Dare to be different OLIVE'S LIFE IN A COMMUNE

It’s not for everyone, but for 20 years, Graham Downs was her happy place

In 1976, at the height of the hippy era, Tauranga teenager Olive Jones left town knowing she didn’t want what was on offer – living in the suburbs and training as a teacher, nurse or secretary.

The idea that she might work for a few years, then get married and have babies filled her with “claustrophobic horror”. So, on the eve of her 18th birthday, Olive hitchhiked down the North Island, eager to discover what else was out there.

“My best friend from Ōtūmoetai College told me she was living in Nelson in this cool place, and invited me to come and visit,” recalls Olive. “I had no inkling as I started down that driveway into Tahuna Farm that I was taking the first steps into a way of life that would absorb me for nearly 20 years and change me as a person.”

Three years later, Olive was one of a group of hippies, idealists and subsistence farmers who formed a charitable trust, setting up an alternative community called Graham Downs, living communally on 24 hectares of farm they bought in the Motueka Valley.

Experiencing communal living was an attempt to achieve social, sexual and financial liberation from the uptight world they grew up in.

“New Zealand was so straight in the mid-’70s. So, for someone who really liked to have fun, it looked the way to go for me.”