The road into Mullumbimby beckons like a promise.
With its palm trees and buskers and its slightly raffish air, “Mullum”, as it is known, has long drawn dreamers and idealists looking for alternative ways of being. People come here to escape, to reinvent themselves, to cast away the past, to be healed.
Part of Australia’s northern rivers region, which includes tourist hotspot Byron Bay, the surrounding hinterland is renowned for breathtaking panoramas of rolling hills and rainforest. The writer Robert Drewe once tried to count the shades of green in the landscape and gave up at 50.
Previously known for its hippy communes, the northern rivers has been at the centre of Australia’s counter-culture for decades. Even now with the gentrification, the influencers and the arrival of wealth, which has divided the community into rich and poor, on a good day you can still find something close to euphoria here.
But in the past fortnight, the region has been confronted by back-to-back coronial inquests into two separate and harrowing deaths of vulnerable people indulging in alternative therapies.
On face value, Natasha Lechner and Jarrad Antonovich were very different. But the common threads that ran through their lives – and led to their deaths – were many.
Lechner died at the age of 39 in a ceremony involving the Amazonian frog toxin “kambo” in Mullumbimby on 8 March 2019. Antonovich had also been treated with kambo, as well as consuming ayahuasca – a psychedelic produced from Amazonian plants – when he died at a festival held near Kyogle attended by about 60 people on 16 October 2021.
Lechner and Antonovich were described by those who knew them best as gentle, loving, creative and soulful seekers, interested in the spiritual and in helping others. They were both clearly loved and respected by family and friends, and valued members of their communities.
But in their hour of greatest need, the inquests have heard, both found themselves surrounded by people unable or unwilling to call for the medical assistance that might have saved them. The northern Irish woman and self-described experienced kambo practitioner who participated in Lechner’s final kambo ceremony not only did not have a phone, she also did not know the number to dial in an emergency.
Witnesses told the coroner they first saw Antonovich in a concerning state of distress after a kambo ceremony that started around 10am on the day of his death. Many people witnessed his condition deteriorate as the day wore on. Yet an ambulance was not called until after 11.30pm, and by the time paramedics arrived at the remote location, he had already turned blue.
“I’m of the firm belief that there’s been a cover-up,” Glen Antonovich told the coroner of his son’s death. “That there was no medical help available, there was no medical staff, there was no risk mitigation practices whatsoever. It reminded me of the old doctors in the wild west, you know, that sell a bottle of spirits and this cures all.”
Mullumbimby has ‘become a lot more polarised over the years’
The ponytails of the men and women who came to the northern rivers in the early 70s to begin the great counter-culture experiment are white now.
Across the “rainbow region” – often without clothes – they would grow food, build homes, home-birth babies, campaign for the environment, practise alternative health and moon dance with marijuana.
Over time, interest in health and wellbeing practices has evolved to life coaches, breath workers, meditation, yoga, chakra balancing, crystal readings and shamanic healings.
“An A to Z of health modalities [is] on offer,” says film-maker Sharon Shostack, whose documentaries Mullumbimby Madness and Mullumbimby Magic show how the town has changed. “The area attracts and supports people looking for alternatives because you can just about do anything you want. Most of the early healing practices are now mainstream, like acupuncture and medical marijuana, but some are still in question.”
Guardian Australia this week spoke to a number of local residents about the alternative therapy scene. Their comments did not relate to the two inquests currently under way.
Photographer Jay Penfold says Mullumbimby has “become a lot more polarised over the years”. It all got too much for Penfold, who lived in Mullum for 15 years before escaping 45 minutes north to Murwillumbah five years ago. While there are still a lot of “regular people who are quite normal and care about the environment”, Penfold says the region was filling up with “nutjobs from everywhere, spiritual narcissists, entitled ones at that, really grifty”.
“Often people don’t get the help they actually need because they’re listening to some snake oil salesman who’s got no qualifications whatsoever,” Penfold says. “These people use these medicine modalities to prey on vulnerable people that they know will part with shit-tonnes of money. It’s like a really crazy bubble.”
