Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                  AS THE COUNTERCULTURE REALLY WAS… AND IS

Recently, I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing on this blog Nick Bollinger’s Jumping Sundays, his entertaining, comprehensive and detailed account of the “counterculture” in New Zealand in the 1960s and early 1970s. As I pointed out in my review, as well as sharing the same familiar name (I’m Nick to many friends), Nick Bollinger and I are “baby-boomers” as we were both born in the same decade, the 1950s. But I am six years older than he. This means that I was already leaving high-school and going to university when the “counterculture” was in full swing, while he was still going through the junior classes of high-school. So (dare I say it?), even allowing for differences in temperament and upbringing, my memories of those times are inevitably different from his.

But before I get into the autobiographical part of this posting, I have to make some general points about the old “counterculture”.

First is the obvious fact that every generation tends to think it is creating the world anew. In my last years at high-school, in the late 1960s, the music that was being created (Beatles, Stones etc.), the relaxation of censorship and the type of films that were being made (The Graduate, Zeffirelli’s version of Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde) persuaded us schoolboys that we were in a new age, unique and different from, and more open than, our parents. But looking back, and comparing 1960s music and films with earlier music and films, what I now see is continuity with just some modifications. If each young generation thinks it has unique and new insights, then each young generation is often sorely deluded.

Second issue is the meaning of this term “counterculture”. In Jumping Sundays, Nick Bollinger’s foreword states: “By the late sixties, counterculture was in common use and remained so for much of the following decade, after which … it began to slip into the past tense.” (p.21) But I believe this freezes the meaning of the word as it is now used, and implies that the “counterculture” applies only to the decade that Bollinger examines. When it is now used by sociologists and other commentators (who frequently present the term in hyphenated form as “counter-culture”), a counterculture is a sub-culture that runs against current norms or the mainstream culture of a given society. Thus, for example, in New Zealand now, where pop and rock music dominate the airwaves and podcasts, and where religious observation has declined drastically, it is truly countercultural to listen to classical music and go to operas and it is truly countercultural to regularly attend church. Radical, man! The term is not reserved for the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Of course there are also destructive movements which could legitimately be called countercultural, such as anti-vaxxers, idiots who call themselves “sovereign citizens” (i.e. people who think they are above the law), gangs etc. but the point still stands.

Third issue is that many of the ideas embraced by the 1960s / ‘70s counterculture have now been largely reversed by a younger generation. For example, in the 1960s, at Berkeley University in the USA, there was the radical “free speech” movement, and gradually throughout the Western world, university students began to take it for granted that platform speakers could now say whatever they liked in a university environment. Now we live in a world of “cancel culture”, which is a reality despite some pundits denying that there is such a thing. The smallest statement a speaker or writer may utter can cause that speaker to be “de-platformed” from a campus, or for petitions to be spread condemning that speaker and asking for some sort of sanction or punishment in the name of (self-)righteousness. The notion that there might be legitimate statements at odds with current norms is incomprehensible to some organised campus groups. This is an age in which “trigger warnings” have to be given if fragile university student ears are likely to be told harsh truths. In the USA, comedians are first vetted lest that say anything offensive to a campus audience. “I am offended” becomes the catch-cry of de-platformers, and anyone who promotes free speech is labelled a “free speech absolutist”. Of course free speech has never been absolute, and rightly so. Laws against slander and libel, laws against inciting violence, and sanctions against genuinely extremist groups have been with us for many centuries. But when many of the present era label people as “free speech absolutists”, they are most often condemning speakers and writers who simply express views they dislike.

I could say other things about the 1960s/70s counterculture, including my great scepticism of those who purported to be seeking “spirituality”, which as often as not meant hedonism and zonking out on drugs. But with regard to New Zealand, what I would emphasise is how much in the 1960s/70s, younger people were more likely to take their cultural cues from the USA rather than from Britain, which had been the model for their parents. Sure there were influential British bands and musicians (Beatles, Stones, Kinks et al, with me being a heretic and preferring Alan Price). But the quality of protests in the USA, the type of anti-war rhetoric in the USA, the psychedelic drug buzzy-ness in the USA, the Eastern mysticism embraced in the USA, the dropping-out-into-communes in the USA  - all became the pattern for protests, anti-war rhetoric, drugginess, mystic aspirations and communes in New Zealand. If I were to sum up New Zealand’s counterculture in the 1960s/70s, I would say it was the decade when New Zealand acknowledged  that its cultural pattern was woven in (love it or hate it) the USA rather than in Britain. (See on this blog a related posting on this reality called Imported Protests.)

Okay, that’s it, apart from my own teenage-and-young-adult memories, so here comes the autobiography.

A book like Jumping Sundays, very detailed though it is, might lead some to believe that every young person on the 1960s/70s was attached to the counterculture, dying to live in a flat or on a commune, smoking weed and rebelling against their parents. And of course this simply was not the case.  Most young people might like new-style rock music and attend rock concerts; but after leaving school, the majority were still busy trying to get a job and earn an income or even (an aspiration virtually inconceivable now) trying to begin the long process of paying off a mortgage on a house. University tuition was free (so long as one had passed the University Entrance exam or Bursary or Scholarship), but even so, the majority of young people were not university students.

