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Friday, 7 September 2007

SPECIAL REPORT...

History rerun - Sydney's Radical Past Revisited

The counterculture context

A decade of youth culture

Most would go into conventional life and everyday jobs. But for every generation there are the disaffected few... that small number for whom conventional life is unattractive at best and boring at worst. The war in Vietnam and the rise of the counterculture would provide those disaffected with outlets for their alienation.

The New Left on the streets of Sydney. Roy Lacey leads a demonstration along George Street. The woman with the white hat on his left is Zelda Bailey; two along is Maggie, then Mandy Nicholson - all Sydney North Shore women.

It was in the 1960s that commentators started to talk about young people becoming alienated from mainstream society, from family life and careers that were supposed to span decades. There was truth in this but it didn't come out of nowhere.

Rebels of an earlier generation had pioneered that undercurrent of disaffection and the creativity that can come from it. In the 1950s it was artists, musicians and writers - especially that restless searcher for life experience, that literary icon, Jack Kerouac. With companions like Gary Snider, Neal Cassady and Alan Ginsberg, Kerouac became the symbol of a post-World War Two, jazz and alcohol-infused, free-living cohort that became known as 'The Beats'. Small in number and coalesced around the arts, they expressed themselves through writing, poetry, jazz and by living a lifestyle out of kilter with the mainstream of their time.

Kerouac's books capture the essence of that milieu, especially his classic On the Road (1957) and his lesser known title, The Dharma Bums (1959). With a writing style unorthodox for the times - it is sometimes referred to as 'stream of consciousness' - Kerouac captured a freewheeling lifestyle on the edge of both the literary world and the social mainstream.

The Beats - the creation of the creative crew inspired by Kerouac and his likes - never had a big impact on the social mainstream. They had been more of an unorthodox side show for the respectable, a creative but unsettled bunch vaguely threatening in their chosen way of life and expression. Although their influence would carry over into the youth counterculture of the mid-1960s, by the early part of the decade their presence, like their be-bop jazz, was in decline.

Overlap and succession - the new social movements

It was the children of the middle class that made up the youth movements of the post-1960 period in Australia and other industrial nations. They were the beneficiaries of the long, post-1950 economic boom that grew out of the productive capacity of the Second World War. As they entered working life they found themselves in a world of full employment and with incomes large enough to provide them with plenty of discretionary spending power. It was this that contributed to the rise of the youth movements that vied for their attention.

There was no single youth movement that spanned the 1960s. Rather, there was a succession of movements - subcultures, really - sometimes isolated, sometimes overlapping in time.

They were made up of people in their late-teens to late twenties who adopted ideas, styles of dress, personal presentation, music, arts, attitudes, behaviours and the illusions which brought individual and group identity. For many, the subcultures were a brief prelude to a conventional life of marriage, family and career. Others moved from one subculture to another. A few found in the subcultures the ticket to life and livelihood.

This new generation was different in outlook to their parents, many of whom had not all that long before fought a traumatic world war. After that, they wanted nothing more than to settle into the peace and certainties of 1950s Australia. Their children went through their first years in the carefree, non-threatening ambiance of the period. Time would pass before they came to understand what many of their fathers had suffered during the war and how it came to be that suburban life had appeared as salvation. That would come, but not for decades, and for some it would come rather rudely in a South East Asian country none had yet heard of.

As the post-war youth cohort entered its mid-teens, many of its number started to search for something more than social certainty, a searching that came to be seen as a rebellion against the values and mores of their parents. It was less this than an expression of the necessity to separate themselves from their origins so that they could adopt new ways and ideas. Certainly, it was true that some simply wanted nothing more than to escape a lifestyle they found stifling - they dived head-long into the masala of subcultures that were to emerge. In one respect, participation in one or other of the subcultures of the time can be seen as a search for individual identity, although the process was largely unconscious. As it turned out, many of them found an identity, then another and another.

Tripping along Highway One - sport becomes social movement

Summer 1964. The sun blazes down on the unprotected bodies milling around in small groups. It is a young crowd on the Surfers Paradise foreshore and there's a sense of freedom in the air. The dress code is swimmers or shorts, T-shirts or no shirts. Music comes over the p.a. - the Beach Boys, a new musical sound whose storyline is one of good times and beach culture. Every summer weekend it is like this - carloads of young people pour out of Brisbane, leaving behind the suburbs, boring school and boring jobs and head south along the two-lane to the Gold Coast. There, thought they don't know it, they are creating a new culture, one that will endure and become part of the Australian mainstream - the culture of the beach.

