In the late-1990s I lived on an intentional community – or hippy commune – near Yandina in Queensland called Starlight. Then in 2003, I bought into Goolawah Co-operative near Crescent Head in New South Wales.
There, I met the best and worst of people, and had the best and worst of times.
In 1985, while I was working at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, the movie ‘Bliss’ was released. Adapted from Peter Carey’s novel about life in the Australian bush, I was so impressed that I went to see the producer of Bliss, Anthony Buckley, to present my photo portfolio in the hope of getting future work.
In the late 1990s I was looking for acreage on the Sunshine Coast, having quit my Regional Economic Development managers job and done a Permaculture Design Certificate, and the opportunity to move into Starlight came up. Peter Carey wrote ‘Bliss’ while living there in the late 1970s. I jumped at the chance!
The two co-ops, Starlight and Goolawah have different legal structures but there were social problems on both.
Starlight Community
Starlight is a company with shareholders, structured to overcome the legal barriers imposed by the conservative Maroochy Shire Council of subdividing the land.
On Starlight, residents have a cleared acre or two around their house and have surrounding acreage allocated to them, usually about twenty acres of old growth and regrowth tropical rainforest. My place was only five acres, possibly because it was stunningly gorgeous.
On one side of the stone and crystal cottage was a twelve step waterfall, and on the other was a two drop waterfall – when it rained. The twelve steps formed a few lovely natural baths.
My Number 7 – Happy Hippy Heaven Seven – fronted Browns Creek, just past the renowned Starlight Community Hall, and before the causeway. I have wonderful memories of the hippies coming out of their forest walking along the road towards the hall for the quarterly meetings.
The renters, like me, had it good. We were living the dream. Those that owned their places weren’t as happy. The reason that I had the opportunity to rent, as I found out at my first meeting, was a few of the male residents had ganged up on the woman who owned my place and had hounded her out. I was renting her place while she organised the sale of her dream home that she and her son had built.
There were extraordinary characters with interesting names like Brian Bees, Paul Trees and Mother Mick, named after a tattoo on his arm.
I drove my old Merc up the mountain to see Mother Mick, only for the car to give up in a cloud of oily smoke. That created a problem – how to get the car down a mountain on a pot-holed dirt track.
I went into Yandina pub and talked a group of teenagers into hitching the Merc to the front of their car and drive down the mountain behind me so they could apply brakes if needed. A young Chris Vermeulen, who went on to win the 2007 French Grand Prix in MotoGP, was amongst the fearless teens who drove off the side of a mountain tied to a mad man in a Mercedes Benz.
It turned out that a $2 o-ring on the gearbox had failed, and the Merc continued on in battered condition for another year or two.
“How many in your vehicles and how long are you staying?”
Police helicopters flying over the houses at tree top level was not uncommon at Starlight. The army regularly bivouacked in the neighbouring state forest for a couple of weeks while they searched for dope crops.
One day I was standing on the dirt road talking with a neighbour, who’s hair went down to his hips, when a convoy of army trucks came up. Cousin It stood in the middle of the road and put up his hand, signalling Stop! The army obliged. Cousin It went to the door of the first truck and said:
“How many in your vehicles and how long are you staying?”
The soldier just laughed, so Cousin It repeated his question.
The solider said “I’m not telling you that!”
Cousin It said: “You have to. I’m the local Fire Warden”
A quick radio call later and we discovered there were 12 of them staying for a week. Within half an hour, everyone for miles knew and were keeping tabs on them. One woman chased them off her property with a broom.
At dawn a few days later, I figured it must be my turn for a visit, so I walked out about 100m into the bush, sat on a log and rolled a smoke. Sure enough, 20 minutes later, the troops came sneaking in so I waited until they were all around me, stood up and pointed at each of them, shouting: “Bang, got you! Bang, your dead! Bang, I see you too!”
Without saying a word, they left.
I stayed on Starlight Community with the forest dwellers for two years before moving into Hidden Valley.
