Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop admires WILD WILD COUNTRY (Chapman Way, Maclain Way, USA, 2018) ...and extra added response from David Hare

Editor's Note: Following online posting David Hare commented about his memories of the Rajneesh in Sydney.  I've now included this further contribution at the foot of Rod's review.

When the religious commune known as the Rajneesh imploded in rural Oregon in the mid-1980s, they had already carried out the largest biological terrorist attack in US history; they were armed to the back teeth; they had committed widespread electoral fraud and had planned assassinations including killing their own kind. They were led by an Indian guru who believed in free love, disco dancing and collecting Rolls Royces – 93 of them - the world’s largest collection. 

But when their downfall eventually - and inevitably - came in a welter of prosecutions, no-one had died. Not like Jonestown or Waco, where the loss of life ensured those deranged religious cultists made pop culture infamy. Without any lurid deaths as their commune fell apart, the Rajneesh sort of faded away and have largely been forgotten.

I’m just as guilty as anyone of forgetting the Rajneeshees. At the time, I merely relegated their guru and his Rolls Royces to the Monty Python part of my brain. I even gobbled up the Waco TV series last year as soon as it was available (five hours of my life I won’t get back) while avoiding Wild Wild Country, no matter how many glowing reviews it was getting.

The Way Brothers were pitched the idea for Wild Wild Country by an archivist at the Oregon Historical Society who had access to nearly 300 hours of archival footage collated from television stations and material filmed by Rajneeshee film crews.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known as ‘Osho’) established an ashram in Pune, India in 1974 and preached an odd combination of meditation, self-actualization, sexual freedom and a celebration of wealth. Unsurprisingly, Westerners flocked to the ashram, but when Indian authorities decided to clamp down in 1981, the Bhagwan’s loyal ‘secretary’ moved the commune to the rural town of Antelope, Oregon, population 40 (mostly retirees).

Thousands of Rajneeshees, clothed in their trademark red-and-orange, descended on the tiny community, bought the 64,000-acre Big Muddy Ranch and set about building the city of “Rajneeshpuram’’ - homes, vast assembly halls, dams, a pizza parlour, clothes shops (all orange or red), a Medical Research Laboratory and a private airstrip for their planes.

Exploiting US laws, they set-up a hugely sophisticated electoral fraud scheme, took over Antelope and renamed it Rajneesh with their own Rajneeshee police force. When their hotel in Portland was bombed, they went to war against the locals, the nearby towns and State officials. 

Their inventory was 17,400 rounds of rifle ammunition, 20 semi-automatic Uzi rifles, 96 AK-47s and a million rounds of AK-47 ammo - “more semi-automatic weapons than all of the police forces in Oregon combined” muses one old-timer. At one point, they shipped in the homeless from surrounding states and put them up in the commune to add to their electoral roll.

The commune’s biological warfare attack on the town of The Dalles poisoned 751 residents with salmonella in an attempt to stop them voting on election day.

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Oddly, but possibility due to a lack of footage, the Bhagwan is the least successful of the characters in this series. After all, he stopped speaking for three-and-a-half years following the move to Oregon. The viewer spends as much time wondering where all their money came from as wondering how he managed to exert such influence and control over his happy-flappy followers (left). Even by strange guru standards, he appears as anything but charismatic.

The sex, money and the much vaunted ‘freedom’ are clearly attractions, but their devotion to this man was so intense that even after a handful of Rajneeshees were sent to jail, the commune collapsed and the Bhagwan was deported, many still followed him back to India. There are remarkable scenes at his funeral in 1990, where the wide-eyed devotion of the followers to their guru is palpable.

Bhagwan’s ‘secretary’ Ma Anand Sheela (formally known as Sheela Silverman, right) is the commanding presence and the main focus of attention. Her controlling, antagonistic commands and her ruthless strategies have not diminished in the least, judging by her recent interviews for this series. 

Not so, Australian Jane Stork (formally known as Ma Shanti B) who was charged with plotting the murder of another Rajneeshee, but who now denounces the cult. She is the exception and the eloquent lawyer Swami Prem Niren (formally known as Philip J Toelkes), who once represented Linda Ronstadt, sees nothing at all wrong with anything that happened in Oregon, except for the persecution of a religion by a xenophobic country eternally afraid of “the other”. He wonders whether all this calamity would have been foisted on a community of Christians moving to Antelope.

There are six episodes running nearly seven hours and there’s not a wasted minute. The Americans have been the world’s best documentary filmmakers for some time now and you can add the Way Brothers to their great tradition.

David Hare responds I have extremely fond memories of the Rajneesh folks who were still current in Sydney right up to the mid eighties. They seemed to have “happened” at some weirdly distorted point in middle class western history when AIDS had broken out, and the sexual revolution was grinding to a halt. And for that moment in time their followers in Sydney were all ex “smart” middle class people who had embraced the movement after becoming repulsed by the Greed is Good religion that was following on the coattails of neo liberal capitalism which was even beginning to poison the ALP government in Australia. I had more than a few personal, sexual and social connections with a remaining stalwart group, who wre communally living in Surrey Street Darlo, near Phil Noyce’s house, and around the corner from a tiny but wonderful 20s apartment down the hill a bit which I had bought and where I was then living. There is so much to tell but I was, as a lifelong sceptic and anti theistic anti spiritual arsehole to simply find awe in their achievements, not least their totally sublime Vego restaurant at Taylor Square in the old Chez Ivy joint - a font not only for superb food and wine, but home to my second favorite dealer in Sydney who sold the best and cleanest coke it was ever my privilege to snort. I wish we had them all back in our lives!