Beach culture was constructed largely by accident, through the accretion of the things people did, the thoughts they had, the ideas they hatched, the magazines they read, the businessess they started and the music they listened to. Somehow, all of this coalesced around a sport ancient in its origins but new in its rediscovery - surfing.

By the time the surfing subculture started to form in the early-60s, the rebellious of the late-1950s were settling into a daily life marked by work, young families and beers with mates. There was an air of certainty about and a house in the suburbs and the weekend backyard barbecue were still very much on the aspirational agenda. The youth movement that had grown up around rock n' roll had been portrayed as rebellious but, as its participants grew into their twenties, such an image was difficult to reconcile with the move into suburban respectability. As if to give notice of this change, on the radio the wild sounds of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Elvis had given way to the reassuring, lulling and commercial sounds of Pat Boone and the like. Soon, another sound would push out this soft-toned pap.

Something is happening, but you don't know what it is

It was the early 1960s and along California's coastline and around Australia's eastern and southern coasts, something was happening, something new was coalescing. That much was obvious even to those in high school.

Surfing was not new - Captain James Cook had observed it during his navigation of the Pacific in the late-1770s. The sport had been introduced into Australia in the summer of 1915 when Hawaiian surfing pioneer, Duke Kahanamoku, demostrated board riding at Sydney's Freshwater Beach and carved a surfboard from local timber. What made surfing popular was a technological development - the availability of new materials and the know-how to mould lightweight, cheap, foam-cored, fibreglass-covered surfboards.

Solid timber, balsa wood and long, hollow-core surfboards has propelled the sport's early adapters through the 1940s and 50s. Now, the new technology effectively democratised the sport, making it available to all with the cash to buy a malibu. What had been the somewhat esoteric obsession of a few quickly became a mass sport; a social movement and a lifestyle was in gestation. A relaxed style of clothing, language and music that expressed a carefree attitude to life boosted participation in a way of life new in Australia. The most enthusiastic focused on seeking out the best swells but you didn't have to own a malibu board to be known as a 'surfie' - you just had to look the part. Appearance, as usual, signified belonging.

The pages of US surfing magazines and the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean carried California's beach culture to our shores. Here it blossomed, finding a suitable climate and a youth ready for something new. It must have been more than the few who surreptitiously leafed through copies of Surfing World under their desks at high school, who dyed their hair yellow-blond with hydrogen peroxide, who spent Saturday nights in dance clubs like Brisbane's Surf City and who pioneered the first wave of skateboards. These were basic assemblages of roller skate wheels screwed to short, surfboard-shaped, pine planks painted in the patterns of popular surfboard manufacturers. On weekends, these land-locked sidewalk surfers would ride the smooth curves of paving at suburban service stations, carving wide right handers as if they were on some liquid band of moving energy. Sooner rather than later, they would discover that concrete, no matter how smooth, is less forgiving to a wipeout than the heaving swells of the sea.

For the serious, there was the pilgrimage in search of the perfect swell, journeys by car up and down Highway One (a practice captured in the popular Beach Boy's song of the time, Surfing Safari). By the 1970s the search for prime surfing venues would start to change the demographics of coastal towns as surfers realised that they could enjoy the swell, full-time, if they settled locally. Sleepy beachside places like Torquay and Byron Bay, once a whaling town and holiday habitat for city families with their tents and caravans, would change forever. By this time, the movement had sufficient mass to support the growth of businesses that had started to cater to it. Quicksilver, Ripcurl and Mambo would grow to multi-million dollar industries.

In Australia, the surfing culture established a presence as early as 1962. More than any other, it was this subculture that demonstrated the growing economic power of youth in an expanding economy where full employment was the norm. It dawned on some that life did not have to follow the staid path of their parents, that other ways of living were possible. As a culture, surfing would eventually become mainstream, amalgamating with the workaday world of employment, mortgage and family. Today, it spans continents.

Even now among the enthusiasts, you can still detect an edginess, an unspoken sense that they are participating in something special. But at the time of its birth, the surfie subculture was a rebellious waypoint, a cultural stopping place that became permanent for some but, for others, served as entry point to the next social experiment.

