Ferals: Terra-ism and Radical Ecologism in Australia - [API] Network

The Beautiful and the Damned 

Ferals: Terra-ism and Radical Ecologism in 

Australia 

Graham St John 

In its most recent edition, The Macquarie Dictionary recognises as ‘feral’: ‘a 

person who espouses environmentalism to the point of living close to nature in 

more or less primitive conditions and who deliberately shuns the normal code of 

society with regard to dress, habitat, hygiene, etc’. 1 A familiar persona dwelling 

on the edges of Australian culture is now ‘on the record’. Though more silhouette 

than profile, we are presented with a verification of the presence of young radical 

ecologists disenchanted with the parent culture’s predacious impact upon the natural 

world, who challenge classical scientific efforts to snuff out its mystery, who 

object to monotheistic religions deferring responsibility to transcendent creators, 

who adopt alternative lifestyle strategies. The definition hints at an emergent 

subcultural milieu identifying with, and defending the rights of, indigenous ecology 

and peoples — natural and cultural heritage. It implicates thousands of young 

Australians who have ‘gone feral’. 

This article investigates the self-marginal milieu now registered in the nation’s 

dictionary. Drawing upon interviews conducted over several years, I document the 

multiple roots and characteristics of those to whom this label has been attached — 

and, despite self-distancing, 2 strong attachment remains. Explorations reveal a largely, 

though not exclusively, middle class cultural formation attracting those actively devoted 

to the celebration and protection of landscapes threatened by resource development 

interests. Elaborating upon the political, aesthetic, semi-nomadic and neo-tribal tactics 

integral to ferality, I delineate a local process of re-enchantment and reconciliation, 

an Australian em-place-ment strategy — antipodean terra-ism. 3 

The global environment of Reaganomics and Thatcherism triggered the emergence 

of post-seventies eco-apocalyptic movements. In 1980, with their doctrine of ‘nocompromise 

in defence of planet Earth’, the environmental millenarian movement 

Earth First! emerged in the US. By the early nineties, Britain was experiencing the 

presence of eco-tribal Travellers like the Dongas. 4 In the local context, a 

contemporary face of defiance percolated throughout the eighties, and by the end of 

that decade, it had a name — ‘feral’. 5 To my knowledge, this metaphorical application 

is exclusive to Australia, an exclusivity which likely derives from the unique historical 

response to, and cultural interaction with, introduced species running wild and turning 

pestilent across the breadth of the continent. 6 

Foremost, a critical discourse and praxis characterises ferality. Though feminist, 

peace, native title and New Age movements have all been tributaries to the feral 

concourse, the radical ecology movement has been particularly formative. Since 

the 1960s, local urban middle class populations of advanced capitalist nations have 

been the chief proponents of a globalist sensibility decrying ‘the death of nature’. 

Awareness of environmental degradation has precipitated the advent of what Beck 

calls ‘long-distance moralities’, and has raised an ecological consciousness wherein 

nature has become the principle ‘field of collective action with which new social 

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groups are engaged’. 7 A key manifestation of this growing cultural anxiety over 

environmental ‘risks’ is ‘ecologism’ which Dobson regards as an ideological 

commitment to ecological balance and diversity, sustainable levels of production and 

consumption, and non-exploitative practices. 8 

On the fringes of this trend lies radical ecologism — a multifaceted critical 

standpoint delineated by Merchant. 9 This system of discourse and practice has 

several elements: an acute awareness of rampant eco-devastation under the 

colonialist imperatives of modernity; 10 an ecocentric attachment to native biotic 

communities; a personal and prescriptive ethical anticonsumerism; a ‘DiY culture’ 11 

of celebration and defence, and; gravitation towards decentralised cooperatives 

(benefiting from permacultural, organic and biodynamic farming). The coupling of 

global consciousness with decentrist habitudes is enshrined in the maxim of the 

Nimbin Star Earth Tribe’s Tipi Village Sanctuary: ‘think globally — go tribally’, 

perhaps the feral catchcry. 

Critical discourse propagates a distinctive confrontational attitude. Not necessarily 

desiring isolation (like the communitarian experiments of the 1960s and ‘70s), or 

‘disappearance’ (as has been described of ravers of the 1980s and ‘90s), 12 ferality 

is about obstructing, boycotting, desiring and actively promoting change. This culture 

of resistance seems to have fomented two types of role: protester and educator. 

The former are inspired by non violent direct action (NVDA), often thought to 

distinguish contemporary activists from hippies, who are rather unfairly typified as 

passive. This provocative ‘new warrior spirit’ is sometimes extended to incorporate 

diplomacy, mediation and commitment to the latter, educational, role. 

