Nimbin - The Hippy Capital of Australia

On Monday, with just two weeks to go until my flight home, I hopped on a bus in Brisbane and started the 930km journey back to Sydney. This meant finally returning to New South Wales, four months after originally departing the state. My destination was Lismore, a Northern NSW town where I was met my by my final helpx host who resides 5km out of town. It's another splendid place, green and pleasingly undulating, and the house is scenically nestled on the edge of a valley with grazing cattle roaming the surrounding land. My host is trying to live sustainably and plant trees and crops native to the area, so the majority of my work this week will be in the garden towards that end.

30km from Lismore is the small town of Nimbin, the hippy capital of Australia, and today I checked it out. Nimbin was once a prosperous dairy farming area, however in the 1960s the industry collapsed, plunging the town into a rapid decline. In fact, Nimbin almost shut down completely, but then everything changed in 1973 when the Aquarius Festival was held in Nimbin. It was a musical celebration of counter-culture and sustainable living that lasted beyond the festival, as some of the attendees stayed in the town and set up communes. Since then, it has been the place to be for a hippy lifestyle. In recent years, the Aquarius Festival has re-emerged as the annual MardiGrass Festival. A couple of weeks ago 15,000 merrymakers showed up to the 2014 MardiGrass, rallying for cannabis law reform and participating in a series of hilarious sounding events such as The Bong Throw (won with a huge toss of 49.9m), Joint Rolling (the "legendary" Bob the Joint Builder again dominating the 'Adverse Conditions' discipline), The World Stoned Chess Championship (described as a "wonderful success" by the local paper), The Hemp Olympix (Nimbin resident Hashy Stashy taking home the womens' title) and The Tug 'O Drug War.

As you would expect, Nimbin is a colourful village where the key words are 'sustainable', 'organic', 'peace', 'love', 'wisdom', and most significantly 'marijuana'. While strolling around town I saw people rolling joints willy-nilly and I was offered weed by around ten different dealers, including once while in the museum. There is a police station in Nimbin, but they don't seem to care about what goes on in the town. And why should they? I'm not a weed smoker myself, but no trouble seems to be caused in Nimbin and if the police were to crackdown then the village would surely lose its unique charm very quickly. Australia, like so many countries, is full of boring, characterless small towns and Nimbin is wonderfully different and interesting. The question of whether marijuana should be legal is waaaaay beyond the scope of this blog, but in the tiny country town of Nimbin I say let it be.

As for the Nimbin Museum, it was unlike any museum I had visited before. I was hoping to learn about how the town became the hippy stronghold it is today, but there was nothing educational about the place. It was basically a giant collection of random artifacts that I suspected were the unsold stock from the Nimbin shops of yesteryear. These objects were thrown together chaotically into exhaustingly colourful and crowded rooms, then interspersed with scribbled quotes from the likes of Krishna and those seemingly-clever-but-ultimately-meaningless sentences of wisdom that will occasionally appear on your Facebook newsfeed, such as 'if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem'. It was all a bit overwhelming and I didn't know where to look.

On the streets of Nimbin I didn't see any national banks or fast food chains. What I did see was a myriad of shops selling crystals, herbal highs, bongs, tarot cards, chimes, sloganed T-shirts, various rainbow coloured apparel, incense sticks, decorative trinkets, meditative balls, books with titles such as 'The End of Money and The Future of Civilization', and hemp. Ah, hemp. Nimbin is obsessed with hemp. It seems like the locals believe hemp is the solution to all of the world's problems and a couple of stores are almost entirely dedicated to it. Hemp seeds and related produce such as hemp protein powder were of course available, more unexpectedly were hemp ropes, which are apparently soft on the hands, and hemp moisturiser in case the ropes aren't so soft after all.

I wasn't in the market for any hemp items and neither did I want any of the other stuff these shops were selling, so the only things I bought in Nimbin were a pie and chocolate caramel slice from the bakery, and the extent of my indulgence in the Nimbin lifestyle - an organic pear. Forgive me if I elaborate on the chocolate caramel slice, because it was heavenly. A generous slab of rich chocolate rested atop the thickest layer of caramel I have ever seen in such a delicacy. The hefty weight of the above was impressively supported by a flapjack style base that was supremely crunchy. It was delicious. It was huge. And it was a bargain at $2.70. So I didn't get high in Nimbin - legally or otherwise - but I did get an almighty sugar rush.