Journal articles on the topic 'Lake Pedder'

The Tasmanian lakes Pedder and Edgar were inundated in 1972 to create a reservoir to feed into a hydroelectric powerscheme, despite biologists highlighting the uniqueness of the fauna therein. This fauna included undescribed species ofphreatoicidean isopods, which were noted in several subsequent publications but not formally described. In 2010, the orig-inal beds of these two lakes were revisited and successfully sampled for these isopods as part of a program to assess theconservation status of the unique fauna of this large freshwater body. These two previously reported species of phreatoi-cidean are both new to science, distinct from each other and belong to the genus Colubotelson Nicholls, so we providedescriptions and illustrations of these species to assist their identification by other biologists. The two species are easilyidentified by the shape of the pleotelson and setation of the head, although they are separated by considerably more thantwo hundred specific differences. C. pedderensis sp. nov. was collected only from the now deeply submerged bed of theoriginal Lake Pedder, whereas C. edgarensis sp. nov. may be found more widely in the current extent of Lake Pedder,owing to its appearance in previously collected samples from the original Lake Pedder as well as in the now drowned areaof Lake Edgar. These results bring the known diversity of the family Phreatoicidae in Tasmania to 26 described species,including 16 in the genus Colubotelson. The persistence of phreatoicids in Lake Pedder, despite the extensive changes to its ecosystem, suggests that these two species are more resilient than was suspected.

In 1972 Lake Pedder in south-west Tasmania was submerged under 15 metres of water as a result of the Tasmanian State Government’s Middle Gordon Hydro-electric Power Scheme. The lake was subsumed into a much larger artificial impoundment formed by three rockfill dams, making it the largest freshwater lake in Australia. The Tasmanian government transferred the name Lake Pedder to the new impoundment. Three species endemic to the original Lake Pedder were recorded as extinct as a consequence of the lake’s flooding. The Lake Pedder planarian, a species of carnivorous flatworm, the Lake Pedder earthworm, and the Pedder galaxias, a small freshwater fish, disappeared from the lake area after the inundation of this unique habitat, the site of a number of ecologically valuable faunal communities. The divergent fates of these animals, their status as lost species and their significance as creatures both meaningful and meaning-making, marks out an extinction matrix suggesting that the absence of specific animals and specific experiences and ways of life matter more than others, that specific deaths can be more readily incorporated into stories of loss and restoration, and that the perceived malleability of habitats invariably involves death inscribed as sacrifice or justifiable casualties. This paper seeks to retrieve some of the perspectives and experiences forgotten or written over in the lake’s stories of flooding and redemption.

The Pedder galaxias (Galaxias pedderensis) from Lake Pedder, Tasmania, Australia, is one of the world’s most threatened freshwater fish. The flooding of Lake Pedder in 1972 for hydroelectric power generation caused a major change to the ecosystem that initiated an irreversible decline in the Pedder galaxias within its natural range. The flooding inundated another headwater catchment and native and introduced fish from this catchment colonised the impoundment. Numbers of the Pedder galaxias declined markedly as the impoundment matured and as colonising fish proliferated. Surveys in the 1980s confirmed the parlous state of the population, highlighting the need for conservation intervention. Several urgent conservation actions were undertaken to save the species from extinction. Translocation was considered the most important recovery action, given the critically low numbers in the wild. The species is now extinct from its natural range and is known from only two translocated populations. The conservation program, and specifically the translocation recovery action, saved the Pedder galaxias from extinction. The conservation management was extremely challenging since rapidly declining fish numbers needed timely and critical decisions to underpin the future of the fish. Recommendations are provided arising from this case study to guide conservation of freshwater fish in similar circumstances.

This study is to find out the relationship of characters to illustrations in a collection of 9short stories from NadiraKarya Leila S. Chudori. In the collection, there are four short stories that contain illustrations of the main characters namely "Melukis Langit”, "Tasbih", "Sebilah Pisau", and "At Pedder Bay". The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative method by using Charles Sanders Pierce's Semiotic Theory which includes sign and object. The study of characterization or characterization is done in two methods namely direct (telling) and indirect (showing). The results of this study indicate that out of the 4 short stories analyzed only 3 short stories that have character relationships with illustrations, namely the short story "Melukis Langit", "Tasbih" and "Sebilah Pisau". Short story of "Melukis Langit" depicts Nadira's character who is strong against her father's behavior since the death of his mother. The short story illustration shows Nadira crying in the bathroom to vent her sadness. Short story "Tasbih" describes Mr. X with a mysterious character illustrated by showing Mr. X's face full of mystery while the short story "Sebilah Pisau" tells Kris who is Nadira's secret admirer. Kris's character is displayed with illustrations illustrating the event when Nadira was surprised to see Kris's table filled with Nadira's picture. Short story "At Pedder Bay" tells Nadira's old friend Marc who is also an admirer of Nadira for a long time. The main character, Marc in this short story is not illustrated in the illustration. The short story shows a background, namely the lake and the figure of the woman sitting pensively.

