Nambassa


Nambassa was a series of hippie-conceived New Zealand festivals held from 1976 to 1981 on large farms around Waihi and Waikino in the Waikato. They were music, arts and alternatives festivals that focused on peace, love, and an environmentally friendly lifestyle. In addition to popular entertainment, they featured workshops and displays advocating alternative lifestyle and holistic health issues, alternative medicine, clean and sustainable energy, and unadulterated foods.
The New Zealand hippie movement was part of an international phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world, heralding a new artistic culture of music, freedom and social revolution where millions of young people across the globe were reacting against old world antecedents and embracing a new hippie ethos. Specifically New Zealand's subculture had its foundations in the peace and anti-nuclear activism of the 1960s where hippies were actively trying to stop New Zealand's involvement in the Vietnam war and to prevent the French from testing nuclear weapons at Mururoa atoll in French Polynesia in the Pacific Islands.
The January 1979 three-day music and alternatives festival, held over Auckland anniversary weekend, attracted over 75,000 patrons making it the largest arts, multiple cultural and popular music event of its type in the world.
Nambassa is also the tribal name of a charitable trust that has championed sustainable ideas and demonstrated practical counterculture ideals, a spiritually based alternative lifestyle, environmentalism and green issues from the early 1970s to the present.

Significant events

  • 1977 January. Waikino music festival at Bicknel's farm, Waitawheta Valley, between Waihi and Waikino. Attendance 5500.
  • 1977 December. Parade from Queen St, Auckland, to nearby Albert Park for a free concert. Attendance 10,000.
  • 1978 January. Nambassa three-day music, crafts and alternative lifestyles festival on Phil and Pat Hulses' farm in Golden Valley, north of Waihi. Attendance 25,000.
  • 1978 October. Nambassa winter road show toured the North Island promoting the 1979 festival.
  • 1978 December. Two-day gathering in Maritoto Valley for the Mother Centre and friends. Attendance 1500.
  • 1979 January. Nambassa beach festival touring family roadshow – Whangamatā, Waihi Beach, Mount Maunganui and Coromandel.
  • 1979 January. Nambassa three-day music, crafts and alternative lifestyles festival on Phil and Pat Hulses' farm in Golden Valley, north of Waihi. Attendance 75,000 plus.
  • 1981 January. Nambassa five-day celebration of music, crafts and alternative lifestyles culture on a farm at Waitawheta Valley between Waihi and Waikino. Attendance 15,000 – well down on the 1979 festival. Reacting against the huge 1979 event which was deemed by many of the counterculture movement too large and not reflective of the alternative message, the organisers purposely ran this festival on the same weekend as a major commercial rock concert. While this event lost money, it dramatically changed its character away from rock music towards hippie and New Age culture.

    Performers and guests

Some of the hundreds of performers and guests who took part in Nambassa activities included:
Image:Nambassa 1979 The Plague on the Main Stage.jpg|thumb|230px|right|Nambassa 1979, The Plague on the Main Stage
Image:1981 event Australian aboriginals.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Nambassa 1981 Australian Aboriginal dance
  • The Plague, Nambassa 1979 and 1981. Performed naked but covered in paint in 1979.
  • Mahana. A travelling Māori theatrical rock band whose rock opera depicts the trials and tribulations of early white colonisation of New Zealand. Showcased at the Nambassa Winter Show 1978 and the Nambassa festivals 1978, 1979 and 1981. Produced by John Tucker.
  • Billy TK, Nambassa 1979 and 1981.
  • John Hore-Grenell, Nambassa 1978 and 1979.
  • The Rodger Fox Big Band, Nambassa 1981.
  • Gary McCormick, Nambassa 1978, '79 and '81. Poet and comedian.
  • Sam Hunt, Nambassa 1979. Poet.

