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Hippie baby boomer idealism or increasingly relevant form of living? Annie Hastwell heads to a NSW commune set up in the heady 1970s to see how it has lasted 40 years, and why off the grid communities could re-emerge across Australia.
It began in 1973, the year of the Nimbin Aquarius Festival and an age when rebellion was in the air.
People my age—baby boomers—do not want to be institutionalised.
Often described as Australia's version of Woodstock, the counterculture festival celebrated sustainability and an alternate way of living.
A new generation was flexing its muscles and anything seemed possible, especially a way of life different to the safe suburbs of post-war Australia.
'Something really important happened at the Aquarius Festival,' says social historian Bill Metcalf, who has devoted his academic career to studying local and international communes.
'These disparate groups from around the country found themselves part of a movement.'
The festival spawned a rush of idealistic commune settlements. Thousands of young people jumped in their Kombis and headed for the lush valleys of the north coast of New South Wales to set up their own versions of utopia.
The rush proved short-lived, with most of the communities falling apart fairly quickly due to lack of planning and resources, or simply personality clashes.
'There was a great deal of naïveté with a lot of the groups in the early days,' says Metcalf.
'There was a belief that somehow social problems would resolve themselves by people just coming together and loving each other. Of course, they didn't.'
Some, however, took things more seriously.
In 1976, Jack O'Reilly and his friends bought 196 hectares of bush south of Ballina in northern New South Wales. The site came with its challenges.
Massive trees needed to be cleared before any building could take place and access was only possible via a steep, nerve-racking road.
The site had poor quality soil, and the local building inspector was ready to tell the group that what they were doing was illegal: rural planning laws at the time were designed around conventional farming, where only one dwelling per 100 hectares was permitted.
O'Reilly and his group formed a cooperative, fought hard to get the planning permission and regulation changes they needed, cut down trees and milled their own timber.
Forty years on, The Ridge, as it's known, is still there, with 12 off-grid houses, most built from local stone and timber, scattered through the bush. There is a central meeting place and several shared gardens.
Recently, a large group came together to celebrate four decades of the community.
Membership is fluid, and people have come and gone, but the overarching organisation of The Ridge has ensured its survival.
'We've had no serious disagreements, [just] lots of heated meetings,' says O'Reilly.
He says having a cooperative structure in which every member has an equal share and an equal vote has helped keep things workable.
Bill Metcalf agrees that communities that have stood the test of time, have done so through a serendipitous mix of a few rules, natural leadership and some control over who can join.
'Groups have to maintain boundaries, but they must be permeable, so you always need to have some mechanism to make sure people coming in share certain beliefs and passions.
'Otherwise, you're trying to form a community out of people who randomly met and the chances of that succeeding are very, very small.'
At The Ridge, potential new members are invited to a trial living period. If they decide it is for them, they have to be voted in by at least 80 per cent of the community.
Communes like The Ridge have paved the way for others to try communal living set ups, and since the heady '70s, several hundred have quietly sprung up all over Australia.
They range from strict and insular religious communities to eco-village-style spiritually aware groups, to 'groups that are together because they are just together'.
Most are in northern New South Wales, but other hotspots include Margaret River, the Adelaide Hills and Gippsland.
There's a common agricultural thread between those places, and Metcalf says it's no coincidence that communes tend to be located in dairy country.
'Dairy was the perfect industry to create land suitable for these groups, because the land had been stripped and it was hilly with good rainfall.'
The timing was fortunate. As dairy collapsed after the 1960s, such land became affordable for the communally minded.
But these days heading for the hills and setting up an alternative lifestyle is even easier.
'It's no longer a weird thing for local planning authorities, because they're used to these groups now, and where there are a number of them in one area they provide support for each other,' says Metcalf.
In the Maleny area in Queensland, alternative communities have even set up their own credit union.
Keeping a new generation around as the original occupants age is the next challenge, though.
'The kids grew up left the place and it seemed that we wouldn't have a continuity of generations, that we'd all die old in wheelchairs up here,' says Jack O'Reilly.
The problem seems to have solved itself. Jack's two sons have returned along with new, younger members, and now The Ridge rings with the sound of small children and new building projects.
So in an age that is both eco-aware and digitally connected, are such communities on the rise?
Bill Metcalf believes they are, and predicts the biggest increase will be with senior co-housing in both urban and rural areas, as older Australians seek cheaper, more fulfilling lifestyles.
'People my age, baby boomers, do not want to be institutionalised.