Struktur Teks dan Makna Pementasan Kesenian Tradisional Deder Kalimantan Tengah.Deder adalah syair yang dilantunkan serta berisikan nasehat, sindiran, atau petuah yang dapatdiiringi oleh nyanyian. Deder dilakukan berpasangan, laki-laki dan perempuan secara bergantian.Saat penampilannya, deder diiringi oleh alat musik kecapi, gong, suling, dan gendang. Penelitianini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif. Dengan pendekatan ini, peneliti dapat memberikan tujuanpenelitian secara objektif karena menggunakan dokumen karya sastra, yaitu kesenian deder yangditampilkan oleh pededer yang selanjutnya ditranskripsikan menjadi bentuk tulis untuk diteliti. Sumberdata diperoleh dari beberapa orang yang latar belakangnya adalah sebagai seniman sastra lisan dederdan juga rekaman video penampilan deder. Hasil penelitian yang diperoleh adalah sebagai berikut. (1)Struktur teks deder terdiri atas pembukaan, isi, danpenutup. Pembukaan berisi tentang pengucapansalam kepada hadirin dan kepada seluruh pihak. Penyampaian isi berisi tentang penyampaian maksuddan tujuan dari bededer. Penutup berisi salam perpisahan kepada hadirin dan kepada seluruh pihak.(2). Teks deder pada umumnya, seperti deder Dampak Sosial Asep memiliki rima berangkai namunada beberapa bait yang tidak sempurna. Terjadi pengecualian pada deder karya Bilton yaitu tidaksemua baitnya memiliki rima karena hamper tiap baitnya, terdapat pengulangan bunyi akhir katalarik pertama dengan kata awal larik kedua. Hal tersebut terjadi karena pemenggalan kata akhir larikpertama yang kemudian disebutkan secara utuh pada kata awal larik kedua. Selain itu teks dedermemiliki asonansi atau pengulangan bunyi huruf vocal dan aliterasi atau pengulangan bunyi hurufkonsonan. (3).Pola irama teks deder dalam pelantunannya terdapat penekanan pada beberapa katatiap baitnya. Letak penekanannya tidak teratur tergantung kesesuain kata dengan nada yang ingindilantunkan. Teks Deder terdiri atas kata yang tidak sama jumlahnya pada tiap baitnya.4.Penyajiandeder ditampilkan dengan menghadirkan unsure penyaji, penonton, music setting, dan interaksi denganpenonton. Penyaji pada deder ditampilkan dengan berpasangan, biasanya laki-laki dengan perempuan.Pededer secara bergantian melantunkan teks deder antara bait satu ke bait selanjutnya hingga selesai.Penonton yang menyaksikan berasal dari berbagai kalangan. Alat musik yang digunakan dalampenyajian deder adalah gong,gendang, kecapi dan suling yang merupakan khas Kalimantan tengah.Pada deder karya Bilton, Setting yang ditampilkan adalah taman wisata kum-kum dan juga tempatwisata huma betang. Kum-kum menggambarkan panorama hutan di Kalimantan sedangkan wisataHuma betang menggambarkan rumah yang digunakan suku dayak pada zaman dulu. Sedangkan, padadeder dampak sosial asep, setting bertempat di studio RRI KalimantanTengah.Kata-kata kunci: deder, struktur teks, pementasan

