Endless Connections 22.08.12
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Endless Connections: New Zealand secular intentional rural communities founded in the 1970s A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History at Massey University by Robert Jenkin 22/08/2012 1 We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams; World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems. Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 1874 2 Acknowledgements First I thank my supervisor, Dr Kerry Taylor, who encouraged me to begin this thesis and has helped me complete it, a longer process than either of us originally expected. Throughout he has encouraged and given sound advice. I am also grateful to Dr Geoff Watson, my Post Graduate Co-ordinator for his advice and support. My partner Anne, a committed member of Rainbow Valley Community for more than thirty years, helped in many ways, and came with me on some parts of my research journey, acting as a photographer at interviews. I also thank my father Ian, whose love of people and their stories distinctively shaped the way I see the world. I have been greatly helped by Olive Jones, who last year finished a PhD thesis on New Zealand communities. We shared ideas over a twelve-month period, during which time she generously let me have copies of hard-to-find but highly relevant material. Lyman Sargent in his turn supplied me with a recently updated digital version of New Zealand Intentional Communities: A Research Guide, 1 and Lucy Sargisson provided me with some of her related articles. I also wish to thank Alan Gotlieb, who shared his memories of the 1970s communities and pointed me towards Karuna Falls and Moehau. Jonathan Moffat, the Tasman District Council archivist in Richmond, went to extraordinary lengths in tracking down old Waimea County Council minutes and reports concerning Sunday Creek, which were invaluable. I thank him for it, as I thank Mike Scott and Alison Harris for lending me their Whole Earth Catalogues and Mushroom magazines. Lastly I thank the members of the 1970s rural communities without whose help and trust this research would have been impossible. Twenty-six subjects were interviewed and some went on to help by way of email or on the phone. Two new subjects who now live in Canada joined in. All interviewees checked the transcripts of their interviews. A few gave more extensive help with narratives. In this respect I particularly thank Jane N, Stephen, Carol, Cheryl, Jan, Maureen and Stephanie. The subjects here are all co-authors and I gratefully acknowledge that. 1 See Sargent 1997 for the published version. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 3 Table of contents 4 Chapter One: Introduction 6 Literature and media 11 Methodology 21 Chapter Two: Journeys to Community Jane N. 24 Stephen 29 Marahau 34 Cheryl 44 Jan 53 Sunday Creek 63 Other journeys 76 Chapter Three: Other communities 93 Lists of communities 94 Riverside 98 Long Louis and Jerusalem 99 Tahunanui and Famagusta 102 Wilderland 102 The Ohu Scheme 103 Karuna Falls 104 Nambassa 104 4 Chapter Four: Who were these hippies anyway? 107 The sample 109 Dreamers and wanderers 111 Outsiders and individualists 112 Travel 113 The peace movement 114 Music and theatre 115 Drugs 118 Sexuality 119 Maori and Maoritanga 121 Religion and nature 123 Home births 126 Chapter Five: Living in a community Endless connections 128 Survivalism 130 Domesticating anarchy 131 Shared parenting 135 Rural re-settlement 136 Self-sufficiency and sustainability 140 Chapter Six: Conclusions 143 Bibliography 150 Other sources 155 Appendices 158 5 Introduction I wrote a research paper in 2011 called Shared ownership, decision-making by consensus, and sustainability at Rainbow Valley and Tui Communities. It was an insider view. I live at Rainbow Valley, and wanted to find out how what I saw as defining and reforming goals of these alternative communities in Golden Bay had stood the test of time. I first read widely about alternative communities in general. Then, by considering Rainbow and Tui in depth and putting my ideas about them into writing, I was able to explore their similarities and differences. Members of both were mainly middle aged, which led to many of the similarities. The differences related more to the ten years that passed between the forming of the two communities. Tui began at a new age gathering in 1983. By then the counter-culture’s outlook had become more spiritual and didactic. Tui’s founders, about half of whom were German, pooled their assets and in 1984 acquired a coastal property in Golden Bay which they immediately vested in a trust. From the beginning Tui was a place of dedication and