With Our Toes in the Dust

About the Book

These are the escapades of a little lost white tribe of South Africa.Idealistic visionary hippie alternatives who search for justice, truth, freedom and spiritual enlightenment in a country at the height of its brutal apartheid regime.

They rail against racism, war, conscription, pollution and rebel against the system with a youthful bravado that sometimes even astonished themselves. There are tussles with the establishment, pre-dawn raids by security police, dope busts and daring escapes from the military.

And like all whimsical fairy tales that begin long, long ago in the mid-60s, their message was love and peace, set against a backdrop of rock music, motorcycling, beat-up Volkswagen kombi travel, tumultuous socio-political upheaval and milestone historical events.

The journey is a tribute to one of these free spirits, made up of sketches, flashbacks and anecdotes. Most are hilariously funny, others outrageous, irreverent and sad.

Some tribe members paid the ultimate price for their naïve, misguided gallantry and were never heard of again. Others escaped, usually back home to England, or dropped out and retired to country communes where they basked in the sunshine, drawing those little pictures with their toes in the dust.

Many found peace in the mystical teachings of obscure Indian gurus. Others cut loose from conventional moorings, build a raft and set sail for an idyllic island home, somewhere south-east of Madagascar. Their vision is to establish the new utopian Eden, with a bunch of bananas and a sewing machine.

Others hit out for neighbouring Swaziland to escape the long, strong Afrikaner arm of the law and the deadly game of lion and mouse goes on. Like their black expatriate brethren, they are fugitives, exiles; but theirs is a different freedom struggle. They are peace guerillas, clutching a sixties dream, not a gun.

At the end of it all, the little lost tribe has splintered and dispersed, cast their fates, like seeds, to the four winds and to as many different continents. Like similar lost tribes the world over, these scattered remnants still hang on to the dream. They reassure themselves that they have left their little mark. Even if it was just a collection of idealistic, blow-away pictures etched with their toes in shifting dust.

About the Author

Garry Shuttleworth would have been about eleven years old when he first heard The Beatles' Paperback Writer and all boyhood ambitions of becoming either a professional footballer or an astronaut was quickly laid to rest. He wanted to be a paperback writer.

But this was a colonial farming village in Natal, South Africa. It was also the mid-sixties.

And nobody from that era or that sort of place could ever become an author. Or even an astronaut or a famous soccer player for that matter. That was unheard of. Hell no, you had to get out there and get a real job. A steady job.

He dabbled quite contentedly for many years in the newspaper and promotions industry in Durban, where he eventually established his own marketing and advertising operation.

But writing imaginative blurb and hard-sell copy for products and services, boring press releases or piecing together uninspired drivel for corporate brochures wasn't quite what he originally had in mind as a kid. Nor were they steady jobs in fact.

He took some comfort however, in the fact that writing advertising copy for the local shopping centre catalogue was probably easier and significantly more lucrative than paperback books.

But he became a closet author anyway, and filled the bottom drawers with bulging manuscripts, files and typewritten sheets, convinced that sometime, somewhere, somehow, something would come out of it. It finally has. It's taken him 40 years, he says, but finally he has what feels suspiciously like a proper job.

Garry Shuttleworth and his family migrated to Australia in 1990 and live near Melbourne, Victoria. He has his own advertising and promotions consultancy and holds diplomas in Marketing, Advertising, Public Relations and Journalism. His feature articles covering a range of topics have been published in various magazines and specialist publications. This, he says, is his first stab at real writing.