Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand

by Nick Bollinger

Award-winning writer Nick Bollinger’s deep history of the transformation of New Zealand life wrought by the counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s.

A remarkable story of beards & bombs, freaks & firebrands, self destruction & self-realisation, during the 1960s & '70s.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics

407 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2022

About the author

Nick Bollinger was born 1958.

He attended Clifton Terrace Primary School and Onslow College. He describes his tertiary education as ‘very motley, not worth mentioning’.

Nick was introduced to Beethoven, Gilbert & Sullivan and the Fireside Book of Folk Songs as a pre-schooler. His life changed at the age of five, when he heard the Beatles’ recording of ‘Twist and Shout’. He went on to become a bass player and a member of many bands, from Rough Justice, Ducks, Pelicans, Living Daylights and Laconics, to Wellington’s iconic Windy City Strugglers.

Nick worked as a postie and trained as a teacher before finding an outlet for his musical obsession as a record reviewer and rock journalist. He is a regular contributor to the New Zealand Listener and has written for Mojo, Rhythms, International Arts Manager, Rip It Up, The New Zealand Herald and many other national and international publications. Since 2001 he has written, produced and presented the music review programme The Sampler for New Zealand’s National Radio.

Slightly abridged from Awa Press website

Reviews

[Carol, She's so Novel ꧁꧂ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5★

OCKHAM'S AWARD AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

I love supporting my country’s premier literary awards & Illustrated Non-Fiction is my favourite category in the Ockham’s. I was excited to read this one as I have enjoyed another Bollinger title (Goneville) & the music column Nick used to write for the New Zealand Listener.

So I wanted to love this book more than I did.

This book came alive when Nick talked about New Zealand music. This is Nick’s main field of expertise & this really shows. I just powered through these passages.

Other parts of New Zealand history were very dry & I felt like Nick was having to force himself to push through them as well.

But as a New Zealander I enjoyed reading about people I had had a very slight acquaintance with. A special highlight was reading about Sue Kedgeley’s brief period as a student teacher. After various bouts with authority, she was still allowed to go out on placement, even though she was not allowed to attend Teacher’s College. This explains a lot as I remember reading that Ms Kedgeley was only at Teacher’s College very briefly but she was a student teacher when I was at Selwyn College. Being taught about feminism, the boys behaved how 70s boys behaved & Sue must have thought she was lecturing some of the most spineless teenage girls ever. She often looked incredulous.

Another good point was that counter-culture & going back to the basics wasn’t much fun for the women - especially once they had children. (read Nick's Aunt Helen's account of the toilet!) Sounds like pretty chilled bliss for the guys, frankly.

The illustrations were fantastic - not that I was pictured but the seventies ones made me feel like I was seeing myself on the page.

Magazine Cover from 1972

& the cover was great!

https://wordpress.com/view/carolshess...

[Rebecca Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful cultural and political history of New Zealand in the 60s and 70s through the lens of counterculture, illustrated with brilliant archival photos. Highly recommended!

[Jimmylanyard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this as a coherent document of so many incoherent threads of NZ History. One thing that Bollinger never makes explicit but leaves in the subtext is how many of his 1960s and 1970s references would go on to become explicitly reactionary figures (Billy TK, Germaine Greer, etc) which adds a whole lot of depth to his thesis.

[Tama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you, Nick Bollinger, for reminding me at the end there that mine is a generation of anxious paranoiacs with not as many worldly freedoms as a booming economy had made possible previously. Those youths are the subject of my current screenplay, a slasher which, I hope, amplifies the core of the genre, about the jealous-old not being able to cope with the youthful-new, and so killing them off, using the powers that they have inherited. They are musicians; queer; outsiders, making electronic music.

I haven't been writing about the work I've been consuming so much recently, but seeing that there are only three reviews so far for this book which on presentation alone could be a coffee table book to stack on top of 'Needles and Plastic,' or Dylan's 'Philosophy of Modern Song' which only comes to mind as I bought both those books at the same time, and in the middle of reading 'Jumping Sundays.' At the same time I noticed the 30th anniversary edition of 'Secret History' in Unity Books which is a favourite of the time when fiction was perhaps the most valuable in my story consumption.

