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Michael Balderstone - Nimbin Museum director
I came to Nimbin a bit over 15 years ago after hiding in Himalayan caves and other out of the way places around the planet for a decade or so. Being an old hippy, I had regularly visited the tiny village on visits to Australia but wasn't ready
to settle down. It was only after having children that happened and we traveled the east coast looking for like minded people to live with. Nimbin seemed to have the biggest mob of black sheep so we stopped here, renting a house in town. I was keen to do something, there were
plenty of empty shops and I moved into one setting up a second hand shop mostly stocked from the local tip. Hippies have good taste, a keen eye, and little money so practical well made items from the past were popular. Soon I was regularly attending auctions and farm clearance sales where
often historical pieces of the areas history were sold. A collection started to grow, a few aboriginal artifacts, lots of early European pioneers relics and a few hippy bits that hadn't been composted.
After eight years there was a grand collection hanging from the ceilings and stuffing the eight rooms the shop had grown into. The business had always been called the Nimbin Museum and as the unusual village attracted increasing visitors keen to know how the
"hippy experiment" began, and we got sick of answering the same questions every day, the idea came to create a walk through educational history of the area. Several local artists helped and the Rainbow Serpent Path was born!
No doubt it reflects my own long, drawn out journey of self discovery but it's not dissimilar to many of the new settlers in the area attracted from around the globe to the ideals and visions of the tribe here.
I grew up on a sheep and cattle farm in Western Victoria after the formative years spent on the Murray River near Tocumwal. I was the eldest of four children who one after the other were sent off to boarding school in Melbourne at age ten. I hated it, missing
the warmth and security of a loving family and the farm I knew so well. To survive, I shut down and closed off a whole emotional side to myself which I rediscovered some twenty years later.
After leaving school I went home on the farm for a year, then two years on a big property before traveling around Australia in an old Holden Wagon with a mate. Then it was to the bright lights of the city working for a stock and share broker. All went well
for a while, it was a big party, lots of alcohol, girls and good times, everything I'd missed out on in my teenage years locked up in the conservative, traditional military style jail they called Scotch College. I couldn't get enough of life and was soon restless for more travel. The
stockbroker sent me to their London office. That was it! Once I'd had a taste of overseas adventure I wanted to see more, gave notice and upset everyone by declaring there must be more to life than helping the rich get richer. With friends we bought an old police van and headed off
over land to India on the famous hippy trail after I'd ceremoniously burnt my suits and ties! I was twenty five.
Five months later, bearded, beaded and hair lengthening the caretaker at the Kandahar campground in Afghanistan attached me to his hubbly-bubbly which he was regularly smoking from. I thought it was tobacco and hooked into it. Alas, it was the best black
Afghani hash. I arose from his cubby hole wildly hallucinating and my life has never been the same since!
It took the following decade to even begin to understand the experience. Not to mention, amongst others, that first mushroom trip in Bali which really tipped me upside down. Lots of travel, thinking and more drugs took up most of the
next chapter before I eventually returned to Australia, had children and moved to Nimbin.
I live in a community outside Nimbin now, absolutly love the unique tribe that exists here keeping the dream alive of living in harmony with nature, though occasionally a strange thought wanders through wondering if ignorance really is bliss. Of course it's
not.
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