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There were two almost separate aspects to the place. The land itself seemed to play an important part in creating the atmosphere in more ways than just creating a backdrop for human activity. The land had its own strong characteristics and a powerful influence over the people who lived on it. But at the same time, maybe half of what Sally liked about it was directly due to the people. The way they lived, the way they worked together. And the way they were as individuals. They all seemed to draw an unusual strength from their physical and social environment, and this was reflected in everything they did and said. As a group, they were a surprisingly confident and powerful mob.
The normal problems and difficulties that every group of people encounter were always there. But mostly they were dealt with quickly and effectively as they arose. Problems with group dynamics - like some people dominating discussions and others not saying what they felt - would be solved without leaving anyone feeling defeated or insignificant or an arsehole. And this impressed Sally constantly.
In discussions, everybody listened with interest to what was being said, and in the long run everyone had an equal say. If someone was dominant today, they would most likely say nothing tomorrow. And if they'd kept quiet for a few days, they'd suddenly come out with a powerful and well thought out argument about something they felt strongly about.
The overall structure of the community was remarkably effective in giving every member an equal say in the general running of the place. Each individual village was basically autonomous, and its residents made all the decisions about how they would live their daily lives and how they'd fit together with each other. When it came to things that affected other villages or concerned the whole of Happy Christmas, decisions would be made through delegates to a community meeting. These delegates would only report the decisions and views of their villages, and when they met, they had no power to make decisions on behalf of the people they represented. They could only discuss things and present ideas that had already come up at village meetings. In this way, there was no form of hierarchy. No small group of people who dictated to the rest. Every decision, in fact, could only be made with the full agreement of everyone who'd be involved in the effects of that decision. So, although this might seem quite improbable, everybody in the place was basically in agreement on everything.
The only thing that made this realistically possible was the complete willingness of the entire population of Happy Chirstmas for it to be like that. At times, it seemed as if a discussion on a particular problem could never come to a resolution - or that there was no possible solution that everyone would be happy with. But then suddenly, maybe after hours of talk and repeated discussion, someone would chuck in a completely new twist on the whole thing and it would quickly resolve itself. These ideas usually came from within the group that was involved, but sometimes they would come from outside. Either that village's delegate at the time would mention it at a community meeting and a few days later the idea would come from another village, via their delegate. Or someone who just happened to be visiting would hear of the problem and make a suggestion.
But the single thing that really guaranteed the success of this way of doing things was the complete lack of rush. There was always time to spend another couple of hours trying to solve a problem. It was always worth the extra thought to guarantee that no-one would be left unhappy with what was happening. And it worked. You really could see the difference in people's lives.
Somebody said something to Sally in passing, while explaining a bit about the decision making structure, that stuck in her head: "Democracy is the oppression of the minority by the majority. If three quarters of the population freely vote to kill the other quarter, then that's a valid democratic decision. But a quarter of the population won't be happy with it. We're not interested in that shit here! Either all of us are happy or none of us are..."
"So if that's not democracy," Sally asked, "what do you call it?"
"Anarchy."
*-*-*
It took Sally a long time to begin to get to know her way around. The main village, as it was sometimes called, was easy. This village - the one Liz lived in - was also known as the "cultivation village", or, more usually, as "Here". The path from Here to Nowhere was reasonably straightforward too, and as it was the one that Sally and Julie walked along most, they came to know it quite well.
But there was another village, right across the other side from Here, called "There which Sally found it quite impossible to get to without getting lost a few times on the way. She only walked there a couple of times on her own - it was quite a trek - probably ten kilometres across the hills and she got lost both times. There were all sorts of little paths leading off the main track and it was very easy to wander off down one of them without thinking what you were doing.
One day Sally had begun to spin out quite severely, thinking she was going to get totally lost in the bush. It was getting on towards dark and she was on her way back from There after a visit. She'd strayed off the route a couple of times, and found her way back without difficulty. But the third time, she realized she was completely disorientated and had no idea at all where she should go. The thought of either wandering around in pitch darkness all night - it was around the new moon - or sleeping out there on her own scared her intensely. She was getting used to the bush, but not that used to it!
She was just beginning to panic, when suddenly a black face appeared out of the bushes and a voice said "You look lost sis. Need any help?"
Sally jumped and then felt immensely relieved to see another person. She smiled broadly when she recognized him.
"Hey. Don't i know you from somewhere?" He gave her a puzzled look. It was Jimmy, who she'd met in the Starlight a couple of times.
"Sorry i didn't recognize you, but all you gubs look the same to me!" he joked, as he led her through the bush to where his camp was.
There were about fifteen people sitting around a couple of fires eating and talking to each other. They were mainly Murries, but there were a few europeans there too. Jimmy introduced her and explained that they were one of a few groups that lived nomadically wandering slowly around the place and living entirely off bush food.
