Essays On Air

A scene at the Aquarius Festival, Nimbin, 1973. Flickr/Harry Watson Smith, CC BY-SAIn the north-east corner of Australia’s most populous state of New South Wales is a small former dairying and banana farming community. Today, however, that village is unrecognisable. Nimbin is now widely acknowledged as Australia’s counter-cultural capital, a sister city to both Woodstock in New York State and Freetown Christiania in Denmark. Among Nimbin’s tourist attractions today are its Hemp Embassy and the annual Mardi Grass festival in early May, which argues for the legislation of marijuana for personal and medicinal use. The village’s transformation from a rural farming community to its present form can be traced to 1973, when Nimbin became the unlikely host of the Aquarius Festival – a counter-culture arts and music gathering presented by the radical Australian Union of Students. A scene from the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin, 1973. Flickr/harryws20/Harry Wat