Kalgoorlie Miner (9): Nimbin - Part Two

They came at us like dreadlocked zombie salespeople, their toothless mouths stretched into pleading grimaces, trinkets rattling from their gaunt outstretched arms. As their slow advance relentlessly smothered us, panic and paranoia set in and their numbers swelled into what seemed like hundreds. The situation, my learned friend, was bleak indeed…

Last week I left you as your heroes Angry Turk, Billygoat, Typhoon and Sooty were with me aboard the lemon yellow Corona wagon, lazily gliding through picturesque hills bound for Nimbin. Unfortunately, as you will find out, if the highway we were slithering down was a long black snake, then Nimbin was surely the venomous apple lodged in it’s fangs.

But back to the action.

The great surging tide of hippies was by now so close that we could smell the lentils on their breath. If a clove of garlic, a silver bullet, or a stake through the heart would kill a vampire, then what, we frantically asked ourselves, would repel this plodding army of emaciated John Butlers and Janis Joplins? Soap and a scrubbing brush? A barrage of unsustainable Brazilian beef and battery eggs? A macro-economics textbook?

Mercifully, just as their yellowed fingernails began clawing at us, we found refuge in the local kebab shop, where we ate, drank, and came to the consensus that our stay in Nimbin would be brief. So after chilling out for a while we stepped back onto the street, the mob having diverted their attention towards another group of unsuspecting visitors, and quietly slinked back towards the Corona.

Just before getting in though, our hearts softened and we bought a Nimbin tea-towel off an aging woman, clearly fried by decades of drug use, who without a hint of irony warned us “Don’t go to the park. That’s where all the junkies are.”

As we drove away the woman became entangled in a screaming and clawing match with another vendor, who seemed to believe that the sale should have been hers. Textbook irony, my friend and reader - an embarrassing display of greed and competition in Australia's communal living mecca.

Angry Turk skidded the Corona out of there, not being an admirer of hippies at the best of times, and we soon became quietly contemplative, as people are prone to do on the return leg of a memorable road trip. To be honest I can't remember what music Billygoat chose for the drive back, but I'd like to think it included Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine".

It seemed to me that capitalism must organically grow out of socialism, like penicillin forming on mouldy bread in a share house pantry - was it really inevitable? I was sure that Nimbin once worked, but as soon as a single member of the commune started selling glass beads or organic beetroot then powerful economic cogs began to turn and the end of the dream was nigh.

At least on the Gold Coast the greed, glamour and excess were shamelessly on display, so as we cruised back in there we felt strangely comfortable. Later that night Typhoon, Sooty and I made our customary trip to the casino, ordered a round of mango daiquiris, settled in around one of the bile-yellow roulette tables, and chased the elusive capitalist dream.