HIPPIE RETROSPECTACLE THRIVING DOWN UNDER

(NIMBIN, Australia) -- This tiny mecca of psychedelia, the "Hippie
Capital of Australia," sits along Australia's blue highways, nestled
amid rolling hills bearing mangoes, avocados, lychees and--perhaps its
most distinctive crop--marijuana.

Since carving its countercultural identity in 1973 with the Nimbin
Aquarius Festival, modeled after the 1969 Woodstock in upstate New
York, the once desolate bush village is burgeoning with hippies,
mystics, artists, backpackers, entrepreneurs, farmers, drug addicts,
misfits and miscellaneous lost souls.

At least 10,000 live in or around the New South Wales town of Nimbin.
Most reside in the 62 communes surrounding the village, though others
live out of tepees, tents, vans or campers. Few people actually are
from here. Many come in with the wind and end up staying either
because they have nowhere else to go or because no one is kicking them
out.

"We're all dropouts on one level or another mostly," conceded Michael
Balderstone, 51, who would be considered a town elder if Nimbin were
the kind of place that conferred titles.

"People realize Nimbin is the last bus stop. It's the end of the road.
It's a very tolerant, accepting community. That means we've also got
junkies, we've got alcoholics, we've got mad people. It's
inevitable."

At the end of the century, Nimbin is expecting so many more of all
varieties that town organizers, in a rare effort at restraint, are
trying to downplay its New Year's Eve celebrations.

At sunset, village folk will be invited to write down everything about
their past they wish to leave behind, from bad memories to regrets,
and drop them into a paper "Old Man Millennium" as he is paraded
through town. At midnight, Old Man will be set afire amid a circle of
tepees in the town's Peace Park.

Stoned or sober, Nimbin is a trip.

It takes less time to get from one end of town to the other than it
does to smoke a joint, which is what just about everyone is doing
openly, not to mention illegally, as they hang out in cafes, in the
Hemp Embassy or in the Peace Park.

Nimbin has become such a colorful spectacle that now a new population
is flocking here for a gander: tourists. These gawkers and the money
they bring are a blessing and a curse for the former cattle-and-dairy
town that verged on extinction three decades ago.

No one denies that tourists have helped revive Nimbin. The hippie
population lives largely impoverished, with an estimated one-third to
half dependent on welfare assistance. Much of the other half, police
suspect, survive on the marijuana economy. But the potential of luring
ever more easy money has presented a dilemma to townsfolk, whose
lifestyle is founded on eschewing materialism.

Being free takes discipline, acknowledged resident George Forsyth.
It's already a trick to keep a household afloat on organically grown
food, solar power and well water.

Woodstock might have been born of an era marked by controversial
military involvement in Vietnam, racial strife and repressive social
attitudes, but one senses Australia's hippies have to look harder to
find things against which to rebel.

While Forsyth mumbled something about revolution while lighting up a
joint, this prospect appears somewhat elusive, given the generally
friendly and laid-back nature of his Australian environs. Even on the
road into Nimbin, highway construction signs express "regret" for any
inconvenience to drivers, while sign holders smile and nod at passing
cars.

The "injustices" Nimbins do manage to find often lack the power to
galvanize.

Before Nimbin's annual Mardi Grass festival last May, police staged a
helicopter raid on local marijuana growers and made a series of
arrests "to send a message," according to Nimbin Police Sgt. Neville
Plush.

In protest of such "Rambo tactics," town residents organized and
marched down the main drag, Cullen Street, toward the tiny,
four-officer police station to stage a smoke-in. By the time marchers
reached the station, they had forgotten their cause.

"It turned around from being a demonstration against the highway
patrol to saying `No Bombs in Bosnia,' " Plush laughed, shaking his
head. "They completely lost the focus."

Among the town's longtime activists is Michael Balderstone, director
of the Nimbin Museum, where visits are more far out than historical.

From the ceiling of the cavernous museum's entrance near the center of
town hangs about three dozen rusty hand egg beaters. "To stir things
up," explains barefoot tourist-greeter "Chicken George," 59, absurdly
dressed in a furry green, black and white domed cap. On other days he
dresses as a hemp plant.

Inside the museum is hippie chaos: painted halves of Volkswagen buses;
protest materials against mining, forestry and nuclear power; tie-dye
clothing; fantastical bongs (marijuana pipes) and piles of junk that
could only be explained by someone's bad drug experience.

"It was because more tourists were coming that we thought, let's make
something to explain, `What's this freak show all about?' " said
Balderstone as he sat on the floor of the Hemp Embassy across the
street from the museum, rolling a joint.

