WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

It's the Labor Day long weekend in Melbourne, with the Grand Prix on,
and Moomba, and a big night of new season football at the virginal
Colonial Stadium. For the E-dancers though, for the fiercest party
people, a long weekend means something else ... a bonus day off to
come down from all the drugs.

Two Tribes is a huge rave on the public holiday's eve. So huge it
spreads over five warehouses at Victoria Dock, under the pulsing blue
lights of the Bolte Bridge. Eighteen thousand tickets sell at $65
each, making it Australia's biggest rave yet.

Late in the AFL game at nearby Colonial Stadium the crowd hears the
steady pounding of techno music. Police take 200 complaints from
inner-west residents until 7am, and even field one from Toorak. The
party, licensed for over-18s, runs from 10pm until 9am; the bulk of
the crowd arrives between 11pm and 1am. A fair few of them carry on,
going to day clubs and "recoveries" until some time on a lost Monday
afternoon.

Nothing's going to stop them - Two Tribes is an entirely legitimate
event, with all the necessary permits and approvals. Staff with
lightsticks helpfully guide in traffic. Uniformed security officers
prowl everywhere, some with dogs. The place is set up like a fun park.
Big Tops, food stalls and fairground rides - with DJs and electronic
acts playing techno and all its many variants inside laser-lit
dockyard pleasure domes all night, through the dawn and into the
morning. And the signs are everywhere: "Undercover police patrol the
event." But nothing's going to stop them - most of the huge crowd
takes drugs. Most, if not all. Speed, acid, cocaine ... and especially
ecstasy, the ubiquitous E. That's what they do. That's what happens.
That, in many ways, is what the music is for.

Beneath the commercialised legality of the event, and despite the
police warning signs and omnipresent security, the E and the rest of
the drugs make up an overwhelming part of the equation.

Raves and ecstasy have been in Melbourne since the late 1980s, but
it's never been this big. The underground is now well and truly above
ground. And the newest generation of clubbers and ravers - the
teenagers and twentysomethings dipping into the culture for the first
time at an event like Two Tribes - see the TV-advertised, mass-market
trappings of it, the legality of it, the size of it ... and they must
consider it so normal. So very clearly sanctioned. It's just another
night out.

At 1am Two Tribes is already huge, a crush. The warehouses stand in a
long row on the dock, the city skyline aglow in the near distance. At
one end, among the fairground rides, a ferris wheel slowly cranks
around in its arc with a big queue waiting to get on and all the seats
full.

Music pounds from the filling rave arenas. There are 50 DJs and dance
acts playing tonight, from Europe, Britain, America and Australia. But
it's early. There are a lot of people inside dancing - heads down,
punching the air - but an equal number mills outside, lit up like day.
They're hugging the perimeter's cyclone fences in groups, walking up
and down the site and congregating near the warehouse doors in
expectation. It's all about timing. They're timing their ecstasy with
the music.

It's a weird chronology. When? How many? Half a pill or a whole?
That's what they're saying in the queue to the free-of-charge ferris
wheel ... how the ride will bring them on, how it'll double the rush.

A young guy wearing a beanie and ski goggles, and a big purple backpack with
sequenced flashing lights on the back says he did a couple of lines of Lou
(Lou Reed: speed) when they parked their car and a Pisces (a "brand" of E)
in a portable toilet with his mate. Then they saw the ferris wheel and
joined the queue. He's 20, from Lorne. He works in one of the beachfront
shops. "Pill should come on just about on the way up, I reckon," he says.
"Nice." He's chewing gum like mad and smoking other people's cigarettes.

3am is pretty much the peak hour. Inside the "Hardware" arena
incredible lasers bathe it in intersecting shafts of green and red
light, playing off holographic spheres hung from the roof while video
screens hold color-soaked digital images to the walls. The music -
from Canadian Richie Hawtin, a figurehead to the techno scene - pounds
upwards through the floor.

There's maybe 5000 people in here, dancing in unison, wiping the sweat
from their faces and swilling bottled water. Near the door is a stall
selling glow-in-the-dark jewellery; cheap rings and necklaces and the
small cylindrical glow-sticks that ravers carry like precious talismans.

In the dancing throng is a group of young women dressed as she-devils,
wearing miniskirts and red plastic horns strapped to their heads.
They're shuffling around their backpacks on the concrete floor between
them. Others have glittered faces and spiky hair and plastic
fridge-magnet letters stuck to their clothing. A group of cowgirls
with straw hats and big grins and eyes like saucers look stunned but
blissed as they dance robotically with the drugs flowing through them,
heightened by the sensory power of the music. And this is the feeling
of ecstasy - to be stunned by bliss. To be kissed by a fickle
synthetic bliss. But what goes up must eventually also come down.