Hans Lovejoy went to high school in Mullum and has been the editor of local independent newspaper the Echo for 15 years. “I know many ‘trustafarians’ who just have so much time on their hands, they do workshop after workshop,” he says.
Not that Lovejoy is against experimentation. He has partaken in an ayahuasca ceremony in South America. “My take on it is, that is the place you do it. You don’t do it here. I felt I was very lucky to go over and experience it in that way because you just have to be very careful about who you get involved with.”
Lovejoy says there are “shysters and grifters everywhere”, including South America. “There is so little honesty and integrity in any of this stuff. Whether a person who claims to be a shaman or a politician, they are all doing the same thing. They are all trying to present themselves as somehow they have got the answers. It’s all just bluff, just trying to attract money and followers and be a messiah.”
The search for healing alternatives: but at what cost?
Both Lechner and Antonovich had shunned more mainstream vices in recent years. But over a relatively lengthy period of time, both had what they believed to be positive experiences ingesting various Indigenous American hallucinogens and stimulants. These included kambo and ayahuasca, both known for inducing extreme vomiting.
In “kambo” ceremonies, a participant’s skin is burnt and scraped and the secretions of the South American giant leaf frog (or giant monkey frog) is rubbed into the wound. There is no medicinal benefit to kambo, according to Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), and it can be lethal. The TGA has listed it as a schedule 10 poison, in the category for “substances of such danger to health as to warrant prohibition of sale, supply and use”.
Ayahuasca is a potent brew made from boiling plants containing the psychoactive compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Used in the Amazon for more than 1,000 years, it can lead to powerful hallucinations and has increasingly attracted the attention of mainstream science in recent times.
Former paramedic and film-maker Benjamin Gilmour says ayahuasca should not be demonised “because it has healed and helped a lot of people”.
A northern rivers local whose film Jirga was selected as Australia’s entrant for best foreign language film at the Oscars in 2018, Gilmour now works as a consultant in “psychedelics harm-minimisation”.
He says some people access psychedelics because of their poor experiences with the mental health system.
“They are self-medicating because they are desperate and in need.”
Both kambo and ayahuasca are currently illegal in Australia, but Gilmour says hundreds of people across the country continue to seek treatment. He says psychedelic medicines should be accompanied by psychotherapy, and that it is up to the TGA and Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists to work towards legalising and regulating these treatments, like has been done recently for MDMA and psilocybin.
As long as it is unregulated, he says, “narcissism in this space is definitely an issue”. “It is the ‘white shaman’ phenomena. But there are also highly qualified, professional, humble people doing the work for the right reasons and genuinely helping people. It can be hard to navigate for people seeking help.”
Both Lechner and Antonovich sought these treatments to help them on healing journeys as both had had their lives turned around by debilitating injuries.
A degenerative back condition forced Lechner to abandon hairdressing, the profession she had left school to pursue. In 1997, Antonovich was the passenger in a single-vehicle car crash that saw him airlifted to hospital, in a coma for weeks, and that left him with lasting physical and cognitive injuries.
The incurability of their ailments left both seeking answers – Lechner’s family spoke about how she tried various measures, conventional and exotic, to alleviate the pain. Antonovich’s father, and also the man with whom he had shared a five-year relationship, spoke at the inquest about how Antonovich’s seeking made him vulnerable.
And yet, both had much to live for. Antonovich was polishing off his second book and in a loving relationship. Lechner was described by her good friend and housemate as someone who loved learning new things, and who was so supportive of her friends that she was known as “the mamma bear”.
Which made their deaths – and some of the reactions to it – all the more difficult for their friends and families.
This week’s inquest heard that the shaman, Lore Solaris, who was running the retreat at which Antonovich vomited himself to death, described his passing as “beautiful” in a conversation with Patrick Santucci, who had been in a five-year, intimate relationship with Antonovich.
Antonovich’s brother, Christopher, told the coroner’s inquest on Friday he had last spoken to Jarrad three weeks before his death.
“For the family to hear in this inquest that it’s been alleged the organiser of the retreat where Jazz died had said that Jazz’s passing was a beautiful occasion, and how beautiful his passing was, was particularly galling for the family to hear.”
