My Introduction to Mushrooms and Psilocybin

OldmateArt 23/09/2022

Rain was uncommon but heavy in Wedderburn (Magennis and Beers,2022) where we lived, it cascades down onto a gravelly arid landscape dotted with mulga dried creek beds and abandon gold mines. Wheat and sheep were farmed on land cleared by bulldozer, on these stark paddocks heavy rains awakened field mushrooms in numbers. Carrying buckets mum and I would go collecting a delicious feast: butter- fried mushrooms on toast. On mentioning the caterpillar’s mushroom I was lectured about toadstools. An Australian cultural lesson: don’t pick pretty fungi, you will die.

Mum was a smart lady, the first 16-year-old female to matriculate in Victoria. She decided that I should learn to read early in life. I remember getting a simplified version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (Carrol and Ridell, 2020) and pondering the caterpillar sitting on a mushroom smoking a hookah. Talking with Alice, regarding her size and the mushroom, the caterpillar said: 'One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.' I got curiouser and curiouser.

Two decades later my hair had grown, I smoked dope and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pink Floyd were favourites. A friend suggested going to the misty mountains to find magic mushrooms, the toadstools of my childhood. After a ‘watch someone do it first’ strategy, no one died, I ate some of Bob’s Continental mushroom soup laced with magic mushrooms. After LSD’s scary visuals, and deep reflections, I just loved these little brown psilocybe subaeruginosa. Acid can be hard work, psilocybin is kaleidoscopic pleasure.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Psilocybe.subaeruginosa.5.jpg

Married with children: Jacquie and I left the city for the NSW North Coast, Nimbin made it famous. After visiting heavily hippified Nimbin we went to Billinudgel. Green rolling hills, banana plantations, cheap land and a friendly less cosmic community, Billi was perfect. We bought land, built a house, and learned of gold-tops, imported psilocybe cubensis. Big round white mushrooms with a yellow dot in the middle of the parasol. Local trippers dried these and handed them out at social events. Better texture, but not as trippy as those little brown Aussie mushrooms. Some 30 years later my kids told me they once ate goldies while walking down the hill to school. Their only problem was boredom as Spencer tried to teach them arithmetic.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Psilocybe_cubensis_-_Flickr_-_Dick_Culbert.jpg

That was then, this is now. Jacquie succumbed to breast cancer, my children are in their 50s, I’m 76 and afflicted with a gentler prostate cancer and medicinal mushrooms have helped, a lot. My next blog will discuss healing qualities of fungi.