MEDIA RELEASE
Commue: Chasing a utopian dream in Aotearoa
OLIVE JONES
Published by Potton & Burton, September 15, 2023, RRP: $39.99
Former commune member Olive Jones was a teenager when she joined a group of hippies, idealists and subsistence farmers at Tahuna Farm in Nelson and 21 when they bought an arable farm in the Motueka Valley. Influenced by the counter-culture movement sweeping Aotearoa in the 1970s, she rejected her formative, conventional mainstream way of life in favour of an alternative lifestyle within the Graham Downs community, of which she was a founding member.
Away from home, Jones took to communal living and punched above her weight. Her natural intelligence, curiosity and resourcefulness made her invaluable to the community, where she quickly assumed leadership roles. Jones often took on the burden of work and organisation and at times struggled with ideological clashes, shifting social dynamics and seeming hypocrisy of ‘liberated’ gender roles, where men and women replicated the same distribution of labour as mainstream society.
Navigating the complexities of communal living and gender politics in a free and unregulated environment, Jones describes with courage and candour the pain of first love and jealousies which arose in polyamorous relationships. Throughout, she learned many life skills, including how to tan leather, make cheese, grow food. Significantly, she also built her own house, helped to deliver babies and became a mother.
Jones’s memoir Commune offers a rare, intimate glimpse into the world of life on a commune during the 1970s and 1980s. Lacking rules and membership, the unstructured Graham Downs communal living experiment ultimately failed to thrive and fulfill its early vision. Many left the community, to be replaced by drifters and addicts. Around this time, Jones severed her 16-year tenure with the community and left with her young daughter. Her life-changing experience led to a career in teaching, post-graduate study of long-lived, intentional communities and a lifelong interest in communal living.
Sharing memories and stories in her book, Jones recounts the sheer hard graft of life on a commune and the many challenges and triumphs which shaped her time within the community. She also reveals why she was ultimately disillusioned with the Graham Downs community and why she broke away to start a new life.
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.
