Thousands of Police stayed away from Nimbin today, no arrests were made, and as far as we know no media were present.

As a result, the crowd that attended had a great day locking up mock police in a cage on the back of a cattle truck, having a smoke-in, and listening to live music with short speeches in the breaks.

It brought people out of the hills that had not gathered together in that way for a long time. It brought back memories of the way the 1976 Raid united us; like when people were collecting money for bail and people were throwing their wallets in, anything they had, to free the 42. That sort of unity of purpose is an amazing thing when it happens.

That unity has reappeared, in the wake of the 2006 “Riot Squad” MardiGrass, and by staying away from Re-Enactment Day, they enabled us this day to “reclaim the Nimbin” that we wish it always was. It was a return to the Cullen Street of ’76, to the kind of day that an aging hippie wishes the rest of the world could have.

Spare us all from the politics of fear, hatred, and division.

http://www.hempembassy.net

August 1976

In the first year or two of the Tuntable Falls Co-Ordination Co-Operative there were many meetings discussing what we should be doing on the property, with no agreement on whether people could construct their own shelter. In our 900 member Athenian democracy, we couldn’t seem to get any lasting agreement. This meant that everyone was living in the original farm buildings, or even under them, living and eating together.

Someone, fed up with the delays, or bored with the ongoing encounter group, just went out and built a “house”. That forced the issue, and it did not take long, once it was clear there was a common urge for many of us to step back from the intense communal living situation. We had to work out a procedure for house site selection and then getting community approval, to stop it turning into a free for all.

So, in August 1976, I was one of those still living in an original structure, at the Centre, in one of the five original pig-sties. Being taller than the average pig, I had raised the roof, and added doors and windows to suit. It was temporary, but dry and comfortable enough at the time. Just above were the community veggie gardens, and winding below was Tuntable Creek. I had four neighbours, and the Tin Shed was the kitchen for our hamlet. It was winter, in our subtropical narrow valley, which meant warm days, but frosty nights. During the nights ripe chokos would fall onto the roof waking me with the bang, and then roll slowly down the roof ending with a thump on the ground. Sometimes bandicoots, lizards or snakes came in.

On August 12th , in the dark, before dawn, I was awoken from my slumbers by a police officer pointing a gun in my face, and asking me if I wanted to be charged with a cap of smack or a bag of grass? I told him there was nothing there. He said that didn’t matter, what did I want to be charged with, a cap of smack or a bag of grass? He was still pointing his gun. The words sank in. I said that seeing as I didn’t have anything, he’d have to decide that for himself, whereupon he ordered me to get dressed and get outside to join the others, already herded into a group near the Tin Shed. No pot had been found on or near anyone arrested at the Tin Shed, nor was there any effort made to find anything.

(They couldn’t find much of anything anyway, because there was a pot drought on, and as far as anyone on the property knew, there was no pot. They were very lucky that morning to find the one person on the property sleeping with a “stash” of twelve ounces in a powdered milk tin by their bed.)

Twenty yards away, through his plastic windows, we could see Terry McGee at his desk in the Cow Bales, lights on, already on the phone, surrounded by his files and books, and being completely ignored by the police. Barney and Ruth though had been marched out of their Cream Room right next to it. If you looked like a “hippy”, you were going. We stood together in the cold, the sky growing lighter, wondering what was happening for the rest of the community.

Our “Tin Shed” group was marched down to the creek crossing, and up to the council road, where we were merged with the Echo, White House, Pala, and Wattle Creek residents that had been rounded up. While we stood analysing the situation, a red cattle truck full of people from the North End of Tuntable drove past. We were a little more fortunate; we were soon packed into Paddy Wagons, but not taken far, only up to the ridge, part way to Nimbin, where everybody arrested was taken to first.

