When you make a speech at a book launch in Byron Bay you probably won't get a lot of laughs overdoing the Guru Maharaji cult aspect of Lovejoy's life with in jokes about being so hung on inspirational speakers and inner peace but thereabouts you can't go wrong talking about drugs.The following from the Byron Bay Echo:
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 Lovejoy both went to Oxford. Just what do they teach in these English universities?
I have been tied to this shame, to this unAustralian perfidy, 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 first 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.
