We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“JUMPING SUNDAYS – The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture
in Aotearoa New Zealand” by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press, $NZ49:99)
Sometimes it’s best to give a succinct
verdict on a book at the beginning of a review rather than working slowly
towards a verdict, so here I go. Nick Bollinger’s Jumping Sundays is a
thoroughly-researched, always interesting and very engaging work – a mine of
information about a time and a place. Nobody will agree with absolutely every
judgement Bollinger makes in the course of his narrative, but everybody will
note the care with which he negotiates a decade now receding into the distant
past. For baby-boomers such as Bollinger and I (we were both born in the 1950s)
much of Jumping Sundays is an exercise in nostalgia, a reminder of
things that are largely forgotten and basically unknown by younger people. But while
he celebrates much, Bollinger does not endorse everything that belonged to the
old “counterculture” and in the end he delivers a very nuanced verdict on his
chosen decade, weighing up the good and the bad that came with a period of
change and often confusion.
There now. You have my verdict on
this very good book and if that was all you wanted you have to read no more.
But I’m one of those picky people who actually reads in detail the books he
reviews, and I’m now going to plunge into the specific details that support my
verdict. This will mean clopping through Jumping Sundays chapter by
chapter, quoting book and verse.
Bollinger’s opening gambit is a
vignette of the “jumping Sundays” in Auckland’s Albert Park, just across from
the university. These events were initiated in 1969 when thousands of (mainly)
young people invaded the park, against the regulations of the city council, and
turned it into a place of dancing, picnicking, speechifying, singing, listening
to bands and maybe smoking pot (though not too conspicuously). This was seen as
“liberating” the park and for Bollinger it typifies a new mindset of the times.
Bollinger shifts then, in Chapter
One, into the oft-told story of New Zealand’s precursors to the 1960s
counterculture. (I say “oft-told” because you can read about the Kiwi 1950s in
Redmer Yska’s All Shook Up and
about Auckland’s cultural 1950s and 1960s in Murray Edmond’s Time to Make a
Song and Dance.) There were those few bohemians and rebels in the
1950s and early 1960s who hung out in
coffee bars, knew about American beatniks, tried to emulate them, and generally
showed discontent with the way things
were. Some such people were genuine thinkers and writers, but others were
simply performative narcissists like Lorna Jenks (self-styled “Anna Hoffmann”),
an exhibitionist who specialised in posing and making scenes. Of course much of
this chapter assumes that New Zealand in the 1950s was a dour, puritanical,
tightly-controlled society where controversial books and films were regularly
banned and the RSA still held sway in the shadow of the Second World War. Some people
who lived at that time might question such a characterisation, but right or
wrong it has become the standard caricature of the New Zealand 1950s.
Then we get (Chapter 2) the first
whiff of the counterculture in the early 1960s. Awareness of the threat of
nuclear weapons sets more New Zealanders to thinking about banning the bomb,
protesting and often taking their cue from the British CND. The Vietnam War is heating
up and becoming a matter for protest. The jazz musician Thelonious Monk visits
New Zealand to the applause of jazz aficionados. In 1963, the Beatles visit New
Zealand. Girls scream. Some boys scream. It’s the harbinger of something, but critical
mass has not yet formed a real New Zealand counterculture. New Zealand is, as
always, behind the beat of what is going on overseas in Europe and especially in
the USA. Whereupon (Chapter 3) there is the beginning of a drug culture, which
rapidly becomes big in the USA. New Zealanders begin to smoke marijuana. Some
New Zealanders take LSD (which is banned in NZ only in 1967) and claim to be finding
enlightenment in their altered states. Others of course crash and have their
brains fried. Bollinger, balancing things up carefully in these matters, gives the
example of an overseas musician, Syd Barrett, founder of the band Pink Floyd, whose
“experiments with LSD inspired some of his most adventurous music, though
