After Bushfiresand Pandemics, apparently it’s now time for Floods here in New South Wales in Australia. We have had a huge amounts of rain in the last few days, causing massive floods in parts of the state.
Here in Rylstone we haven’t had terrible floods like other parts of the state, but a large amount of rain for our region nonetheless. 2 inches of rain less than a week ago, then 4 inches of rain in the last 48 hours, with far more predicted today.
Through Rylstone runs the Cudgegong River. For years of drought this river has resembled more of a creek than a river; a small and stagnant waterway that meanders its way through the small township.
Find below a few images and a short video of what that usually small & stagnant river looks like this morning (23/03/2021). These were taken from the It will be interesting to see what it looks like after even more rain today (Edit: Same size but faster flowing).
As I mentioned when reviewing theE-I-E-I-O burger, I love a meal where there is more than one meat contained within the dish. And on a recent visit to Katoomba NSW I discovered a restaurant-slash-bar that had on its menu a dish that contained not two meats or three but indeed four!
So lets have a gander at the Bootleggers Meat Share Plate.
A meal made in Trev-heaven!
So the description of the meal is a Share Plate and it is indeed intended for two people. Given it was our anniversary I relented and shared this plate with my wife, but being the kind woman she is she let me devour the lions portion of it.
The meal comes with four meats from two different animals. Beef brisket and links (sausages) and chicken wings as well as fried chicken. Personally I would have preferred the links be made out of pork but you can’t have everything.
Along with the above came enough non-meat foods to ensure that you would have some chance of being able to pass your next bowel movement. Slaw, Corn, Pickles, Potato Salad and Chips. Good to see that at least 40% of the sides were spud based – potatoes being that good that they should almost be considered an honorary meat!
Unto the breach!
The meats were all very tender. The fried chicken was done very well, not remotely oily or greasy like that one would get from a fast food restaurant. The chicken wings were lightly spiced so not as hot as buffalo wings but at least had a bit of bite to them. The brisket was very tender as brisket should be. The only meat that didn’t impress me was the links. They weren’t bad in any way, but just your average beef sausages so were somewhat overshadowed by the rest.
The non-meat stuff was good too. I think. I dunno, I wasn’t really paying attention.
Exploding Hot Sauce!
Sauce made by chef Wile. E. Coyote
The waitress brought out two types of hot sauce, espousing their virtues about how they were made on site, not simply store bought. As readers of my blog would know I love hot sauces so was eager to try them out. The red hot sauce was indeed very hot, not as hot as the likes of Mad Dog 357, but still had a helluva kick. The green sauce? Well I went to open it…
…and it exploded!
Perhaps exploded is not the right term. The heat had built up in the bottle so as soon as the top was twisted it made a sound like shook up cola can and the sauce blew forth! It covered my shirt, splattered my face and even left a sorta Trev-shaped splatter pattern on the window behind me.
The poor young waitress was very apologetic. After ascertaining that it had not gone in my eyes she brought multiple wet paper towels for me to clean myself, then later appeared with a shirt from the restaurants merchandise stash for me to wear home. So sadly, unless I had chosen to lick my clothing I never got to sample what the green hot sauce tasted like.
The shirt I wear when doing my radio show, though my music isn’t bootlegged – the CD’s are just really worn
Overall
This meal is nearly $80 but its certainly enough for two people (as long as one isn’t me) and its very good tasting. Besides the volatile hot sauces the only other accompaniment was a small bowl of BBQ sauce – personally I would have preferred to get a hearty gravy but perhaps that would push the meal into the realms of making a coronary a certainty. The bar had a different selection of wheat beers on tap which were quite nice, but if you’d take my recommendation skip the ginger based beer, it was pretty average. So yeah, do yourself a favour and if in Katoomba drop past Bootleggers – you will get a decent feed and maybe a free shirt!
As the COVID-19 crisis continues and cases within Australia and particularly NSW continue to rise, its been considered a good time to be a rural resident.
Out here where my family lives we are a solid 2 ½ hour drive from the nearest capital city where the majority of cases are taking place. So far there is only a handful cases of Coronavirus within a hundred kilometres of us all together.
