Written for Nimbin News, April 2003
The1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival was an affirmation of peace, a victory celebration for the student movement, which had successfully resisted the US War on Vietnam and Australia¹s complicity in it with so called defence forces¹. At that time the army was made up of conscripts.
The counter cultural re-settlement of Nimbin and district was inspired by the dreams expressed at that seminal event. Many were the seeds planted for peace and harmony. Many crops of social, cultural and economical innovation have been harvested since. And not just in the Rainbow Region because the influences of peace are subtle and graceful as ripples on a pond.
Thirty years on and once again Australian troops have sided with the rich and their managerial elites against the poor. Once more our politicians are lying and once more our soldiers have blood on their hands. Shameful it is to be part of the military levy we Australians pay as a vassal state of the USA as hyper power. No conscripts this time, all mercenaries.
Once again, the richest most industrialised nation ever is bombing and shooting the faraway poor. From the web comes news of huge peace protests around the world and eyewitness accounts and photos of blown apart Iraqi children. Once again Australian troops have sided with the rich and their managerial elites against the poor, blood on their hands and hiding their shameful deeds from the witness of journalists. For shameful it is to be the military levy we Australians pay as a vassal state of the USA as hyper power.
And once more the US war has come to our streets as civil conflict. Like last time it is waged in the name of law and order, this time courtesy of Bob Carr, the super suit courtier of the corporate rich who, newly re-elected under the cover of war, moved at once to suppress student peace marches in Sydney.
What is the difference between Labor Premier Robert Carr and former Liberal Premier Robert Askin? As a fellow student at UNSW I know Carr never went to a Vietnam War peace protest. Truth is in the early days of the campaign he was as pro war as Premier "Drive over the bastards!" Askin.
Down the road in Wollongong and he opened a new Drug War offensive with tactics learned from the US, assets stripping for cannabis offences. Carr's corruption as a courtier of the US aligned corporate rich knows no bounds.
Once again we live in a time of global scale piracy, tyranny, big lies and managed consent. Deja vu. The wheel has come full circle in forty years. The technology may have changed but the aggressor is the same and so is the story.
The government lied to us about the Vietnam War with the same arrogance and contempt with which they lie to us now. Just like Iraq War, the Vietnam War was asymmetrical: the US lost about 50,000 dead, Australians 500, and the Vietnamese an estimated 1.2 million.
And the peace movement was in much the same position, many people without much cohesion or organization up against the paid managerial elites and their technology. Many individual voices, citizens feeling appalled, denigrated, powerless and ignored. Not knowing how to proceed.
I recall that in 1966, the Liberals had won a landslide victory campaigning All the Way with LBJ'. The feckless ALP, as loyal Opposition, also endorsed the Vietnam War. At the time Bob Carr was a student then, a suit wearing protege in training with the NSW Labor Council, the ruling ALP faction, which was particularly fervent in its pro Americanism.
But six years later all that was turned around. Popular opposition was such that even the ALP Right came out against the War and in 1972, after 25 years of corrupt and toadying conservative rule, the reforming Whitlam Labor government swept into office.
In those times I was an engineering student at the University of NSW, editor of the student paper and president of the Student's Union and active organiser of protest on and from that campus. I witnessed the movement grow from protests of about 50 people rattling around Martin Place to Moratoriums with 100,000s outside the Sydney Town Hall.
What were the roots of this turn around?
There were many factors: concern about the rising casualties, the impact of graphic TV reporting, the ALP branch revolts and so on. But the foundation of it was the widespread suspension of belief in, and rejection of, the political, social and cultural institutions that had led us to war and fed us lies to justify it.
At the time we called this movement the counter-culture. It turned its back to the liars and set about searching for truth and experimenting with right living alternatives, building community as it went.
By the end of the 60s the manifestations of the counter culture were many and multi-faceted. It was primarily a youth movement and a cultural exploration, which went beyond the Cold War ideologies of the Right and Left.
The signs of it were in the reassertions of humanism and activism; people before corporations, governments and their war machines, protest as a lifestyle, make love not war, a popular slogan.
It was visible in such things as:
the reassessment of diet, in food organics, vegetarianism, macrobiotics; in medicine, a rediscovery of herbs,
naturopathy, acupuncture and a whole raft of non pharmaceutical, holistic modalities,
in a renewed search for the sacred in which new Christian sects arose and eastern gurus Hindu and Buddhist gathered following;
in alternative technology, with its interest in low tech, energy efficient and sustainable;
in alternative fashions of long hair, beards, mini skirts, flowery, flowing and clothes;
in different patterns of drug use;
a turn away from alcohol culture of our parents and an uptake of cannabis and LSD; in music the protest song became amplified and cultural traditions fused;
in communications pre email networking was the go and underground tabloids were passed around; and
in sexual mores, there was lots of it because what's the use of a revolution with out general general copulation, copulation, copulation.