To find early on that the cover imagery wasn't staged for the book cover by generous AUP funding but is a beautiful scene of the era was empowering, we have had cool things!

I was wondering as I read 'Jumping Sundays' whether I was actually taking in the stories or letting these images of a bygone era escape me from my meagre physical existence. There's nothing radical about my output. It is tiny. I did find myself sucked out of the book on a bus ride every now and then and the weight of my body depressing my thought.

What I had been telling people about 'Jumping Sundays' as I was reading the first half is that it is as important a portrait of the counterculture as the world could want. The US and England combined are too big to condense. It'd be nice to have a Scottish equivalent to this book. We are petite and readily influenced by world pop culture. Seeing the effects of the counterculture on this small place is as true as anywhere else. I did find it to be a little dry sometimes when running off dates and events that were less human but more bureaucratic, there is much more human to these fourteen chapters than paper-trail. It captures the radical artistry of this countercultural way of life. The world is such a complex place at any given time. It is either the arts or politics that make any given moment the most historically interesting, but sub cultures are something to think about. What kind of unknown communes were out there in medieval times, surely there were many obscure societies with their own ways of life that mimic early human groups?

[Michael Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impressive history of the 60s-70s counterculture, as it played out in New Zealand. There's been a lot of research go into this book.

Even though I was familiar with some of the areas covered, there were many others that went down fantastic rabbit-holes of hippie arcana that I knew little of. Particularly memorable for this reader were the stories about NZ poet John Esam (who helped organise the International Poetry Incarnation in London, 1965), the communes, the organic food movement, counterculture retailers, spiritualists, and the hippie trail across Asia to Europe.

Nick Bollinger presents quite a complex evaluation of the counterculture's goals and impact, a perspective acknowledged as informed by personal observations as a teenager at the time. Most interesting for me was the way he looks through a bicultural lens at events of 60 years ago, often observing that countercultural ideals could look less than revolutionary to Māori.

That said, I hope this book will prompt more research and debate about the overall topic. One area not covered, that I would like to know about, was whether the NZ counterculture had a penchant for technological tinkering and adaptation. The US counterculture featured a fair bit of technological invention. Writers such as Jesse Jarnow have suggested it was a crucial influence on the development of personal computers and eventually, the Internet, through what has been termed "the Californian Ideology". In this sense, the counterculture didn't really "fall" but has become a pervasive influence on the world.

[Barry Allan]

The 1960's started with the glow of nuclear testing in the South Pacific visible in Auckland. The Vietnam War was 5 years old and carried on through to the mid 1970's. Concern at sporting ties with apartheid-bound South Africa added to the mix. In Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in New Zealand, Nick Bollinger (born 1957) claims these circumstances to be the main triggers for a counterculture to develop in New Zealand. The establishment accepted war and supported this regime - that led to it being mistrusted.

The title refers to events starting in 1969 where a group of so-called "hippies, freaks, wierdies, radicals and longhairs" took over (or "liberated") Albert Park in Auckland - to protest, but also for songs, dancing, poetry and theatre. It sounds like a festival, along the lines of (and inspired by) Woodstock but on a much smaller scale.

The counterculture he describes rejected the old ways of doing things as being "morally bankrupt", in favour of a changed consciousness, an emphasis on feedom through spirituality, Eastern belief systems, travel, religion, communism, community and, yes drugs - particularly marijuana and LSD, but not heroin or cocaine. This counterculture is presented as an actual defined thing, rather than just a number of disparate people not happy with the status quo.

In subsequent chapters, Bollinger identifies the key people within the movement - his parents might not have been key, but they were there - and the groups constituting it. These include the CND and Progressive Youth Movement. Bookshops and publications were vital elements. He calls the former "sites of resistence": people would meet there, even live there sometimes, and of course they were outlets for the various underground publications, such as "Cock" magazine. It sounds juvenile now (and calling those who sold it cocksellers even more so) but was an obvious direct provocation to the squares. Getting these things printed was always difficult, so often they had to acquire their own presses.