Inspired by Earth First! and a veteran of the Franklin conflict, Banyalla is a 

notable example of the protest activist. A one-time Greenpeace canvasser who 

became disgruntled with ‘leaders and bureaucracy’, he is now a staunch defender 

of East Gippsland’s remaining old growth forests and a key member of that region’s 

activist collective GECO (Goongerah Environment Centre). Banyalla believes in 

the feral movement, but he says it must ‘challenge the status quo’. 13 

Suspecting she was conceived at Nimbin’s Aquarius Festival in 1973, Quenda 

exemplifies the educator activist. Raised in a rock house on a Queensland organic 

permaculture community, she completed a degree in environmental science at 

Lismore specialising in conservation technology. Though possessing the qualifications, 

she has so far resisted taking up a professional position as ‘nothing really fits in with 

my ideals.’ Quenda stresses that: 

[if] you’re not interacting with lots of people and you’re living in a little plot of 

rainforest and you’re just sprouting your own sprouts — you’ve got you’re own 

simple herb garden and you’re completely isolated from other people and temptation 

— then you’re not the ideal feral. 

As such, she commits to raising ecological issues with ‘red neck farmers’, who, 

now she’s shaved off her dreadlocks, aren’t threatened by her approach: ‘Hey! 

Ya’know if you plant x ya’know at x time of year you’ll have heaps more nutrients 

and you can even have cow fodder. And then you can keep the cows off the creek 

at the same time’! 14 

Many demonstrate a convergence of both roles. Take Mardo, a communicator 

and ‘hard core’ activist. Brought up in housing commission flats, Mardo took to the 

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streets and then the bush at an early age. His ‘love of the land’ and knowledge of 

ecology developed working on cattle stations in outback Queensland and the Northern 

Territory. Once having objected to the cattle industry, he later became involved in 

several campaigns: Timbarra, Iron Gates, Roxby Downs, and, latterly, the Goolengook 

Forest blockade in East Gippsland. By April 1997, he had been fifteen months with 

GECO teaching people climbing techniques, bush survival skills, designing lock-on 

devices and building platforms for ‘tree-sits’. Mardo also liaises with police and 

loggers at blockades. In 1997, he conceived the inclusive grassroots group CIDA 

(Concerned Individuals for Direct Action) to provide equipment and training to 

communities protecting natural heritage from development. 15 

That ferals first appeared in the Northern Rivers area of northeast New South 

Wales is probable, as that area has been Australia’s primary geographical repository 

for alternative enclaves and lifeways since the 1960s. According to the co-founder 

of the Star Earth Tribe, a multiple occupancy community near Tenterfield in northeast 

NSW, Om Shalom, was ‘the parent of all the feral movement’. 16 There are three 

key historical factors to keep in mind when attempting to comprehend the feral 

emergence: 1) a hippy/punk/pagan exchange throughout the 1970s and 80s; 2) the 

appearance of travelling anarchists/activists in the late 1980s/early ‘90s, and; 3) the 

postcolonial valorisation and defence of indigenised landscapes in the nineties. 

As ferals possess multi-subcultural roots, genealogical research is necessarily 

complicated. Here it will suffice to say that the seventies and eighties occasioned 

‘commerce’ between, and eventual mergers of, disparate youth cultural dispositions 

— namely, the idealism of ‘hippy’ counterculturalists, the confrontationalism of punk, 

and the eco-spiritualism of local Pagans. As the feral milieu lies downstream from 

the confluence of these streams, we will likely discover a range of formative radical 

indices: the struggle for individual liberty and freedom of expression, a largely 

imported culture of dissent fomenting in the sixties which included genuine opposition 

and outright disengagement (militant and bohemian elements); the culture of refusal 

and often directionless confrontation apparent in the late seventies and eighties ‘blank 

generation’ and urban squatting scene, and; the dutiful commitment toward, and 

identification with, the natural environment inherent in Neo-Paganism — the ‘spiritual 

arm’ of the ecology movement. 17 Early evidence of convergent streams, the first 

and third in particular, is discernible in that which Lindblad described as ‘a new bush 

para-culture ... of geodesic domes, A-frames and Kombi vans’. In the mid seventies, 

he observed an: 

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eclectic religiosity which blends Zen Buddhism with the primitive tribal belief that 

man is essentially a part of nature. Just as nature was the basis of beliefs of the 

