Across Australia, digitally mediated ecosystems increasingly fuse conspiracism, spiritualised meaning-making, and anti-institutional grievance into forms of mobilisation that can appear, at first glance, as community care, environmental protection, or cultural revival. This article synthesises a large body of public-record analysis and applied theory to examine a Central Coast case ecology centred on Jake Cassar, Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA), Campfire Collective Australia Incorporated, and a surrounding network of contested Aboriginal identity and custodianship assertions commonly described as the non-Aboriginal “GuriNgai”.
Drawing on cultic studies, research on conspirituality, and Australian governance and regulatory frameworks, the article argues that this nexus can be understood as a narrative infrastructure that can: (a) normalise conspiracist epistemologies through “community” aesthetics, (b) intensify conflict around land-use and heritage by spiritualising planning disputes, (c) enable authority laundering via ambiguous organisational forms and public-facing legitimacy cues, and (d) produce high-demand-group harms that complicate exit and recovery, particularly where identity claims are later experienced as false. The analysis concludes by outlining integrity and safeguarding implications for institutions, platforms, community organisations, and support services.
Introduction
A recurring problem in contemporary Australian civic life is that harm does not always travel under overtly violent branding. It often arrives as moral urgency, a promise of “truth,” and a call to defend the land, children, or community against hidden enemies. In these settings, environmental concern can become the wrapper for a more complex ecology: conspiracist cognition, spiritualised authority, and populist hostility to institutions. Within this ecology, Aboriginality and “custodianship” can be rhetorically invoked, sometimes without verified community legitimacy, because Indigenous signifiers dramatically increase moral force, perceived authenticity, and media traction.
This article integrates a substantial set of public-facing analyses associated with guringai.org, including case reports on Kariong campaigning, CEA mobilisation, Campfire Collective governance risk, and a sustained critique of contested “GuriNgai” identity claims (Cooke, 2023–2026). It pairs those materials with peer-reviewed and doctrinal frameworks on conspirituality and cultic control, then anchors the governance discussion in Australian charity and consumer-law integrity principles. In doing so, it treats the case not as gossip about personalities, but as a contemporary example of how narrative ecosystems can reorganise reality-testing, legitimise informal power, and generate predictable harms to Aboriginal governance and community cohesion.
Conceptual frame: conspirituality, cultic convergence, and “authority laundering”
“Conspirituality” describes the fusion of conspiracy thinking with spiritualised narratives of awakening, purity, and moral election (Ward & Voas, 2011). In practice, it tends to produce a closed moral architecture: insiders are enlightened, outsiders are corrupted, and institutional checks become proof of persecution rather than signals to recalibrate beliefs. In such systems, what matters is not verification, but initiation, belonging, and the emotional rewards of certainty.
Cultic studies help clarify why these milieus can become high-demand even when there is no formal “cult” organisation. High-demand-group dynamics are often generated through social and psychological mechanisms rather than membership cards, including epistemic enclosure, sacred language, charisma-centred authority, and “bounded choice,” where constraints accumulate until dissent becomes personally costly (Lalich, 2004).
Within the Central Coast ecology examined here, “authority laundering” is the core operational logic: contested claims to cultural legitimacy are circulated through repeated visibility, institutional adjacency, and the compliance aesthetics of formal entities, even where substantive accountability and community consent are disputed. The result is a confusing legitimacy field in which residents and institutions may struggle to distinguish Aboriginal-governed authority from settler-led simulation that borrows Indigenous signifiers for power.
The Central Coast case ecology: a network rather than a silo
Public-facing material around Jake Cassar presents overlapping roles: bushcraft instructor, environmental campaigner, and community figure, associated with campaign pages and organisations that repeatedly intersect (Cooke, 2026). The analytic point is structural: low-structure, high-visibility networks can be highly functional for mobilisation because they distribute content rapidly, blur responsibility, and concentrate symbolic authority in charismatic nodes while remaining resilient to scrutiny through continual rebranding and page proliferation.
This ecology is repeatedly documented as entangling CEA and campaign identities with a contested “GuriNgai” identity network, including the circulation of custodianship language in contexts where Aboriginal Land Council authority is disputed or reframed as illegitimate (Cooke, 2023–2026). Whatever an individual participant’s private beliefs, the public effect is that planning disputes are moralised as sacred conflict, dissent is treated as corruption, and Aboriginal governance is repositioned as an obstacle to “saving Country.”