Every May, Nimbin sponsors Mardi Grass, a celebration of all things
hemp. Organized by the Hemp Embassy, the confab features a drug reform
parade led by an 11-yard-long mock joint, marijuana judging contests,
rallies, concerts and smoke-ins promoting the legalization of the weed.

While Sydney is to host next year's Olympics, Nimbin has its Hemp
Olympix. "Athletes" compete in hemp cord tug-o-wars, bong-throwing
contests and joint-rolling competitions, where judges score for speed
and creativity.

Visitors to the Hemp Embassy may purchase items of clothing made from
hemp, hemp string, hempseed oil soap, hemp jewelry. There is also
literature about hemp, hemp calendars and the Hemp Manifesto.

"The Australian Cannabis Cookbook" contains recipes for everything
from Disorderly Meatloaf (1 packet onion soup mix, 1 can whole peeled
tomatoes, 1/2 cup chopped cannabis and 1 kilogram of ground beef) to
Gone Bananas Loaf.

Up a step in the rear of the storefront is a lounge where locals
gather on Fridays to discuss hemp and new strategies to legalize it.
"You should come," clerk Robert Long drawled to a visitor in his
slow-motion, Down Under baritone. "But we're staying hippie, so we
usually don't start on time."

Locals wander in and out, plopping themselves onto the stained and
ripped upholstery, picking up on conversations without formal entry,
rolling joints and sharing them openly. "Like a bud?" plays
differently here than "Like a Bud?" does in mainstream culture.

While early hippie settlers such as Graeme Dunstan continue striving
to create a Utopian sense of community--on this day he's rushing to
school to get children to help him build hundreds of paper lanterns
for the New Year's celebration--Nimbin's very alternativeness also
attracts ever larger numbers of do-nothing drug zombies.

As much as many here defend adult drug use as the pathway to greater
consciousness and harmony, they also live every day with its dangers.

Overdoses have become so common, particularly in the last decade with
increasing numbers of heroin users and other addicts pouring into
Nimbin, that the local hospital donated a stretcher to the museum.

Whenever a drug emergency arises, townsfolk cry "Overdose!" and rush
for the stretcher. Addict in tow, they charge down the street to the
tiny Nimbin Hospital. Hospital workers said they listen for the
shouting, then rush out to take over stretcher duties as they haul the
patient inside.

In a good week, the town sees only one overdose, Plush said. In
others, there might be as many as three or four.

The hospital distributes, free for the asking, small black boxes
containing five syringes, alcohol swabs and a built-in needle
disposal. Vending machines behind one of the town's two community
centers also sell syringes and condoms for $1.

Hospital nurses said they rarely see cases of HIV and attribute this
to the free needle exchange program.

Drug counselors abound in Nimbin, and a new program started this month
will offer ear acupuncture to help addicts through
rehabilitation.

Plush calls it an "impossible situation" to police Nimbin. Far from
taking a zero tolerance approach, officers have learned to look the
other way in all but the most serious cases. If they wanted to
strictly uphold the law, Plush said, the town's four officers could
spend all their time and buckets of money making fish-in-barrel
arrests of pot smokers.

Instead, police have developed a wary but respectful relationship with
the hippies, many of whom have a revolving door relationship with the
local jail.

"They know if we come down (and see them smoking), if they're caught,
they usually realize we have a job to do," Plush said.

Police now have to spend more time on increased violence and theft,
which Plush attributes to the rise in heroin users.

Many children growing up in Nimbin are so turned off by the sight of
junkies on the streets "that most of them end up little capitalists,"
said Vicki Hughes, 40, a Nimbin Hospital nurse who described the
village's main school as first rate.

On the other hand, so distinctive are some children of hippies that
Australians even have a name for them: ferals. Ask anyone about
ferals, and they describe barefoot, dreadlocked, militantly vegan
vegetarians who live out of tepees and have wild looks in their eyes.

Not all Nimbins are hippies. The New Age types coexist with older
natives such as Eric Bazanna. Bazanna, 64, runs the feed and produce
shop at the edge of town, up a short hill overlooking the banana and
cattle fields his family used to farm 50 years ago.

While he doesn't approve of every aspect of hippie culture, Bazanna
acknowledges they have brought new life to Nimbin.

"A lot of the alternative lifestylers here are very educated and
intelligent people, and they've probably improved things because they
diversified the culture," he said. "Then you have people who are drug
dependent, they have no purpose in life and are sort of a drain."