may also have been a catalyst for the mental illness that would ultimately
curtail his career.” (pp.82-83)
As mores begin to loosen up
(Chapter 4) adolescents and younger adults begins to clothe themselves
differently. Dare I use such antiquated terms as “funky” and “groovy” to describe
their kaftans and tie-dyed skirts and bandannas and soft-leather jackets with
tassels? For young men, the real sign of your hipness is long hair. They are,
as Bollinger correctly notes, in a way emulating those nineteenth-century
French poets who set out to epater la bourgeoisie (“flabbergast the
middle classes”). One problem is, however, that it takes a lot to really epater
la bourgeoisie, because in no time la bourgeoisie has monetised and
commercialised the counterculture’s fashions and is selling them in expensive
boutiques and using their imagery in their advertising. Far more important,
especially after the introduction of The Pill (as it was then called), sexual
mores were changing, sex outside marriage was less criticised, unmarried
mothers were more accepted (although their lot was still often a difficult
one). So we were into the era of “free love” with no barriers. But again there
was a big problem here. Often, in this new sexual environment, “free love”
meant men shaming or coercing women into having sex. Bollinger notes “A new
vocabulary, imported from psychotherapy, developed around sex and could be used
for coercion. Not wanting to have sex, for whatever reason, indicated that the
woman was ‘uptight’ or had ‘hang-ups’. Despite the counterculture’s
do-what-you-like ethos, social pressure could be powerful.” (p.116) The
result was that men often gained more freedom than women did in the era of “sexual
revolution” and it was understandable that women were soon to adopt what one
academic miscalled “sexual puritanism”. [On this matter it’s interesting to
look at Milo Bilbrough’s memoir of her time as a teenager in a hippie commune In
the Time of the Manaroans, reviewed on this blog, where
she notes the opportunism of males in the commune seeking sex.]
Meanwhile, a new sort of publication
was growing (Chapter 5) among university students and in “alternative”
bookshops such as the preciously titled Resistance Bookshop. Poets were (they
thought) “freeing the word”, though often writing in an opaque way understood
by few. Often the term “revolution” was bandied about, but it was never made
quite clear exactly what sort of revolution was being considered. Some
publications were simply high-spirited provocation, such as Christ’s College
old boy Chris Wheeler’s Cock, which was published between 1967 and 1973.
Some of its contents were amusing political satire but, as Bollinger freely admits,
much of it was schoolboyish smut and potty jokes. Understandably it was a great
hit with schoolboys. A similar, but not quite as scurrilous, publication was Earwig.
Then there were the university papers such as Craccum and Salient,
also now increasingly including satire and protest. In all this there was a
greater tendency for teenagers and university students to identify with “anti-establishment”
American movies such as Easy Rider. There was also the greater influence
of young public speakers only loosely connected with the universities. The best
known was Tim Shadbolt. As Nick Bollinger notes, Shadbolt’s soap-box orations
were often so nebulous that they meant little when analysed: “Wherever he
went, he never shut up. It helped that he was extremely entertaining. His
speeches, always recounted with humour, combined revolutionary rhetoric with ripping
yarns of masculine derring-do.” (p.153) Later (in Chapter 7) Bollinger
examines a violent Mick Jagger song and notes that it “amplifies the
casual misogyny of many a countercultural male” (p.214). Like it or
not, macho posturing and bullshit, even if wrapped in revolutionary language, was
a strong component of the counterculture.
Relentlessly (Chapter 6) , the
Vietnam War became a focus of protest, with marches, demonstrations, sit-ins
and petitions, at their height when US vice-president Spiro Agnew visited New
Zealand, facing protests around the Auckland hotel where he was staying. Though
some critics of the protests (such as Robert Muldoon) saw this as the work of
Communists, the fact is that the old and largely insignificant New Zealand Communist
Party had split in two and was a very minor component of such demonstrations.
