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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Jerusalem No Hangout for the Freaked-Out; Love not Sex the Keynote

Jerusalem No Hangout for the Freaked-Out; Love not Sex the Keynote

Jerusalem is a combination of hippie-type commune and Maori settlement, along the Wanganui River about thirty miles from Wanganui.

It’s not the sort of place you’d send a fifteen-year-old to visit without some reservations.

But whatever else has been said of it, it is not a godless hangout for freaked-out drug addicts, nor does free-love interpret as free-sex or a sleep-around paradise for anybody and everybody.

Leaving Auckland to see for myself, I expected to find enough evidence of rampant drug-taking, ‘free-love’ and squalor to last a lifetime. What I had heard about Jerusalem wasn’t much – but not very encouraging, either.

Suspicions fed on the odd looks and uncertain remarks that answered questions about Jerusalem asked along the way to Raetihi, the last town on State Highway 4 before turning on to the long dusty road to Jerusalem.

Thirty miles of dust, pot-holes, broken by ridges of thick gravel piled on the road just where you’re trying to negotiate a particularly nasty bend is no joke on a heavy motor bike.

Nearly ready to abandon the whole idea and turn back, I asked a man on horseback how far to Jerusalem. And he told me, ‘Mile or so back.’ Terrific! A great place if you can drive right past without recognition.

First sign was a church steeple, of all things. Then a rough Cross mounted on a rounded hillock.

A large building which looked like a convent . . .

All part of a Maori pa. Church, convent, meeting house and several small houses containing five or six families.

This couldn’t be the place I was after?

Before I could turn the engine off I was greeted, embraced like a long lost brother by several people in either way-out robes or regular jeans and shirt.

I must have looked the part. Black sweater and jacket, jeans, and covered from head to boots in mud and dust. But every arrival is greeted this way. Stranger or otherwise.

The one meal that nearly everyone has together is dinner, served in the evening at any time between 7 and 10.

Visitors to the Jerusalem commune are amazingly frequent – of all ages from late teens to senior-citizen status who come to see ‘how the hippies live’ and genuine interest, maybe bringing food and other usefuls. Few stay page 366 overnight. Younger ones may stay a couple of days.

Conditions are not four-star but you couldn’t call it squalor either. Conveniences consist of two deep holes at either end of the community with surrounds and a seat mounted across. There’s tank-water on tap for washing, but a dip in the Wanganui River is much better.

Of course there’s a bathtub in a back-room of the kitchen if you really want to go overboard. Fill it with hot water from an old copper and you’ve got it made.

About three couples slept together regularly while I was there.

Introduction to about forty ‘hips’ (about half of them full-time members of the community), then to the ‘kitchen’ – an old four-room farm-house. Outside, someone stood cleaning mud from an unsavoury looking leg of goat killed that morning.

Inside, an old cast iron stove blazed away preparing roast goat, potatoes and a few unidentifiables for a waiting crowd of about twenty.

Left standing with a great hunk of meat thrust at me, I wondered if I was supposed to eat it. You’d be surprised how reasonable a question it seemed at the time. I ate it . . . after a while, and it wasn’t too bad.

To the ‘top house’ – a farmhouse-cum-bunkhouse is a five hundred yard climb from the kitchen over a well-worn track through scrub. It sleeps about thirty people quite comfortably, Miss out on a bed and you can sleep on the verandah or move to a smaller house called ‘Bug Inn’, or sleep by the fire outside if you like. It burns throughout the night.

Some retire before 8 p.m. Others may not until dawn or later, either making music or talking around the fire. Or eating in the kitchen. Meal time is any time if that’s how you want it.

One couple had built a tepee just over the hill and about twenty yards from the top house. A large roomy affair, about twelve feet high, water-proof, thick floor covering of blankets and waterproof ground sheets. Two thick mattresses lay side by side opposite the entrance.

A cot for their eighteen-month-old stood at arm-length from the ‘bed’.

The other couples slept in the top-house on bunks. Each room in the house has four bunks, which means four or more people to a room during the night.

From what I saw and heard, couples who ‘shack up’ do not change one partner for another easily. It is a more or less permanent arrangement.