Aborigines, so you can still find mountain and mushroom worshippers among these 

new people of the bush, and their beliefs correspond directly with their geographical 

location. Children are given such names as Possum, Sunshine and Rainforest. 18 

Shifting attention to the eighties, another factor in the feral emergence — mobile 

activism — became apparent as occupants of urban squats (‘crusties’) were set 

even further adrift. Cedar clearly remembers: 

a particular type of people who were like squatters but they travelled. And they 

would go from action to action ... Whilst the squatting movement in Melbourne were


very activist, and they were into things like resisting evictions, it was all still local and 

it was much more city based ... Suddenly the squatters would go feral and that was it, 

they’d start travelling. 19 

Harbouring a strong cold-war survivalist mentality and transience akin to Britain’s 

newer Travellers 20 or ‘rainbow punks’, 21 and an eco-defensive apocalypticism akin 

to Earth First!, ‘political crusties’ mobilised throughout the eighties to form counterdevelopment 

(clear-fell logging and uranium mining) protests. Many expatriate urbanites 

began occupying and defending those contexts of unique identity formation — the 

Australian forests. Conservation issues have had an especially radicalising influence 

in Australia. Threats to valued areas of natural heritage sparked an effective series of 

‘greenie’ civil disobedience campaigns/occupations: the anti-logging campaign at 

Terania Creek in NSW 1979 followed by the Nightcap National Park struggle in 1982; 

the celebrated Gordon-below-Franklin Hydroelectric Scheme protest in Tasmania’s 

remote southwest in 1982-3; and the blockade of Errinundra forest in 1984. 22 

Protests followed one after another. By July 1991, there was a successful 

blockade mounted at the Chaelundi Forest conflict in northeast New South Wales 

dubbed ‘Feral Camp’. 23 According to Cohen, it was Chaelundi which spawned ‘a 

new generation of young, alternative environmental activists’. Amongst these he 

includes the ‘punks for the forests’: 

a wonderfully rare breed of wild young men and women, outrageous to the extreme, 

who shocked everyone, from police to protesters. Wild and often drunk, they surprised 

all with their outlandish humour and bravery. Under the rough exterior of rags 

and skull earrings, nose rings, boots and beer were some of the finest people I had 

encountered (when they were sober). 24 

Members of a burgeoning ‘earth volunteer army’, 25 these terra-ists of the nineties 

came to inhabit, if only temporarily, threatened regions where strong attachments, 

with both native landscape and co-volunteers, were formed. 26 

And it should be clear that it is no longer necessarily ‘wilderness’ (or ‘pristine’, 

‘untouched’ nature) that is held in the highest regard by eco-radicals. As 

postcolonialist re-evaluations of nature transpire, it is an indigenised landscape that 

now constitutes a primary object of valorisation and defence. In a climate of 

awareness of a ‘humanised realm saturated with significations’, 27 indigenised 

landscapes have become sources of enchantment and targets of protection. For 

instance, Nimbin Rocks and Mt Warning — reputed Bunjalung male ritual initiation 

sites — have become sacralised ‘energy’ sources or ‘power spots’ for many of the 

Northern River’s post-sixties settlers. According to Quenda, Mt Warning (or 

Wollumbin, Bunjalung for ‘cloud catcher’ or ‘rain gatherer’) is: 

a really sacred mountain ... the first place of ritual, where ritual came to this planet ... 

It really crosses on a ley line there and it’s very significant in terms of the whole planet 

... I think Ayer’s Rock is like a crown chakra and Mt Warning is like a third eye. 

Further to this, eco-radical awareness of prior Aboriginal occupation and the history 

of dispossession has inspired direct action campaigns, especially where bioprospectors 

are involved (eg, WMC at Roxby Downs, Ross Mining at Timbarra and ERA at 

Jabiluka). According to the producer of a documentary about the protesters at 

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Jabiluka uranium mine in Kakadu National Park in 1998, as a counterpoint to urban 

youth ‘schooled on coke, basketball and vandalism, these amazingly empowered 

young people fuelled their actions on a deep love of the land and a profound respect 

for the indigenous owners’. 28 

Combined, these factors triggered the emergence of ferals as a unique 

phenomenon by the mid-nineties, when they were first mediated. Concentrated 

coverage occurred between 1994-96, and it was the spectacular style of this mobile 

theatre of the weird which offered the stimulus. So what constitutes the feral 

spectacle? Despite informative accounts, 29 popular mediations have maximised the 

visual impact provided by the milieu’s strangeness, its otherness, 30 sometimes 

chronicling the exploits of intrepid reporters returning from our outer-terrestrial regions 

with tales (and images) of Euro-Australian primitives, 31 other times consigning them 

to a notorious leisure status. 32 

They are often talented musicians, didj players, artists, dressed in recycled garb, 

dreadlocked, adorned with multiple piercings and folk-jewellery: feathers, birds 

feet, skulls and umbilical-cord necklaces (feralia). A wild rustic appearance is 

desirable. Some will go to great lengths to achieve a turbulent look — a ‘cultivated 

crustiness’. 33 They revel in an iconography of otherness and authenticity. The 

identification with various indigenous peoples and historical cultures — their 

cosmologies, rituals and artefacts — is apparent in multiple appropriations. 34 Amid 

feral argot, body-art and material culture, a customised ensemble of beliefs, language, 

architecture, musical instruments, dietary habits, cooking methods, medical knowledge, 

clothing and hair aesthetics deriving from Celts and various indigenous peoples, is 

discernible. They will likely celebrate the season’s cycle — the Pagan year, the 

path of the sun and phases of the moon — at small gatherings, communities (e.g. 