The 60s peace movement grew and grew exponentially as it affirmed itself as a creative and caring culture of many frontiers. Lots of individual and small groups acts of resistance, draft resisting and conscientious objection, office sit-ins and so on, celebrated and supported in a culture of dissent.
More or better information was an important contributor, but more than information is needed to create cultural movement. The 60s counter culture gave one the sense of participation in a new frontier of friendliness and creative exploration. Like a snowball it gathered following and momentum, less by cerebral argument and more by the meetings with open hearts, a smiles and a lives more fully lived.
Protests became cultural expos and great fun in spite of aggressive police and the old fart neo-Stalinists at the microphones. We took out culture into the streets and lived our truth joyfully, waving peace signs and walking the talk of freedom.
This cultural victory was the context of the 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival. Ten days living on the Earth together, camping in and around a small village of Nimbin, in a dramatically beautiful lush semi-tropical valley in northern NSW, ancient initiation grounds of the Bundjalung people.
Neither big nor hyped up rock'n'roll; but rather small (may be 2,500), and intensely charged with good ideas, challenge, wonder and revelation. Radicalised students came from all round Australia along with all kinds of counter cultural gurus, seekers, experimenters in truth, shaman, yogis, street performers, minstrels, poets, jesters, lovers, ravers, fools, prophets, pioneers and kings.
In 1972 Johnny Allen and I spent the first part of the journey to the Nimbin Aquarius on the counter cultural trail, travelling the country, meeting people, listening to their stories, and talking up Aquarius as a lifestyle festival and inviting participation.
"Come," we would say. "Ten days in May; do your stuff, be your truth."
"Culture is politics" was a slogan; another was "We will not be sold our culture." Paul Joseph joined us songman and every meeting ended in song, anthems of the times and the benediction: "May a long time sunshine upon you/All love surround you/And the pure light with you/guide your way on."
And it all happened under the radar of the corporate/government media. The 1973 Aquarius Festival promoted itself through the student and underground press, on the lips of the counter culture. Johnny Allen formed the White Company to tour the campuses and make the medium of our artful festival, our message.
The cultural ramifications of the Aquarius festival and the counter culture it expressed have been many and subtle. Byron Bay for example became a land of healers, and is now seen as the ultimate real estate for good lifestyle living.
The legacy that gives me deep joy and satisfaction is the social activism that has taken root and flourished in the province around the Nimbin valley that now calls it's the Rainbow Region. This culture of activism revealed its strength at the 1979 Battle of Terania Creek, the first successful defence of rainforest anywhere ever. But there have been many, many green and social justice campaigns since then and its in second generation now. The children of the dream are activists.
In fact activism has become a protest export industry. From the Rainbow Region came the environmental defence forces, which saw action at Terania near Nimbin, also defended the Daintree forests in far north Queensland and the Chaelundi forests near Coffs Harbour. They shut down the cyanide gold mining operation at Timbarra near Tenterfield and now protesting the cyanide gold mining operation at Lake Cowal in central NSW.
Likewise the activism for social justice that has taken the opposition to the US Drug War from Cullen Street Nimbin, to Lismore and Byron courthouses, to the NSW federal parliaments, to the gates of all the major jails of NSW, to Sydney for the 2000 Olympix and to the gates of the s11, World Economic Forum in Melbourne in 2000.
A great joy it was for me earlier this year to be far away and see 750 naked Byron ladies clustered in a giant heart, and making peace art on national and international TV.
We Aquarians were not the first to walk the peace path of friendliness and community building. The disciples of the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and many other cultural heroes have done the same; many are the footprints on this path, all of them rungs for our ladder.
Nor will we be the last. The erring wheel of ignorance, like moisture in a meadow, never can be checked. The greed and tyranny of the rich is ever re-asserting itself with new weapons, new lies, new cruelties, new fears.
Free people ever struggle to build communities of compassion, care and dignity. Pirates, liars and thieves are the field in which we must work. The Tao te Ching says it this way: "What is a good man but a bad man's teacher? What is bad man but a good man's job?"
A new generation faces the challenge of reinventing peace and democracy. On behalf of all Aquarians, I wish them well. May the fruit of their peace making be abundant for many generations to come.
Graeme Dunstan
Anniversaries are about storytelling and remembering. In a time of war we will be remembering the pathways we Aquarians walked for peace. We invite interested people to come join us as a circle of old friends link up and reflect on changes. Check the program at http://www.aquarius.rainbowregion.com/