The Last Great California
Hippie Commune
is still going Strong
BY FRANCKY KNAPP
APRIL 29, 2019
STORY LINK .... https://www.messynessychic.com/2019/04/23/the-last-great-california-hippie-commune-is-still-going-strong/
They came from the mountains, and kept to themselves. If you were lucky, you might have seen them frolicking in the hills under the glow of the buttery, golden hour sunshine that California does so well. Collectively, they were known as “The Brotherhood of the Sun,” and in the 1970s, they emerged as one of the most successful communes in US history. In a manner of speaking, that is, because if we’ve learned anything from our past investigations into communes and cults, it’s that these sort of things have an expiration date. Otherwise, things get ugly, which is why we were surprised to learn that the Brotherhood not only existed, but turned into “Sunburst Farms”: a multi million-dollar business. This is the story of how one man’s dream gave birth to a Californian Camelot, a trip steeped in idealism and salvation, complete with stallions, schooners, and firearms. But most of all, it’s a fascinating tale of what happens when peace, and making a profit, collide…
Our story begins in a Southern California psych ward in 1963. Local bricklayer Norman Paulsen was trying to calm the voices in his head at Santa Barbara County Hospital after an overdose on his medication; the same voices that would return to him six years later, prompting him to found a haven away from the mounting anxiety of the era. “The center was not holding,” writes Joan Didion about the fall of the 1960s in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “It was a country of bankruptcy notices and commonplace reports of casual killings […] People were missing. Children were missing. It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold, late spring of 1967.” The Haight-Ashbury overflowed with pre-teen junkies, and the Tate murders gave the counter culture a serious ice bath. Flower power was at its tipping point when Paulsen tried to give the dream one last chance to work.
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The Haight-Ashbury in 1966. © William Gedney Duke University
................................To really understand the complexity of the 1960s, we recommend watching Ralph Arlyck’s 2005 documentary, Following Sean, whose plot finds more parallels than you’d think with Sunbursts’s story. The movie combines footage from 1967 and 2005 of a hippie boy, Sean, who fascinated Arlyck when he lived in San Francisco. At barely four years old, he waltzed around Haight Street barefoot, and talked about smoking weed. Truffaut was fascinated, and called Sean “a kid of our modern times”, while the White House (which had a private screening) was horrified. Folks predicted he’d become a genius stockbroker, or an addict. Whatever his future held, outsiders thought it would fall into one of two extremes, but couldn’t necessarily see a place for “hippie” culture to become integrated into the norm. That’s where Sunburst becomes interesting.
• ................................
Paulsen began leading meditation sessions at the end of the ’60s in an old ice cream warehouse in Santa Barbara. Soon dozens of young folks from all walks of life made it their mecca. By 1971, he’d amassed hundreds of followers and moved to a nearly 160-acre ranch where they built teepees and adobe houses, planted orchards, and herded Nubian goats and French Percheron horses (the sturdiest of stallions). The goal was to consume cleanly, and only what they needed.
There was a strict no drugs, no outside possessions, and no sex (outside of marriage) policy. A member named Mehosh Dziadzio captured some beautiful images of the period, and his snapshots paint a dreamy picture of Sunburst during its glory years. “Before we started our day, we would join hands in a circle to thank Mother Earth for the bounty she has given us and pray for the healing of our precious planet, much like the native peoples who came before us,” explains Dziadzio, now a professional photographer, on his website. “With self sufficiency as our goal, we learned all the skills and the trades necessary in working with the land. From cowboys to sailors, blacksmiths to weavers, store keepers to bee keepers…” ................................
Sunburst community ................................
They were such busy bees that they started selling their produce to local establishments. “Their image in the community was quite wholesome for a long time,” explains Ernest, a Santa Barbara resident for over 40 years, “They were way ahead of their time with nice fresh organic fruits and vegetables (great avocados for 10 and 25 cents) granolas, and fresh carrot and vegetable juice on order. Their markets were funky but clean, pleasant to go in.”
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Market 3 in Goleta, Ca November 1978. Image courtesy of Sunburst Sanctuary.
“It was a different time,” Patty Paulsen, a member of Sunburst since 1975, told us over the phone, “I was from the East Coast, but I felt this calling to California. You couldn’t not follow it.” Like the majority of the Sunburst followers, she was in her twenties and looking for a way of living that, she says, deepened her understanding of “living with awareness and in a connection with one another”.
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Image Courtesy of Sunburst Sanctuary ................................
