If the hippies really were going to be eaten alive by insects, as the locals were always predicting, then surely that summer of 1976 was when it should have happened. It’s a time you can hardly remember without feeling the nip and sting of things. Swarms and infestations,  the flubber of moths in the washing, the arch-aching bite of green ants in the lawn. Already on that humid afternoon in mid-October,  the fruit flies were turning the town’s tomatoes into putrid sacks dripping on the vine. Things flickered and dived in the air of the place. They were slapped and sprayed and stamped on. Clouds of gnats sent whole soccer teams veering off course during evening training and clogged the gauze on the ventilation fans at the back of the Parmenters’ shop.

And every night, across the valley, the rainforest would open its canopy and let its big guns fly: horned beetles and cockroaches, lacewings and leaf-green cicadas, cricket-like creatures with jointed legs and long fishing-rod feelers. Called by the glow of the street lights,  they hurtled towards the town and struck against the BP sign at the top of Main Street. Bing zap! went the ultraviolet ring on the wall of the Repentance pub, where men crunched on beer nuts and drank to the hippies’ demise. ‘I give ’em six months.’ Nods all round and a  thoughtful pause as they pictured all those men and women sleeping naked in the hills, the hearts of their organic cabbages oozing with caterpillar slime. Even in the noisy pub, you could hear the scream of mosquitoes coming at their bare flesh like needles in the dark…

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