As such people in situations similar to us haven’t been panic buying. We didn’t all go mad stocking up on toilet paper, we haven’t cleaned off shelves and we haven’t gotten into fistfights over a bag of rice. For the most part us rural folk have taken it pretty calm, and in small communities like the one I inhabit, you don’t take ever single item of a product off a shelf as the people you are depriving are your neighbours, your community members and your friends.
Yep, the panic buying had been contained to the big cities. But now its not. It’s hitting small country towns and its not small country town people that are doing.
It’s Raiders from the Big City!
An sight no longer contained to capital cities
It’s been amazing! Tiny towns with populations of well under a thousand are seeing more new faces than they have in years. And these are not tourists – these are food-filchers! People driving out from capital cities to hit up every butchers, every bakers and every small supermarket they can, to grab whatever they can, and then return home. One can only assume the candlestick makers will be next.
In fact it’s not just people in cars – it’s entire busloads! Buses pulling up at little supermarkets in one-horse towns and twenty people disembarking. These people head straight into the local stores and come out carrying as many bags of groceries as they can lift. These raiders leave barren shelves behind and nothing for the local people, who depend on these stores, to buy.
Is it greed that is prompting these people to come out and grab all the tucker and toilet paper they can tote? Is it desperation?
Because no matter the motivation – it is NOT ON!
Big City people don’t get it. Country people are not surrounded by stores where if one store is out of a product they can simply try a half dozen others down the road. If you raid a store, then that leaves NOTHING for the locals! These stores, due to their remote, don’t get restocked every day. And if that store is empty, the next store is usually a loooong way away. The town I live outside of has one small butchers, one small bakers and one very small supermarket/bottle-o. Besides bags of chips at the servo that’s it for places to get groceries. If those shops are empty I have to drive an extra 10 minutes to the next town which also only has a few small shops. If they too are empty, which increasingly they have been, my next option is to drive 60km to Mudgee where the major supermarkets are in the hopes that their shelves are also not bare. Should I have to do that because Big City people have depleted their own stores in panic buying and now are doing the same to us?
You know what is even better than a clean fridge? A FULL ONE!
This isn’t just in our area, this is happening all over NSW and Victoria! Small town locals going home without any food for their families because these busloads of city slickers have come out and nicked all the grub! And it has to stop! Not only because of the effect on the locals, but the potential spread of COVID-19. People are coming from places like Sydney and Melbourne where the virus is growing ever more rampant, and driving through town after town where the entire populaces are so far uninfected. I wonder if these raiders realize, or care, that if country people get sick the food shortages will only get worse since we are the ones that grow all the food!
So, I say this to you raiders. DO. NOT. COME. HERE! You are not welcome! You take all our food and risk infecting us all! And why? Because you all couldn’t stop yourselves going nuts and panic-buying out your thousands of stores until there was nothing left. Stay in your damn capital cities and wait for the stores to restock. Because when you come here and take all our food, we have nowhere else to go. We didn’t panic buy, we were sensible. And now we are paying for it because our cupboards are not overflowing since we didn’t want to deprive our neighbours of their tucker – because, you know, that’s what good people do.
So please. If you are from a capital city do the right thing, especially these school holidays. Wait for your stores in the big smoke to restock. Don’t come and take all our food and risk spreading COVID-19 into rural communities that have managed to remain unaffected thus far. We managed to make it through the bushfires, we as a society need to pull together to make it through this too.
We, your rural cousins, thank you for your cooperation.
Despite, thankfully, not losing our home like so many other poor souls, our family was affected by the unprecedented bushfires this summer. We had to evacuate our home for an extended period – twice, with the flames getting to within 500m off our back fence and 200m off our side fence. These were scary times for us, like many others across the state. If it wasn’t for the RFS fighting the fires tooth and nail for months on end, I have zero doubt our property would have been consumed and they have our families eternal thanks.
Image taken from the cab of a fire truck on our road the night we had to evacuate. (Photo Credit: R. Oldfield – NSW RFS)
These fires affected our entire family unit. We had to cancel our sons birthday party and all my wifes family coming for Christmas. We had to spend Xmas itself at relatives homes instead of in our own. We had to tear our farm apart to try and make it as fireproof as possible, and we are still now trying to put it back together. We had all our most treasured personal belonging stashed in three other people’s homes and likewise for our animals three more. We stressed and fretted and on one night drove for our lives as the police came down our road on their loudspeaker ordering people to evacuate, our animals and children in tow. We sat up until 1am at my mother-in-laws house watching the reports come in about a house destroyed on our road, wondering if it was ours and if we would have a home to return to. We consider ourselves fortunate that all we lost in the end was a few fridges and a deep freezer full of food (a waste of good ducks though).
