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Perceptions of Nimbin

By Graham Irvine - posted Wednesday, 14 July 2010


In some ways the village of Nimbin has come a long way since the 1973 Aquarius Festival which was the largest assembly of alternative thinkers Australia has ever seen. Even the nearby town of Lismore which, for decades, ignored or denigrated its potential is now embracing it in its tourist brochures. Lismore would be foolish not to do so as Nimbin is now the second most visited place in New South Wales after Byron Bay. However in the Council’s events calendar there is no mention of the hugely successful Mardi Grass Festival which attracts thousands of people to this village of some 750 souls. But how much of Nimbin’s change has entered the consciousness of the Australian print media and its readership?

Every so often these newspapers despatch a reporter and sometimes a photographer to do an “exclusive” on our little village. So what do they see and how do they report it? As a long-term resident I was curious to know their themes, their “spin”, their mistakes and their attitudes to what they saw. I decided to use the Factiva database to find newspaper feature articles as far back as possible and to conduct a content analysis of this data.

The methodology employed was quite simple, being based on the numbers of un/favourable characteristics ascribed to Nimbin, so as “to indicate the attitudes held by the writers, their readers or their common culture” (Krippendorf, Klaus, Content analysis) towards Nimbin. The papers sourced were a combination of metropolitans (The Australian, Adelaide Advertiser, The Courier-Mail and Sunday Mail, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Daily and Sunday Telegraph) and regional newspapers, (the Gold Coast Bulletin, Townsville Bulletin, Cairns Post) and one piece each from the Toronto Star and Chicago Tribune. All in all the database rendered 34 articles ranging from 1989 to 2010 which formed the basis for the subsequent analysis.

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Unfortunately the Factiva database only begins in 1989 but fortunately a book chapter written by my colleague Rhonda Ellis and ex-colleague Fiona Martin devotes a few lines to the attitude of Lismore’s Northern Star towards Nimbin before and after the 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival. Their research indicates that:

“… in the last three months of 1972, the Northern Star carried only one ‘neutral’ mention of the area’s new arrivals. All other accounts related to ‘Indian hemp’ and narcotic drug charges, a protest outside the Lismore courthouse after a drug raid, and a piece entitled ‘Surfies asked to move on’ sourced from Victoria.

“In early 1973 this trend continued, although as the Aquarius Festival gained growing attention, most Star stories were positive and enthusiastic about the business opportunities for Nimbin. Only days after the festival started, however, an editorial raised concerns about health hazards and child welfare, complaining about the ‘scruffy’ newcomers, whose ‘primitive and permissive lifestyle’, it suggested, ‘the majority will reject’.

“Subsequent articles that week examined: unfounded rumours of a venereal disease outbreak at the festival and the details of drug charges laid against visitors; ugly scenes between police and festival-goers; vandalism of Nimbin by persons unknown; and protests about government funding of the festival.” (Martin, Fiona and Rhonda Ellis, Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast).

In the same book, Wilson claims that even today, “there is still a tendency in popular discourse to spectacularise hippies and ferals as different, unruly and … threatening.”

Of the 34 articles analysed 18 were generally favourable in their reporting and attitude to Nimbin; ten unfavourable and six equivocal. The more right wing publications, for example the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and the Gold Coast Bulletin, tended to be more negative than the rest.

As expected, the most common theme was drugs, both hard and soft, and hippies. There was not a single article which did not mention drugs and very few which did not refer to hippies. The more sensationalist press overflowed with negative hyperbole on drugs, like, “dope-crazed hippies”, while another claimed, without a shred of evidence, that, “Today, the free-spirited hippie of the Nimbin fairytale is more likely to be a bikie whose clandestine laboratory pumps out hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of speed.

Said another, “the Aquarius Festival of 1973 [was] organised … as a victory celebration for the withdrawal of Australian support for the Vietnam War”. One wonders whether the scribes who made these allegations had imbibed too much of the local green herb.

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Hippies were variously described as “unwashed” or “ageing” but more maliciously the “lost souls of the Whitlam experiment white trash” and Nimbin was “the hippie capital” or “the mecca of psychedelia”.

