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Chapter 1

Gaialands 1978

We were raised at Gaialands to believe in freedom— personal, societal, spiritual—but in the years after I left the commune not a single day passed when I did not feel tightly bound by the fate laid down for me there.

Conditions on the commune were harsh. No electricity or flushing toilets or hot running water in the long winter months, and in the summer, no way to keep a beer cold, or even any beer. Despite all legends of hippie excess, no one on the commune was allowed to drink or smoke or take LSD or sleep with their mother. And then there was the groovy outdoor lifestyle. Each December we were hit with summer storms, days of lightning strikes and torrential rains that took out trees and burst the creek, drowning animals and flooding the surrounding paddocks, and that was in a good year. In the bad years we had to evacuate, returning when the valley had drained of water and our belongings were covered in silt.

But it wasn’t the weather or the basic facilities that made living at Gaialands a trial. It was philosophy. The commune was never what anyone expected it to be—and nobody could stand it for long. People who had heard about us, hippies mostly, arrived at our gate with big, wonky ideas about drop­ping out of society and living where no one expected them to lift a finger unless it was to roll a joint. They wanted yoga and meditation and a smattering of Zen Buddhism and whole foods, but had no concept of how hard it was to grow all your food from scratch and how little time it left for other pursuits.

We didn’t welcome the hippies with open arms but we allowed them to stay a few days, feeding them up on nut roast and alfalfa sprouts and letting them sleep in the tepee down by the creek, which leaked when it rained and was too hot, during the day, to hang out in. If they lasted a week, the hippies were given chores: picking apples, chopping fire­wood, scrubbing pots; and if that didn’t make them leave, there was one task that always broke them.

Early in the morning, before the heat of the sun trig­gered the high-noon stench of feces, Hunter woke up the hip­pies and handed them a long-handled spade with which to dig out the long drops. These were six-feet-deep holes filled with communal excrement, and that was on a day when it hadn’t rained, when the shit hadn’t spread to the paddock. As one by one the hippies laid down their spades and refused to go on, Hunter, our self-appointed leader, rubbed his hands together with glee. He loathed hippies and nothing pleased him more than proving they were a no-good breed of dirty, privileged layabouts.

He drove them to the end of our driveway in his ute, and there he gave them his farewell speech, so well rehearsed he could say it in his sleep. The climax, which followed a bunch of Marxist stuff about the cooperative labor ethics of a working organic farm, was an idiosyncratic take on an old Zen proverb. “Before enlightenment: chopping wood, shov­eling shit,” he would say, waiting for his audience to grow agitated before delivering the punch line: “After enlighten­ment: chopping wood, shoveling shit.”

And then, one fine day in the spring of 1978, a woman turned up on the commune who single-handedly reinstated the hippie reputation we had worked so hard to destroy.

The afternoon she arrived, I was on pig duty with Fritz. The two of us shoveled pig shit into a wheelbarrow, trying to get the job done as quickly and as badly as possible. As the oldest, I was supposed to supervise. Fritz had just tried to run away from the commune again, and I had been told to keep an eye on him. To this end, I had so far handed out only one instruction, and that was to at least try to look as though we were doing what we had been asked to do. Just because we had grown up at Gaialands, and were stuck there, did not mean we shared our leader’s work ethic.

“Do you think,” said Fritz, leaning on his spade, “we could get away with rinsing the rest of the yard with a bucket of water? I don’t see why we have to get every last bit of crap—it only gets dirty again.”

“I don’t make up the rules,” I said. “I only know what happens if we don’t follow them.”

“You’re such a goody-goody,” said Fritz. “I can’t believe we’re related.”

“We weren’t—until a few months ago.”

“Can we change it back?”

“Nah. You’re stuck with me until one of us carks it.”

Brother-sister teasing was new to us, risky and untried. Barely a few months had passed since we had found out we shared a set of parents. Before that we had been forbidden to speak of such things or even to speculate. But I think I had always known Fritz was my kin. He had been born with a clubfoot, never treated, and though the other kids had teased him about it, made fun of his lopsided walk, I never had. Instead I had felt protective, as though his clubfoot was my clubfoot. There were other things too that made me suspect. Sometimes I heard him talking when he wasn’t, or I knew what he was going to say before he said it. When we were alone together we barely spoke, not because we had nothing to say, but because we didn’t need to talk.

