ConFest

In 1976, three years after Nimbin's famed Aquarius Festival, a diverse host of the disenchanted, converged upon the banks of the Cotter River in the ACT to celebrate what they called 'ConFest' (a conference and a festival). Responding to former deputy PM and anti-Vietnam war crusader Jim Cairns' call for 'A New Society', many of those who organised, facilitated and participated in this event later formed the Victorian Down to Earth Co-operative Society (registered in 1980). DTE had been part of a nationwide network of 'families' or branches which, following Cotter and up until the early 1980s, saw themselves united as ADTEN (the Australian Down To Earth Network). A watershed in Australian counter-culture, the first Down to Earth festivals, particularly Cotter, provided thousands of participants with the opportunity to explore the possibilities and celebrate the lived experience of alternative culture. Twenty Two years on (28 events experienced by around 100,000 people), ConFest - the most significant, and now biannual cooperative event in the calendar of Australia's alternative lifestylers - continues to be facilitated by the Melbourne based DTE.

DTE has evolved into an organisation which is not driven by any master narratives, political manifestos, or religious doctrines. Members (over 1,500) possess an enormous variety of skills and come from diverse backgrounds: trades people, artists, scientists, healers, students, teachers, engineers, performers etc. This not-for-profit cooperative has no paid positions yet is responsible for laying the groundwork and reproducing the infrastructure for temporary organic communities twice a year. In its evolved history, ConFest has accommodated a vast range of alternate lifeworlds, conveying the fashionable ideas and practice of a multiplicity of contemporaneous social movements achieving degrees of popularity and influence over the past two decades: communitarianism, Green and alternative technology-energy movements, Women's, Men's, Queer, and human potential/alternative spirituality movements.

Today, there is a ground swell of interest to recreate the cooperative spirit and potential of ConFest. After a long period of internal bitterness, confusion and waning interest, in recent years DTE has sought to embark upon a course of openness, delegating responsibilities and empowering individuals and groups such that a diverse spectrum of workshops and tribes can be accommodated at ConFest. As a result of the Society's efforts at restructuring, ConFest has itself taken on an open and decentralised character, resulting in greater energy and diversity. There is now potential for several committees of what has become known as 'the ConFest Committee' to deal with different aspects of ConFest. A seemingly ever widening diversity of networks (many of them funded via the village budget) have recently been setting up villages (e.g. a multimodal Healing village, GECO, Queer, Food Not Bombs, Rainbow, Magic Forest, Labyrinth, CIDA, Sculpture, Laceweb, Art, Tek Know and Earth Sharing, along with the more traditional Art, Kids, Spiritual and Massage villages) providing input and creativity. Communications have been enhanced via the presence of base radios ('community radios') positioned at various locations around the site making operations more inclusive. Recently, the ConFest Safety Group - a trained and coordinated group of non-violent community peacekeepers - was incorporated within the existing security initiative (Pt'chang), and a solar powered stage have become part of the counterscape.

How it develops as we pass into the new millennium is up to you...

ConFest is an extraordinary communications exercise. Normally, a multitude of organisations, enablers, co-ops and tribes with a diverse range of therapies, philosophies, spiritualities and politics meet and fabricate a switchboard of alternative discourse and practice. This diversity is reflected in the numerous workshop zones called villages and other spaces (like the community food kitchens, steam lodge, market etc.) which usually appear over the course of this multi-dimensional experiment in alternative living.

ConFest's workshop system is unique. There are blackboard walls whereupon anybody can notify ConFesters of their wish to give a workshop, funshop, discussion group, forum, whatever, on just about anything at any time throughout the festival. And hundreds of workshops are held all over the site in the various villages and fire circles. It is a popular, seasonal centre for the exchange of information and skills, attracting an ever-widening network of militants and mystics, revolters and refugees, Maoists and musos, Rastas and radicals who often bed down together in the most fantastic neighbourhood ever imagined - a miasmic confusion of students and teachers, artists and activists, accountants and anarchists, ferals and professionals and professional ferals, wizards and wankers, ravers and ranters, pixies, pagans, seers, queers, doomsday speakers and blissed out prophecists, hip new agers and aging hippies, chai tea, Tai Chi, tipi dwellers, bank tellers, I Ching throwers, dope growers, 6 am conch horn blowers, vivacious belly dancers and tranced-out necromancers, Jung devotees, deep ecologies, itinerent psychonauts with curious methodologies, druidic triads, dynamic duos and hypnotic drum solos, sadhus, wonderers, warriors, wimmin and ... yobos. Here reside the hard core, the soft centred, the tuned in, the turned out, the mixed up, the put down, the pissed off, the passengers and the voyeurs - the whole movie! The place is a do-it-yourself community drop-in-centre for the excommunicated, expatriot, ex-army, extreme! Is ConFest at the headwaters of an ecotopia, a utopia, a heterotopia, a dystopia? Or something else? Well ... it depends on your perspective.

ConFest offers a smorgasbord of alternatives ranging from personal-growth techniques to political activism. Typical workshop themes are healing, growth and disciplines (e.g. massage, Reiki, past life regression, dream interpretation, shamanic journeying, firewalks, wild women, chanting, Yoga, Tantra), spirituality and religion (like Ananda Marga, Wicca, Paganism, Celtic mythology, Full Moon celebrations, Earth rites), environmental awareness and protest (organisations like FOE, GECO and JAG), alternative agriculture/technology (permaculture, recycling, alternative energy, veganism etc.), theatre, performance, music and fringe-art (percussion, firesticks, didj, bands, sculpture, dance, trance dance), sexuality (bi/homo/hetero sexuality) and many others.