Perceptions of Nimbin

Another frequently mentioned topic was the counterculture/alternative lifestyle and the landmark Aquarius Festival of 1973.The main street is reported in some detail and that is about as far as most of the hacks got on their visits. Since the street is the locale for petty drug dealers it is not surprising that their stories are negative.

“Communes” or intentional communities often get a run - usually favourably - although there was much confusion over their numbers and their success. The Sydney Morning Herald could only find “about six”, but the two overseas papers reported “sixty two communes surrounding the village” and another hack reported that “hundreds of communities [had] sprang up in and around Nimbin”. The real figure is about 20, depending on your definition of “community”. While one writes that, around Nimbin, “the rural communes flourish”, a few months later another writer asserts that, “the days of the commune are over [and] the last were dying”.

Stories on Nimbin businesses also frequently feature the successful “straights” (non hippies) who run them or who practice a profession at home or in Lismore or Nimbin. Latterly the scribes have been writing about the boom in tourism which sees seven buses a day visiting the village, disgorging dozens of tourists from all over the world, from backpackers to grey nomads.

One of the two more bizarre stories reports on the launch in Nimbin of the latest Volkswagen Kombi, the Caddy Life, whose PR manager is quoted as saying, “There will be a lot of people who know Nimbin from thirty years ago who are now well off and interested in a vehicle like this”.

But perhaps even more bizarre is a poisonous piece from the notorious Piers Ackerman in an article entitled “Pay no mind to paranoid hippies” (Sunday Telegraph October 14, 2001). Conflating the Greens and Democrats with “dole bludging fringe dwellers at Nimbin” who want the navy to release videos of refugee boat people, he insists that, “The navy must not accede to the wishes of ageing hippies and dysfunctional children”.

About a third of the reports contained errors of detail. Given their distance from Nimbin it is excusable that the two overseas reports were mistaken in erroneously claiming that, “at least 10,000 hippies and others live in the New South Wales town of Nimbin” (Cornelia Grunman, “Stoned or sober, Oz outpost a real trip”, Chicago Tribune January 9, 2000 and Toronto Star February 5, 2000). However there is no such excuse for papers like the Townsville Bulletin which also claimed a population of 10,000 while the Sydney Morning Herald claimed “about 250” and The Courier-Mail “three hundred residents”.

Some of the more egregious errors include the completely false assertion that, “Before the Age of Aquarius … [Nimbin] was a thriving agricultural district. It was not. A teahouse 15km from Nimbin is described as being “on Nimbin’s outskirts”. But the prize for the most muddleheaded misstatement should go to The Australian whose reporter wrote about, “the neighbouring coastal town of Dharmananda”. Dharmananda is in fact not a town at all but an intentional community situated 50-odd kilometres from the coast.

So what are we to make of these findings? Well, first, that Nimbin still retains the uniqueness that stemmed from the 1973 festival. Second, that there are too many newspapers whose reporters and editors won’t let the facts spoil a good story.

But let the late Rick Farley, who was known when he lived in Nimbin as “Rick Far-out” because of his radical views, have the last word of advice for journalists writing about Nimbin: “The great legacy of Nimbin is having an open mind, being inquiring, being able to cross boundaries and not be stuck in your own little world.”