After Blaze

Already April and Blazing Swan - the Aussie answer to Burning Man, was closing in fast. Living out a tent on my friend's family farm on the grass plains north of Perth, our loose-knit circle came alive in anticipation, conjuring mad outfits and kicking the air like dirt, bracing for the techno maelstrom brewing on the horizon. Sick, broke and strung out in fairyland I went with my better judgement and house-sat for Panda and her 8 cats instead, a week of long grass bumming under the massive peppermint tree that encompassed her small but perfect backyard on the dunes of Two Rocks like the middle of the world. Though a little tilted on the traverse, retreat picked up where adventure had dropped off, under an excruciating clutter slick with regrets, justifications, blue-bladed questions set to music and the full moon I murmured to myself, what a lost opportunity. The pain buried in my legs from a car accident a couple of years earlier was beginning to seep into my hips, back, and the white depths of my midnight dreams, pulling out to sea to watch the gliding goddess flower of my childhood hover with refuge of the strongest cuppa, a beach house overture of Murakami novels and scratchy music of the spheres, moonlit obsidian scrying and feverish coffee-fueled journal streamings. Seven days to straighten out slipping quietly beneath a child's cry in the sky. 

I met Aimee at the Wanneroo Markets, working alongside each other in an offbeat vortex between two cute old- fashioned New Age shops. Her undeniably magnetic personality and fiery enthusiasm to defy mediocrity was an encouraging nudge out of chronic reclusion back into a social life and for the first time in years I felt a sense of community. After work we sometimes hung out in the car park with a tarot deck and a cheeky spliff but it was an ecstatic welcome-to-summer seeing Nahko and his band 'The Meidicine Tribe' play in Freo with the full moon on my birthday that made the friendship official, an equinoxal pact of revived freak flag and youthful immortality. From there we kept the rhythm close with countless nights stoned under the milky way on her family farm in Gingin and occasional weekends at bush doofs, a fringe world of scuzzy psychedelic splendor set against wild back country and the grass-roots spirit of Burning Man in its first shoes. 

Inspired by the small but spirited techno diaspora that pioneered the legendary Goa beach parties of the 80's, origins of the Aussie bush doof can be traced back to the early 90's where  small DIY gatherings broke out in reaction to the increasingly regulated state of rave culture. Back in the day events were founded on  social activism and general cultural perception-distortion and participants were genuinely switched-on fringe dwellers fully dedicated to the movement, embarking on epic Mad-Max style road trips all over the country to unleash mind-bending protest parties outside of remote Uranium mines and detention centers. By the early 2000's major multi-day festivals like Earthcore, Maitreya, Rainbow Serpent and Earth Frequency had caught on to the lucrative potential of cashing in on the doof experience, amassing crowds in the tens of thousands at tickets $300-$400 a pop. As mainstream appeal and the sheer size of events ballooned, doof culture began its inevitable descent into decadence and debauchery, attracting strange cross-over scenes in the form of culture-appropriating faux hippies and thuggish psy-bogans. Aimee had an admirable openness to it all and was an exponent of the scene in her own right,  but for the most part I remained somewhat neutral on the periphery, honoring the doof's counter-cultural roots and embracing its boundary-dissolving invitation to psychedelic discovery, but also keeping a level sight on the scene's many contradictions,  of drug-fueled hedonism masquerading as 'tribal spirituality' and  occasionally the sad wake of trashed bushland at supposedly eco-conscious gatherings. Most of the time it was in incredibly joyous and serendipitous experience, a fascinating field of mixed metaphors full of characters whose obsessional energy seemed akin to their humanity, drawing the spectrum from hardcore off-grid anarchists to curious suburbanites, earth-goddess yoga mums to sketchy meth heads,... its open call to skate the edge 'all part of the ritual', as they say.