Journal article
Counterculture, property, place, and time: Nimbin, 1973
M/C journal : a journal of media and culture., Vol.17(6)
2014
Metrics
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Abstract
Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin.
Details
- Title
- Counterculture, property, place, and time: Nimbin, 1973
- Creators
- John Page - Southern Cross University
- Publication Details
- M/C journal : a journal of media and culture., Vol.17(6)
- Publisher
- Queensland University of Technology
- Identifiers
- 991012862998902368
- Academic Unit
- School of Law and Justice; Law; Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article