She recalls that they ran a little café, “the Farmer and the Fisherman”, a bakery, and eventually had a wholesale warehouse for shipping their produce across the country under their newly adopted title of “Sunburst”. They came out with a veggie-centric cookbook taught, “How to Get Protein Without Really Trying”, and had a domino effect on other local businesses in the area to go green. Come April of 1975, they were a $3 million business that, according to an archival article in The Los Angeles Times, had a school for members’ children and a 3,000-acre ranch adjacent to land owned by Ronald Reagan and John Travolta”. It was the largest organic farm in the USA.
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Image Courtesy of Sunburst Farms ................................
“I don’t know what it was,” Patty says when asked about what made the commune work, “It was something in the air. Something about being young, too.” She pauses. “I think that when people hit age 28, something happened. They either stayed or left, but something about that number brings in a big change – not always bad, you know. But not always good. We were like a family”.
Image courtesy of Patty Paulsen and Sunburst Sanctuary
Ernest’s perception of the family, however, was that it really kept to itself. “They were so insular nobody really knew what went on in their culture when they were back at the commune,” he said, “They were driven in school buses into their Sunburst Market stores every day. We would try to talk to the girls at the check out, they just smiled and did not respond. [They were] all in hand-made tie dye clothes, long hair, barefoot.” He recalls an odd run-in with their members when he was a carpenter, when the city demolished old baseball field stands. He says he went down with some friends to help take it apart in exchange for some scraps, but “the Sunburst guys showed up in a big group and aggressively laid claim to big chunks of it, demolished it like maniacs and loaded it on their trucks.”
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Sunburst Natural Foods Warehouse, Goleta Ca. March 1976. Image courtesy of Patty Paulsen and Sunburst Sanctuary
“People didn’t always understand,” says Patty about the tension between the commune and the community at large, “you hear the word ‘commune’ and you think of all these extremes that just weren’t us. Everything has its ups and downs, its roses and thorns. It’s up to you to dwell on either the thorn or the rose”. When asked about the financial ups and downs of the commune? “Well the company didn’t go public,” she says, “and in the late ’70s and ’80s… those were some hard times
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Image courtesy of Patty Paulsen and Sunburst Sanctuary ................................
Hard times is an understatement. The police “discovered that they had a stash of serious weapons up on Gibralter Road at a strategic bend,” explains Ernest, “with a plan to close the road when some doomsday event they thought was imminent happened. That was the end of the party for the stores.” They found M-14 military and Belgian assault rifles, which Patty says they purchased not as doomsday effects, but to defend themselves against intruders in the then isolated mountains. Paulsen also bought and spruced up 1920s schooners, which he chartered to the local islands with members.
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Image courtesy of Patty Paulsen and Sunburst Sanctuary
The commune, it seemed, had no trouble standing on its own two feet away from the conventions of the city. “There was also a guy, a member who was a Green Beret,” says Patty, “who Norm had people train with. Not everyone liked that.” It’s a subject Patty is touches on openly, but doesn’t dwell on for long. Even less so, when the topic of Paulsen’s mounting drug addiction comes into play.
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Norman Paulsen ................................
Paulsen, who passed in 2006, was a curious man. Patty talks about him lovingly, as a leader who inevitably “had to carry the responsibility of a vision” that was bigger than himself. His backstory, too, has all the eclectic trappings of a 20th century prophet; he was the son of a blind judge from Lompoc, Charley Paulsen, who played piano at the local silent movie theatre. As young man, he survived a 30-ft fall, and began seeking spiritual guidance through the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, the man who brought yoga to America.
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Centre: Paramahansa Yogananda ................................
“Beginning in 1920, Yogananda was one of the first masters to bring meditation and yoga science to the United States,” explains Sunburst on their site. “He came from a rich lineage of enlightened teachers, beginning with the great master Jesus working in conjunction with the ageless Himalayan yogi Babaji”. When Paulsen bought the land for the original commune – thanks to a $6,000 from a workers’ compensation settlement, and $50,000 from his mother – it was as the torch bearer for Yoganada, and, as Patty says, one simple goal: “to meditate together”.
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Norman Paulsen. Image courtesy of Patty Paulsen and Sunburst Sanctuary ................................
As early as 1971, Paulsen declared the Brotherhood to be a Christian non-profit despite the fact that the commune was a mix of Christian, mystic, Kriya Yoga and indigenous tribal beliefs (couldn’t hurt in terms of achieving a tax-free status). By the late 1970s, Sunburst communities had expanded to cities in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, while Paulsen burned through their earnings on alcohol and drugs. A 1982 Drug Enforcement Agency investigation found that he’d spend $60,000 on narcotics, while members – who were defecting left and right – said it was upwards of $200,000. In a 1986 interview with the LA Times, former member Michael Ableman recalls the day he left. “Norm was sitting in his house, in a very dark room, with his shirt off, and he was quite drunk. He said to me: ‘I am the man they call Jesus of Nazareth. If you believe me you can stay. If not, get out.’ I was told to be out of there by the next day.”