1964 - change comes

Saturday mornings in Brisbane brought a strange sight. Late in the morning, small knots of young people would start to gather on the Queen Street corner. One glance would disclose that they were not the usual suburbanite in town for a morning's shopping - the guys wore their hair a little longer than the generally-approved length and they brushed it straight down and over their forehead to form a wispy fringe. They wore blue denim jeans, a style until then associated with the American working class and with farmers. The females were a little unorthodox too - many wore their hair cropped a little below the ears so that it hung either side of the face and, like the guys, they wore it in a fringe. Even stranger, many of them toted large, cane baskets instead of demure handbags.

The gathering thickened as 11 approached, so much so that the police would move along the street cajoling the assembled to "move aside, move aside please", so that pedestrians could pass.

This weekly gathering signalled the arrival of something new to the early-60s city - cappuccino culture. The sweet dark liquid was served in the basement coffee shop that those on the footpath had lined up to get in to. Cappuccino, however was not the real reason people lined up. The basement was a gathering place for the youth of the new rhythm and blues (r&b) culture, a provincial manifestation of the British r&b revival. The coffee house was a daytime focus for youth who would later go on to populate the city's one or two nocturnal blues clubs. Less popular as a daytime venue was the Cave Club, another coffee-serving basement across the road from the old treasury building.

In its homeland, the British r&b revival had already combined with the fashion houses on London's Carnaby Street to kick off a new visual identity for youth. Smart and sophisticated was the look, with short skirts for girls, stylish shirts for boys and flared trousers for all. The Beatles signaled the genesis of this British-led movement and soon the sounds of a driving r&b spread far and wide.

Just as magazines, film and the poster were the media that spread the surfing subculture, so too the British r&b revival spawned its own media, notably a press made up of tabloid newspapers reporting the pop music and fashion scene. In the UK, weekend pop music programmes had thousands glued to the grainy image of their parent's monochrome TV sets as programs such as Ready, Steady, Go went to air. Here, local variants like Johnny O'Keefe's Six O'Clock Rock on the ABC, the tamer and socially safe Bandstand and Channel Nine's Teen Beat, in Brisbane, were keeping Australian youth in touch with overseas trends. A small Australian music industry had come out of the rock n' roll era. A few years later, surfing subculture performers like Little Pattie (whose hit single, He's My Blond-Haired, Stompy-Wompy, Real Gone Surfer Boy, had catapulted her to temporary stardom) brought it renewed life in the early-60s. But it was the later-60s music scene that truly kicked off the Australian industry.

To get to Brisbane's Primitive Club, patrons came into a deserted arcade - the club opened at night - descended the staircase and entered a smoky room. No hard liquor here, only coffee, but what attracted people was a new Brisbane band - the Purple Hearts. They would set up at one end of the room and belt out cover versions of a new album from the UK - Animal Tracks - the product of Eric Clapton's up and coming band, the Animals.

The surfie subculture took its recreation in large venues such as Surf City, but the r&b crowd preferred smaller, more intimate places. Like the Primitive, the Red Orb Club in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley was another such venue. A basement, visitors entered it down a narrow flight of stairs. When the band started, the dancers in the already crowded place made it very hot and patrons would go into the fenced-off lane to get some fresh air. Occasionally, plain clothes police would come down for a look around, stopping to harrass - should I say question - the occasional patron but sometimes leaving without so much as a word. The owner was unhappy at their appearance and on occasions would make his feelings known.

The use of recreational drugs was introduced into this social scene. Marijuana had been around for decades but was it was not yet to play a big part in youth culture - certainly, that would come, and in the not-too-distant future. In Brisbane, in the an old building, one of a row that used to stand opposite Town Hall but which were later demolished, a man called Ray had a shop selling Carnaby Street styles to young people. Reputedly, this was not all he sold - he was said to have another line of merchandise in the form of small pills dispensed in the backroom to those in the know. Apparently, this illicit merchandise had a lot to do with Ray having to hurriedly leave town.

in general, drugs of any kind played a relatively small role in the social scene.

The r&b scene and the surfing subculture diverged down radically different paths. The reality was that most took the path of their peers, that of their school mates and friends. In orientation, one subculture was coastal, the other inner-urban. Rockers - they were another, less conspicuous youth subculture - attracted the revhead and motorcycle afficianado and, when they visited the beach, you could be sure that two subcultures would clash. Clash also came with the later appearance of yet another subculture, though thankfully one which remained very small before it faded away - the shorn-haired, right-wing and violent Sharpie.