Nevertheless, a Marxist-inspired group, the Progressive Youth Movement (PYM),
became prominent for a short time in this era. A small minority of protesters
turned to violence of a sort, such as John Bower who blew up a few things to
little effect. More important than this was the other great cause of protest,
to wit, apartheid South Africa and New Zealand’s sporting contacts therewith.
This inspired the foundation of HART (Halt All Racist Tours) in 1969, although
the biggest protests against racist tours came in 1981, when the “counterculture”
was largely over.
Forms of art were changed in New
Zealand’s 1960s and 1970s (Chapter 7). Some silly things happened, such as the
trial for obscenity of the American rock-musical Hair when it was staged
in Auckland. The producers of the show were acquitted and the show went ahead,
which shows how much censorship had been relaxed. More important than this
imported side-show, however, was the interesting musical work of Jenny McLeod,
who moved from classical music to grandiose compositions involving orchestra,
huge choruses and large settings. Her presentation Earth and Sky was
widely praised and appreciated with its telling of Maori origin myths; but her
later Under the Sun did not gain such applause. Later she moved into
rock music, said goodbye to academic teaching, moved into Eastern Mysticism by
way of drugs, and basically faded from the scene. Other music was making more
impact on young people. Prominently there was acid rock music and the influence
of Jimi Hendrix who, apparently, had a great influence on Maori bands. And
there were travelling shows, “festivals” and theatre, playing mainly to student
audiences, such as Ken Rae’s Living Theatre and Bruno Lawrence’s BLERTA and the attempts to
emulate Woodstock with rock festivals staged in rural fields (often very
popular but most of which lost money for their promoters).
And of course (Chapter 8) there
was a proliferation of communes and different ways of using a house. There was,
for a very short time, the “scandal” of “mixed flatting”, meaning male and
female students inhabiting the same house; but soon such arrangements were
accepted without comment. For some people, the poet James K. Baxter was a guru
of the counterculture, though his adopted Catholicism was often at war with his
propensity for having affairs with (sometimes young) women. Baxter was
undoubtedly one of New Zealand’s greatest and best poets, but his advocacy for younger
people and their point of view was often muddled. Nick Bollinger gives an amusing, sceptical and
somewhat jaded view of James K. Baxter’s interaction with young urban
lost souls in Auckland (pp.224-225). Famously Baxter later moved into a sort of
commune at Jerusalem on the Whanganui. Again, Bollinger gives a very mixed
report on it. But then communes in general, and the urge of some to separate
from cities and go “back to the land”, also get a mixed review. Some communes
functioned well and survived, especially those that were run by people who
really did know how to use the land and raise crops. But far more failed or
faded away after just a few years, frequently because the town-bred aspiring
communards didn’t know what hard work was required to be self-sufficient. Also,
in the general counterculture, there was an ongoing debate about their worth.
Bollinger writes: “There were those who believed that dropping out was
copping out; that to change the system or to bring about the revolution you had
to be in the thick of it, not on a remote hilltop smoking grass, nursing a
child or talking to God. An educated elite seeking self-sufficiency in a
commune or other closed, minority community was betraying its social role,
Russian-British architect Serge Chernayeff told students at the Warkworth
congress in early 1971. Others insisted that dropping out was itself a
political act.” (pp. 237-238).
This was the age (Chapter 9) when
gurus flourished and people who claimed to be seeking spirituality and
enlightenment became their disciples. Some took what became known colloquially
as “the hippie trail” and headed for Asia, especially India. Some took to
Transcendental Meditation or to chanting Hare Krishna. There were followers of the
Mahjara Ji’s cult. Perhaps the ultimate countercultural seekers of truth were
the Jesus Freaks. Most of these groups were benign and peaceful. But there were
other groups that were either authoritarian or extremely manipulative, such as Ananda
Marga, the Moonies and Scientologists. And there were gurus who, when they
turned up in New Zealand, proved to be less impressive than their supporters though
they would be. Bollinger gives a scathing account (p. 267) of Scottish
psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who visited in 1973 and underwhelmed his audience
with a rambling, semi-coherent speech filled with long pauses as he kept losing
the order of his pages. It surely can be no accident that Bollinger’s
publishers have chosen an accompanying photo of Laing looking as if he is
half-asleep or otherwise zonked-out. [From the perspective of 2022, I wonder why
anyone ever took Laing’s crank theories seriously, but let us move on…]. Some
gurus proved to be totally malign. In America, the notorious Esalen Institute
bent people’s minds and were perpetuators of the idea that women were “uptight”
or had “hang-ups” if they said no to sex. And, with a shudder, there was Bert
Potter’s Centrepoint, north of Auckland, which claimed to be curing people's
inhibitions but which ended with criminality, wide practice of paedophilia and
legal suits filed (successfully) by survivors.
