Stairway to Heaven, House of God

During the 1980s I lived with Zsuzsi, a wonderful Japanese ‘princess’ - illegitimate granddaughter of Baron Tanabe - who signed the surrender on the battleship Missouri (I lived with her for far longer than any other woman to date). To save our lives and relationship we left Sydney for parts unknown in 1983 in the IlluminatiMobile – a strangely hybridised matt black panel van with black windows and ‘The Illuminati’ carefully lettered on the side in white rising sun script.

We headed north up the Pacific Highway in the mild winter, making stops in remote locations (including the beautiful valley in which I now live and write this) and, making love on beaches, in forests, in rivers and friends’ spare rooms, we eventually found ourselves parked in a shed on a cow farm just our of Nimbin, in the Tuntable valley. There we were gradually surrounded by scores of people who, like us, had arrived to help set up the Nimbin Ten Years After festival, next to the communally-owned land where the alternative movement came of age in Australia. I was there, officially, to set up the lighting for the festival.

There we met two of the organisers, Jenni Elf and Perry White, a couple who ran an alternative magazine called Maggie’s Farm – they were publishing the next edition on a hired typeset machine and photocopier from a room in the old farmhouse owned by Heather, a recent divorcee who hoped to sell the land to someone attracted to the festival.

It was here I began my publishing apprenticeship. Exactly a decade earlier I’d found myself leaving high school very early after a small roneoed magazine I published and distributed there landed me in hot water – the Head Master had ordered all copies recalled and publicly burned before the students in a metal drum in the middle of the bitumen playground and my father was threatened with legal action. I still have one copy I rescued and saved for all these years.

My grandfather had ended up with two lifetime sentences in Siberia for a pamphlet he’d published as a young man during the first Russian revolution(s) – but that’s another story.

Perry and Jenni were both extraordinary individuals, halfway between the old and new paradigms and, like many people in Nimbin, helping to evolve the consciousness of humanity into something less self-destructive and more imaginative. Living and working in these beautiful surrounds we were all free to explore a myriad of possibilities and witness the best and worst that humans had to offer each other. But today, as Australia elects its next government and I sit here, listening to ‘Private Universe’ by Crowded house while typing on a laptop in this remote paradise (not voting for the first time in my adult life – the nearest polling booth isn’t open), Perry’s words as we sat in the IlluminatiMobile overlooking the lush northern valley come back to me;

“Do you know the story about the man who wanted to meet God?” he asked, surveying the beautiful creation laid out before us. I shook my head, meeting his crinkled eyes as he puffed on his cigar.

“Well, there was a man who wanted to meet god. He decided he’d dedicate his life to exploring the world until he could come face to face with the creator of the universe, and had a wonderful time discovering strange things in all the nooks and crannies he came across. For years he wandered the Earth, going wherever he liked, having amazing adventures, and he always knew that one day he would find the object of his quest – maybe just around the next corner.

“Then, after many years, on one day like all the rest he came to a little path that wound off the main road and followed it. It twisted and turned through rocky ground and into a forest, and then it became a narrow footpath that wound up a high hill. As the man continued up the path he felt his heart race and his breath quicken and he knew that at the top of the hill there would be a house, and in that house he’d find God. He climbed up to the top of the hill and came to a picket fence that circled a little house on the summit.

“The gate swung open to his touch and he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck as he approached the steps up to the veranda. He slowed his pace as he climbed the steps and walked the last few paces to the old wooden door. There he saw an ornate knocker in the shape of a lion and reached out his hand to raise it – and hesitated.

“‘Here I am,’ he thought, ‘this is it – the end of all my searching, where I can finally meet God. When I knock on this door, all the days of my seeking and adventuring will be over and I’ll know what I came to learn.’” Perry’s eyes twinkled brightly.

“And the man stopped and turned around and quietly went back down the steps and retraced his path down the hill and earnestly began to forget where the house of God was, and went on to have many more years of questing and adventuring.”

This is not what I did.

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