    Cultural guests

  • Stephen Gaskin, Nambassa 1978, 1979 and 1981. Co-founder of "The Farm", an internationally known spiritual community in Summertown, Tennessee. Stephen Gaskin was a Green Party presidential primary candidate in the US elections of 2000. He and wife Ina May Gaskin, plus other farm residents, made the annual pilgrimage to Nambassa.
  • Swami Satchidananda, Nambassa 1979. Known among the 1960s counterculture as the man who opened the original Woodstock festival of 1969, and as the sage from India who introduced the art of Yoga to the west.
  • Ina May Gaskin, Nambassa 1978 and 1981. Widely credited with having created the modern home birth movement and helping to inspire the renaissance of midwifery in the United States.
  • Eileen Caddy Nambassa 1981. Eileen co-founded the Findhorn spiritual community in Scotland in 1962. Her workshops and discussions on Findhorn Foundation were well received.
  • Richard Alpert, aka Baba Ram Dass, Nambassa 1981. Richard Alpert was a professor of psychology at Harvard University who became well known for researching the effects of LSD, working closely with Dr. Timothy Leary. At Nambassa there was standing room only for Ram Dass' diverse lecturers on meditation and health.
  • Chief Oren Lyons, Nambassa 1981. Lyons is a Native American, a traditional faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Council of Chiefs of the Hau de no sau. He conducted lectures and coordinated with Māori land rights activists, sharing his Native American land rights experiences.
  • Jim Cairns, Nambassa 1981. Former deputy Prime Minister of Australia and Labor Treasurer in the Australian government who opposed Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War and in 1970 led a protest against the war. He resigned from parliament in 1977 to devote his life to the counter-cultural movement.
  • The Twin Oaks Community eco community from Louisa County, Virginia sent a delegation of six people to the 1981 Nambassa five-day celebration. Their workshop contributions were well received.
  • Eva Rickard, Nambassa 1979. Vocal agitator for return of Raglan golf course land to the Tainui Awhiro people from whom it was taken during World War II. Gave a number of powerful lectures, on aerial railway and the main stage. Nambassa is sympathetic towards many indigenous Māori land claims.
  • Tim Shadbolt, Nambassa 1978, 1979 and 1981. Political activist and workshop participant. In the 1970s, he founded a commune and concrete cooperative at Huia. He wrote an autobiography, Bullshit and Jellybeans.