I watched him shuffle over to the water trough with an empty bucket and return with it full, at which point he flung water at the yard, standing back to survey the results.

“Bugger,” he said, throwing the pail aside. “I’ve made it worse.”

He had. Propelled by the force of his sluicing, the water from the pail had briefly flowed uphill, and then, according to the laws of physics, flowed downhill again, bringing with it all the shit we had scraped up that morning.

I didn’t have the heart to tell Fritz off. Better to lean on my own spade and laugh at the inanity of being made to shovel the same shit twice.

We were easily distracted after that, looking out for trouble. The sound of an engine straining to climb the loose gravel on the last stretch of road before the commune was all the encouragement we needed to abandon our task. We stood, hands on hips, waiting to see who would appear over the hill. I expected a car but the first thing that came into view was the yellow roof of a gingerbread house, like some­thing out of “Hansel and Gretel.” The car that towed it was a thing so rusted and barnacled that it might have been a fishing trawler.

Fritz scratched his head. “What is that?”

“Some sort of caravan?”

At the crest of the hill, gravity took over. The car swooped forward, out of control, propelled by the weight of the gingerbread house behind it. Missing the curve at the bottom of the driveway, the car then fishtailed through a pile of rotten avocados, picked up speed, and set off on a direct collision course with the pigpen. And in the pigpen, my brother.

“Fritz!” I called out, and he turned and looked in my direction instead of moving out of the way.

The pigpen fence gave way like paper. The car was seconds from impact. Seemingly in slow motion, his head swiveled back toward the oncoming car and stayed there. With not a moment to spare, I leapt out of my gumboots and across the pig shit toward him. Here the slipperiness worked in my favor, and I skated the last few feet in time to grab him around the waist and fling both of us out of harm’s way.

Squeals and oinks filled the air, along with the sound of metal grinding against metal, and then a loud bang as the car slammed into the stump of an old oak tree. This stopped the car, but not the carriage behind it, which shunted forward, driving a long metal tow bar clean through the vehicle’s boot. The car made an awful splitting sound while the cara­van, which I now saw was painted midnight blue under its yellow roof, swayed from side to side before settling intact on its wheelbase.

Over by the water trough, the pigs snuffled around, unharmed, and my gaze returned to the car, whose wind­screen had shattered in its frame, concealing the driver. For a few ugly seconds, I feared we would have to retrieve a corpse. But then, the driver’s door swung open, and a woman exclaimed joyfully, “Wow, what a ride!”

I still could not see her, but below the driver’s door, a bare foot and an ankle festooned with silver bells peeped out. When it encountered pig shit, this foot retreated, and the door closed.

In slow and jerky increments, as though the glass had come out of its hinges, the driver’s-door window lowered to reveal a living mirage.

I was used to the commune women: plain and hearty; milk-washed or sunburned, depending on the season; and sturdy as livestock, built for work. But this woman was the human equivalent of a Fabergé egg, existing only to charm and beguile. Beside me, Fritz gasped.

“Oh my lord! I seem to be stranded,” she exclaimed, and the two of us stepped forward, eager to assist but mute.

The woman laughed openly at our efforts. “You’re very sweet but I think what we need is a man—don’t you?” Her accent was American and soft like waves lapping at a beach.

Valiantly, Fritz held out his hand. “I’m strong for my age.”

“I’m sure you are,” she said, stroking the offered hand, then rejecting it, “but I doubt you could lift me an inch off the ground.”

She sat resolutely in the car, while Fritz tried his best not to look crestfallen.

“Oh look,” she said, pointing out the window, “one is coming!”

From far away across the paddock, Hunter strode in our direction, arms waving. Halfway to us he broke into a run— something I hadn’t seen him do since we were kids. Behind him, at a slower pace, others followed.

“Hunter,” said the woman. “I’d recognize that beard anywhere.”

