It was an appropriately unsettling entrance to the world of the bonecarvers – lost on my first visit, on
June 12.
I must have walked past the door marked with the torn Greenpeace sticker and an incoherent bit of graffiti (something about Mariah Cary).
My informant, Justine, had told me to “knock on the blue door near the Leb shop”. Had she forgotten that in this part of Sydney’s inner suburbs, every other shop is owned by Lebanese?
One of Sydney’s ethnic quarters, definitely. The blue door was actually squeezed hard between a Chinese-owned store and a pizzeria (to give more details would break my promise of anonymity to the scrimmies and Justine).
Considering the neighbourhood is so cosmopolitan, I was surprised that the scrimmies were so Anglo-Aussie, except for the Mexican, Serge.
I twisted the ancient bell knob on the grimy, chipped door and waited. And waited. And turned the knob again.
“Yeah?” came a woman’s voice, that one syllable betraying a broad Australian accent.
I introduced myself and she remembered that Justine had said I would be coming to interview the scrimmies.
‘Hannah’, reluctantly it seemed, led me up the steep, narrow staircase. The air was cold, gloomy. At the head of the stairs was a small landing with threadbare Westminster carpet. On the wall was a framed airline poster of that famous fairytale castle in Europe.
Hannah led me, or, rather, I followed her brisk pace into the book-lined, messy room with its untidy plethora of computer equipment, but I had to introduce myself as she dumped me and headed for a small sink in the corner where she made herself a cup of lemongrass tea.
The ‘scrimmies’ I met in that room, with its two kinds of worn carpet, and a flyspecked paper globe lampshade askew above the centre, had not assembled for the benefit of this pariah of the press. It seems that this apartment/office/clubhouse regularly holds a dozen or more lounging or websurfing scrimmies.
This day, there were five.
Hannah is 26 and a taciturn, rather surly postgrad Arts student majoring in history. Talia, 23, is a typical college waif who just topped her class in design. Serge, 36, works delivering furniture, and apparently can often drop in on the apartment on his run. He is possibly a lover to Jo, a 40-something musician with a prominent orchestra who doesn’t look it. She apparently inherited some money and puts up most of the rent.
The fifth scrimmie that afternoon was Leo, 38, a heavily tattooed street performer, sometime hip hop singer and rainforest activist.
Scrimshaw
Though I knew of the ancient maritime art of scrimshaw, as practised by whalers and sailors, and I even knew that a scrimshander is one who practices the art, until Justine let slip one afternoon over coffee that she knew some scrimmies, I had never heard of the bizarre practice of having designs incised in one’s own bones.
According to Jo, the human scrimshaw phenomenon goes back at least 150 years, but as far as she knew, the Australian origin was in that very apartment in 1995. There are “probably thousands of adherents” in the world.
Adherents? Jo’s use of the word surprised me and I challenged it. When people get a tattoo, they aren’t called adherents. Is this a religion? A cult?
Talia started to reply but respectfully deferred to Jo for what seemed to be “the party line” answer. (To this day I still don’t know if Jo is a cult leader. With her broken teeth and K-Mart tracksuit, she would make a most unlikely one. But stranger things have happened. And this whole scene was strange.)
According to Jo, no one knows if the art of incising living human bones was practised in Australia before she had the first, when her femur was ‘scrimmed’ as she put it, and an American anthropologist with her, by the enigmatic medical practitioner they simply refer to as ‘the doctor’ (who is not a scrimmie – just a scrimshander I suppose).
I asked to see the scar, and to my surprise, she pulled down – not up – her trackie pants to reveal a neat 15cm line; one of several on her body, she told me.
What design had been scrimmed on her thigh bone?
“Initiates all have the same,” she told me, pointing to a framed photograph of a fat Middle Eastern-looking woman of about 60, back to camera, showing a large tattoo of a caduceus.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“She’s our teacher, Ma Kala” Jo replied, but nothing more was forthcoming and the subject was apparently closed. Finis.
“What do I have to do to find out more?” I asked.
“Nothing. You won’t ever know any more.”
I wanted to interview the other scrimmies, but it was made abundantly clear that the topic was closed. Why had they given me this much, only to cut short the interview? Were they after publicity? More ‘adherents’?
 Sir Richard Burton | From what I could glean from Justine, who says she only knows a little, the teacher is an Iranian who inherited her position from her mother and grandmother, and possibly from female ancestors before that. Justine believes that the folklorist
Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough) was a scrimmie and so was the 19th century writer and adventurer Sir
Richard Burton (translator of Arabian Nights; Kama Sutra). Justine believes that scrimmies are recruited from a select group: to become one you must be blue eyed and left handed. She qualifies for initiation, and somehow is close to the group, but she clammed up when I asked her if she was a scrimmie, or a scrimshander herself. I know through a mutual friend that Justine was a medical student at the University of New South Wales until she unexpectedly withdrew from studies in fifth year in 1998. |
The only other salient points I could get from her were these:
Orphic egg | - There was once a connection with the Rosicrucian order, but scrimshaw members were expelled early this century;
- Several of
Jiddu Krishnamurti’s followers received death threats in the 1940s for belonging to the scrimshaw cult, and the old guru himself reprimanded the would-be assassins, threatening them with expulsion from his order;
- In the years preceding this scandal, a household of English scrimmies lived at Sydney’s Balmoral Beach, and were closely associated with Krishnamurti and the Order of the New Dawn. They worshipped in a pavilion they had constructed in Balmoral;
- Walter Burley Griffin, designer of Australia's capital city of Canberra, was a devotee of “the teacher” if not actually scrimmed himself, and he placed esoteric symbology in his city design (the star- and circle-shaped roads that so annoy the tourists) at the behest of the Iranian woman;
- The cult is not protective of human scrimshaw and openly encourages the practice, much as Christians encourage the celebration of Christmas. They provide techniques and information to the many young people who have taken on the practice, probably having grown tired of tattoos and pierced belly button. However, true scrimmies feel superior to those who do not exactly follow their tradition;
- Crushed red coral of some sort is ground into the incisions to prevent the bone regeneration from erasing the design;
- The scrimmies have various sayings, one of which is “Skin lasteth a season, the jabah (bone) an eternity”;
- Celebrations are held by scrimmies, both members of the cult and non-initiates, each new moon at hundreds of locations throughout the world. An international gathering is held on
April 8 each year at an undisclosed location. I have since learned that April 8 was declared the scrimshanders' sacred day (Tamum Shud Day) by Ma Kala, but Justine clearly would not be drawn on any information concerning "the teacher" or her teachings.
|
I wish I had more to report. More I do not know. Justine allowed me the use of several photographs, but I don’t know why. Why are the scrimmies at once so revealing of themselves to a journalist, yet also so hidden?
I have no answers to the questions you are probably asking, and I ask them myself. I simply leave you with a strange thing Justine told me before announcing several weeks after my visit to the scrimmies that she had been forbidden to tell me any more:
“Tattoos are skin deep and won’t survive more than weeks in a grave. A scrimmed bone will reveal to archaeologists after the Awakening a great deal of information about certain arcane principles that will explain many things about the role of the Illuminati in the 21st century.”
Loonytoons? Who knows. I’m just a confused reporter.
Copyright ©
2002-now, Pip Wilson www.wilsonsalmanac.com
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