    Arts, self-sufficiency and healing arts workshops

The notion for education-based workshops and displays developed out of a philosophical view; that the world was heading towards difficult times and that people needed to learn how to become more self-sufficient so that they would be less reliant on a system unable to provide spiritual and survivalist needs.
The following extracts are taken from the first 1976 "Nambassa Sun" newsletter proposal, in support of their survivalist workshops on self sufficiency and to heal the body and the mind.
The Nambassa festivals were not only music and entertainment events but included educational components which sought to instruct people on lifestyle aids it felt important enough to promote within the then conservative society of New Zealand's 1970s. Many of those involved in Nambassa aspired to the notion that throughout the evolution of western civilisation, many valuable ancient survival, healing and spiritual techniques, had been lost over 1700 years of a philosophically and culturally dominating Roman Christianity. Nambassa advocates that many past civilisations supporting religious and political institutions, have historically sought to alienate, and too often violently eliminate, many worthwhile belief systems which did not conform to its then strict conservative doctrines on culture and religion. Adherents of Nambassa promote the ideology which suggests that, to deny what was once integral to survival in ancient history, is essentially to deny one's personal spiritual development. Through its wide variety of workshop subjects, the festivals attempted to nurture a better understanding of culture and spirituality with the goal of fostering a more tolerant and better informed society.
The idea of integrating education based workshop demonstrations with popular mainstream entertainment, set the Nambassa festivals aside from other festivals coming before it. It was during the social revolution of the early 1960s and 1970s that Nambassa pioneered the concept, and was a world leader, in what was to evolve as a new format of presentation for the all encompassing major cultural, creative arts and music festivals. Most large open-air entertainment gatherings, prior to Nambassa, were essentially pop concerts. This new format demonstrated the merits of combining, in a complementary way, multiple and diverse entertainment and cultural modules, within the one grand celebratory event. During the 1970s, the Nambassa Trust developed this concept of large scale multidimensional events, which the rest of the world only began adopting some 20 years later.
While the 1960s and 1970s hippy movements were, and continue to be, unfairly derided
for their infatuation with rediscovering ancient religion and culture, many of these re-birthing systems are now part of mainstream ideology.
Image:1981 festival joins for World Peace.jpg|thumb|220px|left|1981 10,000 Nambassadors join for world peace
At Nambassa, one could attend and participate in free workshop demonstrations, symposium and discussion groups on diverse subjects such as: leather-work, hand crafted jewellery, spinning, pottery, indigenous Australians didgeridoo, boomerang throwing, creative art, musical instruments, puppeteering, bonsai trees, batiking, screen printing, basket weaving, Māori woodcarving, furniture and woodturning, natural cosmetics, custom made Sandal, clay therapy, aboriginal emu egg carving, silk screening, crochet and embroidery, macramé, ceramics, bone carving, candle making, stained glass, paper making, journalism and printing, glass blowing, enamelling, Māori art and jewellery, wood carving, the art of throwing pottery, weaving on inkle and back strap looms, wood-adzing, moccasin making, airbrushing, organic gardening, tie-dye, Māori kit making, mulching and composting, growing and using soya beans, herb gardening, hydroponics, small orcharding, natural child birth, breast feeding, child care, alternative education, animal husbandry, raku pottery, fencing, small dams and irrigation, solar heating, methane gas plants, wind pumps and generators, solar power, solar cooker, waterwheels, goat farming, sheep milking, rammed earth walls, soil-cement adobe, stone-masonry, hydraulic power, wind power, low cost housing and renovation, furniture making, moulds and mud houses, bamboo and its uses, alternative lifestyles and communities, Rudolf Steiner Schools, permaculture, ecology and mining, native forests, saving the whales, food preparation and storage, dried fruit, bread making, self-sufficiency, wine making, beekeeping, butter and cheese making, soap making, food cooperatives, healthy eating, civil liberties, New Zealand's nuclear-free zone, world peace and disarmament, music, Gay Rights, puppetry, origami, theatre, dance and costumes, mask making, conservation and pesticides, clean water, mobile homes construction, bush craft, legal aspects of alternative land development, horse ploughing, family planning, vegetarianism, animal rights, martial arts, Third World poverty, civil and human rights, work cooperatives, craft cooperatives, wood gas producers, solar panels, development of electric cars and bikes, Feminism, Women's Rights, amateur radio, wood stoves and wetbacks, kite making, the environment, alternative education, Pacific cultural exchange, Māori land rights, community development, Māori marae, Māori hāngī, Maori Language Tutorial, substance abuse, new age and green politics, alternative media, meditation, yoga, sufi dancing, I Ching, tarot cards, alchemy, massage, sweat lodge, nutrition, alternative medicine, astrology, prayer and chanting, clairvoyance, meditation, spiritual healing, naturopathy, acupuncture, tai chi, herbalism, natural remedies, reflexology, iridology and osteopathy.
At all festivals there was a smorgasbord of spiritual and religious learning. Here the public could venture to various Healing Arts areas and attend either a bible study course, or chant spiritual names with the Buddhists and Hare Krishnas, or sing and pray with Christians, or attend Sunday mass with the Catholics or learn how to meditate with Ananda Marga or find out the meaning of Karma from the Hindus. The policy of the Nambassa Trust was to attempt to create an ambiance which would dispel all religious factionalism, so that philosophical labels could dissipate enabling people of all religious persuasion to share in their most common fundamental of traits, their humanity. In maintaining Nambassa's nonsectarian and open door policy on religious philosophy, workshops were conducted on: Hinduism, Hare Krishna, Bible scholarship and born again Christianity, Roman Catholic Church, Judaism, Ananda Marga, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Krishna-Haribol, Sufism, Esoteric Christianity, shamanism, Wicca, and Zen.