Kat was going to this thing in the bush, the WA Rainbow Gathering. Some sort of party for hippies out in the bush, organised by no one in particular and uncertain in duration. She said I should go with her and her boyfriend Jim to check it out, and I thought well maybe it would be fun.

So on Friday I packed all my stuff and went down to meet them in Bunker Bay. They were fishing, but all they had caught was this one tiny little fish. I saw Kat’s new camper van, which runs fairly well but has seen better days. She said the backpackers who owned it before her left a bunch of stuff in it, like some torches without batteries and a solitary flipper. She gave me some clothes that she found in there, and they might fit so that’s OK. Anyway, after all the fishing we camped at this little clearing in the woods up on top of Cape Naturaliste, just off the road. It was a good night. Fairly warm.

The next day we went into Dunsborough and Jim did some more fishing while Kat and I replaced one of the headlights on the van. We didn’t really know what we were doing but we muddled through anyway and got it done. After that we had lunch and went off to the Gathering site. I went ahead because the camper van is slow slow slow. I was looking forward to checking out the Gathering, but I was also a little unsure about what to expect, because the rumour I’d heard from Kat was that the camp didn’t have much clean water and lots of people were coming down with gastro. I made sure to stock up on water for myself before leaving, natch.

Anyway, we were supposed to go to this camp on Brockman Highway where they organise protests to save forests. It’s a big, semi-permanent hippie camp. Pretty cool. When we got there, we were supposed to walk about an hour down a track to get to the Blackwood, where the Gathering people were camped. Except when I got there, the dudes were all like “Nah, they’ve moved. The rangers were harassing them.” Someone said people were lighting fires, and you just can’t light fires in a national park this time of year. The whole water thing might have been an issue too, whatever.

So they gave me a map to the new place, which turned out to be down about 100km of dirt roads. My car, Wesley, got real shaken up, and in the end the road signs were too confusing so I was running out of petrol and not sure which way to go. One way was a sandy track, the other said ‘Welcome to 4wd Country.’ So I thought screw that, and decided to get some petrol and camp in the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park for the night. On the way up to the park, I got lost and accidentally found that there was a sealed road back to the highway, which meant that the suspension-crushing trip along the dirt roads had all been for nothing. (Stupid crappy directions!)

So I put up the tent in the dark and camped for the night. I’m getting pretty good at cooking on the Trangia - the secret seems to be putting sachet tuna on things. The next day, I went back and ventured down the ‘4wd Country’ track. After 7km of shuddering along in first and second gear, I was just about to give up when I parked the car and walked forward to look over the next hill. There were some rainbow flags on a gate. I was nearly there.

But I was still out of luck. The ‘car park’ for the gathering was an area under revegetation; basically a big patch of sand covered in tentative little shrubs. I saw Kat’s van in there, but I decided that Wesley was too precious to get bogged and just parked temporarily at the side of the road. I wondered why a four-wheel-drive was suddenly a necessary thing to have in order to commune with nature.

I did get to stay for an hour or two of Gathering though. When I got there the camp was sitting in a circle on the ground, having a heated debate about whether to allow cars to drive directly past the camp. When I say ‘heated debate,’ I mean that people were trying to get their opinions across while still being extra nice to everyone. Even the anti-car camp couldn’t bring themselves to say that there should be a rule against cars going past. They seemed to arrive at the conclusion that they should make a ’suggestion’ or ‘guideline’ instead, but the issue was never really resolved. They also debated about having dogs in the camp. One lady talked about how “Gatherings are traditionally drug-, meat-, technology-, car- and dog-free, so people might consider at least keeping their dogs on leashes and not letting them run around during the talking circle” while the dogs were boisterously running around her, which I thought was a pretty good display of diplomacy. That issue wasn’t totally resolved either though, because one of the dogs decided it wanted to play fetch and stole the talking stick. After that everyone got distracted, and people just talked about how good it was to be there being part of nature, and so on. Someone said some stuff about vibrations, but I didn’t know what they meant.

