At age 18, Olive Jones lived in a Kiwi commune, Tahuna Farm.
Warning: Contains details of a sexual nature that some readers may find upsetting.
Olive Jones was 18 when she hitched a ride to Tahuna Farm, a commune near Nelson after being invited by a school friend.
It was 1976 and she’d ditched the “unappealing options on offer for a female school leaver” in Tauranga.
The 4ha property had been discovered by a man named Toppy three years prior while he was doing repairs on the roof of a nearby home. The rundown property was owned by Dominion Breweries, which had abandoned its plans to build a tavern. For $4 a week, they were able to rent the property until it was needed.
In 1979 Jones and a group of others later went on to buy Graham Downs, a 24ha farm in the Motueka Valley, and set up another alternative community.
In this edited extract of her new book, Jones tells what it was like sharing everything in her first commune - including relationships.
I reached a point where I could go for weeks without wanting to leave the farm. I didn’t need money, everything I needed was there – food, shelter, clothing, friendship. I became a central person through being there all the time and getting involved in producing dairy products and cooking meals. Increasingly, people turned to me for advice and direction. I enjoyed the challenge of creating meals for a crowd of people, and revelled in it all being produced from our own labours. It was immensely satisfying.
A shelf above the workbench in the barn held a row of old yellow Milkeeze tins containing an assortment of demolition nails and screws, and the kerosene tin and jar of meths for lighting the Tilley. Each evening, it was primed, lit, pumped up and carried up the garden path to the house to hiss on its hook in the kitchen ceiling, casting a circle of light below, and deep shadows in the outer edges of the room where people sat shoulder to shoulder around the kitchen table on the built-in benches after dinner, smoking joints, drinking tea, and talking. The sound of guitars and drumming and singing floated through from the veranda or the lounge room next door, where inevitably someone would be stretched out in front of the fire getting a massage.
The stove generated plenty of hot water from the wet-back. John installed an open-air shower on the outside wall of the kitchen over a little bricked drain. After dinner, a steady stream of people stripped off on the veranda to shower. When each person finished, they’d call out and the next in line would run out naked to bathe. In cold weather, we’d dry off afterwards in front of the stove – and the assembled people sitting round the kitchen.
Nudity was part of the open-minded ethos that underpinned the hippie scene. It was part of a rejection of the perceived uptight and prudish ways of the straight world; about breaking down barriers, confronting and letting go of our inhibitions and exposing our true selves and bodies shamelessly to the world. When you’re naked, you have nothing to hide. Nudity also went with living closely with others without much private space. It was all new territory for me. My family hadn’t been big on expressing physical affection and there had certainly been no nudity. I was young and inexperienced. This place was like nothing I had encountered before. Naked people. Lots of touching and physical closeness. No concept of private property or personal space.
People slept where they could find a space. I wanted to appear hip and cool so swallowed my discomfort and reminded myself it was “all part of the plan”.
There was something about being publicly naked that I found both liberating and uncomfortable. Being naked in the fields when we were out gardening felt less challenging because nobody was inside my personal space and the people around me were doing the same thing. To begin with, I felt vulnerable and self-conscious taking my clothes off around other people but, as I got used to it, I felt a degree of freedom and power in exposing my strong young body to the world. I felt that power when I stood naked, drying myself in front of the stove after a shower, aware of the desirous male gaze of the men sitting half-concealed in the shadows of the Tilley lamp.
But sexuality stood uneasily to one side of nudity and the lack of inhibition about exposing our bodies. I was conscious of a nebulous and intangible line between being naked and uninhibited, and being aware that men were aroused by looking at my naked body. It was tricky territory, especially for a young woman relatively new to intimacy and relationships. And I was surrounded by men who were several years older than me.
You could never quite identify the point where mateyness turned into sexual attraction, so it could be difficult to know if I was reading something into a situation that was really just an innocent gesture of affection.
There was also the idea, actively promoted by a few of the men, that we were all sexually liberated, and that sex was an outward expression of love for our fellow sisters and brothers. And if you didn’t want to have sex with someone, you might want to look inside yourself to ask why not; it might be because you were uptight or inhibited and needed to decondition yourself from the oppression of the straight world you came from.
It took me a few years to realise that free love was an ideal mostly promoted by men who liked to have sex with as many women as they could, and it didn’t include emotional intimacy. Some women, like Sandii, had no qualms about telling a man to f**** off, but I didn’t have that sort of personal confidence. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings or dent their egos.
John was the partner of Betsy, the pre-Raphaelite woman with the long golden hair I saw when I first arrived at Tahuna. He looked a bit like James K. Baxter. He was thin with wispy brown hair that didn’t see a brush very often. He wore woollen trousers and a loose cotton or woollen shirt. His beard brushed his chest and his steel-rimmed glasses framed a twinkly look of mischief in his eye. John loved to smoke a joint and hold forth, which invariably included a diatribe on the corruption of capitalism and its obsession with consumerism, profiteering and constraining rules and regulations. He was eloquent and insistent as he expressed his contempt for mainstream mores and structures.