Music, drugs and sex were intertwined - while marijuana produced a mellow state, LSD allowed for an altered state to reveal a greater truth, which led to enhanced musical creativity and sexual freedoms. No wonder the establishment was concerned when people started living in mixed flatting arrangements! Orgies were the presumed inevitable result. They were formally banned by Otago University in 1967 - I don't recall any concerns raised when I was in a mixed flat in Whangarei about a decade later. No orgies, sadly.

But how to live was also a concern of the counterculture - the focus was on communal living, ranging from urban crashpads where anyone was welcome to intentional rural communities where groupd would strive for self-sufficiency. I was surprised to learn that Norman Kirk's Labour Government in 1973 created the ohu scheme, where Crown land was given to groups who wanted to do this. Something like 60 such settlements started - who knows if any survive - but they faced considerable disapproval from locals, councils and the environment, because some of the land was inhospitable. I've actually been to where some were set up, near the Bridge to Nowhere in the central North Island. Their own ineptitude did not help!

Bollinger included a chapter on travel - mostly given to one fellow's account of the hippie trail. The main importance of travel was that it allowed ideas and spiritual methods to be brought back.

The book concludes with several chapters exploring those who were not well served by the counterculture movement and factors causing it to end. Despite the lofty ambitions, Māori. Pasifika people and women were often subject to the same prejudices and expectations as in the wider community. People left. People got jobs and moved to the suburbs. The movement was exploited - not just by monetising its artefacts but by some men taking advantage of the sexual freedoms (Bert Potter is named). Heroin became the dominant drug. Muldoon became Prime Minister.

I was alive during this period, but out in the country so completely oblivious to almost everything that was happening. I have vague memories of Norman Kirk being Prime Minister, and certainly remember the Little Red Schoolbook which "encouraged young people to question societal norms and instructed them on how to do this" being talked about, but never actually saw one.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I collect books on the UK counterculture of the 1960s, and it is a trope that young Australians and New Zealanders arrived in London to find the action, since their far-flung provinces were sleepy. One might even subconsciously assume that New Zealand never saw the upheavals of the Sixties that the UK, Western Europe, or North America underwent. Yet it did, and apparently only with this 2022 book by Nick Bollinger did the phenomenon finally get its due.

Granted, developments often lagged behind, and a small scene like a counterculture would be even smaller with a country with such a low population as New Zealand in this period, but we learn here about NZ analogues for all the typical phenomena that make up a book on the Sixties and early Seventies: beatnik writers, drug use, communes, rock music, the sexual revolution, environmentalism, protest, and festivals. Of all this, the chapters on music, or on scenes tightly linked with music, are the strongest, which makes sense as Bollinger is a New Zealand musician himself and has published before on this aspect of his country’s history.

Bollinger draws on oral testimony to some degree, but one regrets that this book wasn’t begun decades ago, perhaps before the turn of the millennium, when more people would have been alive and memories fresher. Also, the presentation of events and fashions is not kept very chronological; within a few paragraphs Bollinger often jumps around all over these years, yet with things that moved as quickly as youth culture, the gap between, say, 1967 and 1971 would have enormous. These aspects of the book have led me to dock a star, but generally Bollinger has done fine work in newspaper and magazine archives, and taken good advantage of his personal contacts and those of his parents (who were bohemians themselves).

[Grant McDougall · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exemplary piece of social history. The writing is typically excellent by Bollinger and flows easily. Each chapter carefully articulates, investigates and questions a particular aspect of the counterculture. There are numerous firsthand anecdotes and comments that bring the stories to life and superbly provide context and insight. The many photos and graphics throughout the book are often excellent and brilliantly evoke the issues in each chapter. The strength of this book is that it covers the entirety of the movement, rather than just the peak. Thus it's initial, somewhat staid origins are explored and explained, before getting into the peak years, which are then followed by a look at the demise and ongoing influence on NZ society. A superb, very well-written book.

[Liv Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really big book to read was just too many words lol