How the hippies really did help to change our world

[Joanne98]

Look around New Zealand: modern, multi-cultural, accepting of difference and nuclear-free. Our No 8 wire mindset has evolved into an entrepreneurial ability to put our music, film and fashion on the world stage.

We have come a long way from the Holyoake years of the 50s and 60s, a time former hippie Chris Hegan describes as grey: "It was self-righteous, it was stuffy, it was conventional."

New Zealand in the 60s was conformist and repressed, an uptight little England in the South Pacific.

Into this blandness came the hippies, a rainbow revolution of new ideas. They started a cultural war that changed New Zealand, but one that also saw many of the so-called hippies beaten up and arrested. Others became casualties of their experimentation with drugs or sex.

Despite the fact New Zealand resisted the hippies, most of them survived, and gradually their social conscience and healthy disrespect for uptight traditionalism infiltrated almost everywhere. Most of the hippies may never have become policemen or joined the armed forces but some did became mayors, MPs, wine-makers, architects, business owners and creatives.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10705881

Dirty Bloody Hippies premieres next Sunday in Auckland as part of the Documentary Edge Festival 2011.It opens in Wellington on March 11.

[xchrom]

1. lovely. nt