The 'Tiser, cults and cultists, and how to turn back a tidal wave with political prayer ...

(Above: bullets hidden in bedheads. Oh Adeelaaayaaade).

Every so often Adelaide offers up special lifestyles more interesting than a Scientologist in search of volcanoes.

Bodies in fridges, lecturers in the Torrens, the Truro murders, barrels in Snowtown, and so on and so forth.

Right now the town is in the grip of a doozy, namely a doomsday cult, the Agape ministries, and its leader Rocco Leo.

For The Advertiser, long a tabloid, it's tabloid heaven, and they're making a meal out of it.

The latest riff is that cult leader Leo visited Vanuatu in a bid to get villagers to donate their land as a safeguard against the apocalypse, but didn't do so well:

"He told me God gave him the gift for healing and God told him to find a place to build a church for people to get healing.

"I took him all over the island to different people to talk about finding a place for his mission."

But Leo, described as a "charming and charismatic, fast talking preacher" was irked by the villagers' reluctance to part with their land.

"Here in Vanuatu it takes time to get customary land exchanged into privately owned," said Iad.

"You can't just take our land for free with a handshake," he added. (Doomsday fugitive visited Vanuatu).

Hmm, does this mean the people of Vanuatu have more sense than the citizens of Adelaide?

Not really, the world has always had cults, and schoolmarmish Adelaide wouldn't like to stand out from the crowd.

Ever wondered why, when you trot off to a new town, chances are you're likely to find the Catholic or a Protestant church occupying a choice bit of real estate, often on top of a hill if the town happens to have a hill? They got in early. There's nothing like decent, solid real estate for a church interested in showing it's a rock built on a rock.

Sadly for The Advertiser, but not so sad for the cultists trapped in the cult, the affair lacks the kind of pizzaz and fireworks offered up by David Koresh in his Waco cult (and if you ever want to understand why people can go mad, why not drop in to Waco and say hello).

Sure the cult, with a core membership of forty to sixty members, had a stock of fifteen guns, fuses, dets, extendable batons and 35,000 rounds of ammunition, secreted in various parts of the twelve properties raided by the cops - the very things you need when Armageddon is just around the corner, but Armageddon came a tad early for Leo, forcing him to go on the run.

What's left behind are shattered lives and strange deluded beliefs of the usual kind associated with cults. There's access to young women as "little brides", and there's a letch for 2012 as the end times, and there's an obsession with mind-controlling microchips. There's the heavily fortified "church" and snarling German Shepherd guard dogs, and much more.

No need to steal the 'Tiser's thunder - you can read all that and more in Police raid Agape Ministries of God doomsday cult properties.

And if that gives you a taste, you can also dip into Zealots ready for battle in Adelaide Hills. Take a look at a handy map of the cult compound here in pdf form. Not to mention a gallery of snaps of assorted cult highlights, which sad to say, lack a little in the way of 'je ne sais quoi' when it comes to a decent flurry of visual cult sensationalism.

Unless as an Adelaidean you find a photo of Nick Xenophon looking extremely concerned some kind of visual highlight.

Naturally Nick is out and about on the matter - Don't be chicken on cults, senator urges - and even spruiked what he called "mind control laws" in Cult raids prompt calls for mind-control laws.

It being good old SA, it wasn't long before people worked out that Mike Rann's notorious bikie laws might be used against the cult - Bikie laws could be turned on cults - and the affair also led to some fierce philosophising by Tory Shepherd in If you start to ban cults, where do you stop, given an anxiety attack by Senator Nick's proposed mind control laws:

... if you start to ban cults, where do you stop? The best minds in the world still struggle to separate cult from religion. Do you base the decision on how many members there are? How different the beliefs are from the major world religions? Your mistrust of the leader?

There are not large numbers of Aborigines still practising their ancient rituals. Jesus only had 12 disciples originally, so size doesn't really matter.

The major world religions are constantly at each others' throats, so cannot be counted on to be any sort of yardstick.

The leaders of many long-established churches could be called charismatic, and have been found guilty of heinous crimes throughout history, and in the present day. Banning cults would also be a restriction on freedom of religion. The only fair way to target them is through their criminal behaviour, and by removing the tax-free status of all religions.

