The opening night film at this year’s Byron Bay Film Festival will be a feature-length documentary that captures and celebrates a defining event in the history of the Northern Rivers – the 1973 Aquarius Festival.
The film, Aquarius, directed by local filmmaker Wendy Champagne, is sub-titled ‘Dreamers, Tree-huggers and Radical Ratbags’, 10,000 of whom descended on the sleepy hinterland township of Nimbin, introducing sometimes unwelcome new ideas and behaviours such as drug use, free love and hedonism.
The inflow of a revolutionary agenda, weird sounds and psychedelic aesthetic transformed the moribund dairy and banana growing community into the vibrant rainbow region that still exists today.
Many of the newcomers stayed, strengthening the burgeoning environmental, anti-war, Aboriginal rights and feminist movements, and giving the Northern Rivers a reputation as a haven of social and cultural free-thinking that has attracted similar-minded seekers from all over the world ever since.
Visionaries ‘called’
‘[The Festival] attracted visionaries and prophets, pioneers, who could see the vision and knew how to work for it, and also the people who wanted to be saved, people who were falling and wanted a new kind of community to live in,’ says its director, Graeme Dunstan, still a resident in the area.
The hippies didn’t so much ‘find’ Nimbin, Dunstan says, as they were called there, into the heart of ancient initiation country.
Wendy Champagne is an award-winning writer and documentary filmmaker whose film BAS! Beyond the Red Light, a study of child-trafficking, opened the Byron Bay Film Festival in 2010.
To make Aquarius, the Byron Shire resident says she spent three years finding storytellers and gathering and stitching together archive footage to chronicle all the excitement and chaos of the festival.
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