The police had entered the property at three points in forces of about twenty, and at each entry point had rounded up as many people in the vicinity as possible before the alarm spread. On the ridge overlooking the South End, on the road to Mt Nardi, the police had set up a command post to overlook the operation, process the arrestees, and have a barbeque at the same time. While they finally took down names and ages, we were able to talk to people from other parts of the property, and find out what had happened to them. Jerry B. told me they showed him a photocopied warrant. I hadn’t seen one. The word went round later that the twelve ounce stash was to be divided among us for the charges. I am unsure if this was where we were fingerprinted and photographed. Perhaps someone else who was there can remember that more clearly?

They seemed to reach “capacity”, and then began the procedure for transporting us prisoners to Lismore lockup. We sang and joked in the back of the van, and laughed at the high comedy of some of the situations that had occurred with police in the course of the raid, like naked people fleeing into the bush, that sort of thing. I don’t want to say too much, so others can tell their story themselves.

Eventually, all 42 of us were bailed, released onto the street, and allowed to find our way home. In all, 43 had been arrested, but a young woman caring for a child was left behind at the North End, perhaps to keep the child out of the cattle truck used there, provided she came in later. It was the beginning of months of court appearances, big name barristers, and newspaper coverage.

On the 29th August 1976, Queensland police raided Cedar Bay with the help of a naval vessel, and destroyed houses and rainwater tanks before taking those arrested to Cairns…Queensland police said they had done this raid in support of the NSW police.

Ultimately, all Tuntable drug charges were dropped, after the search warrant was successfully challenged. As I remember the grounds for the judgement were:

• A warrant to search Tuntable Falls community was the equivalent of a warrant to search a village or small suburb, which was not on. The warrant was not specific enough in the address to be searched.

• Photocopied warrants were not acceptable. The actual warrant had to be served.

• The warrant was to be served between sunrise and sunset, and was not served at that time, but before sunrise.

The police seem to have acted in ways that went beyond law enforcement, and showed us the depths of the intolerance some sections of the community felt towards us. Possibly we were naïve not to foresee this, but we never had any sense of being a threat to anyone with our land sharing experiment. We were just a bunch of young people looking for a better place or way to live.

Sadly, there will always be some police who think the current laws and police powers are inadequate, and that they themselves are the true arbiters of the law as it should be. They are one of the very real dangers in police culture.

Alan William Huttley (Spelling?), known to most as Barney, one of the few names actually on the search warrant, and arrested in the same group as me, is no longer with us. I remember you Barney, and the good times we shared at Tuntable Falls.

Celebrating 30 years of

Police Over-kill...

"The real question is whether there was some over-kill" NSW Premier Neville Wran , 1976

Scenario 1-
A small, economically poor rural community is sleeping peacefully. Just before dawn, 60 heavily-armed & uniformed men burst into the various dwellings and wake the inhabitants at gunpoint. 42 people are rounded up and herded into a cattle-truck in which they are taken to the nearest large town, imprisoned and booked on a series of trumped-up charges. Germany- 1936? Vietnam- 1972? No... Nimbin, Australia, 12th August, 1976.

The community in question was the newly-formed Tuntable Falls co-op, the largest so-called "hippy commune" in Australia. The charges were all marijuana-related and were all later thrown out of court. At the same time as this heavy-handed example of hippie-bashing, Australia was being flooded with heroin by a consortium of career criminals and corrupt NSW Police. Nimbin at the time had no visible street trade in marijuana, the only drug commonly used there. Most of the new inhabitants had moved to this sleepy rural haven as part of a conscious decision to seek a healthier more sustainable lifestyle than that offered in contemporary society. Rightly or wrongly, these people were largely well-intentioned idealists... not criminals.

Scenario 2-
A small village is holding its yearly festival. Women, children, family groups, young and old are peacefully enjoying themselves. Music is playing. People are smiling and laughing. Flags, banners and balloons are waving in the sun-soaked breeze. Suddenly a group of muscle-bound, armed men begin randomly grabbing people from the crowd, shouting at them, strip-searching them and physically intimidating anyone who resists. At either side of town, roadblocks have been set-up and visitors to the festival are being forced from their cars, strip-searched and harassed by dogs. Those not treated in this way are told to "go back where they came from" East Timor- 1998? Serbia-1995? Nah... just good ol' Nimbin again- Mardi Grass 2006. Some things just don't seem to change... or do they?