Less controversial than all this,
and still much admired by many, was (Chapter 10) the growing environmental
movement. There had long been such a movement since the 1930s, but it had been
embraced only by a few vegetarians and crusading naturalists. In the 1960s and
1970s it became mainstream, with big campaigns such as attempting to save Lake
Manapouri from being flooded in the interests of generating power. This
campaign failed and the lake was duly flooded; but the campaign to save South
Island beech trees was more successful. Anthropogenic climate change hadn’t yet
become a widely-known issue, but conservationist groups stepped up their
interest in protecting threatened species. Nick Bollinger gives much credit to
the short-lived Values Party, founded in 1972, and sees it as the precursor to
the current Green Party.
But in the whole account of this
era of “counterculture”, there was an element that many radicals and protesters
took a long time to recognise. This (Chapter 11) was the presence of Maori and
Pasifika people, and the fact that they had legitimate grievances that Pakeha
protesters had ignored. Hence the formation of the Maori Nga Tamatoa and the
Pasifika Polynesian Panthers, which were inspired by the American civil rights
movement and the American Black Panthers. Increasingly Maori were asking
questions about land that had been expropriated and reminding communards that
the land they went to, with utopian plans, was Maori land. Samoans and Tongans
were protesting against being deported. After having discussed the different aspirations of
young Pakeha and young Maori, Nick Bollinger says: “If Maori and Pasifika alliances with the counterculture
were not stronger, it may be because Maori and Pasifika societies are
essentially collective, while Pakeha society is… individualist. The
counterculture sought in many ways to reject the tenets of mainstream society,
but old habits die hard. Despite the aspirations espoused by certain
communards, rabble rousers, hippie idealists and fallen priests, the
counterculture, with its overriding notions of freedom, would increasingly show
itself to be a group of loosely affiliated individuals doing their own things.”
(p.299) To put it another way, the idea of a coherent “revolution” was really a mirage. Within the
counterculture there were simply too many conflicting priorities and ideas to
stand together as a unified cause.
And, just as the presence of
Maori and Pasifika voices blew apart some of the certainties of the counterculture,
so did (Chapter 12) the feminist movement, or what was then called Women’s
Liberation. Increasingly women critiqued the assumptions of male counterculture
figures who took it for granted that women still had to do all the chores while
happy pot-smoking men lazed around and theorised or strode about making
barnstorming radical speeches. Thus the common-sense and critical comments of
Rose Beauchamp, wife of Ian Wedde (p.305). And thus, much later in the book,
the shrewd comments of Miriam Cameron, partner of Tim Shadbolt (pp.355-356).