Wolfgang’s Palace in Victoria), ‘doofs’ (like Earth Dream events), 35 forest festivals 

(like the ‘Celebrate and Defend’ Goongerah Gatherings in East Gippsland) or larger 

alternative lifestyle events like ConFest. 36 

Performing in transit — especially hand drumming and fire dancing — these are 

youth for whom life is akin to theatre. Hebdige’s discussion of the ambiguity intrinsic 

to subcultural gesturing sheds valuable light on the spectacle of ferality. Youth 

subcultures are ‘insubordinate’ — they ‘drive against classification and control’. 

Yet, pleasure is derived from ‘being watched’, from being spectacular. There is 

pleasure in being watched and power is, as Hebdige avers — in reference to a 

comment attributed to Foucault — ‘in fashion’. 37 

It could be suggested that the feralian ensemble illustrates ‘symbolic’ resistance, 

their marginal corporeality, their ‘fashion statements’ resembling the apparently 

inconsequential ‘rituals of resistance’ which Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary 

Cultural Studies researchers located in the leisure time of working class youth. This 

is qualified by Banyalla who makes the distinction between a ‘fashion feral’ (which 

he says he’s not) and an ‘alternative lifestyle feral’. Banyalla does agree appearance 

is critical, as by one’s outward appearance, one consciously poses a challenge to 

society. He says of ferals: 

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you can be totally fashion conscious and still not have to spend three or four hundred 

dollars on a fucking dress or a fucking flash pair of pants or something ... they 

stand out in a crowd ya’know. They’re fucking stunners! ... And just by the fact of 

doing that ... you have to be activists in some way.


Like other subcultural ensembles, feral is an intentional sign system. Ferality ‘stands 

apart’. It is ‘a visible construction, a loaded choice. It directs attention to itself; it 

gives itself to be read’. 38 However, at the risk of inciting a shallow rebellion, an 

‘alternative lifestyle feral’ must be politically active, must celebrate and defend. 

Ultimately, the feral spectacle must be in service of the cause. ‘Weekend ferals’ do 

not pose a threat. According to Banyalla, the ‘rebellion’ of the narcissistic ‘fashion 

feral’ remains substantively empty. 

Like other middle class subcultural milieux (eg, hippies), feral resistance is not 

confined to the field of leisure. 39 Nor is it merely ‘symbolic’ or ‘ritual’ 40 and, therefore, 

containable. Furthermore, though edged into the media spectacle, in the large, feral 

remains in the subterraneous marginalia of ‘immediatism’. 41 As such, its anarchic 

confrontational potential has been spared the degree of ‘recuperation’ via 

commodification that is the experience of other subcultures (eg, mod, hippy, punk 

and raver). This is the case as: there is no distinctively commodifiable feral literature 

or music; there is little evidence of an entrepreneurial ethos; clothing is DiY, 

inexpensive and recycled; hair is not usually styled professionally; and there have 

been few feral ‘pop stars’. Feral signs are not converted into mass produced objects 

on any scale comparable to punk. In Hebdige’s language, 42 they have not, at least 

yet, been ‘rendered at once public property and profitable merchandise’. 43 

As the feral assemblage is significant, it is abundantly clear that style cannot be 

easily dismissed. It ‘speaks’ of the values shared by adherents, radiating a transient, 

eco-conscious, non-material atavism. However, while ferality’s spectacular aesthetic 

predominates in popular media representations, pivotal social, political and cultural 

traits have gone largely unnoticed. 

A key characteristic of ferality is its transience — semi-nomadism. The rejection 

of ‘the parent culture’ — especially ‘the great Australian dream’ of home-ownership 

— has sent these ‘nomads of the 90s’ 44 spiralling out from their domestic origins. 

Ferality, which approaches the transhuman resistance to a settled life so strongly 

endorsed by Chatwin, 45 is cognate with the earlier ‘rucksack revolution’ declared 

by Kerouac in Dharma Bums. 46 Indeed, their immediate solution to a dissatisfying 

urban existence — mobility — corresponds with that of their Beat antecedents. 47 

Yet, also like Beats (and not to mention Travellers), ferals seek stability and belonging 

with ‘like-minded’ others. 