So yes, we were much luckier than many, but the NSW fire season was truly a horrible month for our family.
So the RFS saved our home, but what saved our sanity? Easy to answer – community, friends and family. Without these people my wife and I would have descended into madness long ago, and ours is a tale of how people pulling together made what was a terrible experience so much less worse than it could have been.
Here are some of the examples of how we were helped by truly wonderful people:
Community & Emergency Workers
*The Grader Drivers that came to our property on two separate occasions and put in fire break lines everywhere they could, in an effort to stop any grassfires that might make it in onto our land.
*The local branch of the RFS, who provided constant updates and were always able to answer any questions we sent to them, even at 2am while our road burned.
*The local member who posted constant updates and videos about what the fires were doing in our area for weeks on end and was an excellent source of information. I may have been a Greens voter all my life, but there is a National’s member who has earned my vote!
*My sister-in-laws friend taking in our chook and 8 of our ducks for a full month and caring for them, despite never even having met us before.
*Our neighbours across the road and next to us keeping an eye on our property in case there were spotfires while we were evacuated.
Grader driver putting in containment lines in our back paddock
Friends
*My friend Jordan driving over a hundred kilometres and spending 3 hours in 40 degree heat evacuating all goods from the Transformatorium shed into the main house (we thought that the firey’s might be able to save the house but would probably let the shed burn if they had to). Then in the hot sun helped me clean out gutters, that had never been cleaned before, of dead leaves and other flammable material.
*My boss and friend Toni from work storing my 3000+ Transformer action figure collection in her loungeroom for an entire month, despite it meaning she could hardly move in that part of the house.
*Our friends Lisa and Scott taking our pet goats for extended periods on two separate occasions and feeding and watering them every day despite the heat.
*Our new friends and neighbours down the road, Bill and Lynne, feeding the poultry we couldn’t evacuate, even though it meant a daily drive closer to the fire front.
*So many of our close friends messaging us with comforting words and emotional support, yet allowing us the space to breathe when we had to.
Family
*My brother-in-law Matt driving over a hundred kilometres with his chainsaw to cut down every tree within a 5m radius of our farmhouse, then staying the night so the next day he could seal breaks in our guttering so they could hold water in case of ember attack.
*My sister-in-law Jo storing so much of our personal belongings, taking our fish for several weeks, and making us Christmas dinner
*My mother-in-law Noelene putting us up for long periods – twice – while we were evacuated, looking after our dog and storing even more of our belongings (my wife’s family rules!).
*Our children, so young and yet so brave. Being evacuated twice, missing out on birthday parties, missing out on spending Christmas in their own home. That’s a lot for a 4 and 7 year old to cope with and they both took it in their stride.
*And more than anyone, my beautiful wife. By my side we spent so much of our summer trying to fireproof a farm that had never before been threatened by flames and was a tinderbox ready to ignite.
Ours is just one example of how families and entire communities came together to support each other during this horrible time for our state and indeed for our country. If ever there was evidence that the spirit of empathy and generosity is still well alive in this land, it’s been well and truly presented this summer.
So to all our friends, all our family, all the community and all the members of the RFS, on behalf of our family
As of writing this the western edge of the Kerry Ridge Fire is about 5km from our farm. Due to this being the worst bushfires in Australia’s history, our heroes in Rural Fire Service are severely overstretched. As such, the RFS is extremely busy trying to fight the fire fronts and saving homes, they don’t have time to attend every single spotfire that is caused by an ember attack.
So as we can do our small part and try to protect our farm from Spotfire/Ember attack, we converted my 22 year old bush-basher paddock-bomb Ford Courier Ute into a Spotfire Fighting Vehicle.
There are kits set up to do this already available, but they are all hideously expensive. This video shows you how to set up your own for a fraction of that cost.
Enjoy, and stay safe this horrible bushfire season.
Here in NSW we are facing an unprecedented level ofBushfire danger. ATotal Fire Banhas been instituted for the entire state, aState of Emergencyhas been declared and some parts of the state have a danger rating of‘catastrophic’– a rating that has never needed to be used before!