While Australia's youth lived in imitation of the British avant-garde or followed Highway One down the east coast, something more ominous was brewing far from our shores. To a country few had heard of, US President Kennedy was sending military advisers in an escalation that would soon change life for many in the youth culture. That country was Vietnam.

A new sound - West Coast reaches East

Summer 1967. The woman, perhaps in her late teens, was dressed with somewhat less elegance than the shop and office girls walking along George Street. Her T-shirt hung outside jeans which had not seen an iron for quite some time. Her khaki military jacket with it big pockets didn't quite qualify as workaday city wear even though it was Saturday, a day when standards were allowed to lapse a little. She wore her long, dark hair parted down the centre so that it spilled either side of her face, but it, too, looked as if a little styling would not be a bad thing.

Her friend was a little better attired with his brown corduroy jacket and button-up blue shirt, denim jeans and seude desert boots. He wore his hair quite a bit shorter than the young woman but still longer than was standard for men, unless they were surfies of those less-desirable types that had been influenced by their Haight-Ashbury counterparts.

At the corner of George and Liverpool, they turned right and headed across the street towards an old, two level building with a sign painted prominently across its upper level. Resistance, it shouted in bold, black letters. Inside, their appearance did not make them stand out from others gathered there, most of whom perused the racks of books that lined the walls while others flicked through troughs of albums in search of the unusual or the new import from the US. Behind the counter, a man with a rusty red beard and uncombed hair of the same colour talked with a visitor, trying to convince him that concern with personal appearance and grooming were nothing more than a middle class obsession.

Responsibility for bringing these people together, and for the existence of the bookshop, lay with the late-President Kennedy and Australian Prime Minister, Harold Holt. Without the military adventure in Vietnam the two had thrown their countrymen into, the shop and those who patronised it would never have come together.

A few years before, Bob Dylan has sung that the times were a'changing, but the war was not quite what he had in mind. President Kennedy's call to service had inspired many young Americans to do something positive in their own country. But, with Kennedy assasinated and the US in the hands of southern Democrat Lyndon Johnson, the future had become a little less rosy for many young Americans. When the Australian government followed suit by joining the US in Vietnam and conscripting young men for military service, a new seriousness entered the lives of young men.

Youth, in the 1950s, was focused on the USA, the birthplace of the first post-war youth culture and the home of rock n' roll. The US stayed centreplace as the surfing culture rescued young people from a music and youth scene that had devolved into an undifferentiated, commercial morass. Things started to change with the r&b revival. Now, the musical and cultural metronome was swinging stateside again. But this time it moved to a different beat.

That beat came to public attention in the USA when Time magazine gave space in its features section to a phenomenon that was gripping San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district. As if called from across the continent by an invisible, soundless piper, large numbers of young people had come together amid an environment of new music, sloppy and often bizzarre styles of dress, a strange herb and a chemical reputed to be the gateway to transcedence. Time didn't quite understand LSD or what was going onand nor did the rest of the media apart from the 'underground press', the tabloid newspapers that reflected this emerging subculture back at itself and fed it with new ideas on music, politics and hallucinogens. This was the time of gatherings known as 'happenings', of The Diggers who provided free food to those attracted to this strange milieu and of crowded, psychedelic performances by the likes of Janis Joplin and The Holding Company.

Other writers attempted to describe what was happening in San Francisco and elsewhere in the country at that time. Tom Wolfe, based in New York and at the start of his fame as a leading exponent of the 'New Journalism' - a literary non-fiction style that used fiction-writing structures - brought the escapades of California's Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to the attention of readers in his The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Around the same time, another New Journalism proponent, Norman Mailer, wrote a long piece he called Armies of the Night, about the 1967 march on the Pentagon and the mass exorcism of the demons that inhabited the building.

The media attempted to make sense San Francisco's 1967 Summer of Love but it could not quite come to grips with the new subculture behind it. Long-haired and dishevelled, socially rebellious and dismissive of the straight world of adults, the 'hippy' culture was scary to many in power because, although the movement wasn't coherent enough to properly articulate the fact - it came with a political undercurrent of opposition to the war in Vietnam. Its political potential was limited by its encouragement of drug use and by an ambivalence towards authority and coherent organisation. This was the time of 'doing your own thing'.

