Canvas books wrap: Jumping Sundays by Nick Bollinger, and a conversation with Kiran Dass

Papanui High School pupils protest a ban on long hair, February 1971. Photo / Christchurch City Libraries

What's hair got to do with it? A lot, in the 60s counterculture movement. "What fearful threat to humanity is posed by the cultivation of long hair, that the defenders of the law and guardians of the establishment should raise their collective hackles in righteous horror?" asks Nick Bollinger, in his new book, Jumping Sundays. Elsewhere, Kiran Dass shares the five writers (alive or dead) she would have dinner with. Happy reading.

BOOK EXTRACT

Long hair, don't care

In the 60s counterculture movement, hair length sent a powerful message, writes Nick Bollinger

To grow your hair was to be aware of society's objections and do it anyway. It advertised your willingness to rebel and acted as a signal to those who might be on your side. If you saw another person on the street with long hair you could assume they also opposed the Vietnam War, were in favour of smoking pot and had a liberal attitude to sex. And it was obvious that they had issues with authority.

"It was epater la bourgeoisie, shock the bourgeoisie!" says Roger Steele, quoting the rallying cry for the French Decadent poets of the late 19th century, among them Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Steele had given up cutting his hair when he moved to Wellington for university in the late 60s. "Why not grow your hair? Like why not be a pacifist? We've always had these norms. Actually long hair is beautiful. We've always thought it was beautiful on women, why can't it be beautiful on men? And it was beautiful on a heck of a lot of men. But yes, it upset our parents, and our parents stood for the establishment and repression and a lack of freedom."

By the same token, short hair could be seen to represent conservative values, confidence in authority and a vested interest in maintaining the established order. Institutions like the police force and the military, as well as schools, enforced strict hair regulations.

The rebellion had started on the chin. Until the middle of the decade, simply to wear a beard was enough to get you labelled a beatnik, a communist, a beardie-weirdie — and beaten up. Newspaper reports of local protest marches in the early 60s would note that some of the protesters wore facial hair as though — along with corduroy trousers and duffel coats — this was confirmation of some dangerous otherness. Fidel Castro had a beard. The last New Zealand Prime Minister to wear one was Thomas McKenzie, briefly in office in 1912.

A few of the bearded also shunned the short-back-and-sides in favour of a slightly shaggier look, but in the mid-60s even the matching fringes and collar-length straight cuts of the Beatles were considered unruly. As the decade went on, hair continued to grow. Hippies in San Francisco and other American cities simply stopped cutting it altogether. The men began to resemble Renaissance portraits of Jesus. Pop stars followed suit.

Hair became the subject of earnest newspaper inquiries. "It is part of a protest by young people against the world they have inherited — a striving to assert individuality in a society which they see as having carefully ordered surface values and hopelessly confused inner attitudes," suggested the Christchurch Press' David Brunton. The Auckland Star seemed to heave a sigh of relief as it realised long hair was just another sign of conformity, before musing that perhaps a little non-conformity was not such a bad thing:

"What fearful threat to humanity is posed by the cultivation of long hair, that the defenders of the law and guardians of the establishment should raise their collective hackles in righteous horror? There is nothing intrinsically virtuous or evil about long hair — and questions of cleanliness and tidiness apply whatever the cut … All the current fuss over long hair is simply one sign of the increasing intolerance being shown by modern society towards anyone or anything appearing to be different. There are many subtle pressures in today's world that seek to bend us all into a mindless conformity of views and behaviour.

"For all the sound and fury of its rebellion against its elders, the modern teenage generation tends to be as rigidly conformist as any other group … One Auckland father recently confided: 'My teenage daughter has to know all the tunes in the top 10 or her classmates wouldn't speak to her.' And the hippies are another group that have merely traded one set of values for another which are just as inflexible.

"But there is no need to be too pessimistic. There is a sufficient proportion of free-thinkers in every age group in this country to make the vision of some future Orwellian brainwashed existence seem quite ridiculous … A civilisation exerts its pressures towards conformity only at the danger of extinguishing genius and breeding a uniform mediocrity."

Some tried to rationalise their prejudices with safety arguments. An officer in the Lower Hutt Fire Brigade worried that long hair and beards could prove lethal for firemen, as "toxic air can sneak in between the whiskers and the rubber of breathing apparatus". A certain amount of regimentalism had to exist in the Fire Service, he added, so shorter hair should remain a requirement.

