Nambassa was a series of hippie-conceived New Zealand festivals held from 1976 to 1981 on large farms around Waihi and Waikino in the Waikato. They were music, arts and alternatives festivals that focused on peace, love, and an environmentally friendly lifestyle. In addition to popular entertainment, they featured workshops and displays advocating alternative lifestyle and holistic health issues, alternative medicine, clean and sustainable energy, and unadulterated foods.
The New Zealand hippie movement was part of an international phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world, heralding a new artistic culture of music, freedom and social revolution where millions of young people across the globe were reacting against old world antecedents and embracing a new hippie ethos. Specifically New Zealand's subculture had its foundations in the peace and anti-nuclear activism of the 1960s where hippies were actively trying to stop New Zealand's involvement in the Vietnam war and to prevent the French from testing nuclear weapons at Mururoa atoll in French Polynesia in the Pacific Islands.
The January 1979 three-day music and alternatives festival, held over Auckland anniversary weekend, attracted over 75,000 patrons making it the largest arts, multiple cultural and popular music event of its type in the world.
Nambassa is also 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.
1977 January. Waikino music festival at Bicknel's farm, Waitawheta Valley, between Waihi and Waikino. Attendance 5500.
1977 December. Parade from Queen St, Auckland, to nearby Albert Park for a free concert. Attendance 10,000.
1978 January. Nambassa three-day music, crafts and alternative lifestyles festival on Phil and Pat Hulses' farm in Golden Valley, north of Waihi. Attendance 25,000.
1978 October. Nambassa winter road show toured the North Island promoting the 1979 festival.