There are obviously exceptions to this rule, but I doubt whether there is more ‘sleeping-around’ than you would find in the city, where there are always four walls to keep it private, more so than in Jerusalem. And with the turnover at Jerusalem, it depends on what type of people make-up the community at any time. Morality would change with the people.

Two years ago, James K. Baxter, a New Zealand poet-lecturer, founded the commune at Jerusalem.

‘I came to Jerusalem blindly,’ he says, ‘knowing there was something God page 367 wanted me to do.’

‘God led me to start a home for nga mokai (the fatherless), for those who needed a home because they were young and afraid.’

‘The young Maori “nga mokai” had to be brought home to their people where they would find the love of the group,’ he says.

He discussed it with the Maori people at Jerusalem.

‘They replied with aroha. They felt a love and sorrow for the young and so the pa became the mother of the commune,’ says Baxter.

Then Baxter went to Auckland to visit ‘nga mokai’, the lost young as he calls them. He says they came gradually to Jerusalem, as the word spread to Maori and Pakeha alike.

Months went by, and Baxter left Jerusalem for a month or so. During his absence he heard of trouble with the local council over accommodation facilities at the commune. ‘I wondered if I should go back to sort it out. But if the boat could not float without me, it was better that it should sink,’ he says.

He believes ‘aroha’ (love) should hold the community together, not James Baxter.

By the time he got back the community had improved the facilities and had satisfied the council.

‘The commune stands or falls on how people get on with one another, on love, pure and simply,’ Baxter explains.

Today, the commune or group numbers about twenty, that is, a semipermanent core, of which some may stay a month or a year.

‘Numbers mean very little,’ says Baxter, ‘We get perhaps a thousand a year who stay here then pass on. Some will come back.’

Most of the work in the community is done by Baxter and half a dozen or so others. This work includes general cleaning up, renovating the old buildings, and improving facilities.

No one has to work if he or she doesn’t want to. But most do.

Although Baxter and the pa supply some money for food and supplies, members of the commune will work for local sheep farmers and others to contribute to the bills that come in. ‘Some contribute thirty dollars, some ten cents. But it is all the same to me, because it is all they have. Remember the story of the woman giving her last coin and the rich men’s bags of gold?’, says Baxter.

A truck with mail and supplies comes three times a week.

It took a while to get used to, but once the thought of home comforts drifts away the place takes on a new feeling.

The ‘new philosophy’ is not rammed down your throat, or protest about the establishment hashed up at every opportunity.

The philosophy works itself out after a while and the protest is subtle; very subtle.

At 2 a.m. one morning sleeping bodies huddled in sleeping bags were page 368 strewn over the verandah and a group was sitting around the fire. On a piece of paper someone had written the words of a very old piece of literature, trying to put it to music:

Entreat me not to leave thee,
Or to return from following after thee,
For whither thou goest, I will go;
And where thou lodgest, I will lodge;
Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.

Call it prayer or a soppy piece of romanticism but if you want a précis of the spirit prevailing in the commune, that’s it.

About three months ago, a young Fijian turned up at Jerusalem. He was violent, suspicious, in a mental quagmire. But he was accepted as a member of the family for no one cares who or what you are.

Within two months he had quietened down to such extent that after the police had taken him back to the mental hospital from which he had escaped, he was allowed to return to Jerusalem under Baxter’s custody.

Seeing him at Jerusalem today, you couldn’t meet a calmer, more pleasant fellow anywhere.

Another person, who is mentally retarded, also found acceptance where he couldn’t find it anywhere else. This is how the philosophy comes through.

One Sunday, twenty-five commune members attended Mass in the church. Many of them had given up going anywhere near churches before they came to Jerusalem.

Is it because there is no form of pressure whatsoever that these things happen?

A young woman came after a nervous breakdown about a month ago. Now she’s ready to go back to her family and live normally because after she had had time to think, that is what she wants.

Baxter says: The essence of the commune is this:

Arohanui: Love of the people

Manuhiritanga: Hospitality to the stranger

Matewa: Night life of the soul – that subconscious life which people outside now try to get by smashing their skulls with LSD

Mahi: Work done for the love of the group.

Despite its attraction, it could seem rather pointless to spend your whole life there. Those who stay there learn maybe what it is to share what they have, to ask when they need without shame, to be useful when needed, accept all others and be accepted.

If you can stand it without becoming cynical of the outside world, that would be enough. 1971 (653)