In May 1973, thousands of students, artists & musicians from around australia and overseas, gathered together for the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin, northern NSW. Aquarius was a conceptual 10 day event to celebrate alternative thinking & sustainable lifestyles and is the spiritual birthplace of Australias’ hippie movement. After the festival finished, many visitors stayed on, establishing their own communities on the rainforest fringes, on land which had been cleared for dairy farming but largely left abandoned with the collapse of the dairy industry in the 60s. These iconic images are from the Lismore Region Gallery photo archive.
