hadn’t been settled, and found an untouched beach with unbelievably white sand, turquoise water under unobstructed blue, blue clear skies..
Hidden amongst a leafy glen, I managed to assemble a shonky palm frond hut, interlaced with paperbark with a sand floor.
As more adventurous 'hippies' learnt of our enclave a motley group of tents and open-air shelters popped up around us.
Each night looking at a starfilled sky that had never seen pollution. trying to spot flying saucers.
We were blissfully happy on the beach simply collecting shells and swimming in the clear ocean water, but the local constabulary weren’t! They did a crawl of the little pockets of mini counter cultures along the beaches moving everyone off.
The simple solution was a camping ground by the perfectly named Lake Placid, for a couple of dollars a week you could have a
campsite. Rainbow-painted tents, and simple ‘lean to’s soon filled the grounds as it became home to its' own 'tribe'.
Young men with brown bodies and muscles, long flowing hair and minimum colorful clothes, women with loose almost non-existent
pieces of fabric and chubby-faced children played happily with each other.
Each night was filled with music and laughter and sharing the sheer beauty of how heavenly the simple life could be.
By day, we found work in the surrounding cane fields, cutting cane was exhausting and backbreaking but with each of the men working one day a week there was enough money to feed everyone and pay the rent.
The weather was perfect, not a drop of rain, day after day of absolutely ideal weather.
But Psychedelic mushrooms need rain to grow and cow shit too, and about 100 miles south was- a rain-belt region home to one of
Queensland’s largest cattle ranches. We'd been joined by some cool motor-bikers and soon were heading off on the highway, Easy Rider style.
We’d scour the paddocks, having to hide from the cowboys who delighted in trying to round up and harass the hippies.
We’d take a large bag and spend the day filling it with ‘gold tops.’ Usually, the first few mushrooms didn’t go into the bag but straight into the mouth. We had a special place near the cow paddocks we’d go after a successful day harvesting where a clean river ran with water that tasted like honey.
Answers flowed with the river that were full of magic, whispering Nature’s secrets to me.
“PEACING OUT” AT LAKE PLACID
No matter how much the road dissolved into pure energy, however paisley patterned it became, no matter how it came at us waves of rolling ashfelt, we always triumphantly returned to camp holding aloft the treasures to be greeted with cheers and whooping.
Literally everyone would eat a mushroom, or as many they felt comfortable with.
There were many beautiful nights where all these youths looked the new hope for mankind, where the ways of the cruel world could be replaced by one with a common purpose and everyone had an equal and loving place in it.
The ‘chug chug’of the camp generator would create a rhythmic background, often to the music and lyrics from Hair the popular Hippie musical ...
“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason’
It seemed to make so much sense and was illustrated before our eyes.
The days were filled with wonder you could walk down to Lake Placid and hand-feed the giant colored fish.
.
I looked up at a beautiful sky and saw the reverse of my experience at St Benedicts, instead of a jury of stern monotone brothers I saw a long table at which sat all the great saints, I saw Jesus, I saw Buddha, I saw Mohamed, I saw Lao Tzu and more and it felt like they all saw me and were smiling, sending me their blessing and beckoning me to join them.
I again filled with bliss but was remaining more non-verbal about it.
I’d just experience it totally,internally and not talk about it.
‘The wet’ was coming so it was time to head south again
FROM HEAVEN TO HELL
Penniless, working on the cane-fields hadn't added to our riches. We stopped at a camping ground in Townsville,
The only source of work was the abattoirs, the 'meatworks' where cows were killed and cut into many pieces... I was appointed to the offal room where cow’s stomachs would 'wobble' down a big chute. The first guy in the line sliced the stomach open, the next would pick up the stomach, turn it inside out and shake out all the shit out. My job was to hang it up, hose it and get rid of the shit sticking to the stomach lining.
The knifeman would be shaving with his knife, when I showed up in the morning, he’d look at me with a strange look and I often thought he was seeing me as a big juicy cow’s stomach, one he’d love to slit from side to side. He wasn’t happy unless he was coated in blood. Before he got his hands on me or his knife in me, I was promoted to the 'carcass' room.
Cow’s bodies, skinned would come along hanging with hooks from their feet, it was my job to keep the line moving, if they stopped I would launch myself at one like a pro footballer in a tackle to get the line moving again.
I was having a tough time till Kathy told me she’d had the job of washing brains in a large barrel. What a fantastic woman who was so sensitive could take this on to help us get out of this hellhole.
We worked hard and got enough money to get us out of there as soon as we could.
Townsville had a huge army base, and as we walked to the meatworks from the camping ground we'd serve as targets for various missiles launched by soldiers in their versions of drive-bys.
We soon had scrimped and saved enough cash to get us back to Sydney.