Drug Reform, Psychedelia and the Parallel ANU

Renaming children with their own dialectics, using our practices, was a process of re-humanisation that built back the cultural infrastructures lost to colonial violence. Culture alone was not the only revolutionary force. In the face of colonisation, the existence of these nations was not just proved by culture, but by people’s resistance against occupation. So naming their children, speaking the names of their fathers, put colonialism to shame by exhibiting cultural treasures right under the nose of the empire.

Ratnayake Mudiyanselage Ranasinghe was my grandfather’s name. He chose to give his given name as a surname to his children. Ranasinghe, meaning an unfaced warrior in the face of battle. I don’t know much about the man he was, but I know he lived up to the name he gave me. A staunch anti-colonialist and active member of resistance politics, he devoted his life to unionism and public healthcare. 518 years of colonisation in Sri Lanka, and his name survived his ancestors and it survived him.

But it won’t survive his descendants. Because in a new country, we were made to feel that his name was a burden. Blank stares during roll call. Long glares, and the pre-emptive “Oh I’m going to get this wrong,” made us feel like an inconvenience. So, on a Wednesday evening in a Perth government bureau, it cost us $50 to change our name. Only now do I realise it cost me much more. Because of course the way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost forever.

James Baldwin explained this phenomenon best: “They come through Ellis Island, where Giorgio becomes Joe, Pappavasiliu becomes Palmer, Evangelos becomes Evans, Goldsmith becomes Smith or Gold, and Avakian becomes King.” This is an intrinsic part of the immigrant experience. Changing our names, and shortening them, is a part of survival. Changing the very thing that uniquely defines you, to live a life that is convenient for the white man. For me, it feels like a tax that we cannot escape. Thank you for letting us be here, we will keep our heads down. I will smile every time you call me a name that is not mine, as you diminish the forces of history that secured my very being today.

It is a tax for existence in a country that was never intended to be yours. A way to show that you know how to keep your distance and stay in your place. The price paid is not just that of the plane ticket, our very being here is at the expense of our eternal ties to our cultures. So, it is no surprise when Baldwin says “at the midnight hour, the lost identity aches.”

As a child of diaspora and an immigrant, it is easy to let the domineering culture convince you the most important contract is between yourself and your loyalty to this country. That you must renew this allegiance every day. I no longer believe this. The most important bond is between yourself and your community. But I don’t know how any relationship with that community can be formed if it refuses to speak your name as you, your parents and your language intend it.

Immigrants and people of colour in this country, live lives that are “up-rooted, re-rooted and rootless.” Our names remain portals to motherlands that some of us never got to know. So, the onus is on all of us, because each time we speak a name correctly, we make more of an effort, we deal a blow to the imperial flags that still fly in the collective unconscious.

Mt Kosciuszko

Collage by Liah Naidoo

I like walking. Repetition soothes the mind. And being in nature resets my head. An all-consuming landscape allows me to untangle my thoughts. Rip them up and glue them back together.

Medium: Collage (Gloss printed Kodak 400 Ultramax film photos)

Drug Reform, Psychedelia and the Parallel ANU

Anonymous

Content Warning: Mentions of drug use

Compared to the rest of Australia, the ACT is an anomaly. Due in part to having one of the most progressive legislatures in the nation, our territory leads the way for informed healthbased approaches to drug policy. The recently introduced decriminalisation of most illicit drugs such as heroin, speed and cocaine works to protect people with substance abuse issues. Decriminalisation will shield this vulnerable population who currently make up the majority of drug possession charges, whilst retaining a level of pressure on drug traffickers and dealers.

This legislation is also a step in the right direction to allow more people to try potentially positive and non-chemically addictive substances – such as Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and Psilocybin, more commonly known as acid and magic mushrooms. Although the reputation of these drugs is mixed, many artists and scientific visionaries profess their psychedelic properties as being hugely useful to their lives and work. Francis Crick famously credited an LSD trip experience as the point he “perceived the double-helix shape” of DNA and interestingly described the drug as a “thinking tool”.

Perhaps it was the words of these creatives, or perhaps I was driven by my own persistent curiosity about the potential of human experiences. But somewhere in the middle of the two, I joined a ragtag group of my good friends in taking 200μg of acid.

We had waited for Bicycle Day, the annual celebration of Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD, and the anniversary of his first encounter with the substance. In his autobiography, he illustrates the now iconic bicycle ride home that day. Writing that as the high set in, it caused his vision to fill with “kaleidoscopic, fantastic images . . . exploding into coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridising themselves.”

Together we spent the surreal and euphoric peak of our experience in a hidden garden on Black Mountain. The substance pushed us to dance together to songs we’d heard a thousand times before but that’d never sounded so beautiful. We laughed at the twisting and animated bark of a tree that seemed to have fallen in a long passed bushfire. Then drifted often into a quiet appreciation of the feeling that the earth was breathing beneath us. This early period of the high, which lasted around four hours but felt like only minutes, left us disoriented as we passed into a state of ego death. Our memories, instinctive reactions and core personality seemed lost, leaving us to experience each moment divorced from our subjective self-identity.

It was only once the strange and beautiful sensation of our high diminished that we could begin to comprehend the choice to leave our psychedelic paradise. Finally coming back to ourselves, we ventured onto the next great unknown: the ANU campus.

The Activist, Botanist, Actor and I took shaky steps through CSIRO rehearsing farcical conversations about watermelon and daily mart to pacify our paranoia. Passing through the now