Movement and residence are patterned by subsistence strategies. The fact that 

most are Centrelink ‘clients’, and therefore State-dependent, challenges a purist 

definition of ‘feral’ as uncontrolled. Though welfare dependency tends to curtail 

mobility — with the requirement to submit ‘dole diaries’ and the pre-1998 threat of 

Case Management — the dole is an accepted part of the lifestyle. Welfare payments 

are often supplemented or superseded by other informal, often temporary, sources 

of income, including itinerant trading at small alternative markets or festivals, seasonal 

fruit picking, small-scale illicit substance trading and busking. 

The receipt of welfare, especially over the long term, is a circumstance around 

which reactionary elements launch offensives: ‘greenies’ are ‘bludgers’, ‘taxpayers’ 

liabilities’. However, insiders rally around the conviction that the kind of work involved 

justifies taking ‘the government scholarship’. This is the case for Quenda. People 

in receipt, she argues, ‘are working real hard ... I couldn’t explain to the typical 

person what I do’. There are actually two means by which Quenda personally 

‘works for the greater’. First, she performs ‘healing work’. Quenda is a member 

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of Bohemia, a group of healers who travel the festivals to heal people through 

massage (including didjeridu massage), drumming and chanting techniques. She 

revealed to me one source of her healing powers — Mt Warning . There, ‘at night 

time, I talk to the Kooris in my dreams and they teach me special songs. And 

because I heal with the song vibration, that’s really sacred to me.’ 

However, doing her bit for the planet, ‘environmental work’, is Quenda’s chief 

preoccupation. In 1996, this involved ‘scouting’ and laying ‘traps’ around the Timbarra 

Plateau, the site of a proposed gold mine. 48 The ‘traps’, or hair tubes, are designed 

to seize hair of species like the endangered tiger quoll. ‘I’m hoping to deter [Ross 

Mining] any way I can’, she says. Since industries whose activities threaten already 

endangered species must possess expensive licenses to do so, the higher the number 

and frequency of endangered species known to exist in the region, the heavier the 

burden placed on companies like Ross Mining. Though she has spent many weeks 

trapping to defend species diversity and Aboriginal heritage, it is not a livelihood: 

‘I’m working for Australia ... So I feel fine taking the dole’. 

Engaging in such protective work, there is a predilection among ferals to become 

affiliated with alternative collectives. Typically they are anarchic, non-hierarchical 

associations within which resource-pooling is favoured and ecological issues foremost. 

They are marginal ‘neo-tribes’, ‘Bünde’ or ‘DiY communities’, 49 wherein 

membership is non-ascriptive. They are highly unstable, yet strongly affectual 

resource hubs and, through long periods of voluntary work, valuable skill sources. 

Some collectives are performance orientated (like Bohemia, Wolfgang’s Palace, 

Earth Reggae and various political ‘sound systems’ like Oms not Bombs and 

Organarchy). Others are intentional communities, including the Star Earth Tribe 

and Feral Wymyn, an Anarcho-Feminist Collective who, in 1996, intended to establish 

Victoria’s first all-female community. 50 Yet, more genuine ‘eco-tribes’ are radical 

green outfits like the Otway Ranges Environment Network, North East Forest 

Alliance and GECO, or more established Co-operatives like Friends of the Earth, 

Fitzroy. These are DiY communities of resistance interconnected in a growing 

network. They are typically engaged in natural heritage conservation and antidevelopment 

campaigns, including anti-logging, mining and road protests. 

Harbouring a legacy of swift occupation and peaceful obstruction, one node in 

this network is the East Gippsland based GECO, representing the last line of defence 

of Victoria’s remaining high conservation value forest. With their familiar screenprinted 

dictum ‘old growth — fucken oath’, GECO emerged out of blockades 

mounted in 1993/94. Dedicated to NVDA, GECO engage in political lobbying, 

police and forestry worker liaison, conduct surveys for endangered species 

(‘scouting’) and public education. They founded an organic food co-op and have 

established a permaculture garden. GECO recognise the prior occupancy of the 

forests by the Bidawal. In 1997, they united with other groups to form a community 

of resistance at Goolengook. With the signing of the Regional Forest Agreement, 

and against the recommendations of DNRE (Department of Natural Resources 

and Environment) botanists and prominent scientists, Goolengook forest has been 

exposed to clearfell logging and slash burning. A large percentage of trees are 

destined for the government-subsidised export woodchipping mill at Eden in southeast 

New South Wales owned by the Japanese company Harris-Daishowa. 

The Goolengook base camp blockade was established when all other political 

processes failed to protect this forest. The camp experienced constant flux, with 

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numbers swelling as ‘Goolengeeks’ assembled for immanent blockades 51 and ‘eventactions’. 

