The
Evolving of the First ConFest
Aspect written from 1992 onwards. Updated Oct. 2014.
When Dr Jim Cairns, Junee Morosi and David
Ditchburn were exploring the idea of a conference festival, the first people
they held a meeting with was an urban hippy commune that lived around the
Reverend Peter Holden's church in Paddington in Sydney.
The origins of this commune can be traced
in part through Mangold’s photographic record of the history of the Paddington
Bazaar. Mangold writes of Dr. Neville Yeomans being the primary inspiration for
realizing Reverend Peter Holden's dream of 'villaging the church' in
Paddington. The following two photos were taken by M.
Mangold.
Neville’s
suggestion was to surround the Paddington Community Mental Health Centre and
the Church with a Saturday community bazaar. This was fully consistent with the
Fraser House model of imbedding the Unit within the local community, as well as
inviting the community into Fraser House, a therapeutic community evolved by
Neville between 1959 and 1968.
‘Villaging’ the Church in Paddington –
photo by M.Mangold - reproduced with permission
Mangold’s photo of where Neville’s Community Mental
Health Centre was surrounded with community - reproduced
with permission
In
the Photo the Vestry where Neville had his first Community Mental Health Centre
is the brick building on the left. The Church is on the right. Between and
around both buildings is where the Paddington Bazaar is held each Saturday
morning. Adjacent the
Vestry was a hall Neville used for community meetings. This is where Neville
and his friends planned a series of Festivals.[1]
Neville wanted to create the public space
of a small friendly village market reminiscent of the island of Tikopia in the
Solomon’s Group, where everybody knows everybody and meets each other
regularly. Neville wanted to replicate the healing and integrative aspects of
‘small village life’ (Tönnies and Loomis 1963) of Fraser House around the vestry in
Paddington. The community mental health centre has long gone, though Paddington
Market survives to this day as a Sydney icon. Every Saturday morning crowds
mingle and meet at the Bazaar. Buskers entertain. The place is vibrant and
alive. It still serves as a public community place for enriching community
life.
When
Jim Cairns, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister under Gough Whitlam, his personal
assistant Junie Morosi, David Ditchburn and others in the mid Seventies began
preparing the first ConFest - short for ‘conference-festival’, Jim Cairns and
his group chose to meet in the Church Hall next door to Neville’s Community
Mental Health Centre in Paddington.[2]
The
first ConFest took place at Cotter River supported by many groups and energies.
The success of ConFest spawned festivals and gatherings in every state and
territory of Australia. DTE entities were set up through Australia and all
joined a loose group called the Australian Down to Earth Network or ADTEN. DTE
Cooperative (Victoria) is the only DTE group that continues the ConFest
tradition.
How
did Dr Cairns know about this Paddington commune? These were a core group that
helped put on the Aquarius Festival in 1973 in Nimbin. They had also put on a
series of festivals between 1968 and 1973. A key figure in all of these
festivals was Dr Neville Yeomans,
Yeomans
had founded an eighty bed experimental mental health unit in 1959 called Fraser
House that was on the grounds of the North Ryde Psychiatric Hospital. This unit
was extremely eclectic in exploring ‘community’ of a particular kind as THE
process for returning to functioning well in the social life world. After a
number of months, this unit was so successful that dysfunction folk with small
(less than 5) family friend networks were leaving Fraser House within 12 weeks
of arrival functioning well, with a functional family friend network of between
50 and 70 people!
Margaret
Mead the famous Anthropologist and co-founder of the world Federation of Mental
Health visited Neville’s Fraser House Therapeutic Community in the early 1960s
and described Fraser House as the best example of a Therapeutic Community that
she had found anywhere in the World.
In
commencing this unit, Neville said that he was exploring ways of creating
networks of people that could support the evolving of a new epoch on Earth. In
his view, the very best people to
start with were the people on the very edges of society as these had had
‘’society knocked out of them.
Neville
is recognised as one of the pioneers
of therapeutic communities.
References
Mangold, M. (1993). Paddington
Bazaar. Sydney, Tandem Productions.
Tönnies, F. and C. P. Loomis
(1963). Community & Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). New
York, Harper & Row.
ConFest and the Next 250 Years