“You know Hunter?” I was taken aback.

“Oh yes,” she said. “We share a deep connection.”

“I’m Poppy. And this here’s Fritz.”

“Shakti,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.”

A couple of pigs had strolled over to sniff the car, perhaps eager to meet her too, and I tried to shoo them away. “Come on, girls, leave the lady alone.”

“I thought Gaialands was vegetarian,” said Shakti, eye­ing the pigs with pity.

“It is,” I said. “They’re more like pets. They eat our scraps and turn it into manure.”

“Of course,” said Shakti. “How silly of me.”

One of the pigs, Doris, who thought she was human, wandered back to the car and head-butted it repeatedly.

“Would you look at that?” Shakti reached out and tenta­tively scratched the pig’s head. “She’s welcoming me. Telling me I’ve come to the right place.”

“She does that to everything,” said Fritz, slapping Doris’s huge hairy backside to get her to move. “She’ll get bored in a minute.”

“Never ignore a sign,” said Shakti. “No matter how humble the messenger.”

“Shakti!” called Hunter, reaching the pigpen and skid­ding across the last stretch of filth. “You made it. Are you all right?”

“Never been better. Though I am sorry about the pig house. I lost control coming over the hill.”

Hunter surveyed the damage, then waved it away. “We were thinking of building a new one anyway. Maybe now we’ll actually get around to it.”

If there were plans to build a new pigpen, this was the first I’d heard of it.

Hunter leaned in through the open car door, and Shakti reached up and put her arms around his neck. He carried her, bridelike, across the mud and settled her gently down on a patch of grass. She wore a flimsy sarong, tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. The hem flitted up, revealing a thatch of black hair.

I pretended not to have seen and tried not to blush. When I looked at Fritz, his eyes were popping out of his head. A second later, he turned on his heel and sprinted across the paddock.

No sooner had he left than the twins, Nelly and Ned, made it to the crash site. Nelly was the girl I was closest to, and we told each other everything, or had done so before the business with Timon. She was still cut up over that.

“Where’s Fritz off to in such a hurry?” she said.

“He’s gone to wash his eyeballs in the river.”

“What did he see?”

I nodded in Shakti’s direction. She was deep in conversa­tion with Hunter, her back turned on the wreckage.

“Who’s she?” asked Nelly.

“A whole lot of trouble,” said Ned, surveying the dam­age. “If that’s who was behind the wheel.”

“She lost control coming over the hill,” I explained. “It wasn’t her fault.”

“That thing shouldn’t even be on the road—it’s a wreck.” Ned was obsessed with cars and couldn’t resist trying to lift the front bonnet to inspect the engine.

“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” said Paul, one of the fathers, who had arrived from his workshop, still in his overalls, a wrench in one hand and a grease-splattered towel in the other. “You don’t want to blow up the commune.” He shook his head. “That thing’s a goner.”

He walked over to Shakti and introduced himself, wip­ing his hands on his overalls first. I heard him say, “Well, love, you won’t be leaving here in a hurry,” and Shakti replied, “Oh, that’s quite all right, I hadn’t planned to.”

“Poppy,” said Hunter, waving to me. “Why don’t you take Shakti to the mess hut and fix her a cuppa? Get out the honey. She’s had a bit of a fright.”

We kept beehives and harvested honey made from the nectar of manuka bushes, prized for its medicinal qualities. But we also weren’t allowed to eat it. We bottled the stuff and sent it to Auckland, where it fetched a tidy price before being sent overseas. It was one of the few products we sold to the outside world, one of the few exchanges we made that resulted in money. Hunter’s idea was to live a cash-free existence, but we couldn’t barter for engine parts, or farm­ing tools, or the sacks of grain that we needed to get through the winter.

I clomped over to Shakti in my gumboots. The pig shit inside them was starting to dry. They’d be hell to clean out.

“This way,” I said.

We set off in the direction of the mess hut, Shakti gliding next to me, with Nelly and Ned trailing behind. I told Shakti who they were but didn’t properly introduce them.