I was, beginning in 1970, a university student, but I never went flatting. For most of my student years I lived, rent-free, at my parents’ home. Being the youngest of a large family, I shared the house with only my parents as all my siblings had already left home; and then, when my father died prematurely, I was with only my mother for two years. Most students found it easy to get jobs during university breaks and vacations; and at one time or another, I worked at nearly every factory on the Mount Wellington Highway in Auckland – Fisher and Paykel, Alex Harvey’s, Sunshine Foods etc. Amazing to think now how ready personnel staff were to sign students on for such casual labour, especially as students often found there was little real work for students to do in factories. Sure, I remember bottling fruit, controlling a gantry and working on an assembly line. But I also remember hours of hiding out with others in backrooms, or walking up and down with a clip-board pretending I was checking stock, because there was really nothing to do. It was almost as if casual labour then was a sort of accepted charity for students. Still, the pay enabled me to buy a (second-hand) motor scooter and buzz around freely in the evening chasing girlfriends or catching up with movies and live-performances at university.

You see, I was essentially a conformist, though I did grow my hair to shoulder-length, hippie-style. I remember once going into a barber shop in central Auckland looking for a haircut, but the grumpy barber took one look at me and said “Nah. I don’t do that hippie-stuff!” and told me to get out. Obviously he was a short-back-and-sides man.

But, being a student, I couldn’t exactly avoid the counterculture. There were rants and orations nearly every day in the quad at the Students’ Union, just across the road from Albert Park, and of course I heard many speakers expounding on the war in Vietnam, apartheid and women’s rights. I can remember students acting out the shooting of protesting students at Kent State University in the USA. Feminist speeches were rarer but impassioned. There was also anger if speakers seemed frivolous or conservative. Near capping days, there was the disgusting tradition of some students “drinking a pub dry”, often announced with the charming chant “Eat more, root more, sink more piss”. There were loud boos and the threat of violence once when a half-drunk engineering student butted into an earnest oration and exhorted students to invade a popular pub and drink themselves silly.

Things were very earnest then. But Tim Shadbolt wasn’t. I heard many of his improvised speeches – usually vague, generalised, more entertaining than serious, peppered with silly jokes and catch-phrases and much fun when he decided to trap his audience. I paraphrase from memory one of his traps. “The government’s pouring twenty million dollars every month into the war. Twenty million dollars!!!” At this, the student throng gasped with horrified disbelief. Whereupon Shadbolt would say “See. I just made that up. It’s all bullshit. People will believe any bullshit. Newspapers, television. It’s all bullshit.” He flashed his toothy grin at me once when I passed him on the street, which seemed a big deal at the time.

I joined in a number of marches against apartheid, but I steered clear of demos against the war in Vietnam. The fact was, I was compromised. One of my elder brothers, whom I admired very much, was a career soldier and was then a young officer in charge of an artillery battery in Vietnam. (See posting on this blog Goodbye Soldier)

What I noticed, too, is that some voices, regarded as very "countercultural", were actually endorsed and approved of by some thinking older people. It wasn't necessarily a battle between the generations. When Germaine Greer made her controversial visit to Auckland, she was interviewed on television. I remember my parents at first watching with a degree of scepticism. But as she got to talking, they found themselves more and more agreeing with her. When she discussed the way society was being atomised, families were isolated from their neighbours, and old people were shoved into retirement homes, I remember my father saying "She's right you know" which was my parents' judgement on nearly all her comments.

One thing about the “counterculture” was how performative its more fervent adherents were. Everybody seemed to be playing a role which I couldn’t take seriously. I remember, in my naivete, going to a poetry reading, innocent enough to believe that I was going to hear real poetry. Silly me. The headliners were Alan Brunton and some of his mates. Brunton seemed to be either pissed or stoned. At any rate he stumbled onto the stage, appeared to be disoriented and fumbled and mumbled before delivering a few lines. There followed a long, embarrassing silence, until Brunton asked his audience “What do you think of it so far?” or words to that effect. “Inertia! ” I shouted with all my 20-year-old wit. Whereupon he shouted back “You, sir, have vertigo!” You see back then, in the counterculture, totally meaningless statements could be taken to be either surreal or profound. Then of course there were the inevitable encounters with the very performative James K. Baxter. (See The Baxter Problem on this blog.)

Defining moment for me, however, was a year or so after I’d graduated. I bumped into a fellow former-student who’d been in the same Eng. Lit. tutorial group as I. He was a guy who would always turn up wearing a tasselled soft-leather jacket and a leather cowboy hat, with shaggy beard and wild hair. “Reid,” he said, “we never could figure out what you were trying to say. One day you’d turn up in jeans and sleeves and the next day it’d be collar and tie.” I thought about this for a moment and then it dawned on me. As a student, I’d wear whatever happened to be available and clean. I wasn’t trying the “say” anything. Clothes were just clothes. But the expectation of that counterculture time was that everything was an act, a public declaration of self, a performance. In that respect among many others, I never was a part of the counterculture and never took it seriously. It took a long time for some people to discover how destructive and bogus so much of it was. And of course the tasselled cowboy himself went on to become a sober, be-suited member of the professions.