After the circle, Kat and Jim and I had tea under a tree. People didn’t seem to be doing much, although some women were in the process of blessing their rather rickety teepee. After that, I left. On the way out, I noticed that someone had put up a sign in the middle of the road saying ‘no cars near the camp,’ and thus effectively resolved the whole cars issue with decisive, unilateral action. Good on them.

So after that Wesley limped back up to the sealed road and I went off to find somewhere to camp again. I thought Boranup, but it was a bit boring. I went up to the lookout there and wandered along an old, disused walking trail but it wasn’t that great. I decided to go up to Conto and hike to Point Road campsite, which I remembered as being quite picturesque. Plus, I wanted to do some hiking even if it was just a couple of km.

This is the site at Point Road, in the shade of windswept peppermint trees:

The site was deserted, which I quite like when I’m hiking. I put up the tent, made another excellent dinner and sat around watching the sun set. When it got dark, I watched the possums with a torch. The was a little rat-sized one, which ran across the ground from tree to tree, which was cool. There was also a big one that climbed from one tree to another, crossing over where the branches touched. How it managed to stay in the air was beyond me, but it looked like it had taken the same path every night for years. I also saw a quenda, which was OK. After that I went to bed.

On the way home I stopped at Clairault to get some wine. I’m not sure how impressive it is to wine connoisseurs (I’ll have to wait until Tom and Eleesha try it) but their stuff tasted damn fine to me. Not exactly bursting with flavour, but subtle and smooth.

So that’s it. Good weekend. I didn’t get to commune with nature and my fellow Brothers and Sisters down at the Rainbow Gathering, but camping at Cape Naturaliste and Point Road was OK.

So right I graduated from uni last night and it was like the whole of Nedlands was covered in leaves and there was lots of smashed glass and cars with dents from the hailstones I mean that storm didn’t really hit Fremantle but it must have it Nedlands something shocking because anyway for the first time in like a hundred years they couldn’t have the graduation ceremony in the big hall but instead they had to have it in the gym and I’m like ‘why do universities even have gyms anyway? plus we had to graduate under the basketball backboard and the gymnastics rings and the offical dignitaries were all sitting in front of that frameworky thing they have on the wall in gyms that I don’t know what it is and it was so damn hot wearing all the robes and stuff and my mum came although it was weird because I took my robe back after the ceremony and she was all like ‘where’s your robe?’ and I was all like ‘I took it back’ and she said like ‘no you have to get your picture taken’ so we went to the robe people and she asked for my robe back which was pretty embarrassing but after that we got out of there pretty quickly and I got all green lights on the way home so I guess it wasn’t bad and if I actually cared about the degree I would be happy but as it is I’m mostly glad it’s over.

So yeah, last night I went to the final of the Perth Poetry Slam down at ye olde Blue Room. I was suffering from a cold so I was pretty out of it the whole time, but it turned out to be a good night anyway. If you’ve never been to a poetry slam before, the idea is that there are a bunch of poets and each of them has two minutes to read a poem. Then they are judged by randomly chosen audience members and the person with the highest score is the winner. It may sound like a stupid idea to make poetry into a competition, but if you accept that the aim is to please the audience rather than produce a work of high art, then it all starts to seem fun.

And it turned out to be quite fun indeed. The poetry ranged from the very loud to the fairly quiet, from rap to free verse, and from comedy to some very confronting personal stuff. There was also some hilarious disorganisation from the presenters, who had to explain the rules several times over and kept arguing with each other about who was explaining them better. My favourite poet was this chick who did one about pogonotrophy (the cultivation of one’s beard) but in the end, the overall winner was this dude who did a poem about being a foot fetishist. It wasn’t a poem that you’d pay much attention to if you’d read it in a book, but his delivery was good and it was quite funny.

So it was a good night, and I was pretty happy with the result. Don’t get me wrong, I’d never compete in a slam myself (I would be absolutely shattered to lose to a poem about feet) but as a bit of fun and a way to promote poetry it think it’s tops.

I said I would write about other stuff, didn’t I? Ah fuck it, I’m too sick. I’m going to go play playstation while blowing my nose a lot.