15 Facts About Nambassa

Nambassa was a series of hippie-conceived festivals held between 1976 and 1981 on large farms around Waihi and Waikino in New Zealand.

Nambassa is the tribal name of a charitable trust that has championed sustainable ideas and demonstrated practical counterculture ideals, a spiritually based alternative lifestyle, environmentalism and green issues from the early 1970s to the present.

Nambassa festivals were not only music and entertainment events but included educational components which sought to instruct people on lifestyle aids it felt important enough to promote within the then conservative society of New Zealand's 1970s.

Many of those involved in Nambassa aspired to the notion that throughout the evolution of western civilisation, many valuable ancient survival, healing and spiritual techniques, had been lost over 1700 years of a philosophically and culturally dominating Roman Christianity.

Adherents of Nambassa promote the ideology which suggests that, to deny what was once integral to survival in ancient history, is essentially to deny one's personal spiritual development.

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The policy of the Nambassa Trust was to attempt to create an ambiance which would dispel all religious factionalism, so that philosophical labels could dissipate enabling people of all religious persuasion to share in their most common fundamental of traits, their humanity.

In maintaining Nambassa's nonsectarian and open door policy on religious philosophy, workshops were conducted on: Hinduism, Hare Krishna, Bible scholarship and born again Christianity, Roman Catholic Church, Judaism, Ananda Marga, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Krishna-Haribol, Sufism, Esoteric Christianity, shamanism, Wicca, and Zen.

Multiple festival format which combined Creative Arts, popular music and multiculturalism that shaped the Nambassa festivals, was conceived by Peter Terry while living in the Waikino craft village during early 1976.

January 1977 heralded the Waikino music festival, a prelude to Nambassa, which experimented with the concept of amalgamating into a singular festive event, controversial alternative culture with popular music.

Nambassa administration involved hundreds, to the extent that the 1981 five-day celebration gave out 1500 complimentary tickets to people and groups involved in the event in some official capacity.

The Nambassa spectacles were organised on a purely voluntary basis by energetic and visionary young unemployed hippies, coordinated into a cohesive working force by Terry.

Nambassa is administered not by private enterprise but through a registered charitable trust whose articles list provisions and aims allowing it to organise public events to raise funds to meet objectives.

All Nambassa events made a profit with the exception of Celebration 1981.

Nambassa significantly expanded the concept of multiple open air staging, all running simultaneously at the one event.

Nambassa Winter Show with Mahana was a musical theatrical production of 60 entertainers and crew who toured the North Island of New Zealand in a convoy of Mobile homes, buses and vans, performing at major centres and theatres throughout September and October 1978.