This, the mid to late-1960s, was the heyday of marijuana and psychotropic drugs such as LSD, experimentation with which was influenced by writers such as Aldoux Huxley (The Doors of Perception). Literary icon, Jack Kerouac, and singer/ songwriters such as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan had by then popularised the art of rough travel, an idea which appealed to the sense of personal freedom that was a part of the movement's group psychology. A distinctive form of rock music known as the 'West Coast sound' emerged thanks to performers like Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Driven by the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam and the pouring of more and more troops into that heavily-bombed country, especially conscripts, the movement would soon develop a politically radical wing which would combine youth culture and politics as never before. The politics, however, would be one of their own making, but in that making it would be influenced by the the existing politics of the Left. That the established Left never gained control of the emerging political consciousness is understandable. The old Left was the product of the Great Depression and the labour movements of the industrial countries, but the participants in the youth culture were, for the most part, middle class. To the new leftists the future envisioned by the old guard appeared grey, conformist and boring. It would not do.

Into this political vacuum poured the ideas of people like Bob Gould (Robert Stephen Gould), himself a refugee from the Communist Party of Australia from which he had been banished for opposing the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. With him came ideas drawn from the socialism of Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. These would be infused into a turbid politico-cultural malange by the more-serious political groupings that emerged on the movement's fringes. Gould would go on to play a significant role in the youth radicalisation of the late-1960s.

The 'counterculture', as the youth movement became known, offered a critical perspective on conventional society and sought to build something better, though it seriously lacked the attitude, organisation and tools to do so. The term covered a wide array of lifestyle practices and ideologies and the politicos soon found that attempting to organise the counterculture could be likened to herding cats. Except, that is, when it came to opposition to the war. Then, the movement fell solidly into line.

Days of emergence - a New Left comes into being

To describe themselves, Australian politicos adopted the term 'New Left' from their counterparts in the USA. The term was considered important because it signaled a distinct break with the left-wing politics of the past - especially that of the established communist and socialist parties and with the stultifying Eastern bloc states with their Stalinist excesses.

The New Left politicised the counterculture. In Australia and the US, the New Left at its broadest was a multi-layered phenomenon, a coalition that was inclusive of the social changes then going on, whether that be a tolerance of experimentation with drugs, sexual freedom, alternative ways of living, the anti-censorship push in Sydney or in music and dress. Socially, it was almost anything its participants wanted it to be, but at its core lay opposition to the war in Vietnam and the desire for a more equitable way of living.

The integration of popular culture and politics was an uneasy one. For the political organisations there was an unchanged core of Marxist analysis and action that could under no circumstanes be breached. Yet, Marxism failed to permeate the movement, most likely on account of its historical baggage. The New Left was a new politics only to the extent that it did not sideline Marxism, although its Marxism was a Westernised, more liberal version of its classic self.

The politicos hoped to influence the growing body of opposition to the war to adopt an anti-capitalist stance by linking the war in Vietnam with imperialism. To their credit, they came out in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, itself an example of imperialism, by opposing big power intervention in both countries. This highlighted their ideological independence from the two global superpowers.

For many, Marxism was an uneasy ideology because of conditions within that self-professed Marxist state, the Soviet Union. It was because of those lingering doubts that the Marxism of the New Left was seldom of the hard-core Soviet variety. Their's was a more humanist and liberal form although it took a sometimes doctrinaire stance. The New Left's youthful exuberance and its concern over the existence of suffering amid plenty, infused with notions of democratic socialism, more often than not positioned it in opposition to the Soviet block and its Western apologists. At the same time among the politicos, there remained the notion that the Soviet Union and its client Eastern bloc were 'distorted worker states' that could somehow be saved from themselves.

Providing further ideological impetus for the New Left was the process of decolonisation as the old European colonial powers relinquished their hold on the developing world. Decolonisation continued through the 1960s and 1970s, a time which saw new states emerge in the developing world only to become caught up in the vying for influence by the superpowers.

From Havana to Prague spring

He had a bushy beard. His hair was uncombed. He wore a beret. His eyes seemed to gaze into a future full of promise. Alberto Korda's photograph of Che Guevara became an icon of the New Left.

To many in the New Left in Australia and the USA, Cuba shone like a light in the darkness. The brashness of Fidel Castro in standing up to his superpower neighbour was only second to the dashing figure of Che Guevara, the global revolutionary. Castro never became the folk hero Guevara did. He was too caught up in superpower politics and the compromising of his island's independence in its alliance with the Soviet Union. That policy brough on the Castro-Kennedy confrontation known as the Cuban Missile Crisis - perhaps the closest the Cold War came to nuclear hot war. Guevara, instead of becoming involved in the minutae of governing Cuba or in big power confrontation, took himself off to Bolivia to forment revolution in what he hoped would be a rerun of the Cuban Revolution. He never returned, but his mythology and his image continued to have influence.