The latter has involved occupying the DNRE office in Orbost, and, more 

importantly, ‘hitting the chippers’ (actions on woodchipping mills at Orbost and Eden). 

These passionately executed actions involved conveyor belt lock-ons, banner dropping 

and eco-political theatrics. Instances of the feral spectacle serving the cause, they 

are designed to attract media attention and are engineered to increase the operating 

costs of an environmentally destructive industry. With cruel irony, on June 5th 1997 

— World Environment Day — police ‘broke the blockade’. Since then, there have 

been over 170 arrests. 

Heritage defence encampments such as Goolengook are risk-laden paroxysms 

of identity formation. Reporting upon road protests in Britain, Jordan claims that 

direct action is ‘praxis, catharsis and image rolled into one’: 

[T]he inherent risk, excitement and danger of the action creates a magically focused 

moment, a peak experience where real time suddenly stands still and a certain shift in 

consciousness can occur. 52 

For Goolengeeks, ‘actions’ possess all the makings of passage rites - an idea conveyed 

in Earth First!, the journal: 

Rites of passage were essential for the health of primal cultures ... so why not reinstate 

initiation rites and other rituals in the form of ecodefense actions? Adolescents 

could earn their adulthood by successful completion of ritual hunts, as in days of 

yore, but for a new kind of quarry — bulldozers and their ilk. 53 

Obstructing logging activity via the ‘lock-on’ constitutes a successful ‘hunt’ in the 

local context. And respect and acceptance is accorded those who perform valorous 

feats of civil disobedience — who, ‘by deploying their bodies in precarious settings 

... convert themselves into flesh and blood bargaining chips’. 54 Yet other, more 

domestic, responsibilities, such as kitchen duties and camp maintenance, earn ecotribals 

equivalent respect. Mardo, for instance, lives by the Zen Buddhist philosophy: 

‘Before enlightenment, chop wood, fetch water. After enlightenment, chop wood, 

fetch water.’ Obstructions accomplished, arrests and fines accumulated, are not 

exclusive sources of standing within the protest milieu. 

Such communities of resistance are, furthermore, autonomous zones of solidarity. 

This was reported to be the case at an anti-logging campaign at Giblett, WA in 1997, 

where, at any one time, in a stand-off with the Department of Conservation and 

Management, there were said to be 150 people scattered throughout the old growth. 

One tree-platform dweller, Zac, revealed that ‘for the first time, I feel like I actually 

belong somewhere ... There is such a sense of belonging and such a sense of family 

in this place that I haven’t found anywhere’. 55 While the loss of forest compartments 

or coupes to which deep attachments have been formed occasions a ‘crushing 

sense of grief and despair’ amongst feral eco-defenders, the desecration binds 

together those who have ‘borne witness’. 56 

Ferality is a confrontational attitude intimately connected to the critical discourse 

and practice of radical ecologism in Australia. It has appeared at the crossroads of 

several historical trajectories: the local confluence of hippie, punk and pagan youth 

cultures, the emergence of a nomadic squatting/activist movement, and the valorisation 

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of indigeneity. Via discussion of this relatively immediate and largely uncommodified 

spectacular/activist subculture, special note has been made of its efforts to 

simultaneously celebrate and defend natural and cultural heritage. 

We are witness to a contemporary transition which indicates detachment from 

the ‘parent culture’ and collective identification with the natural environment. This 

Australian eco-radical project promises to bequeath similarly disenchanted individuals 

with an understanding of their kinship with the natural world, an attendant range of 

responsibilities, and a defensible place in the scheme of things. Evidencing a 

subterranean process of reconcilement, ferals are antipodean terra-ists seeking 

(re)connection with place. 

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Ferals: Terra-ism and Radical Ecologism in Australia 


1 The Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd edition, 1997, The Macquarie Library, Sydney. 

2 A reaction to the way ‘feral’ sits uncomfortably close to the politically quiescent ‘New Age’ in 

popular mediations, and the forest industry’s efforts to discredit the environmental movement by 

making ‘feral’ synonymous with indolence and ‘bludging’. 

3 It takes some energetic contortion to conflate these nascent chthonian others with new autochthones 

who, evidencing ‘the new feralism’, supplant Aborigines in a contemporary ‘search for lebensraum’. 

Yet, see D Cuthbert and M Grossman, ‘Trading places: locating the indigenous in the New Age’, 

Thamyris, vol 3, no 1, 1996, pp 18-36. 