In early 1972, as the school year was getting underway with headmasters ordering mass shearings, two Wellington secondary schools relented. Wellington High School principal Cyril Bradwell went on record as saying there were more important things in education than the length of someone's hair, while at Onslow College, where I was entering my 4th Form year, a threatened strike by students (led by future historian James Belich who, at age 14, was coming to school sporting bushy mutton-chop sideburns) saw the board give way and abolish hair regulations. Around this time Bulls*** and Jellybeans, the memoir-cum-manifesto of Tim Shadbolt, was published. The first page finds him arriving in prison:

"I thought about refusing a hair-cut but wanted to be with the boys and see prison life; for me to go into solitary would suit them just fine. So I submitted to the final act of mass conformity — dress / grey, head / bald, inspiration / nil, education / none. Discipline / uniforms / uniformity. An excellent preparation for New Zealand society, grey and dull. Off came 14 inches of hair, my first haircut in six years."

Extracted from Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press, $50).

5 QUICK QUESTIONS WITH KIRAN DASS

Kiran Dass.

Obviously, people love writers' festivals, but what do you think is valuable about gathering writers and readers together?

Nothing quite matches the spark that happens when you bring writers and readers together. It's always amazing to look around the room and see so many brilliant thinkers, writers and appreciators all in one spot, where they can come together and share a love of books, writing, ideas and storytelling in its many forms. It's the chance to be inspired, informed, entertained and challenged, which I see as topping yourself up. That sense of meaningful engagement, community and connectivity is immensely valuable on both a brain and heart level.

This year's WORD is your first as programme and engagement manager. What are your highlights?

I really feel like there's something for everyone in this programme. Personal highlights for me include Rachel Kushner, Ottessa Moshfegh, Rebecca Solnit and Patrick Radden Keefe. And we have a terrific suite of masterclasses and workshops where punters can learn specific craft from some of Aotearoa's finest practitioners - I wish I could go to them all. I think Chris Finlayson in conversation with Kim Hill will be fascinating, and I'm so excited to see how A Cabinet of Curiosities pans out - it's a lively session where a line-up of brilliant writers and thinkers will each deliver a tiny lecture about an obsession. I'm expecting the weird and wonderful. I'm also looking forward to Te Piki o Tāwhaki, which will be a takeover of the beautiful Tūranga library, featuring kapa haka and taonga pūoro. That will be special. I'm doing a session myself called Words/Wine/Sound with Viva wine critic Dr Jo Burzynska, where we will look at the way words, wine and sound intersect, including sampling all three things together. A match made in heaven, I say. That will be fun.

If you could have dinner with five writers alive or dead, who would they be and why?

I would love to sit at a dinner table that is well furnished with plenty of very cold, crisp white wine with the 91-year-old glacially cool and sharp writer Edna O'Brien; the madcap Scottish writer David Keenan; the late Aotearoa journalist, novelist and poet Robin Hyde, who was extraordinary in life and work; the late satirist and critic Dorothy Parker to supply the witty bon mots; New Yorker reporter and author Radden Keefe because he seems like fun but also because he tells the most extraordinary true tales that you just couldn't make up.

You are also a writer. Can you tell us about what you are currently working on?

I am very slowly chipping away at some personal essays. The one I have been working on most recently is a sort of deep dive based around the strange and sad story of motivational self-help guru Louise Hay - of all things. Would anyone want to read about something like that? I don't know! It's easy to park your own projects when you're working on festivals though - I'm really happy to be able to focus on showcasing amazing writers for now.

What are you reading right now?

I always have a stack of three or so books on the go at once. I just finished Nick Bollinger's new book, Jumping Sundays, which is such an engaging piece of social and cultural history focused on Aotearoa's counterculture told with Bollinger's characteristically warm voice and lively curiosity. I am now reading Ōtautahi-based writer Chloe Lane's new novel, Arms & Legs. I loved her first novel, The Swimmers. She writes with such great tartness and observation. I'm also delighting in the mordant pitch-blackness of Moshfegh's new novel, Lapvona. She's one of the most thrillingly subversive and constantly surprising novelists writing today. All three of these writers are WORD Christchurch participants.

Kiran Dass is programme and engagement manager for WORD Christchurch, which runs from August 31 to September 4, wordchristchurch.co.nz.