‘Bliss’ available from Australian retailer Booktopia
Right: Peter Carey’s book ‘Bliss’ on Amazon
Goolawah Co-operative
Goolawah Co-Operative is a co-operative structure, with shareholders. Of the 1640 acres (664 ha), each resident is allocated 1.25 acres for their house and garden, and they jointly own the natural bush, dams and roads making up the rest of the property.
My camp site was next to a young fellow Paul Martin and over the next five years, I watched him lay the foundations for his own demise. We were the first two to settle on the land at Red Hill. Paul hounded at least 12 people out of their homes, including three women. All the people were a generation older, so perhaps his issue was their age. Who knows.
He went on a rampage killing the neighbours cattle with his car which caused at lot of problems in the cattle town of Kempsey. Two cars full of men arrived at Goolawah wanting a word. Paul promptly vanished, leaving others to deal with the angry armed cattle farmers.
A peculiar people
While I was deciding whether to leave or continue putting up with Paul’s nonsense, I read Gavin Souter’s excellent book, A PECULIAR PEOPLE: The Australians in Paraguay about the New Australia Co-operative.
A group of Australians formed a co-operative in Paraguay in 1892, among them writer Dame Mary Gilmore, who’s portrait appears on the Australian ten dollar note. William Lane was the founder and leader of the New Australia movement. The phrase ‘White Australia policy’ first appears in William Lane’s publication The Boomerang in Brisbane. I highly recommend to anyone considering buying into a co-operative to read A Peculiar People (from Amazon) or Booktopia
The same thing happened in Paraguay. Residents disillusioned with the realisation that their dream of Utopia didn’t match the reality began fighting and kicking each other out. Suicides followed. I left Goolawah in 2008.
I remember saying as I left that Paul would either murder someone or be killed. It turns out he did both by suiciding in 2017 in an extraordinarily violent act. Coincidentally, as I check the date discovered it was five years ago today that he ended his life.
New Australia settlement, Paraguay, between 1892-1905 – unknown photographer, public domain
Do you want to live with other people who don’t fit in?
Co-ops aren’t for everyone. It’s like living in a committee situation 24/7. If you’ve ever seen a community group, like an arts or environment association, go haywire then imagine that magnified and the conflict happening all day, every day.
Cliques form. The Survivor television series strategy of forming alliances works in real life as a coping mechanism. Outwit, Outplay, Outlast. On both co-ops, I witnessed gangs form, gang up on innocent people and “vote them off the island”.
Some people, like Peter Carey, move into communes because their lover wanted to … co-opted into co-operative living.
Other people move into co-ops because they don’t fit into mainstream society, are questioning their place in the world, or are having climate anxiety and want to experience something different.
There’s two scenarios which will likely happen on co-ops – you’ll meet people who don’t fit into society because they have problems and are in co-ops to work through their issues or get away from them, or you’ll meet the best of people who understand the benefits of belonging to a ‘community’. A few co-operatives work because their common goals override personal differences.
Meet as many of the residents as you can and ask yourself – do you want these people to sit on the committee that rules your life? Land sharing co-operatives are cheaper than free hold title, but be aware there is a hidden cost.
The ‘shared vision’ that forms the bond between is vital – it must be rock solid and transcend personal differences. Alternative communities are a great exercise in stoicism while saving for a freehold title property, imo.
Novelist Peter Carey influenced by Starlight community, Yandina
Peter Carey wrote:
For a while I lived on the other side of Brisbane, at Yandina, in what was coyly labelled an Alternative Community by its inhabitants, and a Hippy Commune by the local press. Ever since I left there in 1980, I have recalled it fondly – the beautiful physical environment, my friends there.
I wrote a novel in Yandina and a great deal of the life in Browns Creek Road found its way between the pages of the book. In our bedroom in New York I have a small colour photograph of a red window frame in a stained timber wall. The glass of the window reflects a perfect blue sky and the clear spiky leaves of a tropical palm. This hut or cabin was once my home. Looking at the photograph always makes me feel good.