Living on a fairly remote farm that backs onto a huge state forest, our family has been very concerned. So much so that we have instituted our ownemergency fire planshould worst come to worst.
There are plenty of official sites that can guide you through how to come up with your own emergency plans, and I heartily encourage every reader to visit the sites relevant to their state as well as download the relevant apps. What I’m going to share here is some of theevacuationprecautions I and my family have taken, in the hopes it may provide you with someideas of your own. In particular – ouremergency bags.
We have several emergency bags packed. The whole idea of these is that they are pre-made and ready to go, saving valuable minutes if you need to get out fast. Our emergency bags are packed with such items that can stay in them forever –notitems that we will have to remove a few days later because we need them. Hopefully these bags will hang on hooks for the rest of their lives unused, but better safe than sorry.
Clothing for the day
Despite the heat,long clothingisessential. Should you end up in an area with sparks flying through the air, you don’t want those sparks touching your bare skin. So long sleeved tops and long pants are the order of the day and they should be natural fibres like cotton, not synthetics that have the potential to melt onto your skin.
Leather bootsare also the most preferable footwear to have. In our case my wife and I own heavy duty leather boots but our children don’t, so we would put them in their most suitable footwear and carry them if required.
We have a bag packed specifically with clothing to change into at a moment’s notice. Again, every minute you can save counts.
EvacClothing Bag
Chances are you might not be able to return to your home for a couple of days until the fire has passed. So you will need a few changes of clothes, but taking into account you should notover packas space in your vehicle will be at a premium.
For each member of our family we packed the following:
*2 T-shirts
*1 Jumper
*1 pair of Long Pants
*1 pair of Shorts
*2 pairs of Socks
*2 pairs of Underwear
*1 pair of Pyjamas
EquipmentBag
There will be specificequipmentthat you may need when fleeing from a bushfire. All this should be kept together and easy to access if needed.
In ours we have:
*One torch with fresh battery
*One small fire blanket
*One first aid kit
*One tube of burn cream
*One pack of face masks
*One pair of fire resistant gloves
*One battery powered radio
Pet Bag
If you have pets you naturally are going to want to take them with you. In our case because we have two pet goats this would entail hooking up the trailer. But for most people your pets may consist of a dog and cat (which we also have). So when packing make sure you have enough pet food for a couple of days and leads for every animal – you don’t want to escape the fire just for your cat to run away or your dog to go hungry. A dish to put water in is also advisable.
Food & Water
Chances are wherever you evacuate to will have food and water available. But again that motto – better safe than sorry. Have a bag packed full of food that does not need to be refrigerated and can keep you all going for a day or two. Pre-packaged food likemueslibarsand biscuitswill serve you well, as well as bags of nuts. Also tinned food such as ham, salmon, tuna and so on. Take as much water as you can reasonably fit. Because we would be taking autewe can afford to take a 25 litre container in the back.
MiscItems
These are items that you don’t need to survive but will be incredibly hard to replace should you lose your home. This includes forms such as birth certificates and passports, as well as more personal items such as jewellery and family photos. What you pack in this bag is up to you, but one of the bags you may need to give the most thought too. Also, because these are items that youcan’tstore in anevackit permanently, make sure you know the location of these items in your house so they can be collected up quickly.
So these are just a few different suggestions for what to take if you need to evacuate and a possible way to have them prepared. Again, I encourage everyone to check out the official sites in order to get even more guidance and information about the best way to go about this, but hopefully this blog willgive you a good starting point on advisable things to pack.
Got any other tips on what to pack in case of Bushfire? Pop it in the comments section below.
On our farm here in NSW, like many other farms in the region, we have a problem with Blackberry Bushes.
For anyone from the city who isn’t acquainted with them, Blackberry Bushes aren’t cute little shrubs that give you some delightful fruit. No, they are a noxious weed that grows out of control. There is virtually no limit to the size they grow, and they are covered in thorns ready to ensnare human and animal alike with even the slightest contact.
And that is just ONE patch!
We’ve got some whoppers of Blackberry Bushes on our land, some almost bigger than our house! They have been very hard to get rid of for two reasons:
A: We don’t like to use poisons on our property
B: Even if we did use poisons, most of the bushes are located in the middle of our shallow creek, meaning that any use of herbicides could result in them entering the water, causing major damage to other plants and the ecosystem in general.
