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Article Excerpt
Every year in May, a tiny village in north-eastern New South Wales is overrun by the thousands of visitors who arrive for Nimbin's MardiGrass. (1) The MardiGrass differs markedly from other Australian festivals in that the focus is an illicit drug: cannabis ('marijuana', 'grass', 'pot', 'ganja', 'bhang'--there is an astonishing variety of names for Cannabis Sativa, reflecting both the drug's current widespread use, and over 10,000 years as a medicine and intoxicant). (2) MardiGrass also is somewhat unusual in that it began as a straightforward protest march against the drug's illegality in 1993, but grew into a three day festival that attracts thousands of Australian and overseas visitors. Around 1,000 people marched in the first rally, by the fourth MardiGrass the number had grown to around 7,000, with recent attendance at around 10,000. (3) Tabatha Fulker suggests that the 2005 MardiGrass 'brought $1.5 million to the town's economy'. (4) All this in a tiny rural village with a population of 235 people. (5)
Despite the festival's popularity, local government is embarrassed by MardiGrass; it was not included in a recent tourist publication, because promotion of the festival might imply support for cannabis. The drug's illegality lends a sense of unreality to the festival (cannabis is openly smoked), and a tension (what will the police do?). There is an unusual juxtaposition between the tourist-media spectacle and a vulnerable and often secretive cannabis culture--vulnerable and secretive because violence, prison sentences and 'drug wars' remain real consequences of the drug's illegality). (6) In this article I describe and explore the MardiGrass history, its symbols and events, and its relationship to the region's alternative culture; I will discuss its unique/unusual features, and I will draw from the participants' voices and experiences, newspaper pieces, scholarly literature and excerpts from my doctoral research. (7) I suggest that MardiGrass is an important cultural event, unique in terms of its focus, its form, and its location, but also reflecting the post-war protest style and the aspirations of a substantial cannabis sub-culture.
For Nimbin, it all started when the Aquarius Festival was held there in 1973. According to the Nimbin HEMP Embassy, that was when 'God dealt Nimbin a full hand of hippies'. (8) Grahame Dunstan was a key organiser of the Aquarius festival, and I interviewed him about the baby boomers and Nimbin real estate:
In 1972 I was appointed Director of the 1973 Aquarius Festival, which was a cultural festival which the Australian Union of Students (AUS) put on every second year, under the direction of the Aquarius Foundation, the cultural arm of the AUS ... We decided to define the 1973 festival as a lifestyle festival and invite proponents of all sorts of different lifestyles emerging around Australia at that time ... It was the peak expression of the student counter-culture in Australia at that time ... One of the things that made the Nimbin resettlement different from other areas settled by the counter-culture was that the Festival acquired shopfront property in the main street. The old RSL hall had been purchased by the AUS as an office for the festival; it's called the Healing Centre now, it cost $500 including furniture, and we handed it over to the new community at cost. Also, the Tomato Sauce building was acquired (it was an old general store), and the Rainbow Cafe ... this was the first time the counterculture had a foothold in a main street, and this gave the alternative movement the political power of presence ... Because of the MOs [multiple occupancies] and because of the numbers of people, the counter-culture values of the seventies took root here like nowhere else in the world, sustained itself as a culture, and grew. (9)
After the Aquarius Festival many of the urban baby boomers stayed on, to put their beliefs into practice or to drop out in paradise. Since then, more people seeking an alternative lifestyle have settled in the Nimbin area. A local newspaper estimates that the far north coast of NSW contains around eighty percent of all communally-owned land in NSW, and Margaret Munro-Clark suggests that the Lismore local government area alone (which includes Nimbin) has the largest concentration of intentional communities in Australia. (10) According to Lismore City Council, in the nineties there were sixty-two registered multiple occupancies (along with an unknown number of unofficial communities) covering more than 3,600 hectares or over 9,000 acres. (11) The Nimbin area contains at least twenty-seven, among them the anarchist Tuntable Falls Coordination Cooperative, which is larger than most Australian intentional communities and has its own school, general store and fire brigade, and a population only a little smaller than Nimbin village. (12)
The first protest came a few years after Aquarius, with the 'Battle for Terania Creek', as Graham Dunstan explained to me:
[At Terania Creek] We developed the tactics for successful forest defence; basically it was pioneered here, where we had this evolving culture committed to these values ... It was the first time we'd come into conflict with the established system ... The first two years were spent organising our lives and community to the point where we were strong enough to take on the NSW Forestry Commission. We challenged their logging policy on a 50 hectare patch of rainforest at the end of a hippy valley. The blockade raged for six weeks and became known as the Battle for Terania Creek ... We won, but people back in the hills in their illegal dwellings were scared by the right-wing reaction. After the action, there were all these red-neck public meetings ... I forget what the group was called, but anyone with long hair was excluded. (13)
There was certainly a backlash. Margaret Munro-Clark cited the local newspaper's description of MO residents as 'living in sub-standard dwellings'. (14) A health inspector was quoted as saying that, since the new settlers had arrived in the region, their living conditions caused hepatitis and exotic diseases previously unknown to the area (no evidence was ever produced for these claims). (15) Lismore Council issued demolition orders for many of the alternative dwellings, but some...
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