"Have something to,eat sis." Jimmy said. But Sally turned it down, explaining that she didn't eat meat.
There's some vegetables cooking." he told her. "They should be. ready soon." After a while, a couple of the group got up and started digging a hole not far from the fires. From this hole, they produced a couple of handmade baskets full of steaming vegetables. Seeing Sally's surprise at this, Jimmy explained that they'd been cooking under the ground. They dug a hole and put rocks in it that had been heated in the fire. The vegetables went on top and then were covered with a layer of earth to keep the heat in. It was a kind of bush oven. The baskets were woven from a vine that grew all round the place.
Sally was amazed at how good the food tasted. There were a few different vegetables that she hadn't seen before, including a particularly nice one that was like a tiny carrot, only white on the inside. As well as vegetables, there was hot bread. This had been made from a root which had to be crushed and soaked in running water for several days before it could be eaten. Sally stayed there that night and when she left in the morning, she decided she would come back another time and stay with this group for a while. She was really blown out by meeting them and wanted to learn more about the way they lived. As she walked back along the path to Here, she thought that the more she got to know the place, the more amazing Happy Christmas became.
*-*-*
As well as Here, Nowhere and There, there were a few other villages that Sally didn't discover until she'd been at Happy Christmas for a while. She'd heard them mentioned in conversation and people had told her a bit about them when she first arrived, but that section of the land she did know was more than enough to take in in one go. One day, in the second week of their visit, Liz said she was going to "Out" and did Sally and Julie want to come? At first they thought she meant she was going out - away from Happy Christmas - and neither of them were particularly interested. But then they realized Out was one of the other villages and they decided to go and see it.
They all loaded up backpacks with food and set off. Out was the furthest village from anywhere else in the place. It was almost at the opposite corner to where the road came in. And it was a long walk from Here.
They followed the path that went to There for about a third of its distance and then turned off at a sort of crossroads, quite near where Sally had got lost the time she met Jimmy. Soon after the crossroads, the path got steeper and they had to climb up to a high ridge that seemed to run along straight for miles.
From the top of the ridge, they could see a long way in all directions. They looked down towards Here, parts of which were quite clearly visible - particularly a flag which flew from halfway up a large dead tree.in the middle of the village. Nowhere, of course, was nowhere to be seen, although they could pinpoint where it must be, because the Headstone was easy to spot. And There was only barely visible too - just one of the structures stood out from the bush surrounding that village.
It was easy to work out where Happy Christmas ended, because there was a very obvious change in the landscape. All the neighbouring properties had been heavily cleared, with maybe a few small patches of bush and odd trees here and there in the middle of open fields. The contrast between that and the densely-forested expanses of Happy Christmas was striking.
On the way down again, they came to a big waterfall crashing down the rocks beside the path. It was a beautiful sight and seemed to make the air alive and sparkling all around them. Liz pointed out a rock ledge to the side of the waterfall, where the flow split off to form a smaller fall, running down next to the main one. They put their packs down, stripped off and went to cool down under the rushing water. They had come to it just as they were beginning to get tired and really hot and sweaty - in the way that those things always seem to happen at Happy Christmas.
From that point on, it was quite an easy walk, mainly downhill, the rest of the way to Out.
The first thing they noticed, as they got within sight of the village, was the whiteness. It looked from a distance as if the ground was covered in a thick layer of snow. When they got closer they saw it wasn't'snow at all, but hundreds and hundreds of white poppies growing closely together.
Out consisted of a group of similar-looking huts, clustered fairly close together around an open central area. The huts were circular, with dome-shaped roofs and uneven, slightly sloping walls. They were all thatched with thick layers of light brown grass and were just about high enough to stand up in. The white poppies filled the space between them, and the central open area too, except for narrow paths and a patch of ground right in the middle. In this bare patch, a large iron pot, a bit like a witches' cauldron, was hanging over a fire.
Liz had told them, on the way down the hill, that most of the people in this village were into a strange religious cult based around the poppy. Although most other people at Happy Christmas were against religions in general, and didn't use drugs very much, this lot were tolerated. They lived quite comfortably alongside the rest and fitted in well with the overall spirit of the place. But mainly, they just kept pretty much to themselves and nobody else saw very much of them.
Every now and then, the villagers from Here felt it was the right time to get stoned together and they would bring some fruit and vegetables over to swap for some opium.
There wasn't really a barter system at Happy Christmas - the general idea was that if someone needed something and someone else had it spare, then it was given freely. That way everything was evenly spread, with need being the basis for distribution and no forms of inequality could grow up between different groups or individuals. But still, most people always tried to give something in return for whatever they asked for. If they had something to give, that is. It seemed fairer and more friendly that way. But they always knew it made no difference whether they gave or not - they could have whatever was available anyway.