So what were we to do?
Well, we kinda lucked out. Mick, who I buy nearly all my second-hand pots from in order to propagate plants for our Organic Plants & Produce business, runs a family business of his own. He and his wife Billie run Dry Creek Farm, and they specialize in bringing out herds of goats in order to decimate Blackberry Patches, leaving nothing but stems and fertilizer in their wake. After being impressed with the job they did on our farm, I couldn’t help but ask them for an interview and they kindly obliged:
Sustainable – and cute!
What first gave you the idea to use goats to clear huge blackberry patches?
Huge Blackberry patches on our own place and a strong desire not to spray. We have done a permaculture course and heard of people using goats for weed control. We were getting a fair bit of pressure from the weed inspectors to do something about our Blackberry so we decided we’d have to give it a go.
What made you decide that using goats to clear blackberry was a viable business?
Mostly the fact that it worked so well on our place. We knew other people were also looking to an alternative to spraying. Also, we had the goats and were running out of feed for them!
How much blackberry can a mob of your goats clear in a day?
We usually say a single car garage per day but we’ve recently experimented with using larger mobs and knocking them over a bit faster. We have found that it depends on the goats and what they’re used to eating, we’ve recently bought some goats and found they weren’t as keen on blackberry as our initial mob. Nothing a bit of competition and on the job training won’t fix. (after the goats moved from your place to join with the others they have started churning through the patches like there’s no tomorrow)
How is using goats to clear blackberry more sustainable and ecologically friendly than using traditional methods?
Spraying is very detrimental in the long run, it kills soil life and does not allow the weed to add fertility to the soil. The production and transportation of agricultural chemicals is a huge contributer to greenhouse gases and creates a cycle of chemical dependence on farms. Goats help to increase fertility by turning weeds into manure which makes it easier to break down. Treating weeds in this way also allows the plant to continue filling it’s niche in the ecosystem. For example, blackberry helps prevent erosion and having the goats treat a patch still leaves the canes and the roots to fulfill this function.
I understand something rather odd (and amusing) happened when your goats were at our place. Can you describe what happened?
We’ve well and truly learnt that not everything goes to plan when working with animals. We decided to swing via your place for an unscheduled check on the goats because we happened to be in the area. Lucky we did. When we arrived we noticed there were nine feral and stinky billygoats showing an interest in our girls. One was in the paddock with our goats and another had his horns completely tangled in the mobile fencing and was being humped from behind by another of the billies! It was not his lucky day. Mike had to get amongst it and wrestle him free of the fence then we had to draft them out of the paddock and chase them away to discourage them returning. It was all a bit dramatic but didn’t cause too much drama in the end and gives us something to have a laugh about. We were quite surprised as we had the goats working on our place for twelve months with feral goats always around and we have also done other jobs and seen billies about but never had this situation!
I’d like to thank both Michael and Billie for both their time doing this interview and the wonderful job their goats did getting rid of our blackberries. You can find the website for Dry Creek Farm HERE.
BeforeAfter
Got any questions for Mick and Billie? Pop it in the comments section below and I’m sure they will be happy to answer it.
Rump & Ribs in Rylstone is a review of the food available at The Globe – a restaurant on the main street. It is NOT to make fun of that couple that just moved in on Piper street. You know the ones, the Spratts? Where the woman has a bulbous arse and the bloke is painfully thin? This is not about them. And shame on you for assuming it was and body shaming them, not cool! Comments along the lines that helooks like the lovechild of a skeleton and a xylophone and she looks like someone shoved an air compressor nozzle up her datehole and set it to ‘mega inflate’ are juvenile, unkind and all such commentary will be deleted from this blog.
Ahem. Anyway…
Back to the matter at hand
As I’ve stated in other meat reviews, any dish that serves up two distinct species of farm animal on the same plate immediately gets my attention (see my review of the E-I-E-I-O Burger in Melbourne). Whilst I was all tasted up to grab a mixed grill which always satisfies this craving, I couldn’t go past their specials board which had Rump & Ribs up for grabs.
