The Nimbin Lifestyle Celebration

The Nimbin Lifestyle Celebration of 1983 (4,000 people) marked the tenth anniversary of the Aquarius festival. Concerned by anthropology's apparent neglect of the popular culture of Australian alternates, Janice Newton (1988) investigated this nostalgic attempt to recapture the essence of Aquarius - using 'impressionistic evidence' (ibid:64) gathered at the event itself, and extensive archival research (including documentation on the original Nimbin event). Each day of the Celebration possessed a theme: 'kid's day, yin day (women's activities), green day, peace day and land rights day'. According to Newton, the event was pervaded by naturalism. She observes two key manifestations of 'the natural' desired by participants - 'tribes' and 'Aborigines' - meditating upon what they reveal about Australian counterculture. The attempts to 'recreate tribal communalism' and 'tribal ritual structures' (ibid:64), and the celebration of, and identification with, Aboriginality (evident, for example, in a 'Koori space', land rights tent, workshops on Aboriginal dialogue and birthing practices, a 'bora ring' and 'Rainbow Serpent' closing ceremony [ibid:62]), demonstrate a romantic 'idealisation of a tribal and Aboriginal way of life' rooted in the counterculture.

The Celebration also revealed significant shifts since Aquarius, as 'the radical New Left Politics of many of the 1973 participants were replaced by a more humanistic political interest: conservation, Aboriginal land rights, peace, and world hunger' (ibid). However, Newton reveals that what she regards as the political/personal (or religious) 'cleavage' of early counterculture, was retained, since social and political issues were evidently 'secondary' to the 'expansion of self' (ibid:64).

Like Hetherington, Newton grants Turner pride of place in her theoretical modelling. Indeed, Newton first recognised the value of plying the ideas of Victor Turner to the study of ALEs and their participants. After all, it was the countercultural milieu which Turner believed best characterised the intimate marriage of marginality and what he called 'communitas' in western culture. Newton argues that the original Aquarius Festival was an exemplary 'spontaneous communitas', a source of regeneration, and the '83 Celebration was a kind of 'ideological communitas', an attempt to 'recharge the permanent alternative communities, to revitalise a contra-ideology, to keep up the strength of the anti-rationalistic ideals of work, play and personal development' (1988:66) conceived ten years before. Finally, interpreting the later event as a font of societal change, Newton also acknowledges the utility of the (post)modern 'liminoid', which is applied to render it a 'proto-structural' force. Quoting Turner, she says liminoid activities can:

generate and store a plurality of alternative models of living, from utopias to programs which are capable of influencing the behaviour of those in mainstream social and political roles ... in the direction of radical change (in Newton 1988:65).

While this may be true for the former event, I wonder whether it has equal applicability to 1983 where, echoing the 'personal/political (religious) split' of the early counterculture, social and political issues were 'secondary' to self-growth. I think this inconsistency may be corrected once it is recognised that the 'cleavage' about which Newton speaks, may be quite simply overstressed (see Chapter 7). A related problem can be located in the author's implication that the Celebration's adopted tribal model resembles 'small scale liminality'. My concern is that we are left with little solution as to how this perceived valorisation of 'the tribal model' can be reconciled with the simultaneous predominance of individualism and self development in the observed 'counterculture'. My chief question is, where does the presence of apparently incompatible values - the collectivism of the 'tribal model' on the one hand (including the women who apparently 'acted within a separate social and political unit' [Newton 1988:62]), and the individualism inherent to self-growth practices on the other - leave 'small scale liminality'?

Finally, in accordance with the parameters she set for her article, Newton, in discussing the counterculture's valorisation of Aboriginality, does not go beyond reference to their 'false idealisation of a tribal and Aboriginal way of life' to take in a discussion of the politics and/or phenomenology of cultural appropriation. I have no doubt that further investigation would uncover a complexity of issues: from the neo-colonialist distortion, homogenisation and occupation of essentialised 'others', an approach gaining momentum in the wake of Said (1978), to the reconciliatory and alliance building potentials of cultural borrowing, and the syncretic creativity located in the appropriational process of 'othering' as a means of identity (re)creation. However, this is not a criticism as Newton's goal is to initiate discussion on the matter. As she says, the counterculture's 'reaching out' to Aboriginal culture 'provides a fruitful area for further research' (1988:67).

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