Country Life: 'When The Hippies Bought It, They Said No To Farming And Burning'

Saturday, 8 March 2025, 6:42 pm
Article: RNZ

Cosmo Kentish-Barnes, for Country Life

Rainbow Valley is located on regenerating whenua at the end of a gravel road near Tākaka. Several families share the land and help run a small farm for the benefit of the whole community.

"When I came here I was into horses and I was able to run sheep, which I knew how to do because I had worked on a farm, and we divided the meat among the people here," Robert Jenkins said.

Robert was in his mid-20s when the community was founded in 1974 under the ownership of Rainbow Valley Company.

"When the hippies bought it, they said no to (conventional) farming and burning, so everything has come back from gorse in the last 50 years."

The farmland provided the founders with a unique opportunity to escape materialism and the pressures of society.

"At that time, we had the idea that runaway capitalism and consumerism, industrialisation was not good for the planet and that people needed to try to live in a different way."

For the first 10 years, they lived without mains electricity and the first houses were built without the aid of power tools.

Today, the land has a well-maintained feel about it with a healthy, cared-for farm and houses gracing established gardens.

Robert said Rainbow Valley has one of the most stable commune populations he knows of in the country.

"Half our adult members have been here since the 70s. We've got about 18 or 19 adults at the moment and then seven children of whom all but one are under five."

So how did people join the community?

"People had to come here and stay here for at least three months if they wanted to stay here long term, and couldn't be accepted as future co-owners until they'd been here for another 12 months."

If granted residency, they had to buy shares and provide themselves with a home, whether by buying one that someone else had built, or building their own.

It's not often space comes up now to accommodate families.

When it does, the newcomers must embrace the community's basic concepts of shared land, co-operative participation and non-violence.

Robert is retired now but the historian still works on the property, mainly on the farm and doing native tree restoration.

He said most of the younger residents have jobs in town.

"My daughter lives here with her three children and her husband, who's a builder, and he goes out and works five days a week."

Kahu Squires has lived at the community for 29 years, but accommodation was pretty basic in the early days. But she has gone from a two-room dwelling near an old barn to restoring a cottage on the smell of an oily rag.

Her children were one, three and eight when she was welcomed into the small community.

So what does Kahu love about life in the alternative commune?

"The quiet, the isolation, I love swimming in the river. Just the actual freedom of being able to be naked, do my garden and do my sculptures," she said.

As well as being a very talented sculptor, she is also part of the rotating Rainbow Valley farming team.

One of her goals in this role is to feed the people who live at the community.

"Well, that's what we're trying to get back to, concentrating on our own needs for a while, and resting the land."

She said to increase soil and pasture health, cattle numbers have been reduced from 45 to eight.

"Four will be breeding next year. We just have one in calf which is our milking cow and the others are steers for eating," she said.

Kahu has given some of them names.

"Django is our steer. I've called the little black one Takau. Crystal's up behind him and her little calf, Marama."

Munching away on wild pastures, they occasionally look up to check out the scenery.

From the hillside paddock they can see past their carers' houses and across the valley floor to the Anatoki River and, beyond it, the Kahurangi National Park.

"When you look down from above, it looks beautifully organic. I've never seen a housing development anywhere that seems to fit the land so well," Robert said proudly.

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