Thirty years after the "great Tuntable cattle-truck bust", Nimbin (and anyone that moved here post-1973) is still being used by the NSW Police as easy target practice. Heavy-handed, intimidating, one-sided, expensive (and usually relatively pointless) policing policies are a regular fact of life here. In the '70s, this was somewhat understandable. The world at that time was still reverberating to many of the changes initiated in the '60s and many of the old-time residents here felt somehow threatened by the sudden invasion of hippies, hemp and head lice. A few miles over the border, Joh Bjelke-Peterson was running a corrupt and brutal police state and hippies were treated as second class citizens. Concurrent with the Tuntable raid, North Queensland's Cedar Bay commune was also busted. Houses were burnt down, fruit trees chopped and the hippies were rounded up and chained to coconut trees. A year later, the cops up there shot and killed a hippie in a pot raid in Kuranda. Apparently (according to the cops) he was running off to get a gun so as to come back and shoot it out with 'em.

Under Joh, police got away with this sort of outrageous behaviour. Luckily for the Nimbin variety of hippie though, we had a more enlightened State Government at the time. The premier, Neville Wran was troubled by the Tuntable raid. As police minister he wondered why he hadn't been told about it beforehand and asked that an independent report of the incident be made. "The real question" he said "is whether there was some over-kill". For this he was pilloried by the north coast establishment, police and press.

To the hippies, it seemed we were being persecuted because of our lifestyle choices, and that our civil rights were seriously under threat. Eventually the government and the legal system agreed, but it was some years before the local "straight" establishment accepted this. In the meantime the local press reported things in a very one-sided way (unlike their national counterparts). Police at the time "said they appreciated the level of reporting in the Northern Star". Small wonder when the Star failed to mention the cattle-truck, the shotguns and the photo-copied warrants but somehow managed to print an editorial and several letters praising the Police actions and howling for Neville Wran's blood. As if to justify the raid, two days after the bust, the Star printed a large article about the "scientific facts" of Marijuana, including such priceless gems as pot being "occasionally injected". No doubt about it... quality journalism!

As time went on everything mellowed somewhat. The long-term locals generally came to accept the "new settlers" and "us hippies" in turn learnt to be less arrogant in our dealings with people we'd previously dismissed as "rednecks". Eventually most people learnt that there was good and bad in all social groupings. By the late '90s, a rather comfortable peace had settled over the north coast and policing policies seemed to reflect this. As the 21st Century crashed down on us though, this all changed. As the War On Terror increasingly intersected with the War On Drugs and civil liberties and personal freedom became more and more a thing of the past, we could be forgiven for thinking that we'd somehow stumbled into a bad 1970's cop show rerun. With a couple of major differences.

In the 70s, the cops appeared to have been acting on their own behalf or from a purely local pressure. These days though, the cops really are just doing what they're told. State and Federal policy has shifted so far to the right that a sleazy opportunist like Thomas George or a crazed '50s shopkeeper like Johnny Howard are the ones calling the shots... and we KNOW what they think of hippies.

In many ways, the erosion of civil liberties in a small hippie town like Nimbin is small potatoes compared with the nightmares being dealt out in freedom's name to the rest of the world. Still, wasn't there an old hippie cliche about "thinking globally and acting locally"? I believe there's also an even older activists' one-liner that "it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees" (as borrowed by Midnight Oil in the 80s). Surely it's time to at least try and stand up for our basic civil rights.

So in time-honoured hippie tradition, you are all invited to a peaceful "celebration of 30 years of Police over-kill" to be held in Nimbin on Saturday August 12th. Bring a smile, some courage, a joint (just kidding, officer) and a good sense of humour.
If nothing else, it's bound to be a crack-up. See you there.

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