Nostalgia – things were happening in 1979

On a cold winter’s morning, hanging out with my woollen slippers keeping me warm, I was suddenly tripping back to a year that was explosively fun with not a slipper in sight. This evocative throwback was prompted by reading about rolls of film that have been recently restored into a movie which is now being played at two movie theatres in Auckland.

It will take moviegoers back to an unrepeatable period of freedom. Though I wasn’t literally at this particular concert, I, the wannabe hippie, was there in spirit. While I was gaining my sea legs, hippies were listening to good music and sleeping under the stars. The three-day Nambassa Festival, held on a Waihī farm in 1979, is the subject of a recently restored documentary that beamed me back to simpler days. Literally to what Mick Jagger referred to as a time of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

It was a snapshot of Aotearoa at the end of an era, defined by a spirit of self-conscious innocence that the 1980s was about to stamp out. The footage showcases the essence of the seventies flower power counterculture had supposedly been about: great music, peaceful mass gatherings, alternative lifestyles, spiritual exploration and walking around public events topless. was in awe of the openness of letting it all hang out during concerts.

Once, I even threatened I’d be a topless hippie; Mum’s laughter and quick quip soon followed, “Who wants to see two poached eggs approaching them?” Made me walk away in a huff, never mentioning it again.

Compared to recent concerts, Nambassa was to attract the dizzying heights of 60,000 people, mostly hippies, who came for the music, which included a frenzied Split Enz, the Plague (wearing paint), Limbs dancers, and a yodelling John Hore-Grenell and prog rockers Schtung.

Unfortunately, the reason I never got to go to the Nambassa Festival was that I was working on a Sitmar Line cruise liner sailing around the Pacific Islands as an underpaid, overworked stewardess; what an experience it was.

The idea of being amongst it all, dancing in my long skirts, was a long-held dream dating back to when I displayed a large poster of Joe Cocker from the Woodstock festival on my bedroom wall until I left home.

The poster, naivety, and a few long skirts accompanied me as I headed to Auckland for the eye-opening adventures that didn’t break me; instead, they made me who I am, a woman in her late sixties with her feet firmly planted in the now. Who still plans to have future adventures and still loves getting out of her comfort zone, up to a certain extent and just in case, and to put your mind at rest, it doesn’t now include going topless.

Have a preview, as I’m sure it will bring back some memories for most of you?