Olive Jones was a teenager in 1979 when she joined a group of idealists, and subsistence farmers to purchase a farm in the Motueka Valley and establish an alternative rural commune.
They rejected mainstream culture, in favour of social, sexual and physical liberation from the ‘uptight’ world they grew up in. She talks about the madness, the humour and hard work of living an alternative lifestyle with Karyn Hay.
Speakers
Olive Jones
Olive Jones is one of the founding members of the Graham Downs community, an arable farm purchased near Motueka in the late 1970s. From her teens to her early 30s Olive lived off this land, cultivating self-sufficiency as a way of life, learning to grow and process food, build a house, and farm animals. Her resulting life-long interest in intentional communities has led Olive to study community cultures around the world and resulted in a PhD that documents long-lived intentional communities in New Zealand. Olive continues to be associated with the Graham Downs community, through her role as a trustee of the Renaissance Community Trust that owns Graham Downs.
Events
Karyn Hay
Karyn Hay is an award-winning novelist and broadcaster: her debut novel Emerald Budgies won the New Zealand Society of Authors Hubert Church Best First Book Award in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2001. She was awarded a Frank Sargeson Fellowship in 2004; and is a literary advisor to the Frank Sargeson Trust, and mentor for the New Zealand Society of Authors. The March Of The Foxgloves was published in December 2016 and was a No.1 bestseller on the New Zealand Fiction list. Her new novel Winged Helmet, White Horse was published in November 2018 to critical acclaim.
Events