John postulated that monogamy was a symbol of the controls and restrictions at the core of the nuclear family, that it was an unnatural and fairly recent social practice in the Western world. It oppressed women.
“You realise, of course, that you can love any number of people intimately, and that, in fact, to share your love around is liberating for everyone.”
John hit on me soon after I got to Tahuna and I was flattered by his attentions, even though he was in his early 30s and had a partner and young child, and I was still in my teens.
He’d seek me out and offer me a joint and laugh at the things I said in a way that made me feel I was pretty special. Not long after I moved into the treehouse, he climbed the ladder to wish me goodnight and insinuated himself into my narrow bed. It didn’t occur to me that I could tell him I didn’t want him there. After all, me and my were not so much part of the collective ethos of the farm. It was more us and ours. If I rejected him, he would be pissed off and I didn’t want to upset him, or anyone else for that matter.
I murmured, “But, Betsy ... ” John just laughed and rubbed his whiskery face across my neck. “She’s cool,” he said. “She gets it.” And proceeded to have sex with me. Afterwards, when he returned to his little family, I lay in a state of inner turmoil, trying to untangle my own conflicting feelings about what had just happened.
My sexual experience to that point had been an abysmal disappointment. Having feasted on romantic fantasies about the Marlboro Man, and the racy novels of Mary Stewart in which strong women and even stronger men came together to experience mind-blowing sexual ecstasy after a build-up of irresistible tension, I had high expectations.
Betsy smiled quietly at me when we met in the kitchen the day after John came to my treehouse. She told me John was an extraordinary man and she was cool with him sleeping with me. So John continued to visit me in my treehouse most nights. My predominant feeling was one of nervous apprehension. It felt exciting to be outside the mainstream way of being in a relationship. And I liked John. I admired his intellect and achievements and confidence. I agreed with him that monogamous relationships, with love and romance leading to marriage and a nuclear family, were a crock of s***. It certainly seemed to have worked out that way for me thus far, anyway. I hadn’t met anyone yet whom I felt a strong physical and emotional attraction to. Maybe this thing with John would introduce me to love without attachment or expectation.
John passed me a joint and casually told me that if I wanted to have children, he would be happy to make babies with me. I was thrilled. Betsy said John was such a fine specimen that he should make as many babies as he could. She had limited energy, John was keen to father children and I should go ahead and make a baby with him. We could raise our children together. The idea of raising babies alongside other women appealed in an abstract and theoretical way. I didn’t consider the fact that they lived in a caravan and I lived in a treehouse and none of us had any money. John said he’d build me a caravan. I was in a state of nervous anticipation most of the time, partly with the excitement of stepping outside of the monogamous norms of relationships, partly from the idea of having a baby, and partly as a result of a deep apprehension that I couldn’t articulate, but it made my heart pound.
Every Saturday afternoon, John and Betsy would disappear up the driveway to hitch into town and visit his parents, their daughter atop John’s shoulders with her halo of fine unbrushed hair and her little arms around his chin, Betsy’s arm slung through his. I watched them go, breathing through sharp stabs of jealousy as I felt an acute exclusion from their tight little trio.
Over the months, the feeling of kinship between Betsy and me began to cool. Perhaps John spent too many nights in my bed. Sometimes, he stayed all night. I was always hyper-aware of Betsy lying alone in her bed when he was with me. She began to say that she felt excluded from John’s and my relationship. So I spent an occasional night with them in their caravan. One night, Betsy and I lay together in the caravan waiting for John, who didn’t come to bed till very late. He apologised for the late hour as he climbed in between us, and explained he’d been off with Jane, who was visiting the farm. There was a moment of surprised silence as Betsy and I digested this information. I lay awake mulling over that one for a few hours; John had two women in his bed while he was off with a third. It wasn’t just me taking his attention away from Betsy.
Betsy’s kidneys were barely functioning. She spent much of her time resting in her caravan. I became like a second mother to her daughter, hanging out with her and making sure she was fed and cared for. I started having second thoughts about this idea of making babies with John. No one had greeted the news of our ménage à trois with enthusiasm or approval. I’d watched the daily parade of mothers at the copper and tubs, scrubbing their nappies by hand, and wasn’t that enthused about the idea of joining them. Maybe my friends and sisters had a point. I tried to discourage John from visiting me too often but he ignored my half-hearted protests. I had no capacity to stand up to his insistence. Betsy gave me a notebook of poems she had written, expressing how she felt. I couldn’t articulate my own tangled feelings. I wished John would back off but didn’t feel confident or assertive enough to stand up to him and say, “Stop. I don’t want this. It isn’t working for me”.
One day, Betsy announced she was pregnant. I first felt a pang of envy, thinking, Oh god, and I’m not. Then a moment later, a sense of relief. I thought, I really don’t want to keep doing this. I finally told John with conviction that I didn’t want to sleep with him anymore. He didn’t say anything, just walked off.
Commune: Chasing a utopian dream in Aotearoa by Olive Jones, Potton & Burton, September 15, 2023, RRP: $39.99.
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