Peace, love & revolution

A history of the 1960s and 70s counterculture in New Zealand is a clear and colourful account with some groovy revelations, man.

- GRAEME LAY

JUMPING SUNDAYS: The rise and fall of the counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Nick Bollinger (AUP, $49.99) is published on August 25.

The title is derived from a spring day in 1969, when thousands of mostly young people defied Auckland City's by-laws and came together in Albert Park to dance, sing, play games, make music and smoke marijuana. A band played on the park's rotunda. It was the biggest such gathering, and it was illegal. The Albert Park mass "Sunday Jumping" was a first, and the participants were described by puzzled onlookers as, "hippies, freaks, weirdos, radicals and dropouts".

Wellington-based broadcaster and critic Nick Bollinger documents the subsequent emergence of New Zealand's counterculture in the 1960s and 70s. The book enlarges Bollinger's splendid Goneville: A memoir from 2015.

The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary defines "counterculture" as "a radical, alternative culture, especially among young people, that seeks out new values to replace the established and conventional values of society".

Accordingly, Bollinger (the son of liberal activists Conrad and Marei Bollinger) takes the reader on a rollicking ride through a decade that saw unprecedented social and political change in New Zealand. Dress codes, music, ways of living, eating, drinking, protesting, having sex, political expression and (especially) the ingesting of prohibited substances turned the conformity and insularity of 1950s New Zealand on its head.