Counter-culture with Olive Jones Pukapuka Talks session at the 2023 Nelson Arts Festival

Commune: Chasing a Utopian Dream in Aotearoa captures the spirit of the counter-culture movement in the Motueka Valley from the perspective of Olive Jones, one of its founding members.

Olive Jones was a teenager when she joined a group of hippies, idealists and subsistence farmers, determined to reject their parents’ way of life. Influenced by the counter-culture movement sweeping New Zealand in the 1970s, they purchased an idyllic farm close to Nelson. Their experiments in communal living were an attempt to achieve social, sexual and physical liberation from the rigid world in which they grew up. Ultimately, without rules and membership, their unstructured community failed to thrive and fulfil its early vision.

Jones‘s highly personal and candid memoir recalls the dreams, madness, humour and hard graft of living an alternative lifestyle in the Motueka Valley. Chaired by Kerry Sunderland.