David Lovejoy: ex-President Divine Light Mission, Australia & Great Britain

Michael McDonald looks at David Lovejoy's book, and even reads it

Drugs, fast cars and - gasp! - chess

I have been asked - by Wilbur, my cousin twice removed (from protective custody), and others - to print the speech I gave at the Byron Bay Writers Festival at the launch of David Lovejoy's memoir, Between Dark And Dark. Consider it a book review without the critical analysis, thematic overview or resemblance to reality. At the launch David said my speech had too much emphasis on drugs, but he would say that, wouldn't he?

Lovejoy, the man you see before you, a seeming mild-mannered, some would say bookish, man, is a degenerate drug fiend.

The title of his memoir, Between Dark And Dark, is supposedly a line from the English poet Robert Graves, himself a deluded mushroom-loving pervert. Between dark and dark is in fact the brief moment each day in which David exists in ordinary consciousness, the consciousness which good folk like you and I so regularly adhere to.

I understand that David originally was going to call the book Between Duck And Duck, after his sordid adventures with farmyard poultry, but changed his mind.

The book's cover, the cover designed by Chong Weng Ho, is not as it may seem, some hippy-trippy exercise in 60s retro nostalgia. No, ladies and gentleman, this is what David Lovejoy was actually seeing only 15 minutes earlier as he tried to cadge a reefer from the respected novelist Robert Drewe, mistaking him for his drug dealer.

Despite the posh Oxford accent and 18th century prose style, Lovejoy's book will reveal to you a life of degradation unequalled in the annals of English literature since Thomas de Quincey took up opium in 1803. Perhaps not incidentally, de Quincey and Lovjoy both went to Oxford. Just what do they teach in these English universities? I have been tied to this shame, to this unAustralian perfi dy, for longer than you may think, and Lovejoy indecently spills his guts in great and sordid detail about my part in his downward spiral into hallucinogenic hells. We fi rst met in 1972 when he lured me into the strange cult called Divine Light Mission. After forcing me to paint three storeys of a building in Wentworth Avenue, Sydney, he put me to work for no money - this has been a recurring theme in our relationship - publishing a monthly magazine for the faithful. It was called The Golden Age. In a moment of spiritual bliss I had suggested calling it The Golden Shower but for some reason David rejected this idea. He then went on to England and I fl ed to America. In the late 1970s we met up again in Sydney and under the direction of a mad Frenchman we put together a travel and restaurant guide called Le Guide Bonvoyage. While David was responsible for production, I wrote glowingly about towns I'd never been to and drew pictures of lobsters to fi ll in gaps on the restaurant pages.

It was not until 1986, when The Echo started, that we renewed our friendship. I lived in Tasmania then, and became the overseas correspondent. Two years later I moved to Byron Shire and David's partner, Echo founder the late Nicholas Shand - he was always late - took pity on me and gave me a job as a stringer at the astonishing rate of eight dollars an hour. Since then David and I have been chained to the same wheel, laughing and cursing at its wayward revolutions. Necessity was the mother of strange invention in the early days and David put down his dogeared copy of the thesaurus long enough to beat the Sydney Morning Herald to desktop publishing a newspaper on a network of Apple Macs, held together by string and hope. It was a remarkable act of technical profi ciency from an intellectual dreamer whose opposable thumbs had almost withered away through lack of use. As The Echo's publisher, David adheres to the leadership philosophy of the Tao Te Ching - if you keep your head down long enough in a chess game, the people will think they did it themselves. He has pretty much let me do whatever I liked. His patience over the years has been extraordinary. If he gets angry at all, it's usually at a computer or George W Bush rather than a person. He is learned, eccentric, puckish and of an endangered species which knows that syntax is not a levy on Paris Hilton. It is my pleasure to work for him and to borrow extensively from his collection of Terry Pratchett novels. Ladies and gentleman, I urge each of you to buy several copies of Between Dark And Dark as a salutary lesson to your children and friends as to what drugs can do to you, and for you. If you spend up big, I might get a drink out of it from my boss, or a couple of tabs of acid.

Q Between Dark And Dark is available for $22.95 from Echo offices or from the Mullumbimby Bookshop, Book City, Byron Books, and Icon Books.