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Norman Paulsen ................................
The disparities between what higher-ups in the commune were earning, compared with what those who were farming during 12-hour days, was also of concern. Paulsen was driving fancy cars and buying silver horse saddles. “He wasn’t a drug addict,” Patty says defiantly when asked about Paulsen’s spending. “There were no clear instructions back then like today, no internet, when you were taking medication.” In the same interview with the LA Times, Paulsen chalked down his drug use to his years of absorbing everyone else’s energy. “You can’t sit down and talk to someone without exchanging energy with them,” he said. “If that person has negative thoughts, that leaves a residue of negative energy on the one who’s trying to help. All that took its toll on me.” In the game of revisiting such complex history, the truth tends to live somewhere between the extremes.
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Image courtesy of Patty Paulsen and Sunburst Sanctuary
Patty changes the subject back to meditation. It’s clear that now, after all these years, the community has pardoned Paulsen by way of sweeping the painful parts of his past far, far under the rug. His smiling face appears frequently on their Facebook page — the emblem of their martyr, but also, family member.
Norm Paulsen. Image courtesy of Patty Paulsen and Sunburst Sanctuary. ................................
For over two-dozen die-hard brethren, hope remains. The 1990s saw Sunburst’s return to California, and about a dozen miles southeast of Lompoc and at Nojoqui Farms, you’ll still find their community camped out in what arguably looks like paradise at Sunburst Sanctuary. “We have about 30 old timers still here,” Patty says. “We’re still farming, but it’s for ourselves.” They’ve even got a website that explains everything from their online courses in meditation and yoga retreats to a paleontology workshop, involving a hike to view onsite fossil specimens at the Sunburst Sanctuary. Books by Paulsen are also still available from the website. ................................
© Sunburst Sanctuary ................................
The future of Sunburst remains uncertain. On so many practical levels, the community has its hands tied by its classification as a religious organisation on an agricultural preserve (bringing in new members is hard, when you can’t build the structures to house them). Yet, the degree to which Sunburst has carved out a place for itself online and in social media is impressive. Patty says that anyone is welcome to attend their Sunday service, which is non-denominational and gets to the heart of what Sunburst was always about: making the time to meditate together.
“We have one last store here in Solvang, [California],” she says, referring to the last vestige of what basically became hippie entrepreneurialism. Firearms, etc. aside, there’s something to be said about the commitment and devotion to the ideal of community and how long some followers are willing to carry that dream into the next generation. The media would have loved to see the entire commune brought to its knees – and indeed it was, on several occasions. Yet, Sunburst remains remarkable for avoiding the extremist fate so many predicted for counter-culture groups in the ’70s (selling out, or burning out). It was, and still is, a happy anomaly — and there’s no way to neatly tie up their story in a bittersweet bow, simply because it’s not finished being told.
Where have all the hippies gone?
Forty years after the love-in began, Damien Murphy catches up with the aged of Aquarius.
May 18, 2013 — 3.00am 
Educated at Melbourne's high-caste Scotch College, a stockbroker with JB Were, an uncle the chairman of BHP, Michael Balderstone was once a long way from the rebellious spirit who kept Nimbin's original flame burning bright.
So maybe it is some sort of karma that the week the northern NSW town celebrates being put on the map by the 1973 Aquarius Festival, a NSW parliamentary committee recommended the medical use of cannabis for people suffering terminal illnesses.
Over the rainbow: Michael Balderstone, at home on the outskirts of Nimbin, runs the Hemp Embassy.CREDIT:PETER RAE
''Kismet,'' says Balderstone, who runs the Hemp Embassy in Nimbin's main drag. ''The medical use of marijuana should be a health issue, not a political one. I think 90 per cent of the public would support medical cannabis for people who are really sick.''
In May 1973, Balderstone was discovering another way of getting head lice hanging out in a Nepalese village, as he puts it, while about 2000 or more mainly middle-class young Australian men and women travelled north to a dying dairy village in the Big Scrub. For 10 days they partied hard. They sang, danced, listened to poets, watched street theatre, built dome houses, smoked pot, swam naked and restored Nimbin to life.
The festival aimed to celebrate alternative thinking and sustainable lifestyles, however the celebrants' propensity to remove clothes and smoke pot openly led to the mainstream media labelling the whole thing hippie heaven.
