Hippy Shack

More about the Hippy Shack

The Aquarius Festival attracted international media when special trains from the major cities brought thousands of hippies and alternative thinking people together for what turned out to be a defining moment in Australias hippy history. This was our Woodstock! (Now Nimbin’s sister city).

After the huge success of the Aquarius festival many people stayed on, some banding together to buy farms, and communes began. Some of the earliest were Tuntable Falls Co-ordination Co-operative, Nmbngee Community Co-operative and Paradise Valley, all still going strong and boasting

3 generations in places. Today there are more than 100 commmunities of varying sorts and legalities around Nimbin.

Elspeth’s painting of a hippie commune with Mount Warning and a melting Australia in the Hippy Shack

The showcase of drugs shows one of the dilemmas of our time that has had an enormous impact on the Aquarian vision of people living together harmoniously with the earth and each other, the Nimbin dream. Cannabis, for example, was almost a cornerstone of hippy culture, and in early days a sacred herb, shared, or sold for $30 an ounce to help pay the car rego! Today, its $300 per ounce and a fierce competitive market place exists within the village which has had a massive effect on the museum as well as everything else here……

An integral part of the original museum vision was that it was a temple of sorts, accessible for everyone (donations only), an experimental art installation, if you like, that was interactive between visitors and locals, and reflected what was happening in the community.

We didn’t expect the cannabis market (and other drugs) to be so all pervasive! Many displays in the museum have been trashed or dismantled by… probably, mostly, young people who have little understanding of what they are doing. Remember, we are the idealistic hippies trying to practice what we preach…and the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as we saw in the pioneer room.

Hippies, who won’t go to the police and don’t believe in fighting are doormat material for todays cynical youth, and who can blame them! Nimbin’s unusual tolerance and compassionate acceptance means we have become the last bus stop for many!

The Nimbin hippy community is very cosmopolitan with many new settlers from overseas, Nimbin being the end of a long journey for some who spent years in India, Asia or South America on the famous early hippy trails. Elspeth for example rode a bicycle through India with French Sam who now resides across the road in the Hemp Bar.

Community living, as happening around Nimbin has been a quick learning curve for most. Many hippies grew up in suburbia and went to university. Starting from scratch on a piece of earth to build a house and garden, and sort out electricity, water, access etc., while having children, through wet seasons, floods, ticks and leeches, and so on……many are called but few are chosen!!! Understandably many returned to “the civilised world” where other people do the dirty work for you!! And comfort is surely a word of our times.

Slowly more Nimbin farmers have sold out to newcomers from the city, enjoying the rising prices. If you fly over the area, the regrowth of forest areas is noticeable as hippies let cattle paddocks return to nature and regenerate the forest.

By the time you reach the Hippy Shack on your personal journey along the museum’s Rainbow Serpent, you have started thinking about consequences! Obviously the pioneer era disaster, even if it was unintentional, needs a lot of work to fix. And the whole of humanity is on this consumer roller coaster, out of control, blindly still consuming, consuming and more consuming. People have forgotten where happiness comes from. Searching for answers young baby boomers, arguably the adventurous and daring, took mind altering substances from which there was no turning back.

Hippies tried to live apart from the system. They shared what they had and helped each other building, birthing, gardening and so on. They shared their pot too, in those days. In the late seventies the dole arrived and many think that was a critical point of change. The more money you have the better the nuclear family nightmare tempts you, the poor stay closer together.

Communities have had varying degrees of success, whatever that means. They’ve provided an inexpensive access to life on the land for many. Originally shares in some communities cost as little as $100. They’ve also been real life workshops for relationships on all levels and experimental in all areas of living. Every attitude and habit was reviewed, and alternatives often invented which would have less impact on the earth. Discovering a new lifestyle is not easy, and inevitably some ‘babies get thrown out with the bath water’. Thirty years later it must be called a resounding success, with many of the children raised on communities now very talented adults out in the world making their mark .

The effort is the result! Hippies had often travelled to the East, and brought home many treasures that were ridiculed at first by the populace at large, but are now mainstream. Health foods , vegetarianism and veganism, meditation and yoga, various diets and new knowledge of the plant world was all loony to the redneck locals who were still thrilled by the discovery of the pie. ( The Museum in an earlier incarnation was a thriving Blue Moon Cafe pumping out thousands of pies a week from the oven in the back room.) Every supermarket has a health food section now.

Yoga, meditation and countless other ‘New Age’ healing techniques and remedies have taken root here, flowered, and gone out into the world. The first National Parks, old growth preserved from logging, were created here from the Terania Creek protests. It began a movement and pattern that continues to this day of environmentalists putting their life on the line if necessary to stop bulldozers in their tracks. “Gunns” the woodchipping monster in Tasmania are lucky they operate a long way from Nimbin.