“And you’re Poppy?” said Shakti, with another one of her smiles that felt like a kiss. “What a pretty name.”

“You think so?”

“The poppy is a beautiful flower—and it gives us opium, one of the most powerful narcotics known to man.”

“You mean a drug? Drugs aren’t allowed on the com­mune.”

Shakti considered this for a moment. “Well,” she said, play­fully, “maybe you’ll grow up to be an intoxicating woman?”

Somehow, I doubted it. Shakti followed me down a dirt path that ran between the chook house and a hay barn, the bells on her ankles tinkling as she walked. She was cer­tainly intoxicating. Next to her I felt like a troll. We passed by the orchards, where a couple of the boys were up in the avocado trees, whooping and hollering as they picked ripe fruit. Lukas climbed halfway down his ladder and wolf-whistled. I waved back. Then he climbed back up the lad­der, no doubt to speculate with Timon about who the pretty visitor was.

“Who was that?” said Shakti, when he had disappeared.

“Just Lukas.”

“Just Lukas?” she repeated. “I’d call that a handsome young fellow.”

“He’s the oldest of us kids—and boy does he like to remind us.”

“And he’s how old?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen,” repeated Shakti. “The perfect age.”

She didn’t say what for. Behind us, Nelly and Ned peeled away. They were supposed to be picking avocados too.

Shakti turned around and watched them go. “Are they twins?”

“Yes.”

“And are there more of you? More kids?”

“Seven in all. After Lukas comes Timon. I come next, followed by the twins, Nelly and Ned. The youngest are Meg and Fritz. You met him too.” I paused, adding, “He’s my . . . brother,” to see if saying it out loud still felt strange, which it did.

“You all have quite straight names for a commune. The one I’ve just come from, there were kids called Astral and Rainbow and Star.”

“Is your name from a commune?”

“No,” said Shakti. “It’s a name I have earned.”

In the mess hall Elisabeth was in the process of setting the table for dinner. She was in charge of the kitchen, making up menus and rosters and supervising whoever was on cooking duty. We ate dinner early, when the heat had gone out of the day—or in winter, the light—then went to bed early and rose not long after dawn. We had to. Sunlight ruled the length of our days. The commune had no electricity, only candles, kerosene lamps, and a diesel-powered generator for emergencies.

I was surprised to have to introduce Elisabeth to Shakti. Elisabeth was Hunter’s life mate, and I had assumed she and Shakti would know each other. Hunter and Elisabeth had been married once, before they realized marriage was a capi­talist construct.

Elisabeth was her usual prickly self. Instead of welcom­ing Shakti, she said, “You’re our first visitor. It always starts this time of year, in the spring. Hippies mostly. They think they can come here and sit around getting high. They don’t want to lift a finger.” She was setting out chairs, and as she spoke, she moved an enormous stack of them from one side of the room to the other, showing off her strength.

“We work hard at Gaialands.” She put her hands on her hips and looked squarely at Shakti. “Hippies don’t last long around here.”

“Oh, I’m used to hard work!” said Shakti. “I’ve been liv­ing on an ohu. You’ve heard of those, right?”

Elisabeth nodded. “We met some folk from the one near Wanganui.”

“That’s the one I’ve been living on,” said Shakti. “Ahu Ahu.”

“Across the river from Jerusalem?” Elisabeth was more interested now.

Shakti nodded. “We had to do everything from scratch. It was like a frontier settlement.”

I had heard of the place too, and the ohu scheme. Prime Minister Norman Kirk had leased shitty pieces of land to groups of young people for next to nothing to build com­munes. Most of them had lasted five minutes but the people who had started Ahu Ahu were made of hardier stuff.

“Just getting to it was a mission,” said Shakti. “There’s no road access so the only way in was to cross the river. It was all right in the summer but in the winter”—she whistled— “boy, you took your life into your own hands. They had this basket, attached to a rope, operated by a set of pulleys. It was basically just a flying fox.”

“Cool!” I said. We kids had been trying for years to build a flying fox across the stream, but the trees on either side were too low and we could never get the wire tight enough.

“Nuh-uh,” said Shakti. “Not cool at all. A death trap.”