Che was a culture hero to the disenchanted youth of the West as much as he was to Cubans. Contradictorily for the many that espoused peace and non-violence, when Che the Hero of the Cuban Revolution spouted armed struggle, that was alright.

1968, and it's Spring in Central Europe. In Prague, the Red Army tanks on the streets are surrounded by thousands of citizens out to express their indignation and hate at this latest clumsy attempt by the dominant superpower of the region to reassert its authority. Gone is any vestige of socialist brotherhood; what is happening on the streets of this old city is an exercise in sheer, naked, armed power.

With their crushing of Alexander Dubcek's reforms, the Soviet Union lay exposed to the world as a ruthless and paranoid authoritarian state. Cuba might have been the socialist state of choice for the New Left but the Soviet invasion of Czheckoslovakia brought a new focus. The citizens that resisted the invaders and attempted to assert their right to a more democratic politics were praised by a New Left that was now knew the true nature of the Soviet Union. China's Mao Tse Tung has said that political power grew 'from the barrel of a gun'. The Soviet Union's thugguish distortion of communism was spread by the tank.

In the West, anti-Vietnam war demonstrators linked the war in Vietnam and the Soviet invasion. "Dubcek, Dubcek, Ho Chi Minh" became the slogan on the streets; "Czheco-Soviet-nam", proclaimed the placards.

The Czheckoslovak intervention was the event that split the old from the New Left for good. The politics of that ancien regime was now shown to be moribund and discredited. For many in the loose coalition of forces and ideas that made up the New Left, the Soviet Union now represented repression rather than revolution. Even though the Trotskyites faction continued to give provisional ideological support to the Soviet Union, it was now very clear that the Soviet model was not the way of the future. Their persistence in supporting the Soviets revealed a conservative streak when it came to ideology, an inability to publicly divorce themselves from a clearly aberrant regime. Had they the courage to make a clear and public break with the Soviets they could have been percieved to be a truly independent force on the Left. That chance was lost.

The New Left remained the political wing of the counterculture until the early years of the following decade. It failed to survive longer because it was essentially a single issue phenomenon focused on opposition to the war in Vietnam and Australia and America's role in it. The politicos tried to extend that opposition in an anti-capitalist direction but there was insufficient support for such a move. Marxism had little traction in Australian society. The ending of the war brought to an end the anti-war movement's reason for existence. Those still interested in building a better society would seek a new direction.

Days on the road - the world calls

London was calling. The Australians that answered that silent call were the restless, the odd adventurer or those seeking career opportunities then unavailable in their home country, assuming they had the funds for the sea voyage - the era of cheap international air travel was still well over a decade away. In those days, Australians had the right to work in the UK and the bond between Britain and Australia was still strong. Those crowded, small islands off the European mainland were a natural attractor to young Australians searching for something different, for opportunity.

There had been an exodus of creative people like artists, writers, journalists and musicians, since the late-50s, mainly to London. That continued and numbers increased well into the following decade. It became an established path into a world which, to most who stayed at home, remained psychologically distant. Then, in the middle years of the 1960s, that exodus started to change markedly.

Heat, cold, mosquitos, bedbugs - life on the Hippy Trail

Maybe it was the sheep skin jacket acquired in Afghanistan or their utterings about India and the spiritual search, perhaps it was their travel-weary manner and appearance, the deep tan acquired traveling through Asia, stories about the comparative quality of a certain herb they sampled along the trail or tales of adventure, humour and mishap - whatever the clue, it was a safe bet they those minimalist travellers were fresh off the Hippy Trail.

Like the ancient Silk Road, the Hippy Trail linked countries and cultures, Asia and Europe. And like the ancient travellers, those of the 60s and 70s journeyed in search of the new. But, unlike those ancient travellers, it was not spices and commerce they sought, it was experience, the novelty, knowledge and, for some, insight that might be acquired through months of rough travel.

The trail followed the East Coast then passed in a winding and convoluted sort of way through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and India. From there, the traveller headed north for a break in Kathmandu, then on across Afghanistan, through Iran and into Turkey. The trail diverged when it crossed the Bosphorus, one branch taking the side trip to Spain, the other ending in London. For footloose Britishers, the trail started in London and ended, for most, in Kathmandu. Only a comparative few went on to Australia.