Surfers opened up the NSW north coast to southern eyes. Nimbin lay down the template that turned Byron Bay, Bangalow and Mullumbimby into high property price New Age havens.
Nimbin residents might be living as alternatives in communes and shacks in surrounding bush, but they have done little to disabuse the idea they live in Hippie Central. There's the annual Mardi Grass, and the shops lining Cullen Street are full of the colour, paraphernalia and grunge of a Haight-Ashbury snapshot, circa 1967. Artists who first painted the town psychedelic in 1973, such as Hazelbrook's Vernon Treweeke, have returned to touch up their work. Balderstone's Hemp Embassy, a non-profit venture spruiking cannabis reform, conveniently located next door to the Nimbin Hotel, seems to be the focus. ........................
Hailing from Victoria's Western District, Balderstone tried his hand at jackarooing and stockbroking before being sent to London where he discovered a new person. ........................
He returned to Melbourne via the Greek islands and Afghanistan, and opened a bric-a-brac shop in then hip Greville Street, Prahran.
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''He lived in one of those dilapidated Toorak mansions,'' recalls a contemporary. ''They had a sheep. Come Saturday morning, they'd take it for a walk down Toorak Road to upset the poodles.'' ........................
Balderstone brought a similar style to Nimbin when he purchased two shares in a commune and returned permanently in the early 1980s. His lavatory offers a splendid up-close view of Mount Warning's nightcap tip.
By the time Balderstone arrived, Nimbin was staggering under the weight of self-imposed freedom.
In 1972, John Allen, then the Australian Union of Students cultural director, watched an ABC Four Corners program on dying country towns featuring Nimbin. He and fellow union office holder Graeme Dunstan (a Duntrooner who lay in front of the visiting US president Lyndon Johnson's Sydney motorcade) were looking for a place to hold an alternative festival. Since 1966 there had been three such festivals staged at universities; Woodstock loomed large and rock festivals at Ourimbah and Sunbury were hits. ........................
''There was tension between those who wanted music and those who wanted culture,'' says Allen, an event management lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney. ''Many young people then were the children of people who had grown up in the country. There was a conscious move back to the land. Nimbin sort of naturally suggested itself.''
Artist Treweeke who had seen psychedelia in London and brought it to the Sydney art world in 1967, recalls being told that local Aborigines had cursed the place after earlier settlers had taken their land. ''The curse was that the valley would not prosper, and we had found an almost deserted town, most of the shops were boarded up and unused. Farm houses were empty. We rented them for about $2 a week and we bought the empty shops,'' he says.
Allen says few originals stayed: ''Most of the people who took part in the festival left town. They had their own scenes already. Those who stayed, didn't, although they mightn't thank me for saying it.''
Some say Australia finally acquired the '60s zeitgeist with the election of the Whitlam government. Nimbin, a magnet for freewheelers, became shorthand for sex, drugs and rock'n'roll .
But the drug royal commissions of the 1970s did their job and pot dried up. Dealers opportunistically loaded heroin onto the market and Nimbin suffered greatly. The town filled with runaways, children living in a haze. In a nod to Clockwork Orange, locals called them ''droogs''. A decade ago, hollow-eyed kids still sidled up to tourists pushing grass.
Balderstone says there were many mental health problems but Nimbin has cleaned up its act. ''It's a place you can hang, and that made it hard for ourselves,'' he says. ........................
With festival alumni pulling into town, nearby Lismore has renamed itself ''Lovemore'' for the anniversary party. Thousands are expected with the weekend's fine weather. There is a masquerade ball next Saturday and Southern Cross University is conducting a two-day conference Aquarius and Beyond. "Aquarius has resonated well beyond 1973,'' lecturer Rob Garbutt says. ''Its ideas adapted and altered as time went on, yet the Aquarius spirit - hope for the future - is still clearly alive. Nimbin became a place where ideas mixed and morphed to create something new.''
Benny Zable is one original who kept the faith. Melbourne raised, he worked on a kibbutz before arriving in 1973 with a dance workshop that performed H. G. Wells' Time Machine in Nimbin Town Hall. ........................''We didn't know it then, but we were sustainability trailblazers,'' he says.
Zable helped launch a sister village relationship with Woodstock in upstate New York. Nathan Koenig, of the Woodstock Museum, is in town this month showing locals his movie about them, Woodstock Downunder.
''Hey guys,'' Koenig says, ''You know what some Sunday paper called us? The aged of Aquarius.''
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