Passage (2 page)

The women and children did not join the men on the floor but stood, mute and smiling, behind a wooden rail.

A moment passed and another door opened. A figure appeared, the women gasped, and the men began to shout.

I was a little amused when I realised that the figure in the doorway, framed by the pink light of a sinking sun, was in fact my Brother Ruhamah of the rubbish bin. He had changed his brown tunic for one with a little more embellishment, in the form of braided cord, and when he talked it was in a voice much louder and more authoritative than the one he’d used with me, but it was very definitely him and the effect he had on the crowd was extraordinary. The more he spoke, the louder the men on the floor prayed and swayed, and the women sang and wept.

I saw transfixed for a time – Brother Ruhamah was speaking in tongues, or else in jibberish, which was fascinating. But before long, I started to feel tired again and then, because I was also hungry, I became drowsy, and dreamy, and I suppose I must have slipped into some kind of trance, because I somehow found myself in a queue of the rapt and the grinning, heading up to the stage.

As the men and women in the queue reached Brother Ruhamah, he’d harangue and then hug them. I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, heading up to see him. As the only one in civilian clothes, I felt a bit dirty.

‘Who are you?’

Those were the first words Brother Ruhamah said to me that evening and I suppose I might have answered, ‘What are you talking about? I’m Paul Bannerman. We just spent the night together.’

Instead I said, ‘I am Paul.’

‘Why are you here?’

Again, it’s easy for me now to imagine myself joking, saying, ‘You brought me here, you clown’, but I was then a young man – a boy, really – and I didn’t have the confidence for that kind of thing. Also – and I think anyone who’s ever seen a magician or hypnotist will understand – I felt very much like I wanted to go along with things, rather than spoil the fun for everyone, so I said, ‘I come seeking answers.’

‘What are your questions?’ Brother Ruhamah asked.

I said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘That is a lie!’ he shouted. ‘You
do
know why you’re here! You’re here because whatever you did before was false and wrong and you seek what’s right and good!’

Head down I nodded, and, feeling both a bit silly and dazed, agreed.

‘You’re lost, aren’t you?’

Was I lost? In the literal sense I certainly was since I had no idea, at that time, where in Victoria we were. But also, like many on the cusp of adulthood, I was unsure about what lay ahead. And so I said, ‘Yes, I am lost.’

‘You’re in need of salvation!’

I nodded again. Why not?

‘We here – the Jesus People – we offer salvation. But are you prepared to live the word of Christ?’

I had no other plan, and no better idea, so I told him I was, and Brother Ruhamah fell upon me, and then so did everyone else. It felt pretty good, being at the centre of a hugging circle. If I had a complaint, it was that the Jesus People didn’t smell all that good – and, sadly for a teenage boy normally delighted to have any contact with the opposite sex, that included the women.

‘Are you ready now to repent your sin and abandon your past, to serve the Lord, now and forever, AMEN?’

Once again, I nodded.

Now I’m sure there are people who are going to say, ‘Well, you must have been off your rocker, Paul. What kind of dope would fall for that kind of thing?’ All I can say is this: the Longhouse was warm; I was an unsophisticated and therefore somewhat malleable adolescent; and the people around me, in their simple tunics, with their faces naked of cynicism and guile, had about them a pure kind of happiness that was terrifically appealing to a young man whose family life had been ruptured, and who was still struggling to find his feet.

I slept that night in a room with two new friends – Brother Dawid was in the wooden bunk above me, while Brother Yoav was in the bottom bunk, opposite. When I woke, it was to the sound of a rooster. It was barely dawn, and yet I was sent to work in the vegetable patch, pulling up weeds from around the radishes. Two hours into our labours, breakfast was served. There were eggs from the henhouse, and warm rolls. I was desperate for coffee, but was told that coffee – not to mention tea, tobacco, sugar and alcohol – was not permitted anywhere on the property.

‘You need to break the hold those artificial stimulants have on you,’ Brother Dawid said.

I agreed, but would have killed for a cigarette.

From breakfast I went to morning prayers and then to work in the paddocks. When I asked what it was we were supposed to do, I was told that we’d be putting rocks into wheelbarrows and moving them into a heap.

(I did that for many months, actually. Nobody ever said why.)

With noon came Sisters in bonnets. They hand-delivered lunch from woven baskets: rolls and sandwiches made from stale bread, some of it green and furry.

‘Where do you get your bread?’ I asked.

Brother Dawid said, ‘So much in our society is wasted’, and I guess that meant ‘from the rubbish bin’.

Evening came and with it more lectures, not by Brother Ruhamah this time but by one of the band of Elder Brothers. Then it was bed, and the sleep of the dead, and waking at dawn to pull weeds from the garden again.

I had a constant companion in the form of Brother Dawid. From day one, he was also appointed to assist in my early study of the Bible.

The first passage I learned, which I still know by heart, was this one: ‘Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him … sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and though shalt have treasure in heaven.’

‘You are tethered to things in the material world,’ said Brother Dawid. ‘If you are going to stay here you need to rid yourself of everything.’

‘I don’t actually have anything,’ I said, although it wasn’t quite true. I had a two-door Datsun, worth maybe $1500, plus other bits and pieces: a little cassette player, a two-man tent and a few camping supplies.

‘You need to get rid of all that, but especially the car,’ Brother Dawid said on hearing this. ‘There isn’t a way to keep it and truly be at peace.’

He accompanied me off the property to a small shop with a petrol bowser in a township outside Euroa (I know that now; at the time, I was told only that we were cycling back into the Outside World). Brother Dawid suggested that I call Mum from the phone box. As a parent myself, it’s with great shame that I admit that this was the first contact I’d made with home in three days. (Yes, Mum had called the police, who
told her, rightly as it turned out, that I’d probably just wandered off and would return of my own accord. I don’t suppose that either of us imagined it would take seven years.)

