The next day we took a shuttle bus to the Woodford Folk festival two hours away and set up camp there. My friend Kelsey had a vending booth for her clothes, Kelsey's Creations, so we had a spot in the festival to meet and hang out. I even cooked brunch one day for everyone there. The festival went from Dec. 27 to Jan. 2, with many different stages for music and lots of food and clothes vending stalls. We were really lucky and had great weather the whole time, with hardly any rain and not too hot. It had rained there last year the whole time turning it into a mudfest that kept a lot of people from coming back, but it was still quite a large festival.
Right before leaving NYC, my friend Terence Main heard that I was going to Australia and introduced me to his friend Mark that lives in Australia. He happens to live near Byron Bay, which I was planning on visiting after the Woodford festival so called him up and he invited Jimmi and I to stay. He and his wife Faye and her dog Razu live in Wilson’s Creek just outside of Mullumbimby, which is 20 minute drive to Byron Bay. Jimmi stayed for 2 days and got an airplane flight up to Cairns so he could see the Great Barrier Reef.
I ended up staying at Mark’s for 8 days, working on applications for the Portals to several festivals: Burning Man, Secret Garden Party in the UK and the Eclipse festival in Australia in Nov. Mark is a gourmet chef and would cook dinner every night for Faye and I, and we watched movies from his extensive movie collection.
As I was looking for a place in Byron Bay to do an exhibition and presentation on the Portals between the Rainbow Serpent Festival and the Earth Freq. festival, I learned about Starseed Gardens and went and visited it with Mark. It is an incredible visionary place run by Dan Schrieber, with about a dozen people living there, running a nursery and tea house, with plans to build live-work studios and host festivals in the future. Up till then my plan for building the new Portal was to do it at Kelsey’s parents house which is way out in the middle of nowhere and not very well equipped. It turned out that Starseed had an expert builder named Marti, who also had a geodesic dome company called Wizdomes, that was available to help and that they had a large shed area that it could be built in. I bought Starseed Gardens a welder in exchange for using their place and paid Marti a reasonable fee for having him work full time on building the Portal and use his tools. I moved there on Jan. 12 setting up my tent in a bamboo grove on the edge of the property.
I also was looking to buy a used van to transport the project that I planned to sell when I left and was referred by someone at Starseed to a guy named Danco who dealt with cars to find me one. He had a pickup truck that he offered to rent for $30 a day while I found a van, but I’ve ended up just keeping the pickup truck, or Ute as they are called here, and paying him the rental fee instead of purchasing a vehicle. It’s been an amazing, magical vehicle for me. It fit the entire Portal project and all of my luggage perfectly, as it’s a four door cab.
We bought the materials on Fri. Jan. 13 and started building the next day, Jan. 14, which happened to be my 53rd birthday. I had planned to be done and loaded and driving to Rainbow by the next Fri. the 20th, which gave me extra time to get there and set up, and actually finished the whole project late night Sat. the 21st and loaded it and left on the morning of the 22nd.
I posted a ride share notice on a website and someone named Andrew responded to drive with me that turned out to be the most synchronistic connection. We had so much in common to share with each other on the 2 day drive, which went really smoothly. He got out just before Melbourne to meet his friend Adion that he was going to Rainbow Serpent with. They were part of the Crystal Mandala crew at Rainbow Serpent, an incredible installation of crystals and sacred geometry in a dome that hosted meditations and music performances.
I decided to spend the night in Melbourne at a fire spinning collective called the Play Space that was the equivalent of the WOOM (World of One Mind) warehouse I had been sharing in Oakland. Rob, who was one of the main people there, had actually been to the WOOM after Burning Man, so there was a direct connection! It is in an area of Melbourne called Brunswick and I spent the evening exploring it, but never made it to downtown Melbourne.
