Survive’ these sculptures have evolved into significant reference points for
international technomads whose cultural logic combines the desire to dance fiercely
in the present with the commitment to ‘reclaim the future’ (St John 2001b).
Conceptually transmuted and geographically relocated by scrounger-shaman and
founding member of MWC Robin Cooke, in the Australian landscape these icons
became scaffolds upon which new activists were invited to hang their own flags and
banners, portals through which future primitives and antipodean terra-ists would
pass.
Plane Henge was constructed during Earthdream2000, a nomadic carnival of
protest attracting hundreds of travellers (representing over 20 countries) through
central Australia from May to September that year.^43 Beginning in 2000, this
outback odyssey was envisioned by Cooke as a ‘mega-tribal’ gathering transpiring
annually until 21 December 2012. In the lead-up to 2000, via subterranean
communication channels and over the internet, crews rallied to Cooke’s call. Eco-
radical collectives, white sadhus and sound-system crews were ready to integrate his
vision with their own, travelling the last few thousand kilometres of the old
millennium together. Disembarking from around the globe, techno-tribes,
performance artists and other parties mapped Earthdream into their itinerary Since
2000, in cooperation with and in support of traditional owners, a series of free party
events (including a major event held on the winter solstice) and intercultural anti-
uranium mining protests have transpired on Aboriginal lands.
The proactive millenarian event of a technospiritual movement, Earthdream is
the product of a strengthening alliance between radical environmentalism, new
spirituality and dance culture. In Australia such an alliance has evidenced unique
reconciliatory patterns amongst techno-tribalists. The element of sacrifice endemic
to reconcilement possesses a feral legacy. Since the early 1980s, ecoradical youth
formations became committed to the celebration and defence of natural and
cultural heritage, forming throughout the 1990s a network of terra-ist collectives
engaged in campaigns to blockade unethical logging, mining and road projects (St
John 1999, 2000). These reclamational strategies have been assisted through the
adoption and repurposing of a range of sophisticated campaign tools (laptops, digital
cameras, samplers and synthesizers) by DIY techno-tribes whose appearance can be
understood in the context of the deep wounds inflicted upon the natural
environment and indigenous inhabitants, of which settler Australians and their
descendents are increasingly aware (St John 2001b).
Opposing the nuclear industry and supporting Aboriginal sovereignty, Ohms not
Bombs is a techno-tribe exemplifying this process. Largely the labour of expatriate
Londoner Peter Strong, Ohms not Bombs is a Sydney-based nomadic sound system
inheriting proactive and inspired agendas downstream from the confluence of DIY
anarcho-punk and New Age traveller movements recombined within a community
context influenced by Jamaican émigré reggae and rasta sound-system traditions. As
the technomadic ‘edutainment’ capital of Australia, since 1995 the Ohms objective
has been: ‘tuning technology with ecology, DJing our soul force into the amazing
biorhythms of nature’:
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