Conspirituality in Australia is not a fringe curiosity but a settler-colonial apparatus that merges New Age affect, conspiratorial paranoia, and epistemic simulation into a potent structure of belief and harm. It is not simply the fusion of wellness culture and conspiracy theory, as Ward and Voas (2011) first described, but an adaptive settler logic that weaponises spiritual language to undermine Aboriginal sovereignty and fabricate legitimacy
In this context, “bodily sovereignty” becomes the gateway drug to “spiritual sovereignty,” a concept rapidly expanded into anti-government pseudolegalism, epistemic nihilism, and, increasingly, simulated Indigeneity. Influencers like Pete Evans, Taylor Winterstein, and Jake Cassar are not merely misguided wellness advocates; they are charismatic brokers of a counterfeit cosmology that exploits trauma, distrust, and desire for moral clarity. Their authority is not earned through genealogy or relational accountability but manufactured through aesthetics, proximity, and algorithmic reach.
The COVID-19 pandemic acted as an accelerant. Its information vacuum and institutional failures created ideal conditions for magical thinking, cultic logic, and alternative “truth ecologies.” Within this matrix, settler conspiracists adopted Aboriginal symbols—fire, ceremony, land, and kinship—not to honour Indigenous sovereignty but to cloak their resistance in the language of custodianship. Muckudda Camp is emblematic: a settler-occupied protest site framed as sacred Aboriginal ground, where actual Darkinjung sovereignty was not only ignored but actively sabotaged.
Wellness culture serves as the ideological carrier. The $4.5 trillion global industry markets spiritual purity and natural order while rejecting scientific accountability, state regulation, and community governance. In Australia, it is deeply racialised: white influencers invoke bush medicine, Dreaming, and Country while refusing Indigenous authority. The result is what Cooke (2025) terms “epistemic simulation”: a world in which settler performances of Indigeneity are mistaken for truth, legitimacy, and custodianship.
This simulation is cultic in structure. Drawing on Lalich (2004) and Hassan (2016), we observe high control environments marked by emotional absolutism, charismatic intermediaries, and closed-loop information. These are not simply misguided beliefs; they are coercive systems of meaning that displace culture with consumerism and governance with personal revelation. Disengagement is not intellectual—it is psychological, relational, and often traumatic.
Artificial intelligence now amplifies these harms. AI-generated videos, fake Elder testimonies, and synthetic “Aboriginal” teachings circulate without context or consent. This is not digitisation—it is algorithmic colonialism (Kolopenuk, 2023), where Indigenous knowledges are scraped, repackaged, and monetised by settler systems. It is a digital terra nullius: open source as open season.
Addressing conspirituality requires more than rebuttal. It demands epistemic justice. Recommendations include: Indigenous-led regulation of identity fraud; the legal and cultural enforcement of genealogical and community verification; algorithmic intervention to stem the flow of false authority; and expanded cult recovery services tailored to conspiritualist trauma. Most critically, Aboriginal epistemologies must be funded, protected, and centered not as spiritual resources for settler extraction but as sovereign systems of knowing, doing, and being.
Conspirituality is not only a crisis of belief but a colonial incursion into the sacred. It is simulation with consequences. The remedy is not neutrality, but clarity. Not both-sidesism, but truth-telling. Not reconciliation, but refusal.
Bungaree.org 
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