The darkness and the light

In 1970, as a disillusioned middle-class teenager, Ros Lewis donned bells and bracelets and travelled up the Whanganui River to Jerusalem to learn about love and communal living from James K Baxter. She has good memories of that time, but it was decades b

San Francisco may have been the home of the hippie movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, but the colours and flavours of Flower Power danced their way over to New Zealand too.

As a teenager growing up in the Waikato, I listened to the music of The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, The Who, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. The war in Vietnam and apartheid in South Africa were hot political topics that were always front-of-mind for my friends and me. I watched the Woodstock music festival 12 times on the big screen.

Recently, I watched that movie again with younger friends here in Melbourne. I coerced them into dressing up as hippies and dancing. They humoured me and joined in the fun.

I reminisced with them about what it was like to be a hippie in the 1970s, including my time living in a commune in New Zealand called Jerusalem. Later I shared more fully some of the values I learnt from those experiences – the joy of authentic connection with others and of approaching people with kindness and acceptance – which still inform my life today.

I didn’t tell them everything though.

I kept quiet about the sinister underbelly I encountered during my time at Jerusalem. In some ways, life at the commune was idyllic. In others Jerusalem, and its founder, the poet James K Baxter, were part of a

darker disturbance that troubles me to this day.

When I was 15 one of my teachers declared: ‘‘The trouble with Rosalind is that she thinks too much.’’ What a stupid thing to say! I felt a strong urge to forge my own path and so in 1970, at the age of 18, I wrote my father a letter saying that I wanted to ‘‘find’’ myself.

I had decided to drop out of Waikato university to pursue love and peace. My mother and father both had university degrees but weren’t happy in their middleclass lives, as far as I could see. Bullshit academia was not for me. We didn’t need another lawyer in the family.

My parents did their best, but my father was very reserved, and my mother was anxious and depressed most of the time. Neither was able to offer me the warm, generous love I longed for. Love, peace, connection, and authenticity were just ideas at the time, but I knew they must be real.

I was ripe for the hippie movement. I became a flower child, smoking pot and dropping LSD. To feed the heart and soul and to be true to oneself were my politics; as The Beatles crooned: ‘‘All you need is love.’’

As hippies we were idealistic but sincere. We were critical of mainstream society, and of our parents, who had suffered through the Depression and therefore highly valued education and the need to make money in order to be stable and secure.

We, on the other hand, saw ourselves as free spirits, with robes, bells and bracelets dangling off our corporeal bodies. I hitchhiked around New Zealand in my bells and my bracelets.

On my way to pick apples in an orchard in Nelson, my friend Angela invited me to visit a commune deep in the belly of the Whanganui River, North Island. This commune, founded by the poet James K Baxter, resided at Jerusalem, a Ma¯ ori community, known as Hiruharama.

Baxter, who died in 1972, is celebrated today as a literary icon. During those years he was concerned about the young people who were adrift, lost and lonely in the cities, and who were turning to drugs for their sanctuary and as an aphrodisiac for the soul.

Baxter’s hope for the commune was to model the values of Ma¯ ori community and to privilege a kaupapa Ma¯ ori worldview, which honours collective community, rather than the soul-destroying values of Pa¯ keha¯ , which privilege individualism, materialism and capitalism.

When I arrived at the commune I was welcomed with hugs. I soon learned about aroha (love, affection, sympathy) and arohanui (big love, love of the many). Others in the commune listened to my conversations about life and meaning, and I listened to theirs.

I found myself smiling more, opening my heart because of the embraces of my hippie brothers and sisters, who were so different to my emotionally bereft biological family.