Humans as creatures who were created most perfectly and with the best physical structure, humans must strive to make maximum use of every psychic instrument bestowed upon them so that they can be used to realize the purpose of their creation on earth. Among the psychic instruments that must be empowered and controlled properly is al-nafs (soul). The research method used is also a qualitative field research. The subject of this research is the teacher at the Integrated Islamic Elementary School Bunayya Pekanbaru. While the object of this research is psychological education, one of which is spiritual education (character or behavior education). The data collection techniques were carried out using observation, interviews, and documentation. The results of this study are that the stages of the psychological education process in the form of character education at the Integrated Islamic Elementary School Bunayya Pekanbaru can be seen from programs or activities that lead to character building (behavior) including: Bunayya caring, MABIT (Night Bina Iman and Taqwa), Ifthor Jami ' (Iftar together), Mentor Day, Chile Mentor, Discipline and School Character Enforcer (Pediker), Muhadharah, One Day One Juz (Buanyya Qur'an, Prayer Al-Ma'surat. Then there are several factors that influence psychological education, namely : factors of family or parents, friends, environment, and the influence of television and other electronic media including the internet. ABSTRAKManusia sebagai makhluk yang diciptakan paling sempurna dan paling baik struktur fisiknya maka manusia mesti mengupayakan penggunaan secara maksimal setiap instrumen psikis yang dianugerahkan kepadanya agar dapat dimanfaatkan untuk merealisasikan tujuan penciptaannya di muka bumi. Diantara instrumen psikis yang mesti diberdayakan dan dikontrol dengan baik penggunaannya adalah al-nafs (jiwa). Metode penelitian yang dilakukan ini juga merupakan penelitian lapangan (field research) yang bersifat kualitatif. Subjek penelitian ini adalah Guru di Sekolah Dasar Islam Terpadu Bunayya Pekanbaru Sedangkan objek penelitian ini adalah pendidikan kejiwaan salah satunya adalah dengan pendidikan Spriritual (karakter atau pendidikan tingkah laku). Adapun teknik pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan menggunakan observasi, wawancara, dan dokumentasi. Adapun hasil penelitian ini adalah bahwa Tahapan proses pendidikan kejiwaan berupa pendidikan karakter di Sekolah Dasar Islam Terpadu Bunayya Pekanbaru terlihat dari Program atau kegiatan yang mengarahkan pada pembentukan karakter (perilaku) di antaranya: Bunayya peduli, MABIT (Malam Bina Iman dan Taqwa), Ifthor Jami’ (Buka puasa bersama), Mentor Day, Mentor Cili, Penegak Kedesiplinan dan Karakter Sekolah (Pediker), Muhadharah, One Day One Juz (Buanyya Mengaji, Do’a Al-Ma’surat. Kemudian ada beberapa faktor yang mempengaruhi pendidikan kejiwaan yaitu: faktor keluarga atau orang tua, teman, lingkungan, dan pengaruh televisi serta media elektronik lainnya termasuk internet.

The present paper deals with the comparison of physico-chemical parameters in Saroornagar lake and Ramanthapur Pedda Cheruvu. Various physico-chemical parameters Were analyzed in both lakes. Chlorides, Total hardness, biological oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand and total solids were recorded in high concentration and very low concentration of dissolved oxygen was recorded in both lakes. On the basis of physico-chemical parameters the Saroonagar lake is highly polluted and severe water quality deterioration whereas Ramanthapur Pedda Cheruvu is mildly polluted.

Pure water is the world’s first and foremost medicine and lakes are inland water bodies of water. Limnological studies of peddacheruvu Lake, Rajgopalpet, Siddipet district, Telangana state was carried out was over period of two years. The physico-chemical characteristics were studied and analyzed during the period of one year. Seasonal variations at three different stations of the lake were observed. Sewage drains, clothes washing, bathing of animals, agro-waste with pesticides residue and rituals waste drains into the lake may result into the change in physico-chemical characteristics of lake water. Some parameters like pH, temperature, Dissolved oxygen, Hardness, Nitrate, silicates and Phosphates etc. studied throughout year.

The supply and value chain of the world’s only freshwater sardine, Sardinella tawilis endemic to Taal Lake, were studied from January to December 2016. This study aimed to identify the actors in the value chain, evaluate each actor’s value addition, identify the roles of men and women in the chain, and identify the issues, concerns, and entry points for intervention. Key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and tracer survey interviews were done to gather data. A semi-structured questionnaire was directed to 189 respondents within and outside Taal Lake. The study showed that the tawilis marketing system is limited to the local market. Tawilis is traded fresh and processed. The chain’s key actors include the fishers, fish buyers (wholesaler, retailer, peddlers, and contracted fish buyers), processors, and consumers. The outcome of the value chain analysis of the tawilis industry showed that commercial processors have the highest value-added due to the place, form, and time transformation of the product. Meanwhile, the fishers and small-scale fish buyers have the lowest value-added during lean and peak season, respectively. The tawilis industry provides livelihood to the marginal fisherfolk, which is the first supply chain link. Several strategies were recommended in the form of process, product, function, and overall upgrading to uplift the economic benefit of the different actors in the chain and boost the tawilis industry. These include the improvement on the fishing operations, upgrading of fishing gear and other paraphernalia, provision of training on post-harvest techniques (handling, preservation, processing, value-adding, product development, etc.), market matching strategies, improvement in farm to market road transportation, establishment of fish processing facilities, and access to credit, loans or grants from the national and local governments.

Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. 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