demanding principles. It is still dynamic and culturally diverse, with more than half its current members drawn from overseas. It has a thriving business and still sees its goals as spiritual and educational. Rainbow is ten years older, and began in 1974, when anti-war protest, energetic rock music, and liberated attitudes to sex and drugs were seen as counter-cultural. At that time, hippies from Europe and America looked on New Zealand as a land of hope and opportunity. Mixing in with New Zealand’s own hippies, they started forming rural communes, especially in Northland, Northwest Nelson and the Coromandel Peninsular. These communes tended to be exploratory and anarchistic, and most members were, to a lesser or greater extent, idealistic individualists. Eleven of the twelve subjects I interviewed for Shared ownership, decision-making by consensus, and sustainability were between fifty-two and sixty-six; in each community the age profile was much the same. Most subjects felt that their engagement with community was steadily diminishing. When they were younger they had put more in, but as they aged and as their children moved away, they started losing the idea of an extended family. Some also grew impatient with so many indecisive meetings, and began to live more privately. Ideas about inheritance have also changed; transfer of houses and management to a succeeding generation has so far not been possible. Few adult children have stayed on, or wanted the responsibilities of membership. While both communities did make an effort to 6 recruit young members, many of those they did recruit soon left, and some who stayed have found it hard to integrate. Senior members still have management of each community, and have begun to see their children as important stakeholders. The Rainbow Valley Company owns Rainbow land; all current members are its equal shareholders. Until the 1990s members were committed to a trust, so as to make shared land impossible to privatise. By 2010, when I began my paper on Rainbow and Tui, the idea of a trust had been rejected. Instead it was decided shares could now be sold, linked to existing houses and the land surrounding them. Such sections would be leased to shareholders. At first not every shareholder agreed with this decision, and my discussion of shared ownership, consensus and sustainability was partly written in response to it. I don’t like cities and I do like farms. I was involved with communes in the 1970s. I worked for ten years as a teacher, then in 1989 applied for Rainbow membership. At thirty-eight I was a solo parent, living on a benefit and had no savings, but at Rainbow monetary assets weren’t a prerequisite. Soon I was helping run the Rainbow farm, and it supplied me with my milk and meat. There was sufficient land for me to keep a horse, so I was able to get by without a car; I could get in and out of town by horse-and-cart. I was accepted as a Rainbow member and paid off my membership. The fee I paid was modest, but my shares made me co-owner of all Rainbow property. Consensus, the consent of every member, was the primary condition for new membership, and membership was not seen as investment in financial terms; rather it was a sort of contract, a commitment to the common good and positive relationships. I bought from the community a one-room ‘sleep-out’ built with demolition timber in the 1970s. Although in poor condition it did have electric power and a building permit. Another member helped me renovate it and extend it, and within six years I added two more rooms. So I became the owner of a house. Houses at Rainbow and at Tui are regarded as their owner’s property. I gained materially by joining Rainbow and by living there. In 1975 Jones and Baker produced a survey of New Zealand’s 1970s intentional communities, A Hard Won Freedom, and in chapter five there is a picture of me skinning a possum. That chapter, called ‘Beginnings’, describes Moonsilver Forest, the back-country survivalist community I then belonged to, and goes on to describe Rainbow Valley. 7 Almost two decades passed before another book set out to survey our intentional communities. This was by Sargisson and Sargent, she writing from an English university and he from one in the US. They called their survey Living in Utopia. But were New Zealand’s 1970s rural communities utopian? Young people often hope they can improve the world, and so did we, but we were also pragmatists, and some of us have proved by demonstration what we wanted was achievable. Our ‘communes’ weren’t hare-brained schemes that couldn’t happen, they were practical experiments. Shared ownership and a commitment to consensus have survived at Rainbow over more than thirty years.