Indeed. Here at the pond we too have been a victim of a cult. The tithing was much the same as the Adelaide cult - ten per cent of earnings was deemed the ideal, but truth to tell it had slipped to whatever you could hide in an envelope and drop on the tray. Children were required to go to the cult school, and be harassed by weirdly dressed penguins into strange beliefs, including the notion that there'd be pie in the sky by and by, with the world destined to end soon enough, but let's not put an exact date on it.

There was sweet smelling incense, and a weird babbling in an exotic tongue, worthy of Baptists but actually borrowed from Romans, and each week, a regular meal of human blood and human flesh, even if presented in the humble form of wine and wafers (not that the punters got the blood, that bit was usually reserved for head cannibals at the altar). And of course there was the fetishising of the innocent ... who can forget the sheer whiteness of their first communion dress, matched only by the dark sinfulness of human sexuality?

But you can't ban cults. Some of them have been around for a couple of thousand years and have become very adept at survival skills and blending in with their surroundings. It's the johnny come latelies, who don't have a decent church on a decent hillside location, that cause all the troubles. They have to up the ante, and offer up short term panic while rifling through the goodies and abusing their unholy powers of persuasion.

A few petty souls will see this as just another example of the weirdness of Adelaide, and it's true you need to listen to more than a Paul Kelly song to get the flavour of a town surrounded by wineries and further out a relentlessly semi-desert landscape.

My favourite moment? Surely it has to be this, as remembered in Rachael Kohn's the spirit of things - an ABC show dedicated to celebrating cults and cultists (oh alright if you will religion and the religious).

This particular show, titled When Prophecies Fail, provides a transcript of the ABC reporting on that fatal day January 19th 1976:

Good morning. I'm Hamish Robertson, this is AM. And first, let's say a cheery Good Morning, Adelaide, nice to see you're still with us. Today of course is The Day, January 19th, which if an Adelaide housepainter-cum-clairvoyant can be believed, is the day the city could meet its doom. There's to be an earthquake and tidal wave. No hard, or even soft, scientific facts mind you, just a feeling. But Adelaide has taken heed, it seems, and their King Canute, Premier Don Dunstan, is down at Glenelg Jetty today to prove there's nothing to worry about. Also watching the water lap around the jetty is Jim Bonner.

Jim Bonner: The Glenelg Jetty at this moment probably looks the same as it does at this time of the day every summer, with the first few tourists and would-be swimmers just starting to turn up. I don't know if any of them are taking the day off work, but they might be here for the party which is meant to get under way soon. A pastrycook is going to sell pasties and orange juice in anticipation of a big crowd. He'll be dressed for the occasion in case anything unusual occurs: in a bow-tie, bathers, flippers and snorkel.

There's also a report of insurance company employees walking to work wearing wetsuits and underwater diving gear. But job absenteeism is one of the big worries as a result of what Mr Dunstan describes as the 'quite nonsensical hysteria arising from the earthquake and tidal wave prediction.'

Don Dunstan: There is absolutely no basis for it at all. And I would not make a statement about it because I think it's such nonsense, but for the fact that it has already caused a very great deal of community damage, and is likely to cause more from the reports and complaints that have been made to me.

There have been families which have put themselves into debt to move out of South Australia at that time, there are other families who have sold their houses when they couldn't afford to do so. That sort of thing has happened amongst some poorer sections of the community. I'm trying to see to it that there is no more damage, and trying to reassure people that there is absolutely nothing in this at all.

Jim Bonner: All this fuss because a housepainter claimed that God was going to have his revenge on Adelaide for becoming a sin city.

And you know what? There wasn't a tidal wave that day, and ever since then I've worshipped Don Dunstan for his King Canute capacities, and his mystical ability to calm the seas. All kneel and worship St. Don ... or at least use his recipe to prepare your olives. (and here's the recipe folks, hurry before the link goes down).

The rest of Kohn's show about cults is worth a read too, but enough already, let's not have any talk about the 'Tiser or the pond not delivering true meaty value for cultists interested in loon cultists.

As for Adelaide, take it away Paul. Ah that wisteria and the great aunts and Kengsinton road running straight for a while before turning: