“I always wanted to know what the foundations of this thing were. Why there was this youth uprising in that period. I entered a world informed by it in the mid-seventies. Thinking about it now, I realise it was almost over by the time I stepped into it. It was almost like stepping into this vacuum that had just been vacated.”
As well as the individuals from the period Nick has spoken to for his book, at the end of May he convened a one-day Stout and Manatū Taonga—Ministry for Culture and Heritage symposium bringing together a diverse group of around 100 “academics, activists, historians, hippies, and punters without portfolio”.
It was billed as the “first campus ‘teach-in’ in 50 years!”.
In addition to collecting “a few nuggets of less recorded information”, Nick got a sense of some of the schisms of the period, most notably those around class and gender and the extent to which the counterculture was middle-class and sexist, with men treating the sexual revolution “as a sort of playground for themselves where, when it came down to it, they were the ones going up to the mountaintop and having conversions and expressing themselves”.
The counterculture was also primarily Pākehā, says Nick.
“There was a certain amount of reinvention of the wheel. A lot of them were going, ‘Let’s get back to the land, let’s live communally, let’s do all these things,' almost oblivious to the fact there was already a precedent for that in this country. But rather than going, ‘What can we learn from Māori?’, they were looking overseas.
“There’s an interesting thing with the Māori land movement, Polynesian Panthers, and also the women’s liberation movement: you can see in those early stages they were all interconnected, and connected with the anti-war movement, the anti-nuclear movement, and just the general hippy movement, but there’s a certain point, and it doesn’t take long really, when they realise, ‘All these other people aren’t being helpful to us and, actually, we’re better to focus on our own cause here.'
“Liberation is this word that gets used so much around the counterculture and you have to ask, liberation for who?”
Nick’s introduction to the counterculture was through his teenage cousins with their long hair, bare feet, and love beads.
“That is how I got a connection to this music so early. My cousins were listening to the latest records of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones through the sixties as they were coming out, so I was getting this stuff from them. Jimi Hendrix and all that, I got into all that stuff when I was pretty young, 10 or 11 or 12. It was alluring. It was fascinating. It was dangerous. This whole idea that the previous generation was being challenged, which I think is what the counterculture really was. It was the baby-boomers coming of age and questioning everything,” he says.
“Through a fluke of history, they had the freedom to do that at that point. Because New Zealand at that time had virtually full employment. People were being paid to go to university. I’m not sure people realised how lucky they were. But rather than expressing undying gratitude, they went, ‘Okay, we’ve got this freedom to ask questions. We don’t like this and this and this.’”
