Though possessing derivative characteristics, Down to Earth is grounded in the broad acres of Australian radicalism. Over the course of its history, the movement has undergone significant mutations. While it began as the Australian ACM's millenarian movement, a cultural revolution, a conscious attempt to create a 'New Society', DTE later became the custodian of its subsequent biannual 'new society'. In the movement's first phase, Jim Cairns, and others following him, sought to mobilise skills and resources to create alternative communities, participants saw themselves acting on an historical stage - they were struggling towards 'a sane future'. Though the principal, intentional efforts to realise the New Society (Mt Oak and Rainbow ConFests) suffered huge setbacks, many new communities were conceived within the immediate network facilitation and recruitment capacity of ConFest. In its second phase, DTE became a neutral host organisation, energising and facilitating ConFest - a temporary counterworld accommodating a multitude of NSMs, subcultures and lifeways. In addition to the many DTE Bünde or 'families' scattered over a vast landscape, this powerful social laboratory yielded a multiplicity of postliminal experiments and generated an event-diaspora. In its third phase, DTE is perhaps the most unlikely custodian of the Australian ACM's principal ACH. Yet, despite ConFest's gravitation towards a festival of alternatives, and the emergence of an insular and 'protective' parent culture, DTE's ConFest continues to provide an open, heterogeneous forum on the margins.

Though not in the way envisaged by the original inspirators of the Down to Earth movement, a 'new society' has emerged, and this has happened in two senses. 1) Weathering particularly turbulent episodes, DTE has emerged as a unique Co-operative Society. 2) A protean ALE, the Co-operative's event became, itself, a temporary 'new society' now biannually recycled in indeterminate patterns. Despite ongoing conflict and mounting tension, the 'new society' remains the élan vital periodically reinvigorating the Society. Moreover, DTE's 'new society' is seen to possess tremendous possibilities for further movement developments. According to Les, ConFest is an 'ideal model' for the celebration of cultural diversity and the development of 'community wellbeing', a manifestation of the type of processes which will introduce 'a new way of being for the next thousand years'.

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