In the more favourable accounts Nimbin is still about “the counter-culture, peace and sustainability … [and] … occasionally of retirement villages for old hippies” whereas the more pejorative pieces spoke of “The dope capital’s foul face”; “How Nimbin’s dream [had] dissolved to a dark nightmare”; and how the “real hippies have fled to the hills”.

But the most troubling piece was this comment, which related to a world tour car rally in the Nimbin area in late 2009: “Hippies were respected [sic] to be different up to the weekend rally. Now they are the most hated variety on the whole coast. Watch out you ferals, wearing retro and having dreadlocks has never been so dangerous. The wildlife is safe, the hippies amongst it have just gone to number one come the hunting season.” (Chatroom: What you said about the rally protests”, Gold Coast Bulletin, September 8, 2009.)

Another frequently mentioned topic was the counterculture/alternative lifestyle and the landmark Aquarius Festival of 1973.The main street is reported in some detail and that is about as far as most of the hacks got on their visits. Since the street is the locale for petty drug dealers it is not surprising that their stories are negative.

“Communes” or intentional communities often get a run - usually favourably - although there was much confusion over their numbers and their success. The Sydney Morning Herald could only find “about six”, but the two overseas papers reported “sixty two communes surrounding the village” and another hack reported that “hundreds of communities [had] sprang up in and around Nimbin”. The real figure is about 20, depending on your definition of “community”. While one writes that, around Nimbin, “the rural communes flourish”, a few months later another writer asserts that, “the days of the commune are over [and] the last were dying”.

Stories on Nimbin businesses also frequently feature the successful “straights” (non hippies) who run them or who practice a profession at home or in Lismore or Nimbin. Latterly the scribes have been writing about the boom in tourism which sees seven buses a day visiting the village, disgorging dozens of tourists from all over the world, from backpackers to grey nomads.

One of the two more bizarre stories reports on the launch in Nimbin of the latest Volkswagen Kombi, the Caddy Life, whose PR manager is quoted as saying, “There will be a lot of people who know Nimbin from thirty years ago who are now well off and interested in a vehicle like this”.

But perhaps even more bizarre is a poisonous piece from the notorious Piers Ackerman in an article entitled “Pay no mind to paranoid hippies” (Sunday Telegraph October 14, 2001). Conflating the Greens and Democrats with “dole bludging fringe dwellers at Nimbin” who want the navy to release videos of refugee boat people, he insists that, “The navy must not accede to the wishes of ageing hippies and dysfunctional children”.

About a third of the reports contained errors of detail. Given their distance from Nimbin it is excusable that the two overseas reports were mistaken in erroneously claiming that, “at least 10,000 hippies and others live in the New South Wales town of Nimbin” (Cornelia Grunman, “Stoned or sober, Oz outpost a real trip”, Chicago Tribune January 9, 2000 and Toronto Star February 5, 2000). However there is no such excuse for papers like the Townsville Bulletin which also claimed a population of 10,000 while the Sydney Morning Herald claimed “about 250” and The Courier-Mail “three hundred residents”.

Some of the more egregious errors include the completely false assertion that, “Before the Age of Aquarius … [Nimbin] was a thriving agricultural district. It was not. A teahouse 15km from Nimbin is described as being “on Nimbin’s outskirts”. But the prize for the most muddleheaded misstatement should go to The Australian whose reporter wrote about, “the neighbouring coastal town of Dharmananda”. Dharmananda is in fact not a town at all but an intentional community situated 50-odd kilometres from the coast.

So what are we to make of these findings? Well, first, that Nimbin still retains the uniqueness that stemmed from the 1973 festival. Second, that there are too many newspapers whose reporters and editors won’t let the facts spoil a good story.

But let the late Rick Farley, who was known when he lived in Nimbin as “Rick Far-out” because of his radical views, have the last word of advice for journalists writing about Nimbin: “The great legacy of Nimbin is having an open mind, being inquiring, being able to cross boundaries and not be stuck in your own little world.”

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About the Author

Graham Irvine is a Sessional Lecturer in Law and Justice at Southern Cross University, Lismore, having practised as a solicitor in NSW and Queensland. His background includes radio journalism and documentary production for ABC Radio. He has lived on an intentional community outside Nimbin for 35 years.

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