Campfire Collective Australia Incorporated: compliance aesthetics and charity-grade integrity risk
Campfire Collective should not be assessed solely against the minimum procedural threshold for an incorporated association, but against substantive charity governance expectations, including public benefit and the duties and integrity obligations of responsible persons. Under Australia’s national charity framework, Governance Standard 5 requires charities to take reasonable steps to ensure responsible persons comply with duties including acting with care and diligence, acting honestly in the charity’s best interests, and managing conflicts of interest (Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission Regulations 2022 (Cth) reg 45.25).
The public-register and ABR-facing status of the entity also matters because it sets the baseline for fundraising clarity and donor understanding. The Australian Business Register entry for ABN 49 846 037 917 identifies the entity as a charity registered from late July 2025, and it records tax concessions while also indicating that the entity is not entitled to receive tax deductible gifts, meaning it is not endorsed as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) (Australian Business Register, n.d.).
In integrity terms, the risk is not limited to explicit statements. Australian consumer law assesses misleading or deceptive conduct by overall impression in trade or commerce, and section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law prohibits conduct that is misleading or likely to mislead (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, via ACL s 18 compilation). The governance question, then, is whether public communications, fundraising cues, and brand architecture create foreseeable donor confusion, particularly where a founder’s personal brand spans charity, activism, and private enterprise. The analytic claim in the integrated material is that this ecology can function as “trust infrastructure” for a politically volatile mobilisation network, making transparency and conflict management non-optional, not aspirational (Cooke, 2026).
Settler simulation and contested custodianship: why Indigenous signifiers become accelerants
The most consequential harm channel concerns the use of Aboriginal-coded authority to reshape governance outcomes. In the guringai.org analysis, contested “GuriNgai” claims are treated as a false or historically ungrounded identity construct in the relevant region, and their repeated public use is argued to displace Aboriginal community authority, especially where Local Aboriginal Land Councils are reframed as corrupt, captured, or “developers” rather than as Aboriginal-governed institutions with statutory responsibilities and community mandates (Cooke, 2025–2026).
This matters because custodianship rhetoric can convert ordinary policy disagreement into sacred war. Once a campaign is fronted by people presented as custodians, opponents can be framed as morally contaminated, culturally unsafe, or anti-Indigenous, even where Aboriginal people themselves are raising the objections. In other words, the moral force of Indigeneity is weaponised as a reputational shield.
Kariong is central in this narrative because the area has been repeatedly targeted by pseudoarchaeological and mythic claims, including enduring promotion of the “Gosford glyphs,” which multiple mainstream and specialist sources have described as a hoax, and which have been analysed in the guringai.org corpus as an attractor for conspiracist meaning-making and “ancient-contact” fantasies (Cooke, 2023; Cooke, 2025).
Beverly Spiers, “Goolabeen,” and the social conditions that enable mythic authority
Beverly Spiers functions as a cautionary subcase about how “Elder” branding can be socially constructed and then circulated within non-Aboriginal milieus that lack rigorous community verification. Public reporting and biographies indicate that Beverley Spiers was recognised for work in custodial health contexts and won the Medical Journal of Australia’s Dr Ross Ingram Memorial Essay Competition in 2009 (Medical Journal of Australia, 2009, as reported in associated coverage).
The analytic problem highlights how late-life discovery narratives, expansive Country boundary assertions, and esoteric overlays can become the raw material for third-party appropriation and network-building, particularly in spaces where non-Aboriginal actors seek Aboriginal-coded legitimacy for activism. The case is positioned as one mechanism through which “Kariong sacred lands” mythologies became socially adhesive, and how conspiracist motifs, including “star people” or “ancient visitors,” can be integrated into local lore ecosystems that then attract charismatic entrepreneurs and pseudoarchaeology influencers.
The Cave as mythopoeic infrastructure: cultural appropriation as the organising mechanism
On 3 December 2025, Jake Cassar released The Cave, a text analysed in the integrated material not as a neutral creative artefact, but as operative myth-making for a broader mobilisation ecology (Cooke, 2025). The core claim is that the book synthesises conspiracist world-building, ecological judgment, “ancient aliens” mythology, and visionary experience, while drawing heavily on Aboriginal-coded motifs and custodial language. The most significant analytic point across the integrated excerpts is that appropriation is not incidental decoration, it is the mechanism by which the text authorises the protagonist’s role as intermediary and elevates settler experience into a quasi-Indigenous sovereignty claim.