You sense little dramas unfolding. People are on the move constantly,
never sitting or standing still for too long, never lingering. The
drugs preoccupy them; tangential details become all-important. So
there's constant movement both in and outside the warehouses. People
looking for people. People looking for something. Walking the length
of the rave site, pounding the concrete powered by amphetamines,
looking, still looking, getting lost and being found to a soundtrack
of booming drums and bass.

In the portable toilets - awash with discarded clip-seal "deal" bags -
it's all fake bonhomie, a kind of cheap and breathless togetherness:
"...having a good night, mate?...", "...having a good night? ..."
Outside, near the ferris wheel, there's a giant inflatable Babar the
Elephant, another fairground attraction. It's quivering in the wind
but there are ravers sprawled at its feet, splayed prone and briefly
motionless as the drugs shift direction. The music changes in the
nearest dance arena; the DJ drops the beats to a wailing acapella
vocal: "...be what you wanna be/go where you've got to go in life/hold
on/believe it/if you believe you will find a way..."

Two Tribes is now a sea of chewing mouths and gaping eyes. The faces
are all contortions, like a weird hall of mirrors. No one thinks
anything of expansive gestures; they'll come at you and talk in
overfriendly gibberish then disappear into the night. Long scaffold
grandstands inside the warehouses and outside on the concrete are
filled with people sitting on each other's laps and talking at one
another and swaying to the music. On the top rows they stand to dance.
Even the people walking around are dancing as they move,
involuntarily.

But there are casualties. The StJohn Ambulance first aid tent, near
the food stall selling hot potatoes, is busy at 4am. Those who have
taken too many drugs lie under rough blankets or drink tea from
styrofoam cups. Wedged in a plastic chair against a wire fence
outside, surrounded by groups of chattering teenagers giving each
other neck massages, is Raquel.

She's alone and panicking, with one arm wrapped tight around her belly
in pain, a burning cigarette between painted nails going unsmoked.
She's wearing a purple lurex dress and high heels, her hair teased and
curly but her eyes sad and dead. She's 21, she's taken ecstasy for the
first time and she's freaking. Her friends have ditched her, swept up
in the selfish camaraderie of the madness. It seems she got a
contaminated pill; there is talk of bad batches going around.

"Is this it?" she asks. "Is this what it's supposed to feel like? I
can't believe he left me to go off with them... where are they?

"I feel sick. My legs won't work. My head hurts. My stomach - I feel
like spewing. I feel like lying down." She stares into space, then
gingerly stands up and staggers over to the "Global Underground" arena
as a new dawn light begins to sprinkle itself over Two Tribes. She
comes back to ask for help lighting another cigarette. Her face is
pale, color drained. Then she moves awkwardly away to find whoever
left her behind.

The music goes on. All the arenas are cranking it out. By 7am, a lot
of people begin to leave, walking down towards Footscray Road in
groups, their outfits looking stranger in the dappled daylight. The
gaggle of girls wearing pixie-wings; the fat young guy dressed
entirely in fluffy orange; the pair dressed as twins in white overalls
waving inflatable bananas above their heads as they skip away. There
are thousands of dancers left, still powered enough by the E to lose
themselves in the music at this time on a Monday morning. They huddle
toward the "Hardware" warehouse, to hear DJ Marco Corola, from Italy,
and "Renaissance" where it's Sean Quinn, from Melbourne.

Everything's a lot more wayward now. Anyone still here is really out
of it. Cheers and whistles rise above the music in the warehouses, but
it's a passionless sort of bedlam. The bay water shines in real
daylight around the dock, the city buildings are fully illuminated.
There are people asleep on the cold concrete as the music and the
event draw to a close but still more cheers and whistles rise from
inside the pounding sheds. More heavy beats and thunderous bass. And
when it finally stops, when the music dies away, the cleaners take to
the dance floors with mammoth brooms to sweep away the deal bags,
chewing gum wrappers, cigarette butts and water bottles.

The party people linger, then leave, a simultaneous exodus from the
warehouses, and become a technicolor procession through the site
towards the exit. The daylight plays harshly on strained faces; these
are faces of night, not day, but the night is dead.

Last to leave are four teenage girls, dressed identically in neon
green Lycra hotpants and bra-tops with pale, skinny flesh goosing in
the early morning chill. They're smoking furiously and chewing their
own mouths ... and clutching flyers for a "recovery" party at a club
in South Yarra. More, they're thinking. We want more.