Peace and love still blossom among the ashes of Nimbin

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/14/peace-and-love-still-blossoms-among-the-ashes-of-nimbin

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The facades are faded now, but no less optimistic. The murals of the rainbow serpent dreaming and marijuana bliss, gleefully painted across the shops in the main street of Nimbin in the heady days of the early 1970s, remain.

The faces are weathered, the long hair and beards grey, the idealism tempered by time – but not entirely lost. The dream of living an alternative life in harmony with the earth never died in Nimbin. Dreadlocks and beads wander down the main street in a time warp so perfectly preserved that it feels like an acid trip flashback.

“Soup and hugs”, says a blackboard outside the neighbourhood centre as down the street the heart of the town smoulders in ruins, a mass of twisted metal and charred wood.

The ruins of the Rainbow Cafe and Nimbin Museum, engulfed in flames early on Wednesday morning, are a crime scene screened off as police sift through the ashes.

This is far from the first time the police have had to visit either establishment. Both were frequently raided for blatant marijuana use, the fragrance of which drifted down the main street, to the point that the Hemp Embassy across the road no longer allows customers to smoke cannabis with their coffee, now simply selling drug paraphernalia with encouraging smiles.

Today’s police presence was far more sombre. The history of Nimbin was lost in the towering flames.

The Rainbow Cafe, bought by the hippies when they first arrived, remained home base and the lounge room of the town. “It was the birthplace of the hippy movement when they came for the Aquarius festival in 1973,” says Michael Balderstone, a town elder and proprietor of the museum next door.

“There are a lot of memories associated with it,” says Natalie Meyer, director of the neighbourhood centre. “Babies playing out the back who are grown up now. A lot of people got together and probably split up again at the Rainbow.”

The museum was crammed full of memorabilia related to what Balderstone calls “a big experiment in different values”. He had started out as a secondhand dealer but, as a natural hoarder who didn’t like to sell his stuff, decided to display it so people could look at it in exchange for a donation. Full of murals, early settlers’ tools, a Kombi van and the detritus of the counterculture movement, it was a wildly unconventional record of people who had chosen to live as outsiders.

“Hippies are always producing stuff, but you have to catch it quickly because they are great composters,” says Balderstone. “We started the museum to try to communicate what hippy thinking was all about.” Mad, if the museum was anything to go by.

Those who settled in the valleys the early 70s created communes, says Alan Salt, who arrived in 1974: “We lived together, loved together, ate together in the communal hall, changed partners every spring. It was a back-to-the-earth movement, a simpler life.”

They were the country’s forerunners in sustainable living, permaculture, organic farming, natural birthing, home schooling and cooperative schooling. “There was an element of not trusting kids to mainstream society,” says Salt.

“It was a dream of harmony between the tribes, the planet and its people,” says Elspeth Jones, an artist who was Balderstone’s partner in the museum.

Some came after Damascene conversions when smoking hashish. “They were naive and optimistic,” says Salt, who bought into the earliest commune, Tuntable Falls. “There were fires from candles, people who died from snake bites because they thought they could heal themselves and didn’t go to the doctor.”

But it certainly wasn’t all peace, love and vegetables. They were, they discovered, still human. Mediators had to be called in. “There were people who were into pot and people who were on a spiritual trip where they didn’t take any drugs whatsoever. That created friction, when people assumed they had a God-given right to grow pot,” admits Salt. There were vegetarians v meat eaters, natural therapies v western medicine.

When people started having children, things on the communes began to change. Needing privacy, they began to build structures, and the battles with building regulators began.

“We relearnt a lot of things, we questioned everything. In that discovery we found out why things were done the way they were,” says Salt. “On the commune we had no boundaries, and you learned why there were boundaries. When a person got cattle, who was responsible for the fences? Did a person have to fence their garden, or did the owner of the cows?”

Balderstone believes Nimbin’s reputation for cannabis consumption has kept developers away from its beautiful valleys: “Not many people want a Nimbin address. In a way it has kept us real.”

But in the 1980s the “dirty drugs”, the hard drugs, came along with people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds looking for a cheaper life. So, too, did homeless people who gravitated to Nimbin.

“Those with good educations went back to government jobs, got re-absorbed into society,” says Salt.

Homeless people “will be welcomed with a coffee and a smoke”, says Balderstone. “They get understanding and a sense of community and family. Nimbin is beautifully tolerant and we are about sharing.”

Whether one of these people lit a fire on a cold night to keep warm remains to be seen. Inspector Mick Dempsey, of Lismore police, says the fire is “still under forensic examination. But we start with all fires being suspicious and work our way to a conclusion from there.”

Through it all has come, says Salt, “a strong sense of being a community. When outside forces come we stand firm together.”

And so they will. “Maybe we can get a normal museum now,” says Balderstone.