In this reading, The Cave functions as radicalising infrastructure in four ways. First, it produces an initiation narrative, where “revelation” substitutes for evidence, aligning with conspiritual patterns in which awakening is performed through story rather than tested through accountability (Ward & Voas, 2011). Second, it supplies a moral cosmology that can recode land disputes as existential struggle, making compromise feel like betrayal. Third, it constructs a charisma scaffold by placing the author-protagonist at the centre of cosmic law, a classic pathway to leader insulation from critique in high-demand environments (Lalich, 2004). Fourth, it normalises a symbolic hierarchy in which Aboriginal knowledge is repositioned as something that can be accessed, purified, and reissued by non-Aboriginal mediators through supernatural encounter, which is the conceptual core of “settler simulation” in the integrated material (Cooke, 2025).
From narrative to operations: how mythic systems translate into community harm
This Central Coast ecology is producing real-world risks: community polarisation, intimidation of dissent, erosion of trust in lawful processes, and marginalisation of Aboriginal voices through rhetorical inversion (Cooke, 2026). The operational pathway is consistent: anti-institutional framing encourages residents to treat councils, planning authorities, and Aboriginal governance bodies as corrupt by default; spiritualised certainty discourages corrective feedback; and contested custodianship claims elevate informal leaders while degrading Aboriginal-led institutions.
The result is a predictable governance pathology: decisions that should be debated through evidence, cultural safety protocols, and transparent statutory processes are relocated into personality-centred truth regimes. When this occurs, integrity breaches do not require criminality to cause harm. Confusion, reputational warfare, platforming choices, and institutional hesitation can be sufficient to obstruct Aboriginal self-determination and to produce long-term social fragmentation.
Exit, recovery, and the “double trauma” problem in false-identity milieus
Leaving is difficult even when evidence becomes overwhelming. Exit often involves grief, identity collapse, social loss, and the shame of realising one has participated in harm. Cultic studies describe how bounded choice and community enclosure can make exit feel like existential threat rather than an ordinary decision (Lalich, 2004).
The case ecology here adds a specific complication: false-identity systems can produce “double trauma,” namely, the emotional impacts of manipulation plus the loss of a believed cultural identity, and sometimes the rupture of relationships built around that belief (Cooke, 2025–2026). Recovery, therefore, is not just deprogramming from conspiracist cognition, it is reconstituting a moral self that can acknowledge harm, rebuild truthful belonging, and, where appropriate, re-engage with genuine Aboriginal-led governance and community processes without trying to reclaim authority through performance.
Implications for institutions: what “due diligence” looks like in a conspiritual era
The central institutional lesson is that neutrality can become complicity when a legitimacy field is actively being manufactured. For charities and community organisations, “public benefit” is not satisfied by intentions alone, and the ACNC explicitly frames charitable purpose and public benefit as foundational to charity status (ACNC, public benefit guidance). In politically contested settings involving Indigenous authority, integrity practice requires: verification of who speaks for Country, documented consent, clarity about entity boundaries, transparent fundraising representations, and conflict-of-interest controls that are real in operation, not decorative in a constitution.
Where public communications risk misleading impressions, Australian Consumer Law, including ACL s 18, provides the baseline prohibition on misleading or deceptive conduct (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, via ACL s 18 compilation). For resident-facing institutions, the practical implication is straightforward: do not platform contested custodianship claims as fact without community-validated verification, and do not outsource cultural authority to charisma.
Conclusion
The integrated record and theory converge on a single conclusion: the Jake Cassar, CEA, Campfire Collective, and “GuriNgai” nexus is best understood as an ecosystem of narrative power that can launder contested authority and conspiracist epistemologies through environmental aesthetics and community branding. The signature harms are not only epistemic. They are cultural and material: degraded Aboriginal governance legitimacy, intensified local conflict, donor confusion risk, and high-demand-group dynamics that complicate exit and recovery.
A definitive response is institutional maturity: rigorous verification, clear governance boundaries, cultural safety discipline, and support pathways for people trying to leave high-demand milieus without being further shamed or exploited. The broader democratic task is to restore the social norm that evidence, accountability, and Aboriginal-governed authority are not optional extras, they are the minimum conditions of public integrity.
A Long Con, Gone on Too Long. 
Leave a comment