Nimbin

Nimbin is a village in the Northern Rivers area of the Australian state of New South Wales, approximately 30 km (19 mi) north of Lismore, 33 km (21 mi) northeast of Kyogle, and 70 km (43 mi) west of Byron Bay.

Nimbin is a village in the Northern Rivers area of the Australian state of New South Wales, approximately 30 km (19 mi) north of Lismore,33 km (21 mi) northeast of Kyogle, and 70 km (43 mi) west of Byron Bay.

Nimbin is notable for the prominence of its environmental initiatives such as permaculture, sustainability, and self-sufficiency, as well as the cannabis counterculture. Writer Austin Pick described his initial impressions of the village this way: "It is as if a smoky avenue of Amsterdam has been placed in the middle of the mountains behind frontier-style building facades. ... Nimbin is a strange place indeed."Nimbin has been described in literature and mainstream media as 'the drug capital of Australia', 'a social experiment', and 'an escapist sub-culture'. Nimbin has become an icon in Australian cultural history, with many of the values first introduced there by the counterculture becoming part of modern Australian culture.

Nimbin and surrounding areas are part of what was known as the "Rainbow Region", which was of cultural importance to the Indigenous Bundjalung people. The name Nimbin comes from the local Whiyabul (Widgibal) clan whose Dreamtime speaks of the Nimbinjee spirit people protecting the area. Since 1973, the area has been a haven for Australia's counterculture.Forests of red cedar first attracted loggers to the area in the 1840s, but by the end of the century, most of the land had been cleared. With the cedar forests gone, Nimbin was subdivided in 1903, with the land turned over to dairy farming and growing bananas. In the 1960s, the local dairy industry collapsed due to recession and Nimbin went into serious economic decline until 1973, when the Aquarius Festival, a large gathering of university students, practitioners of alternative lifestyles, hippies, and party people, was held in the village. The festival was the first event in Australia that sought permission for the use of land from the Traditional Owners and made a significant attempt at reconciliation. After the festival, hundreds of participants and festivalgoers remained in Nimbin to form communes and other multiple-occupancy communities, in search of an "alternative lifestyle". Nimbin in fact made legal history for the first ever application of group title ownership of land in Australia. Since the Aquarius Festival, the region has attracted thousands of writers, artists, musicians, actors, environmentalists, and permaculture enthusiasts, as well as tourists and young families escaping city life.Interviews were conducted in 1992 documenting the alternative lifestyle movement of Northern NSW in the 1970s, focusing on the town of Nimbin and the 1973 Aquarius Festival. Interviewees discussed how they arrived in Nimbin, their efforts at organising the Aquarius Festival, and the lasting impact the festival had on the township.In 1979, the Nimbin community staged the "Battle for Terania Creek" to protect the remaining local rainforest. As a result, the New South Wales government imposed a "no rainforest logging" policy covering the entire state, the world's first government legislation to protect a rainforest.The population of Nimbin before the failure of the dairy industry in 1961 was 6,020. In the 2006 census, Nimbin had a population of 352, compared to 321 in the 2001 census.The region's high rural population (35 percent of Lismore residents, according to the census) means that Nimbin services a surrounding rural area of about ten thousand people living within 15 km (9.3 mi). Nimbin had the highest unemployment rate in the Lismore Local Government Area in 2006, at 18.1 percent. Nimbin's population in the 2011 census was 468. The 2016 census published Nimbin's population as 319, with local services provided by the City of Lismore (its area containing 45,000 people).