The way of the loaded Kiwi free-love revolutionary
They were full of hope and full of dope, a lot of sex, and short on soap. And there’s your counterculture trope. Popular culture has so entrenched a caricature and soundtrack of the upheavals of the 1960s, it can make a reader a little wary. Now here comes an account of the Kiwi counterculture, and will it get caught in those same rutted tracks?
Nick Bollinger’s new book Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand does not. It’s a good trip. Some themes are inevitably familiar — all that youthful rejection of uptight conformity and capitalism and materialism and whaddaya got — but the foundational exposition is not laboured.
That counterculture trope romanticises its head off: the freest of people, the greatest of times, the best music and drugs and liberation anyone ever had. It suggests a wild time for everyone. But that was not most people's experience. The counterculture had electric blues and acid, the mainstream had The Seekers.
Nick Bollinger is about my age, so we have in common being too young for the Summer of Love, but our 1960s were otherwise very different. He was closer to this new way of living, got to see much more. His progressive parents engaged academically, socially, politically with these fringe people and I’m envious. He describes a much more interesting life.
And that's somewhat the point here: what happened would sometimes be rebellion but it would also simply be seeking out more interesting ways of living, less grey, less dull. Back then the sun shone brightly in summer and the bacon and egg pies were delicious, but life was monochrome.
In the right places, and at the right moments, this world of Jumping Sundays was most surely a time.
There's Tim Shadbolt being revolutionary and baffling and hugely engaging
These pages, in their nostalgic underground design style, offer vivid personal accounts. The author would only have to mention that he was writing a book about back then, he says, and people would be offering up memories.
It’s more or less inevitable that there are no strangers here, only friends whose chapter you haven't reached yet. There'll be a reference to exotic imported clothing and you'll think Zeke would find this interesting. You turn the page and there's your friend Zeke yarning about drugs and Asia and the Merchant Adventurers of Narnia.
There are recurring characters, some almost Zelig-like. Rachel Stace seems to be there for all of it, a Counterculture everyperson, being photographed by the Dominion as a policeman stops her climbing through a window to see the Beatles; living out the warnings of the Mazengarb report (the committee of which her father had been a member) by slipping away from Onslow College for clandestine liaisons with a painter.
A little farther along, she and her flatmates are putting on beautiful tripping clothes and off to the park to sit in trees “...all very innocent just sitting there giggling looking at nature… you just knew that you were all interconnected and there was some sort of living force that you couldn't really see properly until you were on acid. And then it all became clear. Nature was beautiful, the world was beautiful and it was all amazing.”
Now she’s hanging out with Herne Bay neighbours Dragon. “You'd be swigging back Mandrax and next minute you’d be on a bed with six other people writhing around with or without clothes. Fabulous drug. Lots of orgies. It was great.”
And here we find her at Western Springs for the Stones with friends Grant, Jane and Sally in a photo destined to become a motif for our hippie era.
Bollinger writes, “But to Rachel the image is bittersweet, both Grant and Jane would die prematurely after struggles with addiction. Sally, to Rachel’s surprise, is still alive.”
So, happily, is Rachel. She tells the author, “I became a postie in Wellington but I would throw up in people's gardens….I became very very ill. I was using every other day and thinking ‘oh this is bad, this is not good. I've got to get out of this scene’. I went overseas and quit the druggie scene and went ‘Right, I'm not coming back until I find a career.’”
The story has bad actors whose actions generally speak for themselves. The author’s tone remains kind, sympathetic to the tentative naivete of much of it; inspired and noble, hapless and clueless.
Some nice vignettes seem especially emblematic of the players. Alister Taylor plans an anti-war event to coincide with a SEATO meeting and although the invitation to Dr Martin Luther King doesn't pan out he has some exalted international guests on their way until two weeks out - and let us recall in those far away days you really did have to ask for permission to send money overseas - the Reserve Bank "with the backing of finance Minister Rob Muldoon", writes Bollinger diplomatically, denies permission to pay the airfares of three overseas speakers. Taylor is rescued by Sonja Davies who has a friend in the UK prepared to advance the ticket money.
"By the opening of the conference however," continues Bollinger diplomatically, "it had become clear that Taylor, whose lifelong habit of using one project to fund the next was already in evidence, had no intention of repaying the loan. So Davies took matters into her own hands, positioned herself alongside Taylor at the front desk of the Wellington Opera house and personally collected the cash until she had been repaid in full."
There’s plenty of BLERTA and Geoff Murphy and Bruno Lawrence, true Renaissance Hippie. There's Tim Shadbolt being revolutionary and baffling and hugely engaging; there's Sandra Coney and her father of notorious legend, fulminating old-school hard-school Kiwi bloke Tom Pearce.
Now we know how many Kiwi acid-heads it takes to fill the Albert Hall
There's Nick's father Con helping the publishers of Cock find a way to publish subversive literature when no printer will oblige.
And there's admiration for artist heroes like Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell embracing the chance to “remain permanently on the road and beyond the reach of a dull suburban life,” consistently and expressly evolving their work. “Being part of an institution let alone becoming one was anathema to Red Mole.”
There are expat legends like John Esam, poet, psychonaut, trip adviser. Here he is being the first person charged in the UK with possession of LSD. And here he is helping launch International Poetry Incarnation, a seminal British Counterculture moment. And now we know how many Kiwi acid-heads it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
Music has been Nick Bollinger's life and he readily finds meaning through its lens. Why not, music was intrinsic to the movement. His sources are especially good here; fascinating accounts of free and joyous music festivals and the salacious plodding media reportage of same; stories of favourite acts like Mammal and the mercurial Graeme Nesbitt; a fascinating riff on the influence of Jimi Hendrix on Māori musicians like Billy Te Kahika.
The counterculture was liberation, it was revolt, it was protest. Much of it emulated the counterculture elsewhere, some ran along fault lines more particular to New Zealand that would carry on to 1981 and remain familiar to this day for its confrontational sexist thuggishness. Bollinger writes, "The conservative newspapers with the scaremongering headlines and loaded language... reinforced the rugby world’s view of the anti-apartheid movement as made up of communists and free-love practising hippies. That some were envious of the protestors’ supposed lifestyle was evident in a question put to Trevor Richards by a rugby club member from the Waikato after one of his talks: 'When I come down to Wellington to farewell the team…can I stay the night with one of your protest birds?'"
The counterculture was sexual liberation, but substantially on male terms. For unmarried or underage women there was little chance of being prescribed the pill. For women hoping to find enlightened behaviour in a countercultural man, there was little chance of satisfaction.
Some of these accounts are fond recollections, some more rueful: where did it go to, that life?
Where did it go to, that revolution? The spoiler is right there on the cover: it rose, it fell, it was gone before Muldoon was.
The author is not emphatic about who killed it but he has suggestions, in particular individualistic instincts militating against the collective spirit. The first people of this land understood the collective spirit deeply; young people of comparative advantage took it on as experiment. Some stayed with it, many did not. The apple may rock from the tree but it tends mostly not to roll all that far.
Still and all, they rolled far enough to take us from monochrome to technicolour before we had folded most of the radicalism into long hair and flares and this season’s fashion tips.
Cheers for the changes, cheers for the memories, people in tripping clothes sitting in trees.
Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press,$49) is available in bookstores nationwide.
