Can it be over half a century since a few thousand people - students, hippies, assorted beardy weirdies, kids, dogs, a pet possum, Tim Shadbolt - staged a cheerful liberation of Auckland's Albert Park? 1969. Jumping Sundays.
The politics were anti-Vietnam, anti-nukes, pro-Māori land rights and pro-dancing with friendsand total strangers to the Frank E Evans Lunchtime Entertainment Band playing "Bye Bye Blackbird".
Part sit-in, part old-fashioned knees up. I went to as many as possible - it was fun – and ended up, probably to my mother's horror, in a photo in the Herald. "Perhaps 50 or 100 danced. The rest merely watched and listened in a reserved New Zealand manner," sniffed a Herald report that caught the warring impulses of the moment.
In his new book, Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand, writer and critic Nick Bollinger interrogates the paradoxes, "a belief that the world could be changed and a simultaneous retreat from society".
I'm deep in the book - it's as long as a superb slice of local cultural history needs to be. Some reviews begin by firing a warning shot of "Okay Boomer" suspicion: RNZ's Cynthia Morahan: "Perhaps there are a few people who are sick to death of hearing about Baby Boomer exploits." Yes, yes, all the stereotypes. I won't list them here. Morahan quickly moves on to ringing praise of Bollinger's research, "innately curious" approach and deft nostalgia avoidance.
It helps that he doesn't have too much skin in the Boomer game. Born in 1958, he was too young to experience much of the action. Though he's perfectly placed to appreciate counterculture context. His grandmother, Maria Dronke, a Jewish actress who escaped Hitler's Germany, taught drama in 50s Wellington. A transformative cohort of European immigrants and refugees arrived to contribute to arts, architecture, café society... Along with some local bohemians – Anna Hoffman! - they chipped away at a monochrome wall of conformity. Bollinger: "Almost any kind of cultural activity might, against this grey backdrop, have seemed countercultural."
This history is timely and revealing, particularly in terms of what used to be called the generation gap. Boomers, born into a post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima world, grew up in the lingering shadow of nuclear extinction, processing hard evidence of what humankind was, and might yet be, capable of. After such knowledge, for a significant group, rigid rules about who could drink in a public bar, who could sleep with whom, who could access birth control and abortion, was absurd.
The Jumping Sundays 40th anniversary in Albert Park, September 2009.
The intergenerational warfare of that time seemed to have subsided into a sort of truce since then. I never borrowed clothes from my mother's wardrobe or shared what I was really up to. My generation prided ourselves on being on the same page as our kids and if we weren't they soon put us right. Now the gap is widening again as the world floods and burns. A new generation lives in the shadow of a different kind of extinction event and questions what boomers did to prevent it.
Bollinger gives credit to what 60s counterculture set in train: an expanded sense of community - street markets, Pride parades, community law centres. A flourishing of music, film, and freedoms. But, viewed from the perspective of the history of what happened to Māori culture, he writes, "what we call the counterculture just looks like part of the colonial baggage." He charts the movement's failings: "Ideas of tolerance, diversity and acceptance were celebrated yet white middle-class males predominated"; "While young questing minds were preoccupied with the moral failings of other nations… their neoliberal contemporaries were left unchecked to develop radical economic strategies that would reshape New Zealand." Some things don't change.
Back in 2009, we trucked creakily along to a Jumping Sundays 40th-anniversary event in Albert Park. They played The Carnival Is Over. It was a little sad. That's that, I thought. But Bollinger's book invites a past that refuses to stay put. There are patterns to recognise, lessons to learn. New movements – Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter - demand that failings be addressed.