Bones of a pig on top of the arse of a cow
This was…. ok. The ribs had a sweet BBQ flavoring which wasn’t too bad but the steak came with nothing on it but the ribs. The steak also came out as two smaller pieces which was quite odd, made it seem they didn’t have a full sized steak on hand rather than it was an intentional culinary decision by the chef. Also I asked for medium and got medium-well which is always an irritant. If you are paying $30 for a meal where the star of the show is a steak, the steak should be one whole piece and cooked the way you asked for. That said it wasn’t too bad, the salad made for a crisp counterpoint and refreshed the palette between meaty bites.
Other meals available at The Globe
Surf’ n’ Turf
Once again, this wasn’t too bad. The sauce was fairly creamy and the prawns were done in an interesting fashion, encased in a long cone resembling a parsnip. I do like big thick juicy prawns with a surf’ n’ turf to complement the steak and feel the meal could have benefited from going that more traditional route rather than the novel.
Sirloin Steak
My wife had this and like me she ordered medium and got medium-well (for a place that does medium to perfection check out my reviews ofThe Kings Hotel in Bathurst). Also her pepper sauce had way too much bite, like they had not refined it enough and had left whole peppercorns in there. The ‘yeah, it’s alright’ motif continued with this dish.
Kids Meals
What? Why is everyone looking at me?
The Globe does quite well here. The kids meals are big and they can pick which meal they want by colouring in an accompanying menu sheet which is a novel idea. The meals also include a drink and for $2 extra they get a desert. The Globe gets a great big tick from a satisfied parent in this regard.
Overall
Look, there is quite nice food to be had at The Globe but nothing stellar. However being one of only two places to get a meal out in Rylstone at night, it’s not like you have a lot of options to go elsewhere. Despite this lack of competitors they still provide decent meals at decent prices, the restaurant feels comfy with a big wood heater going and the barman has been super friendly and helpful the few times we have been there. You might not get dazzled but what you will get is a pleasant meal out with your family and on a cold winters night who could ask for more.
Oh, and leave the Spratts alone will ya! It’s their dietary requirements – he can eat no fat and she can eat no lean – it’s not their fault!
Got a review of The Globe of your own? Would love to read it in the comments section below!
As a young man, I thought it was a sign of strength of character to stick to your guns. That if you held an idea about something, you stuck to that idea and you didn’t let anyone mess with it. You fought them tooth and nail and showed them that you were right and they were wrong.
Only one danger to that – what if you are the one that is actually wrong?
This is a short story about how I held a strong perception about a certain group of people and it took one experience to show me that my opinion was total bollocks. And that group of people are hippies.
That’s right, hippies. And I figured I had them down pat. Long haired, pot smoking yahoos that never did a day of work in their lives. Smelly, filthy people putting more faith in a healing crystal than an aspirin and would lecture you about how you should eat nothing but lentils. Tree hugging nudies who deserved a good kick in their chakras.
I was 24 and living with a couple in Yarraville. Good friends who when they heard my first marriage was breaking up turned up with a moving truck and said “We are getting you out of here”. I’d been living with them for several months and was healing nicely from being used as an emotional punching bag for so long. With New Years coming up, they were going to Confest and wanted me to come along. Confest is best described as a hippy festival that takes place twice a year along a piece of river bank in the bush in southern NSW.
Did I wanna go? Hells no! If I went to the bush it was to do proper camping, catch some fish and maybe shoot a few rabbits. I wasn’t going to no damn hippy festival and see blokes walking about with their tackle out! I especially wasn’t going to go when they told me there was no meat allowed – bugger that!
But my friends wore me down and I ended up going along. I made ‘filthy hippy’ jokes the whole way to the point my mate Michael was asking me to give it a rest, and I had a big store of dried beef jerky (the proper stuff from a butcher at VIC Market, not that rubbery crap you get at a servo) hidden in my bag.
When we got there I was very non-plussed. Taking tickets on the gate were indeed two naked people, a man and woman in their late 40’s if I was any judge. As we parked and lugged our tents to find a spot, I was even less enthused when I saw the ‘workshops schedule board’ and saw there was actual tree hugging on it! As we walked past there was indeed people there embracing trees with their eyes closed. Oh gawd, I thought, I’m stuck here for a week with these friggin lunatics! This is gonna suck!