As they approached the village, they were greeted by a crazylooking man with ragged, short hair, tiny pupils and no clothes on. Liz introduced him as Papa Somni, the founder of Out's poppy cult. Sally and Julie were shocked by his sudden appearance from out of the undergrowth of poppies, not because he was naked - that was a fairly common sight at Happy Christmas - but because he held a sharp-looking dagger in one hand.
When he saw them looking at it, he explained that he was in the middle of cutting the seed pods of the white flowers for milking opium from them.
"I was expecting you." he said to Liz, as they walked towards one of the huts together.
"Were you?" Liz was puzzled by this.
"Yes, it's the new moon tonight. One of your mob always comes over for opium on the new moon."
"Really?" She was surprised. "I never realized that. But now i think about it, i suppose it's true. How weird!"
They spent a couple of hours at Out, sitting inside one of the huts, talking and smoking the occasional pipe of opium. During this time, most of the locals came by to say hello and share a pipe or two.
Papa Somni told Sally and Julie a bit about the village and the poppy cult that guided the lives of most of its inhabitants. He explained that the basis of it was the power of opium to tune your mind into harmony with natural spirituality. It placed you, he said, in a semi-dreaming, trancelike state, which opened up the channels for communication with what he called "Dreamspace". He stressed carefully that this wasn't necessarily the same thing that aboriginal people meant when they spoke about the Dreamtime. However, it was probably related in some way as the Dreamspace he referred to was the realm of the spirit of the land. It was a place, a time, or a dimension, where all of nature had its essence, where all natural influence over the land and everything living on it flowed from.
Where aboriginal people are born in touch with the land and its energies, he continued, europeans are not. They've suffered two thousand years of systematically being cut off from nature, first by the christian church, and later by the religions of science and technology. So the only way to reopen these channels of communication was with drugs like opium. It was possible, of course, to do it without drugs. But that way was very slow, and took so long that by the time you got there it would be too late.
So, he concluded, there are really only two sections of society in australia that are in communication with the land on mass. They are blacks and junkies. But unfortunatley most junkies don't know it. They live in the cities, where they are surrounded by the european hallucination which confuses them totally - what they see around them with their eyes is quite different from what they feel around them with their minds. That's why they're so spun out most of the time, unlike the blacks, who know it's not real.
The walk back from Out to Here was much easier than going there had been. They no longer had the heavy packs full of vegetables to carry. These had been swapped for a much lighter block of black resinous opium. They were all pleasantly stoned too, from the opium they'd smoked, and that took away their tiredness and made the journey pleasant and quick.
*-*-*
Another unusual place that Sally found herself in one day was a village called "Up". She'd been visiting Ali at Nowhere and they'd both set off to walk back to Here together, when Ali suggested taking a detour and going via Up.
Sally's first impression of Up was that it was like Nowhere, with all the houses hidden away in the bush. That was until Ali told her to look up into the trees. Then she realized it was nothing like Nowhere at all. Nothing like anywhere else, either.
The entire village was above her head. From the ground, she could see a complex of shakey-looking platforms, suspended perilously half way up the trees. There were odd-shaped huts perched on them and all the platforms were linked together by a network of rope bridges. As she watched, a woman walked across one of the bridges and it moved and swayed crazily as she went. Sally just stood and stared upwards, her mouth open, amazed at what she saw.
"You go up!" she said, laughing, "I'll just stand here and watch!
"It's quite safe." Ali told her, "Nobody's ever had an accident up there."
"There's a first time for everything, you know!" Sally said. But she didn't take much persuading to climb up the rope ladder that was hanging down from one of the trees on the edge of the village. It swayed back and forth as she climbed, but it wasn't as bad as she'd imagined. Once she'd crossed the first bridge, she was quite used to the idea and began to see an immense attraction in living up in the trees with the birds.
The walkways and platforms weren't as dangerous as they'd looked from below, but everything moved to some extent when you walked on it. Most of it even moved when you stood still! There were about twenty platforms in all. Most of them had houses on them, but a couple were just open. These ones were in the centre of the village and were at the junctions of a number of walkways. They had a few plant pots with plants in standing on them, and nothing else. Sally guessed they were communal areas of some sort.
Some of the platforms were suspended from single trees, but others were built between two or three, in places where the trees were closer together. The overall effect of the village in the trees was quite disturbing, but Sally thought she'd really like to live there if she ended up staying at Happy Christmas for any length of time in the future.
*-*-*
"What do you reckon to Papa Somni's theories about drugs and the dreamspace?" Sally asked Jimmy one day.