I had heard of Jerusalem too, not the Holy City but its namesake, a small settlement up the Wanganui River. A famous poet started a spiritual commune there with a bunch of his followers but the newspapers were filled with reports of squalor and drugs and children with head lice. Then the poet died. It was one of the stories Hunter loved to tell to remind us of the difference between our commune and the ones started by “bandwagon jumpers and filthy bloody hip­pies.” Hunter and Elisabeth had started Gaialands in the early sixties, long before anyone in New Zealand had even heard of communes. They had gone on an overseas experi­ence as undergraduate students and spent a long, hot sum­mer on a kibbutz, returning to New Zealand eager to start one of their own.

Shakti drank her tea and I sat next to her while mine went cold. I liked tea well enough, but I was too mesmerized to drink it. Two of the other women, Susie and Katrina, a couple, had come into the mess hut, and listened quietly to the end of Shakti’s tale about the ohu. “All winter it rained and rained,” she told us. “All of the buildings were make­shift and leaked like nobody’s business. The place was like a swimming pool; all the food got wet, ruined. I had to leave, before my caravan floated down the river.”

“How did you get it across to the ohu?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” said Shakti. “It was waiting for me on the other side.”

I wondered what had happened to the other people liv­ing there, if they had stuck it out, eating ruined food and wearing soggy clothes. But Shakti didn’t say.

“Anyway,” she said, “already I can see Gaialands is noth­ing like that place. I’ve dreamt of coming here ever since I met Hunter at the Nambassa Festival last year. It’s so good to have finally made it!”

We had all gone to Nambassa the year before but it seemed only Hunter had met this dazzling woman, about whom he had said absolutely nothing in the months since. We were going to the festival again this year. Paul had built a wood-powered combustion engine, and he and Hunter were going to demonstrate how it worked.

“What part of America are you from?” asked Katrina.

“Berkeley,” said Shakti. “My parents were professors.”

We looked at her blankly. No one knew where this was.

“The Bay Area—near San Francisco.”

“I went there once,” said Elisabeth. “Everyone was so stoned. Tripping on acid. No one washed. You could see fleas jumping off their skin. I couldn’t leave fast enough.”

“That must have been a while ago,” said Shakti, laugh­ing. “Things have really changed. Everyone’s into disco, and all the men are gay. Before I left I was the spiritual adviser at a self-help clinic for women.”

“What’s a self-help clinic?” asked Susie.

“We helped desperate women find men that aren’t gay.”

“Really?” said Katrina, who was a lesbian. “What for?”

“I’m joking,” said Shakti, adding in a serious voice, “it’s a health clinic. We helped women find their cervix—and in a surprising number of cases, their clitoris.”

“Oh,” said Elisabeth, reddening, and looking in my direction. “I’m not sure we need to mention that in front of Poppy.”

“Are you kidding?” said Shakti. “Every woman needs to know how to find her clitoris.”

“She’s still a girl,” said Elisabeth.

“What’s a clitoris?” I said, then wished I hadn’t when the women around me all laughed.

Shakti looked with curiosity from me to Elisabeth and back again. “Only the most important part of your anat­omy,” she said, addressing me. “But I’ll leave the details to your mother.”

“I’m not her mother,” said Elisabeth, sharply, while I backed this up with a shake of my head.

“I’m sorry,” said Shakti, perplexed. “It’s just that you two look so much alike.”

Elisabeth said, “What a person looks like is of little con­cern.”

Shakti said nothing.

“We do things a little differently around here,” said Susie, trying to patch things up. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I guess I’ll have to,” said Shakti, her smile broader than ever.

Elisabeth began to clear away the teacups and wipe the table clean.

Footsteps sounded on the porch of the mess hall, and then in walked Paul and Hunter, sheened in grease and sweat.

“I was right about the car,” said Paul. “It’s rooted. But we’ve moved the bloody thing to where it won’t cause any more trouble. And the caravan—”

“Under a willow tree down by the river,” said Hunter. “We thought it would be nice and quiet for you there.”

“Thank you,” said Shakti. “That’s kind.”

