May 18th, 2020Confessions from the great Glenlyon Confest
THE Hare Krishnas were making meals. Just about everyone else was making love.
When the stories of festivals are written, there’s Woodstock, Glastonbury and even Sunbury. Add to that Glenlyon.
In the early 80s they came in their thousands to the Glenlyon Recreation Reserve: alternative thinkers, social change agents and community dreamers is what they now call themselves.
Back then, however, they were pretty much hippies. “Sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock‘n’roll…,” is how one festival-goer now describes the festival, “without the rock‘n’roll”.
That’s the recollection of Daylesford wedding celebrant Beverley Risstrom, who remembers the Down to Earth Confest as a fabulous time when one of the few hiccups was after a kid in childcare aged about three requested and got a Mohican haircut. Then his mother arrived.
“There was so much angst,” she says, “we had to move to the healing circle.”
Beverly rocked up to the festival with her brother, her boyfriend and two girlfriends, camping in the warm weather, swimming, then rolling in the mud and freshly mown hay.
“I got an ‘elephant skin’ and also four or five straight lines on my arm, scratches either from a platypus or ‘a spirit animal’. It was pretty wild, but I don’t remember any violence.”
She does remember the local CFA coming out to hose the mud off the naked revellers…and the look on the face of a young kid on the firetruck as the mass of naked bodies among the 5000 were washed down. That kid may have been Damian Leonard, now a potato farmer at Glenlyon, who says he would have been 12 at the time, had a dad in the CFA, but doesn’t recall the incident.
Like Beverly, however, Shelley Beer remembers the festival pottery necklace which was the pass-out before wrist-bands. She harks back to the 1982 Confest, one of the hundreds held across the country since 1976.
“My most vivid memories? Nudity, rebirthing, noise. Swimming in the reserve creek. The view of all the campers set up above the oval among the gum trees of the amphitheatre hill. The smell of dope.”
At age 25, she enjoyed the exciting atmosphere – and the Chai Tent as a great place to gather. The Rainbow Chai Tent still operates.
Among the characters was a bloke who was prone to stand atop a bus with a warning sign while wearing a gas mask.
“My cousin played at Glenlyon for the Panton Hill Umbrella Club (PHUC), who were known for having performed regularly around the St Andrews area,” says Shelley.
She arrived in Daylesford in 1993, and moved to Glenlyon in 2006, living in the district for 25 years.
At 62, she now lives permanently on a catamaran. When interviewed by e-mail, she had been locked down in Spain for eight weeks.
“The plan was to sail into the Mediterranean this summer. We’ll be sailing until we can’t…so that’s semi-permanent. We plan to eventually sail across to the Caribbean, explore there, the Panama Canal, and Pacific Islands before maybe returning to Australia/ New Zealand in five to 10 years.”
When the Down to Earth Confest was set up all those years ago, one aim was to shape a future of choices where individual needs were not suppressed and people were encouraged to follow their own paths.
Clearly, Shelley Beer acted on that message.
Words: Kevin Childs Image: Contributed
Images: Image 1 – Beverly Risstrom at left with friends