"Well..." Jimmy replied, being uncharacteristically cagey about his views. "That's a bit of a tricky question sis." He paused and looked thoughtfully up into the tree tops. "I wouldn't say i really agree with it all. But then... Well, we come from very different mobs. His culture is european and mine comes from the land here." He patted the ground where he sat. "His way of seeing and understanding things is not the same as mine. But he's got the feel of it, the land and things. I don't know if it's through drugs or just from living here. But if he needs drugs to help him understand, then that's ok. At least he understands. We all get a lot of nonsense put into our heads by the colonizers and anything that helps us get rid of it must be good. Us mob, well, we just have to get back to our roots. But you fellas, you got no roots here to speak of, so it's different. If opium and heroin's going to make gubs see this country as we do, then i hope you all start taking it tomorrow. But i'm not so sure about that. If it's going to stop you destroying the land, then take it too. But those bastards that are really behind all that never will - and if everyone else is stoned, who's going to stop them?"
"Hmmm..." Sally frowned, still no clearer about it. "But what about what he calls the Dreamspace?
"Yeah. I can't really answer that in a simple way. I think you just have to look around you, listen to what the land is telling you and learn to understand. You'll get the hang of it in the end."
Sally was beginning to get the feeling that maybe asking Jimmy questions about these things wasn't the most effective way to learn. She had an idea that he would tell her things if and when he felt like it, whether she asked him or not. And maybe she did need to just absorb what was around lier before she would be ready to make real sense of anything he might tell her. Patience was the key to learning, after all. Patience... or opiates?
Another time, Sally was talking to Liz about the same sort of thing and Liz said a few things that suddenly seemed to make it a bit clearer in Sally's head.
"It's a weird thing," she said, "but i've begun to realize recently that the real difference between Murries and Europeans in this country - apart from the obvious inequality imposed by the system - is that we see everything completely differently. The simple way of dismissing it is as a difference in cultures. Which, of course, it is. But that doesn't tell us anything.
"I've spent a lot of time with Murries and i've learnt in a limited way to see the world - this country really, this land - in the way they do. And it's fucking incredible. It's a real shock, or it would be if it happened suddenly. But it doesn't, it can only happen gradually. And still to me it's like being three quarters blind. But i can see it's there and i can touch it and it talks to me sometimes. The land, the trees, the animals, they all talk to you if you know how to listen. It's like in those science fiction sort of things, how they go into a different dimension and everything's really weird. It's just like that in a way, only i'm still partly trapped in this european dimension and the other one is kind of shadowy ...
"I don't quite follow you." Sally said, a bit lost in the generalizations. "Can't you give me an example?"
"Well, it's hard really. But say, for instance, you look at that line of hills there." Sally looked up to where Liz was pointing. "You see them, maybe, as big lumps of rock with trees growing on them. But a Murri would maybe see a giant lying down..." She frowned, frustrated by her inability to express concepts that she felt she understood in a way that would make any sense to anyone else. Sally nodded, beginning to get a faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
"Like, for instance," Liz continued, "i was walking through Redfern last time i was in Sydney, a while ago now. And i suddenly had this strong flash that where i was walking was a really powerful place. Suddenly i saw the whole area really differently. It was like the concrete and all that shit became transparent and i could see through it. It was really weird, because i've walked around there so many hundreds of times before and never noticed it. I've never talked to any of the blacks there about it, so i don't really know if i saw it then in the way they see it, or if it was something else altogether. But what i'm trying to say is there's so much in this country that we don't see because of the way we're trained to think from birth, and that a lot of what we don't see is probably what the aborigines see most strongly."
"Mmmm..." Sally nodded.
"And the thing with smack and opium is that it can change your way of thinking. Or mainly, your way of seeing. So you can suddenly see things you wouldn't have ever imagined before. And they're not just imagination. They're real. It's just a different view of reality. It's not just coincidence that one of the most noticeable things about people when they're stoned is the change in their eyes."
"This country's so strange!" Sally muttered.
"Not as strange to us as we are to it, maybe!" Liz laughed. "But the weird thing is that we've somehow managed to project this image on top of what's really here, and that's all we see. We don't see the real australia at all, we see some kind of perverted image of europe. And where the reality is too strong to be covered up easily, or maybe where the people are too weak to maintain the illusion, they bring in the bulldozers and try to physically convert it into if europe.
"I'll tell you what." she continued, after a pause, "they're not destroying-the environment to make money at all. That's just an excuse. They're destroying it because they're shit-scared of it. They're scared of nature. And in their fear and paranoia, they've convinced themselves they can prove they're stronger than it by destroying it and then they don't feel so afraid. I've heard a theory that whites don't come from this planet at all. That we're descended from an alien race and that's why we're afraid of the earth and are trying to destroy it! I think it's a bit over the top, but it's interesting and, who knows, it could be true..."
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