Nambassa was a series of hippie-conceived New Zealand festivals held from 1976 to 1981 on large farms around Waihi and Waikino in the Waikato. They were music, arts and alternatives festivals that focused on peace, love, and an environmentally friendly lifestyle. In addition to popular entertainment, they featured workshops and displays advocating alternative lifestyle and holistic health issues, alternative medicine, clean and sustainable energy, and unadulterated foods.
Chinese dragon dance, mainstage Nambassa Festival 1979
Nambassa 1979 Main Stage, 'Negative Theatre'
Nambassa Festival 1978, poster
Nambassa 1979, The Plague on the Main Stage
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during or around 1964 and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
Contemporary hippie at the Rainbow Gathering in Russia, 2005
A 1967 VW Kombi bus decorated with hand-painting
Beatniks posing in front of a piece of beatnik art, 1959. The Beat Generation are seen as a predecessor to the hippie movement
Escapin' through the lily fields I came across an empty space It trembled and exploded Left a bus stop in its place The bus came by and I got on That's when it all began There was cowboy Neal At the wheel Of a bus to never-ever land – Grateful Dead, lyrics from "That's It for the Other One"