4 The Dongas Tribe, ‘the nomadic indigenous peoples of Britain’, emerged to oppose the extension 

of the M3 Motorway at Twyford Down in Hampshire in 1992. Donga Alex, in G McKay, 

Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties, Verso, London, 1996, p 137. See 

also L Lowe and W Shaw, Travellers: Voices of the New Age Nomads, London, Fourth Estate 

Limited, 1993, pp 112-124. 

5 Other labels have included ‘new age hippie’, ‘bush punk’, ‘eco-warrior’ and ‘crusty’. According to ‘Meri’ 

(actually Neri—Nerida Blanpain — from the band-collective Earth Reggae), the label ‘rat people’ preceded 

that of ‘feral’. M Murray, ‘Ferals: the call of the wild’, Simply Living, no 77, 1994, p 54. 

6 Yet human ferality is an enigmatic disposition. Vilified as green devils and ‘pests’ by rural and 

regional Australia, or adopted as ‘wild’ exotica by metropolitan Australia, ferals are cloaked in 

ambivalence. For a discussion of the feral enigma see G St John, ‘Ferality: a life of grime’, UTS 

Review: Cultural Studies and New Writing, November, 1999. 

7 U Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London, Sage, 1992, p 137; K Eder, ‘The rise of 

counter-culture movements against modernity: nature as a new field of class struggle’, Theory, 

Culture and Society, vol 7, 1990, p 37. 

8 A Dobson, Green Political Thought, London, Routledge, 1995. 

9 C Merchant, Radical Ecology: the Search for a Livable World, New York, Routledge, 1992. 

289

10 An understanding of the abuses of ecological rights is closely linked with a growing knowledge of 

human rights abuses, suffered especially by indigenes. 

11 For an introduction to DiY culture, see G McKay (ed.), DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties 

Britain, London, Verso, 1998. 

12 A Melechi, ‘The ecstasy of disappearance’ in S Redhead (ed.), Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in 

Contemporary Youth Culture, Avebury, 1993, p 29-40. 

13 From interview conducted December 1997. Pseudonyms are used throughout. 

14 From interview conducted September 1996. 

15 From interview conducted April 1998. 

16 From interview conducted January 1995. Om Shalom was the location for the first Australian 

Rainbow Gathering in November 1996, where I noted there were probably more ferals gathered, 

and tipis erected (about fifty-five), than had ever been seen in one place in Australia. 

17 For a discussion of this, see L Hume, Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia, Carlton South, 

Melbourne University Press, 1997, p 56. 

18 J Lindblad, ‘Alternative Australia: where the dropouts are’, Bulletin, March 1976, pp 32, 34. 

19 Interview conducted March 1996. 

20 F Earle, A Dearling, H Whittle, R Glasse and Gubby, A Time to Travel?: An Introduction to 

Britain’s Newer Travellers, Enabler, Dorset, 1994. 

21 C Stone, Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground, Faber and Faber, London, 1996, p 193. 

22 I Cohen, Green Fire, Angus and Robertson, 1996; J Kendell, and E Buivids, Earth First: The 

Struggle to Save Australia’s Rainforest, ABC, Sydney, 1987. 

23 Cohen, op. cit., p 189. 

24 Cohen, op. cit., pp 182-3. 

25 B Hoare, ‘A passion for protest: an insider’s view’, Protest! Environmental Actions in NSW: 1968- 

1998, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1998, pp 19-27. 

26 I wish to avoid a fixed image of ferals as incontrovertibly heroic. Hitting the road, many youths 

have taken their substance, including heroin, addictions with them. Addicts at the fringes of 

festivals and blockades have been a persistent problem. Om Shalom is itself renowned for its 

population of heroin users. 

27 Stanner 1979, quoted in D Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape 

and Wilderness, Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra, 1996, p 18. 

28 K Armstrong, ‘Confessions of a green blockader — from Jabiluka (June 22nd - July 10th 1998)’, 

notes accompanying his film Interstate Ferals for the Planet. 

29 For informative print media reportage, see: J Woodford, ‘Wild at heart’, Sydney Morning Herald, 

7 December 1994, p 17; K Hill, ‘Wild thing’, Age, 1 February 1996, p 18; F Sheil, ‘The flowers of 

the forest are not shrinking violets, Age 3 January, p 6; J Belmonte, ‘Ferals on the frontline’, 

Weekend Australian’s Orbit 14-15 August, pp 2-3. Also, the incisive documentary Going Tribal 

(produced by M Murray) was broadcast on SBS TV in May 1995. 

30 See Murray ibid; and W Gibbs, ‘Feral Aussie families: they live in trees and eat wattle seeds’, 

Woman’s Day, 13 February 1995, pp 12-13. 

31 See M Whittaker, ‘They’re hippies with attitude and a grab-bag of spiritualism’, Australian 

Magazine, 17-18 February 1996, pp 45-50. 