Katrina offered to show Shakti the way to her caravan.

“I’ll take her,” I said, my heart beating faster at the tiny lie I was about to tell. “I’m going down to the river anyway—to clean off this pig shit.”

IT HAD RAINED SO much that spring that the area down by the river was a bog, and we made our way cautiously around it on narrow mounds of dry earth. I kept apologizing for the terrain and once or twice thought of offering Shakti a piggy­back, as though she was some kind of princess, and I was . . . what? Her manservant?

The caravan had sunk about a foot into the soft, buttery mud. Shakti was thoughtful on the walk and had barely spo­ken, but now she turned to me and said, “Elisabeth—she is your mother, isn’t she?”

“She birthed me, yes.”

“She gave birth to you. Then why did she deny it?”

“Because we don’t say ‘mother’ and ‘father.’ We call the adults by their names. They raised us in a group.”

“Of course. It’s a commune. They brought you up together.”

She hadn’t exactly understood my meaning but I was reluctant to explain. The few times I had explained to outsid­ers that we were raised without knowing who our parents were, they had reacted with shock or disapproval, and I had learned to keep quiet about it, to let people assume whatever they wanted.

Shakti walked around her caravan as best she could, inspecting it for damage, while I studied the symbols painted on the side. Next to the moon, there was Saturn, and one of the blue planets; I didn’t know its name. Signs of the zodiac were dotted about, a few constellations, and some symbols that looked like letters of a foreign alphabet.

“She’s a beauty, huh?” said Shakti, completing her circuit and climbing the steps at the front to stand on a little wooden porch. “Whenever I find symbols that mean something to me, I paint them on the outside—kind of like a patchwork quilt for the soul.” When she opened the door, an upside­down stool and a stack of other items blocked the way. “Oh dear,” she said, stepping over them. “Everything must have moved around in the crash.”

I craned my neck to see inside the caravan, drinking in the potpourri of books and macrame and sculptures of drip­ping candle wax.

Shakti deftly positioned herself in the doorway, block­ing my view. “I’d invite you in but I need to sort out this mess before I have visitors.” She smiled, then closed the door emphatically.

I stood in the mud, not moving, wanting to get back the feeling I’d had a few minutes earlier, when I was with Shakti. In something of a daze, I climbed the porch steps and stood dumbly in front of her door.

“Dinner is at sundown!” I called out. “There’s a cowbell, but you might not hear it from here!”

When there was no reply, I wondered if I should knock on the door and hesitated a moment too long. Something at my feet caught my eye, a playing card of some sort, and I bent to pick it up. On closer inspection, it turned out to be not a playing card but one from a deck of tarot. Some of the women had tarot cards, but they hadn’t got them out for a while. This one showed a picture of a man and a woman gazing dreamily at each other, below which was printed “The Lovers.” I was studying it intently when Shakti flung the door open, giving me a fright.

“What was that about a cowbell?”

“It—it rings,” I said, stammering. “To let you know when it’s dinnertime.”

I had foolishly tried to hide the card behind my back, but of course Shakti had seen it. “What’s that in your hand?” she said.

Embarrassed, I handed it over.

Shakti examined the picture. “Very interesting,” she said, with a look that was filled with meaning. “Very inter­esting indeed.” She held the card to face me. “The Lovers,” she said. “Do you know what this means?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, not really.”

“Well, it can mean you’re going to be faced with a huge decision about an existing relationship—or that maybe you’ll face a temptation of the heart.”

At the word “temptation,” a hot patch flared on my neck.

“Or,” said Shakti, “it can signify the thing that drives us out of the garden—like Eve when she bit the apple.”

“We’re atheists,” I said.

“The card doesn’t care what you believe,” said Shakti. “The important thing is that you picked it up.”

“Only so I could give it back. I wasn’t going to keep it.”

“I know,” she said, smiling. “But there’s no such thing as coincidence.” She held the card to her chest and glanced above her, sweeping her free arm across the vast, empty sky. “The map is up there—written in the stars.” She fixed me with a cosmically charged stare. “All we have to do is follow it.” 

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