An Occult History of Glebe Park

We bound through the Galliard Smith gate, dodging the iron pickets, our feet landing hard in the park beneath the park.

Thousands of people trudge through this park every day, Oxford shoes flapping on red brick footpaths, ferrying disposable coffee cups between haphazard stacks of glass cubes.

Those ghosts of day have dissolved, taking their brittle world with them. Now the true park belongs to us alone, and we march on its pathways with awe and purpose.

The lamps are dark, so we feel our way forward by moonlight and the firmness of the stone under our shoes. In summer, the canopy of huddled English elms covers the sky. Now, it is July, and the trees are barren. The green metal benches here tilt backwards, to better view the lattice of delicate branches, a net cast to capture flying foxes and wandering souls.

To my left, I glimpse the statue of tragic Egle, determined face etched into upright bark, her serpent husband coiled on her trunk. Like the hanged man of the tarot, she is transfixed between two worlds, a queen of the sea imprisoned by unshakable nostalgia for land.

Simon taps his lagerphone on the ground as he strides ahead, beer caps rattling in the gloom.

The sound makes me wonder what I will take for my own wizard’s staff. A pool noodle? A plastic flamingo? A butterfly net? A staff that gets as much attention as Simon’s, but is more playful, less patriarchal.

Last night, the magus sketched this ritual for me between puffs of a shared strawberry vape, his darting eyes snatching magic from the coasting smoke. Our first stop is a sculpture at the City Gate, a wedge of granite balanced on a cylinder of polished steel, in affectation of a floating cloud.

It was important that we not enter the park from the City Gate. That entrance is fine if all you want to accomplish here is to taste loukoumades at a tent during the multicultural festival. Even a small city is powerful, and this one has nibbled away at the park. In the hectic 70s protestors shackled themselves to the trees, some out of veneration for a sacred space, others just because they bought their prefab home decades earlier and wouldn’t benefit from new apartments or car parks. In 1983 a painful armistice was signed, centenarian oaks felled to welcome a casino, but in compensation the park’s new border was marked in unshakable slabs of granite and fearsome spears of iron, that the surviving fraction of the original glebe would endure as long as the world.

The other reason we could not use the City Gate was, of course, because we needed to harness Galliard Smith's power.

We walk the path to the pointed rotunda, down the warrior’s staff to the helmet that marks the warrior’s head. In summer, women gather at this spot on Sunday mornings, unconsciously honouring these sacred lines in ferocious warrior poses on yoga mats.

At the rotunda, we turn right and trace the long feather that adorns the helmet, reaching the monument that marks the smeared frontier of town and nature.

Simon had told me that only a light touch was needed here, a reminder of the time when all this was scrubland, a court of snakes and wallabies.

Fortunately, they sell kangaroo meat at Woolie's.

Simon pops the plastic wrap with his thumb, and slips out a wet steak. He slaps the sculpture with it, with a sound like a swimmer fumbling their dive. He explains that construction and nature are alike in Malkuth, both manifestations of the physical sphere of existence. Barriers that aim to separate people and the environment are always fragible because of this inherent contradiction.

Then he asks me if I want to try.

I pinch the steak between my thumb and forefinger, pull back my arm and swing with all my strength. 

The steak clips the stone, slips from my hand, and flies into the night.

Simon laughs, coarse but deep, and tells me that this helps us, because a possum will feed on it, and bring some red tooth and claw to the doorstep of civilisation. He flatters me, saying that a magical gift can manifest in unruly ways.

I’m wise to his patter. He was a fixture at the Shebango house parties, one of a handful of older people adopted by the uni students. Some of them were there because of poly partners, matches from that app for pairing tired money with energetic poverty. Others were charismatic weirdos, the faded MC of a long-running poetry slam or a harmless acid burnout beloved for the slobbering dog they brought everywhere with them.

Simon was the wizard, shaking his lagerphone and offering cryptic insights into the nature of reality to mattresses stacked with stoned arts majors. And just to spice it up, sometimes doing his best Gandalf impression.

He calls himself Simon Magus, after the gnostic teacher from the early, fractious, inventive days of Christianity. He pampers that mystery, dropping oddly familiar comments about people dead for centuries. “Oh, the historians got it wrong, Claudius was tall, and had a beautiful speaking voice, he also really loved cherries, he always had stains on his teeth when addressing the Senate.” Great stuff. Doesn’t matter if it’s real if people start to half-believe it.

That said, if the historical Simon Magus had been alive all this time, I’m sure he would have found better things to do with his Friday nights than chat up willowy girls at Canberra couch parties. 

At least, I’m sure Simon is this guy’s true name. He seems comfortable with it even when he’s not playing the part of timeless sage. His real surname is probably something with no magical frisson, like ‘Jones’.

Our closer acquaintance began at one of these parties. That night, the wide-eyed gazes of pretty young things hanging on his act sparked my ire. I’d been reading Crowley, so I asked him how the Thelma order’s interlaced unicursal hexagram compared with the traditional pagan inverted pentagram. Without skipping a beat, he said that the pentagram can be flipped to show the dominance or suppression of the material world, while the hexagram is the same either way, honouring the universal magical principle ‘as above, so below’.

Unfortunately, the bastard knew his stuff.