I left the next morning and drove the 2 hours to the Rainbow Serpent Festival and met my crew for the first time: Jingles and his lovely Japanese wife Kana were referred to me by Marti and Sananda was referred by Zjael who I was introduced to over the internet by a woman named Billa that I met at the Bioneers conference in Marin in Oct. Jingles had set up a nice camp by some trees, and synchronistically it was right next to the Crystal Mandala crew and Andrew.
We got to work that day by painting all the panels turquoise. The next day Kelsey’s boyfriend Bude arrived and we assembled the bottom half and floor, but couldn’t put the top half on as it was too windy. The following day we finished the top half with the help of a bunch of extra people to help stabilize it. As it gets very windy there we added some extra metal straps around the whole structure to make sure a big wind didn’t rip it apart. The festival started the next day, Fri. Jan 27 and went all the way through Mon. Jan 30. The Portal was located centrally between all the vending areas and stages in a slightly sloping field. I liked to tell people it was “outstanding in its field”. I did a presentation on the Portals Sun. evening in the art gallery dome, as well.
Tues. we packed it up and I followed Kelsey to her sister’s house in Ocean Grove, a little beach town on the coast outside of Melbourne. The next day I started my drive back to Byron Bay alone up the coast, as I had driven there directly on the inland highway and wanted to sightsee. I could have driven all the way around through Melbourne, but last minute saw that there was a ferry that was a short cut, so took that and drove till late at night and camped out in a remote part of southeast Australia in the woods. The next day was the longest drive, all the way up the coast on the highway that actually goes right through the middle of all of these tiny little towns. I drove through the suburbs of Sydney in the late afternoon rush hour in the rain and continued on to the Surfside motel in Lake Cathie, a small town by the beach. I had arranged to stay there in advance, as I knew the weather was rainy and didn’t want to have to camp in the middle of the night in the rain. It was a really great spot, although you couldn’t actually see the beach. They had Kangaroos living on the property, the first and only ones I’ve seen alive, as there are many on the highway as road kill.
I drove the rest of the way to Bryon Bay the next day getting there just in time for the Harmonic Spaces visionary art event that Robert Rich, Android Jones and Phadroid were performing at, put on by the organizer of the Earth Freq. festival Paul Abad. It was quite a good event attracting an interesting crowd of people from Byron Bay. I stayed at Starseed Gardens and set up the Turquoise Portal for the presentation I was doing there on Sun. It went very well but only 30 or so people came as it wasn’t very well promoted. I was at an event they had there in Jan. that had several hundred people, so it was a bit of a disappointment. I had the Turquoise Portal set up with the Quasar Wave Transducer, Robert Rich performed his world class ambient music, I did my presentation on the Sacred Geometry and Earth Energies of the Portal, Andrew Jones did video projections on the Portal (which was totally amazing) and it ended with a performance of Pahdroid, which is Andrew Jones projecting on his wife Phadra as she dances in a white flowing outfit.
I had planned on staying at Starseed until going to Earth Freq. festival next week, but they are having difficulties with having too many people stay there so I’ve had to find another place and am staying at Andrew’s apt. right now. His roommate Ross is studying audio engineering at the SAE Institute here and is very interested in the work I’m doing. All three of us have a lot in common and its been really interesting staying here with both of them. I will be going to Earth Freq. next week and have Jingles and Kana helping again and setting up camp and will have Andrew on my crew as well as Marti from Starseed and possibly another helper from Starseed named Jakob from Denmark, who helped during the entire build there.Jakob arrived at Starseed the day after I did. When he heard I was from NYC, he asked if I knew his cousin Jimmy Carbonetti, who just so happened to my room mate at my apt. therefrom July until Dec. Small world!
I met a woman at Rainbow Serpent that remembered meeting me at the Secret Garden Party festival in the UK in the summer of 2010 named Cylindra and she just so happens to be living right next door to Andrew’s place. We have been going to many different places here in Byron Bay: The light house, the tea tree lake, Sphinx Rock Cafe and the nearby hippie town Nimbin to have dinner with Jingles and Kana.
Go to Part 2