Last month, 14 years after I had left Browns Creek Road, I found myself driving down it once again. At first the road was different – more houses on the fringes of Yandina, a bitumen road where there had been pot-holed dirt, and then the road, to my memory, became the same as it had always been, and I was overcome with the most dreadful anxiety.
Through the foliage I caught glimpses of houses I had known 14 years before, saw the tiny trees had grown into orchards heavy with fruit. I felt as frail and nervous as as a ghost.
In the world outside, suburban developments had pushed across the land. But in here, it seemed, the world was older, but the same. And indeed, when I came around the community hall we had spent so many hours discussing – berating ourselves for our apathy, our inability to ‘get it together’ – I saw it had improved.
It was always a wonderful hall – a great platform raised on high bloodwood poles beside the river with a pitched central roof and then deep verandas at a lower pitch. It had no walls. The climate made them unnecessary. It was always a little like a long-house.
In the 14 years I had been away succeeding ‘generations’ had laboured on the hall. There was now a beautiful veranda rail and an arched slatted skirt for the underfloor, and both of these changes, coming as they did from Queensland vernacular and hippy-chainsaw architecture, had a charm and a rightness. The hall had become a beautiful building.
Encouraged by this we walked – I was with my Australian publisher – along the yellow dirt road up beside the creek, between the flooded gums, the trailing vines, over the concrete ford, up the road to two huts where I had once lived.
At the bottom of the driveway I finally recognised the source of my anxiety – I would somehow be denied entry to this ‘home’ which I had photographed and hung on my bedroom wall. I was coming back as an outsider, successful in the straight world, a celebrity visiting from New York.
I walked under trees I had planted, trees I had cared for. I was disoriented, confused by what had been and what had not, and at the same time seduced, totally, as I always had been, by the beauty of the place, the deep dark rain forest below me, the great strong stands of yellow bamboo, the king parrots whose trajectory stays, in my memory, like a brilliant necklace strung across the sky.
I called out, from 20 yards away: ‘Anyone home?’
Inside the hut there was shuffling, a man of 50 appeared. He had long hair and a heavy moustache, a T-shirt advertising the Yandina Ginger Factory. He had bare feet. Behind his shoulder I could see the tank-stand I had built 15 years before.
‘I used to live here,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
Peter Carey wrote his first published novel ‘Bliss’ whilst a Starlighter.
Peter Carey, while accepting the Miles Franklin award for Bliss, told the London crowd, “It’s a long way from Brown’s Creek Road”.
Peter Carey’s books on Amazon and from Australian retailer Booktopia
Here’s Peter Carey, writing about his experience on an alternative community in Australia in the late seventies:
Like many things in my life, I didn’t really mean to do it. I was living with a woman who inherited a little money, and she saw a photograph of this picturesque hut in a health-food shop window in Sydney, and I went up with her to look at it. She decided she wanted to go there, and I went with her.
It was really wonderful. I suddenly found myself in a different physical environment, learning how to do all sorts of things. It was very tropical. We didn’t have a telephone; at first we didn’t even have any water.
I spent a while trying to be a carpenter, fixing the leak on the roof and collecting water from it. People came up to see us and went back disgusted because there were flies crawling over every surface.
One moment I was in Sydney, working in an advertising agency trying to write mornings and nights, using credit cards and drinking nice wine, and the next I am living in this very shaky hippie hut with policemen coming around threatening to plant dope on me if I didn’t tell them my name and date of birth.
Hanging out with people who saw wood nymphs wearing hats and neat little boots. Arguing about, when you did a collective om, which way the energy flowed from person to person around the circle. Though that makes them sound silly, which they weren’t.
They were all sorts of interesting people and we were living in paradise. Most of my friends lived on unemployment benefits. But once a month I would sneak out of the valley and fly down to Sydney and work in the advertising agency for five days.
Peter Carey’s books on Amazon and from Australian retailer Booktopia
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