So began my deeper inauguration into magic, from invoking psychedelic avatars to careful manipulation of the Enochian alphabet. Great for predicting exam questions, or knowing what time to avoid your ex at the co-op cafe. It’s been like seeing the source code of existence, how all the rows of 1s and 0s align to make a world.

Tonight, we change it. Or at least, change a little part of it.

Our next stop is the Gandhi statue, located just below the warrior’s staff, by the Canberry Gate. 

This one is mine. I have things to say to Gandhi.

I unfold a slip of paper, and relate to his sandals a list of his crimes against women. I paint a vivid poem of a wrinkled, skeletal man in his 70s, naked in bed next to a teenage relative, and call him out for framing doddering indulgence as a test of moral fortitude. I talk about how he usually blamed the victim, cutting off the hair of his female disciples when they were the ones being harassed. Sure, we’re all down bad for pacifism, but he needs to be held to account for not seeing women as equally human. When I’m done, he can’t even look at me, his glasses opaque from shame. I feel elated, like I’ve stood up to my dad.

Simon praises my effort, and asks me to consider why the Ghandi statue is walking towards Egle, and not the peace monument.

Ah, yes. The peace monument. Time to indulge the wizard.

This one is an obelisk. A male symbol, of course. The bogong moths on one side even look like inverted hearts, little kisses up and down the shaft. At least it’s by the warrior’s torso, not the crotch. Oh, well, I knew what I was getting into before we came here.

We head on over, and I start licking. I’m not above putting on a show.

Dissociation is always your friend at times like these, so I let my mind wander to the question of why the Gandhi statue is pointing at a serpent queen, not peace.

Well, Egle’s a classic liminal figure, not one thing or the other. Land and sea, woman and tree. That’s why we don’t have to bother with her landmark, it’s got kinship with trees. On the other hand, the Gandhi statue displays his moral ideas, and they’re all about balance. Better to work for your wealth rather than rely on a trust fund… You need to go to the ethics committee if you’re growing human ears on mice… And if you’re doing religion, you have to sacrifice. Church always comes with the tithe tray.

Sacrifice my dignity, at least. I’ve had enough of licking a stone in a park, even if it’s for a glorious purpose, so I let my ruminations stop there.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why I had to do it.

This is about weakening the markers that have been placed around the park to shape its meaning, like pulling out fastening pins to peel off a layer of fabric. A getaway in the middle of the city for busy officeworkers. A respected social conscience. A wish for peace. Hapless, soft-minded corporate magic, but still with power that must be acknowledged.

Simon claims that most government public works departments have a few people with working knowledge of the occult, a tradition going back to the freemasons and beyond. He’s passionate about what the park was like decades ago, before they knocked down the community housing and chased off anyone with shaggy hair. A place of freedom with eye-opening drugs and tantric exploration in the bushes, with the cops too scared to peek inside. Now it’s clean, safe and sterile. He’s bitter about how the park has been stripped of soul, and he attributes it to a secret magical war between chaos and order.

I can’t decide whether he’s right and these monuments are calculated magical practice, or just the happy accident of civic planners throwing grant money at a dartboard.

Either way, the paths shaped like a warrior balancing his spear on his shoulders tell us this is a place of power, whether the design was intended or not. There are always deeper truths for those prepared to look for them.

Our final stop is the monument between the legs of the warrior, the one sculpture dedicated to the park itself, evoking church and eternity. Honest stones, whispering history.

The path to the left of the monument is being fixed, loose bricks surrounded by perfunctory sheets of mobile metal fencing. There, we leave the path for the final time, stepping onto the same dirt where Pierce Galliard Smith planted his saplings.

Galliard Smith was the priest in charge of a church in nearby Reid, dedicated to John the Baptist. This is coming up on 200 years ago. A blunt Scotsman, away from home, custodian of a lonely church in the scrublands, ministering to the scattered, ruthless vanguard of an empire.

This park was part of his domain, what was called a glebe, or land that belongs to the priest.

So, yes, that’s where the park got its name. Glebe Park.

The priest lost no time in making the glebe his own, planting endless English elms and oaks in careful configurations. The glebe was much larger then, and after thirty years of plantings he manifested his own Sherwood Forest, forced into being by powerful intent. A magician at heart, imposing his will on the world.

Simon says that there is an opportunity here for us, for the land is still called a glebe, and vacant of an owner it is free for a magic-user to claim it, and shape it anew.

Before I can ask Simon what the final ritual will be, I find myself on the ground, a hand on my mouth. He’s on me. And I realise I was a fool to come here with him.

I try to bite and struggle, but he’s big, and his weight holds me down. I reach out with my hand, clasping for anything that can help.

I find a loose brick.

Then I push him off, panting, sobbing, my hand slimy with the sacrifice that must accompany worship.

I look up, and see the rotunda glint in the distance. The ground shakes, the dense branches of trees scraping against each other like twigs in a hurricane. Phantom wallabies scatter across dreaming grass, while the spaces between the sky’s constellations slosh with blue and purple.

The earth opens, and a man pulls himself out.

He’s a giant, skin black as lacquer, white eyes shining in the night. He stands with his legs splayed, and balances a spear behind his neck, his hands clutching its ends. On his head, he wears a feather headdress.

In our innocence, we peeled away a layer of history, but did not think of what else might live in the land, further back than we could imagine, hearing our every step, and waiting patiently.

The giant speaks to me, a word jabbed straight into my brain.

“Run.”