In the late 1960s, but especially the early 1970s, a significant cohort of young people, many of them tertiary educated, escaped Australian cities in demographically significant numbers. This was the era of the ‘back to the land’ movement; one of only four occasions in Australia's urbanised colonial history when the unidirectional flow of rural to city migration was reversed. Much scholarly attention has focused on the zeitgeist of this countercultural era, particularly in the United States. In this chapter, we explore how the Age of Aquarius took a distinctly Australian form: the enactment of a rural utopian vision that played out largely on the degraded green hillsides and forested escarpments of the far north-eastern corner of New South Wales. Here, ancient subtropical rainforests had been clear-felled in less than a century, a frenzy of destruction that left a paltry 1 per cent of remnant cover. This forest, colloquially called the Big Scrub, remains extant at its fringes, confined to the headwaters and ravines of creek valleys and atop the Nightcap Ranges and Jerusalem Creek mountains. But even into the early 1970s, it was a forest that, in its once expansive magnificence, continued to haunt both settler colonial and Indigenous memories.

This chapter begins at this point of inflection, some fifty-plus years ago, when so-called ‘longhaired hippies’ escaped the enclosures of the city, and in their idealism and youthful naivety, began an experiment in what they saw as a new way of relating to land and the environment. Theirs was a story of forging pioneering communitarian property-holding models, of the establishment of multiple occupancy rural land-sharing communities (‘MOs’) where new ways of relating to land and an emerging environmental ethos emphasised ‘repairing the ravages of previous land use battles and liv[ing] in accord with the natural environment’ – not ‘battling the bush in fruitless attempts to subdue it’. As noted, this internal migration had its epicentre in the far north-east of NSW, the aptly named Northern Rivers region bordered by the towns of Byron Bay to the east, Lismore to the south and Murwillumbah to the north. This was (and is) a green subtropical land dominated by a micro-climate of heavy rains, a myriad of creeks and rivers, rich red soils dating from a long-dormant volcano (named Wollumbin or ‘Cloud Catcher’ by the local Widjabul people) and verdant rainforests.