I live in a beautiful part of Australia, known as the Clarence coast…I live in a town called Yamba…it is so the CSIRO claims, the place in the southern hemisphere with the mildest climate….it is nearly always sunny and the surf is spectacular….a prerequisite for my son and Hubby!!!!! It has not always been so however…we have only been here for the past four and a half years…before that we did the alternative lifestyle thing and lived out the back of NIMBIN…Aquarius rainbow town of some acclaim( which I sadly add is not the place we originally set eyes upon…we, like many of the true and old of the place have left…in sadness and disgust…but that is another story)…we lived on a ‘community’ and grew our own veggies and were solar energized and collected fallen timber for our wood fire etc……a very nice if hard period of our lives which was idealistic but unfortunately unmanageable and disillusioning in the end. Our society requires money, our kids needed educations that allowed them personal choices in our world….the people we lived with were all not as true and honest as us and drugs became a greed tool as capitalistic in their growth and sale as any mainstream crop…but far more lethal when used ad hoc by the way too young and stupid …Nimbin was becoming like a war zone with violence a daily occurence and no-one willing to take responsibility for themselves or anyone else( we, I will state never imbibed and never grew these drugs, because we were truly idealistic and damn good parents, and sensible about the abuse such temptations lead to)…..we had philosophy…..spirituality…..dreams… (Did I just use past tense?) Don’t get me wrong, I have not thrown the baby out with the bath water here….I still believe that anything is possible, do yoga, chant and meditate…I still hold truth and honesty and love as my ideals…I still need to know and understand the basic philosophy behind my actions and choices…I still look to the stars…but I hold a deep reserve of self protection as well, I admit to the shadow of ourselves…and do not expect the best of everyone anymore…and do not ask for it either…my dreams are more realistic and my wants are more practical.
Personally, Nimbin taught me many things…that people are not always what they seem, ideals are great but others may not take their so called ideals as seriously as you, in the end we all are really looking out for ourselves and that without a shared philosophy or culture, community living is mostly about power struggles and INDIVIDUALS who earnestly believe their way is the only way…and an element of paranoia…On a lighter note it also taught me how to help a goat give birth…these gals are notorious for legs first offspring and a helping hand ( and half an arm usually) comes in handy!! It taught me that a human baby can survive quite nicely thank you on a diet of kangaroo poo and mulberries (both ripe and unripe), that small children do not have a natural fear of snakes but rather an indiscriminate desire to feed anything that moves, that red back spider bites have nasty consequences and then some, that mud is oh so easy to get over (figuratively not physically), that if you don’t move quick when the rains come you can be flooded out or in for some time…only trouble is its sometimes hard to decide which end of the swollen creek you’d rather be….( in the home end you don’t need to go to work, it can be nice and cozy with a wood fire burning and there is ample excuse to do very little….on the other hand food runs out remarkably fast, everything is damp…the wood too… or leaks, solar power is in short supply, blackouts are common and the small creatures of the neighborhood like to shelter with you. In the town end you can keep going to work so you actually have money…evil necessity that it is, you have hot and cold running water…a luxury any time, food you don’t cook yourself and fairly regular electricity…but the lack of fresh clothing can be difficult and small kids in small places are a disaster waiting to happen,).
We moved to Nimbin after returning to Australia from a stint as volunteers in Western Samoa. We arrived back in Adelaide and the two eldest daughters didn’t know what a letter box was!! We had reverse culture shock and couldn’t handle the bright lights or the choices of the supermarket…so we bought a bus and headed north to warmer horizons( humidity and wet seasons and heat had become familiar friends)…and found ourselves landed at Lillian rock about 20 minutes out of Nimbin…where we both found teaching jobs and the rest is history…including our eventual decision to move all and sundry back to the ocean…a place familiar to both my hubby and I where no hour long drives to have a surf are necessary, where people are pretty much standard folk and what you see is what you get and everyone is defined to their own little space except when enjoying the delights of sun and sand…where deep and meaningful philosophical discussions are hard to find and anything remotely different is highly visible and questionable, where intellectual and political debate can be tricky, but where we have found a quiet respite from clearing paddocks, negotiating community meetings, saying good bye to idealistic dreams and watching the young and impressionable do damaging things to themselves…
Now the real subject of this little transcript was actually meant to be Yamba and all its charms…but that may have to wait until another day…bye bye
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