Florentine Prince and Funny Bugger: Terence McKenna in Australia

Graham St John in Entheogenesis Australis Journal, # 6, August 2025.

Terence McKenna, 1997 Australian tour poster. Courtesy of Dillon Hicks.

In this essay by Graham St John, we squeeze into the back seat of McKenna’s “Archaic Revival” tour, his first and only visit to Australia. Encouraged by a small community of plant medicine enthusiasts and facilitated by promoter Dillon Hicks, for a brief moment, McKenna served as alien frontman for the Australian experimental music underground. We explore the visitor’s enigmatic stature as a cult figure, novelty theorist, and psychedelic prophet with an untiring vision: that the clock is running down on history. His message about the end was magnified by McKenna’s own abrupt departure within three years of his visit, putting paid to the return trip envisioned. But if time was disappearing, and the “transcendental object at the end of time” was fast approaching, as his audience learned during his whirlwind Aussie adventure, McKenna was laughing all the way to the eschaton.

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