COUNTER-CULTURE
Olive Jones
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. Chaired by Kerry Sunderland.
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.
All pukapuka will be for sale through our Festival bookstore Paper Plus Nelson, both at their shop and at their stall at Pukapuka Talks sessions – your opportunity to meet authors and get your books signed! You can also purchase books from Paper Plus online.
Olive Jones
Olive Jones is one of the founding members of the Graham Downs community, an arable farm purchased near Motueka in the late 1970s. From her teens to her early 30s Olive lived off this land, cultivating self-sufficiency as a way of life, learning to grow and process food, build a house, and farm animals. Her resulting life-long interest in intentional communities led Olive to study community cultures around the world and resulted in a PhD that documents long-lived intentional communities in New Zealand. Olive continues to be associated with the Graham Downs community, through her role as a trustee of the Renaissance Community Trust that owns Graham Downs.
Kerry Sunderland (Chair)
As well as curating and managing the Nelson Arts Festival’s literary programme for the past six years, Kerry Sunderland is a writer, editor and host/producer of the radio show/podcast series, Deathwalker’s Guide to Life. Her work has been published in Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety (VUP 2018), Turbine | Kapohau, New Zealand Geographic, and many other magazines in Aotearoa and Australia. Her short memoir, ‘The eagle’s gift’ will be in a liminal gathering (Elixir & Star Press, Nov 2023) and her personal essay, ‘Mother Issues’, will be in the upcoming anthology, ‘Otherhood‘ (MUP, May 2024).
Pukapuka Talks are presented by:
Thank you to:
TE NONINGA KUMU MOTUEKA PUBLIC LIBRARY
Tues 24 Oct | 6pm | 60 min
Pay What You Can (PWYC)
All Ages