The Evolution of The Sub-Species Known As 'Hippy'

Byron Bay is one of those places in Australia that was always on the list. Anyone who'd been there recommended it, and every traveller who hadn't, said they were going there. We arrived slightly dazed and confused, as per every other morning after a night on the bus. Only this time, we felt that we'd landed back in the summer. The first words spoken by the hostel minibus driver were "You can leave your jumpers in the bus; you won't need them here." Time to break out the sun lotion, kick-back, and turn those grey-city tones back to beach-brown.

We had about an hour to explore the town before our bus would whisk us back to the hostel. In any normal situation this would be completely excessive for the size of the town involved, but this wasn't a normal town. This was the king of chill where the infinite supply of surf shops is only disturbed by a selection of hip bars. Everything moves slower here. Nothing is done in a hurry. In one direction, the road leads to rainforest & remaining ridges of one of the largest volcanic craters on earth, while the other direction takes you straight to the beach and a constant supply of waves.

What town could be better than this? Well, we chose to leave the comparative hecticness of this place for a town so laid-back that a koala would be considered an energetic resident. A place with even more reliable waves than Byron Bay, but without the trendy name and consequent draw of the majority of travellers. A place where people didn't dance on the tables (one bar in Byron Bay is famous for this), but where people have chilled out to the sounds of Jack Johnson & Donovan Frankreiter playing in the local pub. Jack fell so in love with this town that he has recently bought a house at the end of the beach for when things get too stressful in Hawaii.

After a few days of doing nothing but watching pretty views, DVDs, and our eyelids, we decided to jump on a bus to a well known hippy retreat. Nimbin is a town that dropped a trip in the 1970s and then got caught in a psychological trance that prevented it from moving forward. Arriving at the town has the feel of entering some kind of warped theme park or theatre town, only the props being taken reek of authenticity. And the constant offers of drugs don't do much to hide it either.

While some locals have maintained a consistent authentic look with acquiring new clothes every year, some appear never to have changed. Their clothes and their skin hang on with an obvious lethargy that barely conceal the paranoid eyes looking suspiciously out at the modern world.

The openness of the marijuana appreciation in this town is not exactly a closely guarded secret. It is well known to both travellers and native Australians and yet its habitual use is somehow able to continue. The only efforts to combat this began when the drugs became less socially tolerable and heroin was introduced. Suddenly things weren't so innocent & naive - restaurant and bar owners were forced to drill holes through their spoons to discourage addicts from stealing new apparatus. This method of cutlery customisation backfired though, when the tourists started stealing these spoons as memorials for their experience of Nimbin.

The government installed CCTV cameras along the main street to identify and later prosecute dealers, but how do you look for someone specific when everyone acts the same - virtually everyone positioned along the main street was selling. Even if one 'provider' did feel slightly paranoid by big brother's ever watchful eye, then they would simply move to a blindspot for the actual transaction.

Our problem with this place wasn't what was being taken, but the hostility we felt when we expressed non-interest in what was on offer. The whole town had the feel of a squat, as if the people had taken over and then decorated in their own poor taste. The 'museum' of the history and benefits of marijuana was a papier-mâché den for people to smoke out of CCTV sight. Not exactly up to the standard of Blue Peter. Most people had that tired look of street beggars, and were viewed with an apprehension of an approaching mood fluctuation that lay barely below the surface.

On the way back to Lennox Head, our minibus driver seemed desperately sorry that he was the one who'd taken us to Nimbin. He talked about the difference in responses of people that had been on his eco tours around the region and those coming back from Nimbin. He said that it had a genuinely pleasant past but didn't believe it had a future. The guy looked like a quintessential hippy with long blond hair, & a penchant for using expressions like 'dude' or finishing sentences with 'man', and yet he wanted to distance himself from the hippy retreat as much as possible. During our stay in Lennox Head we found more and more people that walked the same path and held the same views as the minibus driver. It seemed that while some hippies of the region matured, & found pleasure in the elements of surfing and conservation of nature, others just matured in the scale of drugs being consumed.