It was not a marked trail, just a general westward trend across islands and continents, a movement of individuals and small groups with many side trips. It might take months or years, but it was always done on the cheap.

The transit was the forerunner of the adventure travel industry that made its start later in 1970s, itself a precursor to the backpacker travel industry which now infests our cities and beachside towns but which offers little of the pioneering challenges of those early years. Sooner or later, all routes acquire guides, and it is no surprise that Tony Wheeler and his partner launched the Lonely Planet travel guidebook company at this time with a cheaply-produced little title, Across Asia on the Cheap.

Perhaps the best writing to catch the spirit of the time is that of Australian author, iconoclast and futurist, Richard Neville (www.richardneville.com). His Playpower (1970, Johnathan Cape, UK) and Hippy Hippy Shake (1994, Bloomsberry Books) provide a participant's insight into the times.

Conflict and political change put the Hippy Trail out of business by the late-1970s, but what its travellers carried from the East to London, Australia and the USA was the influence of Buddhism and Hinduism. Eastern philosophy enjoyed new life in the West and, for many, the journey was life-changing.

Days post-war - the rural retreat

The election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972 ended conscription and Australia's participation in the war in Vietnam. The movement built around opposition to that war, its historic mission fulfilled, started to unravel. The hippy era, too, was past, though the term would long persist.

It was not into mainstream life for all, though those that took that course must have carried a cultural baggage of alternative ideas, some of which would go mainstream in years to come.

The sixties had brought a taste for the unconventional life. By comparison, the social mainstream presented the dull picture of a white-bread lifestyle focused on the grind of the Monday to Friday working world. This was fine for many, but more than a few of those who participated in the youth culture wanted something different. That difference was provided by the emerging 'alternative' culture that set up the first intentional communities around an economically-declining town called Nimbin.

In a decade punctuated by ever-new iterations of youth culture, the alternative movement answered the needs of those who had been through the anti-war years and were ready for something different, something more constructive, as they would say. It was the 1970s and change was again in the air.

New setlements on old farms

The foothills of the Nightcap Range are rolling ridges covered in Eucalypt and rainforest. Their sides can be steep, as anyone picking their way up the untracked slopes soon discovers. Gullies have been carved by rippling streams whose waters, higher up above the farms, are considered safe to drink. From high up on the ridges, where there is a break in the trees, a landscape of bushland and farm is revealed.

New settlements on old farms, Australia's first intentional communities appeared around Nimbin in the early-1970s. People began to reinhabit the less-steep land where narrow gravel roads wound into the hills. Owner-built houses of varying design and quality appeared on farms long since uneconomical. Later, it was Bellingen's turn, then other places in other regions.

'Communes', as land sharing settlements were known by the media, had existed at places like Cedar Bay in far North Queensland since the previous decade, but these were informal, unstructured squatter settlements. After a struggle with the local council in northern NSW, intentional communities gained legal standing when the 1970s Labor government of Neville Wran introduced Multiple Occupancy legislation. This permitted more than one dwelling on a piece of land. It was to these new settlements that many who had actively opposed the Vietnam war drifted.

The youth culture of the late-60s is often portrayed as a unified phenomenon. That is an illusion. Many politicos considered the alternatives to be naive escapists rather than people engaged in a serious attempt to set up a new society, something they saw as primarily a political, not a cultural or lifestyle process. They did not understand the motivation of the alternatives to go out and physically build the new society in the form of intentional communities. Maybe, though, after the intensely political atmosphere of the anti-war movement, people had simply had enough of politics and ideology. It was the settled life they now sought. While the goal of creating a new culture remained, the approach to building it moved from political change to hands-on experimentation.

By the early seventies the politicos had gone and the alternatives were to prevail well into the following decade. Now a little aged, many continue to live in the settlements in the hills that they retreated to during those formative years. It is the durability of those settlements and their modern spawn - the 'ecovillages' - that attests to the success of the movement.

Legacy

For around six years - from 1966 to the ascention of the Whitlam government and the ending of Australian involvement in Vietnam in 1972 - the more socially adventurous of Australia's youth were exposed to new ideas that would change them and influence the wider society. During that decade, youth movements rose and faded and people moved easily from one into another.

This period, very brief in the history of the nation, had been politically and socially turbulent. For many who lived through it, its legacy was an openness to new influences and different ways of living.

Next: Resistance rises to leadership