Nimbin

Law Enforcement

People expected an infringement notice for a small personal amount. For what police considered a trafficable amount, they expected a night in the watch-house and court next day, or a weekend inside until Monday if bail wasn’t available. That was the expectation at the time.

Where to Buy Marijuana

Deals went on along the main street. When a police car came, the cry of “Taxi!” carried up and down the road.

There was hydro, bush and now and then local or imported hash. Be careful who you ask.

Marijuana Prices

A$10 a gram or so for hydro, a bit less for bush depending on quality.

Types of Marijuana

Varied. Indoor hydro and outdoor bush were the main distinctions.

More Information

From a struggling town to Aquarius

MardiGrass comes on the first weekend in May. Before Europeans arrived in the late nineteenth century, Nimbin was a sacred Bundjalung initiation site. Then came the clear-felling, the fences, and the violent removal of Kooris who objected to being cut off from their land and way of life. It’s a familiar story. When the trees ran out, European cattle took their place, until the slopes were eroding and the bottom fell out of the meat and dairy market. Ho-hum.

By 1973 Nimbin was nearly a ghost town. Long-haired radicals from the Australian Union of Students took a left at Mullumbimby while looking for a place to hold their national counterculture festival. Nimbin got Aquarius, and the students promised to “recycle the town.”

Twenty years later, the old dairy town was all psychedelia and Bundjalung art, cafés, crafts and backpackers as far as you could wave a traveler’s cheque. The main street smelled sweet and stinky with ganja. This definitely AIN’T Byron Bay.

“What the fuck is happening here?”

Cut to 1993. A laughing, chanting, drumming crowd dances toward the cop shop. A giant smoking joint says “Let It Grow!” in four-foot letters. Banners call for legalization and an end to prohibition and the drug war.

People smoke openly, and a bloke on stilts wears a cardboard helicopter to mock more than a decade of police raids. The station looks suddenly vacant. Nobody looks angry.

It’s the first Let It Grow! MardiGrass and drug-law reform rally. A thousand alternatives, the polite word for hippies, are spitting the dummy in the best tradition of ’60s street theater. That night the national news carries aging hippies, their kids and new recruits breaking the law en masse and demanding change. The war on drugs is messing with more than their lotus-munching lives.

The campaign behind the celebration

At Aquarius in ’73, police tried a bust and the crowd peacefully swallowed up their “criminal.” It wasn’t unprecedented: think Sunbury the year before and the Vietnam protests. By the late ’80s people were keeping their heads down. The U.S.-driven drug war was rolling, heroin was everywhere and the sacramental circles of the ’60s had given way to commercial operations. Helicopter raids were routine. Speaking up for reform felt about as sensible as walking into the station smoking a joint.

From 1988 the demonstrations and press releases kept coming: the drug laws were a socially destructive failure. Bob Hopkins started with a one-man campaign. Museum owner Michael Balderstone and lawyer, activist and later magistrate David Heilpern were early allies. By 1993 the Nimbin HEMP Embassy had kept reform in the local news long enough for a bigger show of support.

A thousand people came the first year and the day went off without a hitch. The following year a conference drew politicians, academics and health professionals from across Australia, and about 2,000 marched.

Olympix, Kombis and a cup

The first Grower’s Cup came in 1995. In 1996 came the HEMP Olympix, Kombi Konvoy and Hemp Traders Trade Fair. The Olympix meant joint rolling, bong throwing and the Growers Ironperson, including crawling through lantana with a big bag of fertilizer.

Decorated Kombis wound up from Lismore at dusk. Led by the Olympix torch-bearer, they circled up in the lantern-lit street for opening night. Cue music, dance, speeches, poems, workshops, pot art, hemp fashion and trade, drug law and health information, seed swaps, magick and stoned civil disobedience.

The Cannabis Cup wound things down. Loosely borrowed from Amsterdam, it had local buds and a handful of “expert” judges. If you didn’t make the panel, never mind. There was enough good pot going around that the judges were probably too stoned to tell anyway.

The helicopter blockade

January 1997: sick of annual helicopter raids, the HEMP crew found where police were staying and where the chopper was parked. Officers opened their motel doors to people chained under their wagons, hippies laughing from across the car park and cameras everywhere.

Across Lismore, others chained themselves to the helicopter. The press release asked why cops on double pay needed an expensive aircraft to swoop over communes and come back with what amounted to personal stash.

The cops shook their heads, got in the blue wagon and drove away. At the time of writing, the helicopter squad hadn’t returned. The Embassy also held smoke-ins outside stations and courts, ran political candidates who polled well, aired a TV ad with a safe number to report harassment or corruption, and kept a drug education shop on the main drag.

More than a pot party

The longer it ran, the less it looked like an all-hippie gathering. Punks and ferals joined in, but so did suburban working people, many with kids. Not all smoked. They knew someone who did and wanted the laws changed.

People were willing to stand up at a “freak-fest” even if they wouldn’t bring it up with the neighbors. That’s a start. It’s easy to ignore protest when it only happens in Nimbin. The laws won’t change until people speak up in their own towns too.

Come to MardiGrass, but remember it’s a drug-law reform rally, not just a pot party. Make a point as well as getting out of it. Take some magick, idealism and commitment home with you. There’s enough to spare.