We had our moments, but at university we were generally spectators to the motley parade of student radicals and the counter-culture.
Sometimes we joined in the fun, but mostly we were working, studying or bringing up our baby.
Our part-time jobs didn’t help. Heather’s was as a dental assistant, and that leather handbag she made for her Mum at Ruapehu Street was the first glimmer of her handcraft career. My first job was in the Auckland Hospital IVS unit, as I’ve already mentioned. My second, later I think, was as a doorman at the Embassy Theatre, which stood at the site now occupied by the Auckland City Library. That was how I came to see one of my favourite movies, Catch 22, many, many times. Another favourite was Fellini‘s Satyricon, which I can’t bring myself to watch any more. One thing I remember vividly about them both is the nudity. It makes me want to remind my granddaughters that men think about that quite a lot.
One of the doorman’s duties was to hand out passes to people who wanted to go outside for a smoke during the interval. One night a young couple approached me for their passes. She was dressed in a totally sheer blouse. I averted my eyes as I handed them their passes, and they sniggered. I was embarrassed, so when they handed back their passes I looked, and they laughed again.
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That’s as good a path as any into how our generation felt and acted back then. We were free! The first and only generation to have shaken loose from our elders, or so we thought. Never trust anyone over 30, Jack Weinberg said in the States.
Personally I didn’t blame my parents for embracing peace and security in the 1950s, not after suffering through the Depression and the War. But yes, we — we were free. Free love, apparently. Our own music. Our own opinions. We were even winning our own war, in Vietnam, although protesting it was a lot safer than fighting it.
And some of us were free to do nothing at all, to surf and claim the unemployment benefit on the East Coast, knowing that out there we were unlikely to be troubled by a job offer.
With a wife and a baby and an education to catch up on, that all seemed rather self indulgent. But I did love the music — although when I got to see the people making it, rather than just hear them on the radio, they did seem rather absurd.
And it was certainly exuberant. Liberating and fun. I remember gatherings in Albert Park with a youthful Tim Shadbolt, beautiful, articulate, long dark hair in the breeze, addressing the crowd about I can’t remember what.
I do remember a student magazine with a black-and-white cover photo, shot on a West Auckland beach with a happy looking guy, lounging on a sand dune as I recall, surrounded by laughing young women and bountiful, naked breasts. What can I say? It was eye-catching.
People too old to trust were prudes. in 1972 Germaine Greer was prosecuted for saying “bullshit” during a pro-feminist speech.
People too young to be prudes were setting up or joining communes, working in the fields, again sometimes naked. I could never understand how they could concentrate — due to my traditional upbringing, of course. The traditional nuclear family started to seem rather limiting. Bourgeois. Larger groups became more common, and kids started to appear in them.
Heather and I became devotees of The Whole Earth Catalog, a kind of newsprint YouTube, full of advice about how to find any tool or do any thing — or at least any tool or thing that would promote sustainability, self-sufficiency and self-conscious DIY.
The format was irresistible. The catalogs were huge, with pages overflowing with photos, drawings, mini-essays, reviews and psychedelic graphics … a newsprint celebration of an emerging San Francisco Bay-area creative community of ‘Thing-Makers, Tool Freaks and Prototypers.’
It captured a generation of readers by offering a tantalising burst of creative optimism in a year marred by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, riots at the Democratic National Convention and the shocking Tet Offensive in South Vietnam.1
Its publisher Stewart Brand went on to found Greenpeace, and then to denounce it.
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While some us were forming communes, farming the land, building houses and starting families — reimagining domesticity — others were heading overseas to see the big wide world outside New Zealand. Travel was becoming easier and more affordable. Our friend Graeme, for example, had worked in the sewers of London and on its buses as a conductor, then visited its museums and art galleries in his time off. He traveled back to New Zealand overland through Central Asia on a route that’s now almost impossible.
There was another popular way to see the world — build a boat and circumnavigate the globe in it. For reasons I can no longer remember, that was the option we chose. More about that to come.
The generations did cross over a bit. Some of ours were straight, as we said back then. They tended to be engineers, accountants and lawyers, and we looked down on them all. And some of the older generations sympathised with us, even if some of them did wear ties. I once saw the poet James K. Baxter on my way into the library. He looked stoned and tired, shuffling up Symond Street from Alfred Street — unkempt in a very old suit, bare feet I think, long, dark, oily-looking hair and beard. I felt sorry for him. This would have been after he’d set up his commune at Hiruhārama (Jerusalem) on the Whanganui River.
Come to think of it, 20 years later I saw Tim Shadbolt again — also wearing a tired suit, and looking tired himself — withdrawing cash from the BNZ in Glen Eden. After working as a concrete contractor he’d been elected Mayor of Waitakere City. He’d celebrated his victory by towing his concrete mixer behind the mayoral Daimler in the Christmas parade.
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Looking back I see I’ve barely mentioned the big political issues of the day, particularly the war that had obsessed me four years ago. It was ironic that now, when I was finally over it, I would need to re-engage with Vietnam and all the rest for Pol. Sci.
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Why am I telling you this?
To give you a sense of the 1960s culture wars — not in California, but here in Auckland. To explain why I think the notion that today’s “boomers“ are — or always have been — reactionary killjoys is rather silly.
And also to suggest that the very idea that the passions and opinions of the young should be treated as received truth is equally silly. Each honest member of every older generation knows as much — from personal experience — and, if you’ve been following along, you’ve seen me holding myself up as a prime example.
I’m not suggesting that today’s youth — to use the term my parents’ generation did — are any worse than we were. I’d back my Red Guards against their Internet Hordes any day.