We found a spot and set our tents up, me grumbling to myself the whole time. I was an alpha-male stuck with a bunch of fruitloops in the middle of bloody nowhere. I figured since I was stuck, I might as well make the best of it and went for an explore.
Over the afternoon some things started to confuse me. There were naked people yes but plenty of clothed people too. You could smell pot coming from the odd tent but certainly not all. People were openly friendly without trying to convert me to crystal worship or lecturing me on the evils of a good steak. I was very taken aback when I stumbled across a cricket game in progress which I quickly joined and even managed to take a catch or two.
What was going on? Where was all the self-righteous condemnation for me not being one of them? Besides being perhaps a bit more openly friendly that is usual, these all seemed like normal people, that couldn’t be right!
Well guess what – it WAS right. It was right and I had been wrong. I had a brilliant time over the following week! People were really friendly, no one was in your face about anything, there were no people drunk out of their brains or off their heads on hard drugs. I had lots of great conversations with people who turned out to be very intelligent and well informed and seemed to have made their own minds up about issues rather than simply subscribing to some ‘hippy dogma’. Yes there was no meat allowed but I think people probably just pretended they couldn’t smell dried beef on my breath.
The Swan-Sarong Song
A few days in and I had had a go at a lot of interesting stuff I had not considered trying before. I wandered round in a sarong, very comfortable in the heat. Hell, on occasion I just disrobed and went for a walk in the nude which I found to be quite liberating! I went to a few workshops (though not the tree hugging one) and learned about yoga and crafts and all kinds of stuff. I learned to fire-twirl and developed a real taste for properly brewed chai tea. All these things I would never have tried if I had stuck to my guns, dismissing them out of hand and therefore never enjoyed experiencing. Come New Years night I danced hard into the wee hours of the morning, covered in sweat and body paint as a dozen guys smashed out a bestial rhythm on their bongo drums – it was primal and it was bloody fantastic!
“It’s 5am, do you know where your hippies are?”
I left Confest on the 2nd on Jan, my mind reeling from the previous weeks experience. I had been wrong all my life about hippies. Oh sure, there were plenty that did exist that fit my preconceptions but it turned out there were way more that didn’t. And they all seemed to be onto such a good thing, it was probably one of the most chilled out weeks of my life. Just a bunch of happy people being happy around other happy people and not bothering anyone else. Instead of continuing to condemn them I had actually learned from them. So if I was wrong about hippies, what else had I always believed that I could be wrong about?
I learned to examine my own opinions, looking for flaws in my own arguments. I learned just because you believe something strongly, whether that be about a group of people in general or because it’s the popular thing to believe or it’s what your parents taught you was right, it doesn’t make you correct. I’m not talking about abandoning your ideals, I’m talking about challenging yourself and making sure that if you believe something that you are right on the money, not simply believing it as that’s the comfortable thing to do. Of course it can work both ways, while some people hold irrational prejudices, don’t believe something just because it’s a politically correct thing to believe either. Find out the truth for yourself – good or bad.
This has served me well in all the years since. I’ve learned to admit when I’m wrong. I think it’s made me more intelligent, or at least better informed on issues as I’ve learned to examine something rather than letting someone else or popular opinion mold my own. A lot of the time popular myths are wrong, for instance I went to France a couple of times and the people there were quite polite. Besides one old street lady no one was overtly rude and it turned out the French weren’t a bunch of sex obsessed, cheese eating surrender monkeys. Back home I walked down the street one day in Broadmeadows and saw a big gang of Lebanese guys on the corner. I nearly crossed the road then thought “Hang on – the only times I’ve been punched in my life was by other ‘Aussies’”. So I continued walking and they couldn’t have cared less about me, let alone get violent or try to sell me drugs. Preconceptions smashed. I think the show A Current Affair might need to fact check things a bit more.
So challenge your own preconceptions, you might be surprised what you find out. And as for the long-haired fruitloops at Confest…
… I went back the following New Years and met a very pretty one. It’s now 14 years later and we are married, have 2 kids and organically grow all our own fruit, nuts and veg on our hobby farm in the countryside (they go well with meat). God bless the hippies!
Big Hippy Trev (my god I was fit back then!)
Got a similar story? Would love to read it in the comments section below!
*Please Note: I have subsequently been informed by Ms Emily Taylor that meat is indeed now allowed at Confest except in some of the communal kitchens – thanks for the update!