In any case, my step-father, Gary, answered. I told him what I’d done – renounced my name, taken a new one (Brother Zephaniah, if you must know) and given myself to Christ. As such, I needed him to sell the Datsun and send the money to my new friends.

‘These Jesus People,’ said Gary, ‘do they take cheques, or only cash?’

I gave him the number of a post-office box in Euroa. He took it down and then said, ‘Your mother’s been worried, by the way.’

I couldn’t think what to say about that, so I put the handset back on the hook and left the phone box.

Two weeks later, Brother Dawid came with new verses from the Bible, this time about the difficulty of getting camels through the eyes of needles, and rich men into heaven.

‘How did you live when you were a student?’ he said. ‘Did you have a part-time job, or any kind of allowance?’

I’d been getting what was then called child endowment – a small payment from the government that used to be given directly to mothers, some of whom passed it on to their children instead of giving them pocket money.

‘You need to arrange things so that allowance gets sent here,’ said Brother Dawid.

‘But what if I need that money when I go home?’ I said.

‘You
are
home,’ he said. ‘Everything you need is right here.’

I arranged to have the money sent to the commune, and when I got too old for child endowment, I went on unemployment benefits and had them sent to the commune, too. All such money was pooled, and kept in what we called the Red Tin, the keys to which were held by Elder Brothers who also kept an accountant’s Red Book.

‘But what were you doing all day?’ That’s also of interest to people who know I spent time in a commune. ‘It can’t have been all prayers and chores’ – but it was, in fact, all prayers and chores.

There was no electricity on the property, except in those houses occupied by the Leader, who wasn’t always there. As such, much energy was spent keeping warm in winter, collecting wood, collecting eggs from the hens, washing clothes in the river, and cooking food over open fires.

I pottered around in a brown tunic and grew a beard (and my toenails).

I didn’t question any part of the routine for several years. I suppose that was because my new life suited me. I hadn’t been able to decide on a path – now I was upon one and the need for decision making had been taken from me. I wouldn’t have to worry about finding a job and keeping it, or borrowing money to buy a house, or meeting a woman who would want to be my wife. I need only follow the Leader – Brother Ruhamah – who made all the rules and would take care of everyone, forever.

As a Young Brother, I was warned that my faith would be tested, not only by my own thoughts –
Can we leave yet, Paul? Because sitting around eating garbage and talking jibberish all day is getting a bit boring
– but by crude tests the Elders would set for me.

I failed the first one. Brother Yoav got sick – or at least I thought he did. He was coughing up what looked like blood. I knew from Bible studies that I was supposed to sit with him and pray, but I sought out Brother Dawid instead, and asked whether I could walk across the paddock to the phone box to call a local doctor.

Brother Dawid avoided my eyes but agreed, and so I set off, making my way gingerly across the potholes, feeling a little spooked – it was the first time in some weeks I’d spent any time alone – until I was stopped, part way to the highway, by two Elder Brothers, who castigated me.

‘How little faith you have!’ they said, chasing me back towards the commune where Brother Yoav was sitting upright and apparently well, and ready to join in my scolding.

Brother Ruhamah, I was told, would not be pleased to learn of my transgression, but Brother Ruhamah was less of a presence at the commune than I’d been led to expect. It’s true what people say: he didn’t often sleep in wooden bunks with his followers; he had a penthouse apartment on the Gold Coast, where he spent a significant amount of his time. Leaving the commune was, it seemed, no big deal for Brother Ruhamah.

It is well known that he forbids his followers from having any contact with their families, including their own parents. He justifies this cruelty by linking his teaching, wrongly, to a passage in the Bible: ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’

He also knows the ways of cult busters.

From time to time, letters from agonised parents would come into the commune. Brother Ruhamah would occasionally read those letters aloud and the desperation of those parents is seared into my memory:

Depending on his mood, Brother Ruhamah might scrunch the letters into a ball, but other times – there was no pattern to it, or none that I could divine – he would say, ‘All right, invite your family here. See for yourself what you have lost, which is nothing but gossip and material things.’

There was a catch, of course. Reunions between parents and children weren’t to take place at the commune, but in a paddock across the river from where we bathed. There were no facilities in that paddock and yet reunions had to be conducted not over hours, but days. The ploy is obvious to me now: the joy that people experienced when coming together after years apart soon gave way to tension, and then exasperation.

Brothers and Sisters – ours, I mean – would soon want to go home, back to the commune. Once, I saw a mother fall to her knees and grasp her daughter, saying, ‘But don’t you know how much this hurts us, not to see you for years on end?’ Her
daughter – our Sister – said nothing, but peeled her mother’s hands off her tunic. The girl’s father said, ‘Get up, Pat. This is ridiculous! Can’t you see she’s brainwashed?’

I understand the concern in the community regarding sexual matters in the commune. Is it a free-love cult, or does some kind of polygamy reign? The truth is more mundane.

During my time there, simple rules governed conduct between the sexes. There were men’s and women’s quarters, meaning we never slept together.

Like any young man, I found celibacy difficult but, over time, the fierce desire for sex – any sex, with any woman – was felled by the certain knowledge that I’d be castigated, and ostracised, if I ever approached a Sister.

An exception to the no-sex rule was, of course, exercised by Brother Ruhamah, who annually required all unmarried women in the commune to bathe in the river, decorate their hair, and assemble before him. He would walk along – first in front, then behind these young girls – before placing his hand upon the head of the prettiest saying, ‘This will be a bride of mine.’

The girl was not permitted to refuse, and if she cried Brother Ruhamah would take her by the hair and pull her face back, and scream into it.