32 In 1995, for example, the Nine network’s Sixty Minutes sent a crew up to Nimbin to probe tipi 

dwellers about dole bludging. 

33 K Hetherington, ‘Identity formation, space and social centrality’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol 

13, no 4, 1996, p 43. 

34 Though a complicated matter, the automatic dismissal of cultural borrowing as pernicious should 

be avoided as appropriations often promote respect for, and strengthen political alliances with, 

indigenes. See B Taylor, ‘Earthen spirituality or cultural genocide?: radical environmentalism’s 

appropriation of Native American spirituality’, Religion, vol 27, 1997, pp 185-215. 

35 There is a certain extropian edge to these postcolonial primitivists. Although mixed feelings 

prevail, ‘trancing out’ to a persistent electronic beat at dance parties in the bush does not ordinarily 

compromise respect for nature. 

36 ConFest possesses a unique combination of festive celebration and consciousness raising. See G 

St John, ‘Alternative Cultural Heterotopia: ConFest as Australia’s Marginal Centre’, PhD thesis, 

La Trobe University, 1999; and, G St John, ‘Going feral: authentica on the edge of Australian 

culture’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol 8, no 2, 1997, pp 167-89. 

290

37 See D Hebdige, ‘Posing ... threats, striking ... poses: youth, surveillance and display’, Substance, 

no 37/38, 1983, p 96. 

38 D Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Methuen, London, 1979, p 101. 

39 P Cohen, ‘Structural conflict and working-class community’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 

no 1, University of Birmingham, CCCS, 1972. 

40 G Clarke, S Hall, T Jefferson and B Roberts, ‘Subcultures, cultures and class: a theoretical overview’ 

in S Hall and T Jefferson (eds), Resistance Through Rituals, Unwin Hyman, London, 1976. 

41 For a discussion of immediatism, see H Bey, Immediatism, A K Press, Scotland, 1994. 

42 Hebdige, 1979, op. cit., p 96. 

43 ‘Feral Cheryl’, complete with oregano stash, pierced naval, pubic hair, tattoos, string bag, nose ring, 

joint, dog and dreadlocks with feather, may represent an exception, though marketing tactics are moderate 

to say the least. C McCullagh, ‘Hard living doll’, Age (Good Weekend), 16 September 1995, p 13. 

44 Woodford, ibid. 

45 B Chatwin, The Songlines. Jonathan Cape, London, 1987. 

46 J Kerouac, Dharma Bums, Penguin, 1956. 

47 See T Cresswell, ‘Mobility as resistance: a geographical reading of Kerouac’s “On the road”’, 

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol 18, no 2, 1993, pp 249-62. 

48 In 1996/97 Ross Mining Co began developing a gold mine on northeast NSW’s Timbarra Plateau 

an area of ‘outstanding and unique conservation value.’ According to the Timbarra Protection 

Coalition, the mining project threatens clean water systems, endangers wildlife and flora species, 

and imposes rigid restrictions on local Bunjalung from accessing sacred sites. See ‘Timbarra: more 

precious than gold’ in Tribe, no 2, 1997, p 12. 

49 Respectively: M Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, 

Sage, London, 1996; K Hetherington, ‘The contemporary significance of Schmalenbach’s concept 

of the Bund’, Sociological Review no 42, 1994, pp 1-25, and; McKay DiY Culture. 

50 Feral Wymyn, ‘Wymyn’s land in Victoria: it’s really happening’, Mother Earth: Anarcho-Feminist 

News, no 1, 1996, pp 18-21. 

51 Strategies included tripods, mono-poles, cantilevers, treesits and ‘lock-ons’ (invariably attachment 

to bulldozers using chains, kryptonite bike locks and home made devices). 

52 J Jordan, ‘The art of necessity: the subversive imagination of anti-road protest and Reclaim the 

Streets’ in McKay, DiY Culture, op. cit., pp 133. 

53 Davis cited in B Taylor, ‘Earth First!’s religious radicalism’ in C Chapple (ed.) Ecological Prospects: 

Scientific, Religious, and Aesthetic Perspectives, Albany, State University of New York Press, 

1994, pp 185-210. 

54 D Williams, ‘Protest, police, and the Green world view: the search for a brave new paradigm’, in 

Protest! Environmental Actions in NSW: 1968-1998, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 

1998, pp 5-18. 

55 S Pennells, ‘The Rainbow warriors’, Big Weekend Dec 6, 1997, p 5. 

56 B Hoare, ‘A passion for protest: an insider’s view’, in Protest! Environmental Actions in NSW: 

1968-1998, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1998, pp 19-27.

Ferals: Terra-ism and Radical Ecologism in Australia - [API] Network

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