Communes were nirvana only for men. The visit of Germaine Greer in 1972 gave a
big publicity boost to the women’s movement, but partly for the wrong reasons. Greer
was caught up in a trial for having used obscene language (she had publicly
used the words “fuck” and “bullshit”) and had to pay a fine. Much of the
mainstream media was negative about her visit. Nick Bollinger notes that the student
press was more open to women’s liberation than the mainstream press; but it
still ran “sexist cartoons and pornographic imagery in the guise of
rejecting bourgeois views of decency.” (p.309)
Thus, in a late chapter (Chapter
13) Bollinger begins to count the negatives of the counterculture as the whole
general idea began to fall apart. The government of Norman Kirk (1972-1974) was
liberal on some things, but conservative on others, perhaps truly reflecting
the nature of the country. Among the more astute observers, there dawned the
realisation that some apparently countercultural figures were more concerned
with being entrepreneurs and making money. Thus a number of “alternative” promoters of rock concerts. Thus
the publisher Alister Taylor, about whom Bollinger writes very negatively
(pp.337-338), depicting him as a man who started publishing anti-establishment
stuff like The Little Red Schoolbook and Tim Shadbolt’s egotistical Bullshit
and Jellybeans, but who (as Bollinger tells it) rarely paid his debts, deprived
his authors of their royalties and enriched himself. Then there was the nagging
suspicion that some prominent protesters had been plants put in place by New
Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service (SIS). Oh dear.
So at last (Chapter 14) Nick Bollinger
raises the question “Who Killed the Counterculture?” Wisely, he does not blame
the government of Robert Muldoon (1975-84), even if Muldoon himself was a
prickly conservative with little love for the counterculture. Rather, the
counterculture died of its own contradictions. Merry takers of illicit drugs slowly
understood that the stuff they consumed was being supplied by, in some cases
murderous, gangs of criminals like Terry Clark. Overseas in America, some notable
rock icons (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin) had died of their addictions. Charles
Manson’s gang had looked like a hippie commune. It was responsible for
massacre. The glamour and lustre of taking drugs died.
And besides all this was the fact
that the counterculture, laying so much emphasis on “doing your own thing” and
individualism, led first to libertarianism and then ultimately (under the Lange
government, 1984-89) to the neo-liberalism of “Rogernomics”. After all, what
could be more individualist than selling state assets into private ownership?
Much of the counterculture in New
Zealand was built on an illusion. In the 1960s and early 1970s, New Zealand was
economically sound, there was little unemployment, university tuition was free
and it was easy for young people to sustain themselves by taking up – and then
dropping – seasonal work and casual labour. But the economy changed and so did
the relatively easy life that made the counterculture possible. Having
considered the hippie lifestyle and the “hippie trail” in Asia, Germaine Greer wrote
with a breath of common sense “The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The
drop-out can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be
dropped out of.” (p.354). In other words, a counterculture could be
sustained only as long as there was a generally prosperous and open society. In
many cases, countercultural-ists were “dropping out of” comfortable
middle-class suburbia to which, of course, they could eventually return… which
many of them did. And “going back to the land” transmuted into buying a
lifestyle block.
Nick Bollinger’s epilogue is
therefore very ambiguous. As an experienced writer on rock and pop music, he
praises many bands and individuals who made new music in New Zealand in the
decade he surveys. He credits the old counterculture with raising awareness of
environmental issues. He notes the greater public advancement of women’s rights
and the status of women in the workplace. He believes the 1960s and early 1970s
saw Maori and Pasifika asserting their rights more overtly. But he also sees
the negative stuff. The trouble with drugs. The false messiahs and gurus. The continuing
macho assumptions of countercultural men. The passing fads that now look either
quaint or absurd. The advancement of individualism at the cost of the common
good.
Ultimately, what does all this
mean? I think in synopsising Jumping Sundays, I have reported accurately
what Bollinger is saying, though perhaps emphasising the negative side of
things a little more than Bollinger does. Even so, like every other decade, the years
that Bollinger covers have made their own imprint, have left traces of
things both good and bad, and are now fading off into history. I do not think
they are more or less significant to us now than New Zealand’s decades of World
Wars, the decade of the Great Depression or for that matter the (near) decade
of John Key. Let us not idealise any decade of the past. All have their positives
and negatives
Hasty Footnote: In writing
this review, I have ignored one important matter. Jumping Sundays is
amply illustrated with photos from the 1960s and 1970s as well as reproductions of artwork from
magazines of the era. They give us the style of the times – but not being an
art critic I am not the person to comment on them.
