Boyle Crescent is a tiny 20-metre dog’s leg of road, just across from the Auckland Domain. It cuts through a dull corner of the hospital precinct, home to a couple of functional buildings.
Some 30 years ago this was a neighbourhood rich in social, political and cultural meanings. Today I plan to poke around the ashes of the vanished community that once stood here. Urban landscapes  - and the memories associated with them - are increasingly being seen as rich resources for public history and public culture.

Historian and architect Dolores Hayden and others have proposed ways to reclaim these memories, drawing on fragments of knowledge about a place’s social and physical history. 

The Boyle Crescent community sprang up amongst a dozen or so tiny wooden villas that once stood here in serried ranks. By the 1960s, university students and first-time flatters had colonised No. 5, No. 7 and No. 9 - part of the rundown  - almost slum – housing stock in this part of Auckland.

The young people on this side of the street were brimming with views and attitudes that we now associate with the resistance movements of the day – the Vietnam War, civil rights, and consciousness expansion. By 1967 Boyle Crescent was a local prototype of the freewheeling urban communities springing up in many western democracies, as part of the insurrection against the values of the so-called consumer society.

Poet Alan Brunton recalls that No. 5 hosted the first meeting of the Cultural Liberation Front, attended by Tim Shadbolt, a student firebrand with the ability to galvanise a crowd. Shadbolt wrote in his book Bullshit and Jellybeans of the times: ‘Loud, extravagant and colourful, an insult to the quiet, rational intellectual crap that’s supposed to flow around the university precincts. We all made large flowing red and black capes and wore bowler hats’.

This ‘liberated’ side of the street attracted enormous attention from the authorities, police wielding search warrants for illegal drugs at a time when experimental use among the so-called ‘children of pleasure’ was on the rise. It was here that first local arrest for LSD was at No. 9 in July 1967.

Over the next few years the street would become contested territory, the epicentre of the many of the power shifts that we associate with the 1960s – but which locally didn’t really take root until the early 1970s. It is not surprising, then, that the street became the focus of an official inquiry at a time when there was a strong feeling that the secure moral and social frameworks of the Holyoake years were under threat.

By the early 1970s, the ‘free’ squats of Boyle Crescent were demolished, partly as a result of all the negative attention, partly as inner city property became an attractive proposition. Scraps of this vanished community can be found in official records, poems, memoirs, oral histories and other narratives from the time. Today these fragments can help us start to reclaim the memory of this long forgotten site of 1960s urban history.

By 1968 there was growing turbulence worldwide in the relationship between young people and the older generation. It has been called Year of the Barricades, with a spirit of change sweeping around the world: from Paris and Prague to Washington and Chicago, from Rome and West Berlin to Tokyo. It was the year that the musical Hair opened; the year that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated; the year that North Vietmanese forces launched the Tet offensive.

Many young New Zealanders shared the widespread anger and disgust towards America’s war in Vietnam. At Albert Park, over the hill from Grafton Gully, Tim Shadbolt, addressed young Aucklanders every Sunday articulating the widespread ‘alienation’ from paternalistic  values. June saw the opening of Parliament, an event disrupted that year by anti-US and antiwar demonstrations, where the Governor General forced to enter by a side door.

On June 26, a 17-year-old Boyle Crescent resident Phillip Sharples died from a drug overdose. The tragedy drew only muted headlines  - but behind the scenes, health and law enforcement authorities were appalled. The full gaze of officialdom now turned to this tiny Grafton Street. Boyle Crescent now seemed to be a visible site – call it a carbuncle - of this curious new malaise.

June also saw a high profile team of officials and experts sitting down in Wellington to examine the growing illegal drug culture. This was the year when Magistrates like Auckland’s M.C. Astley said from the bench that all people on drug charges could expect prison.

I examined the work and deliberations of the Drug Dependency and Drug Abuse committee in NZ Green, my 1990 social history of cannabis and other illegal drugs. Its chairman, Health Department’s deputy director, Dr Geoffrey Blake Palmer, was a leading psychiatrist who once headed the Division of Mental Hygiene and lectured in mental disease. An active archaeologist and former superintendent of Seacliff mental hospital, he was the man who once intervened to stop Janet Frame from getting a leucotomy after she won a literary prize.

The committee was asked to take ‘careful and dispassionate’ look at the problem, but its early energies were diverted at the start of July. A telex marked ‘urgent and confidential’ flew between Auckland’s CIB boss and committee member, Detective Chief Superintendent Ron Walton at Police HQ in Wellington. It talked of an outbreak of abuse involving ‘literally hundreds of people in Auckland’.

Police Department records from 1968 show that the authorities already had been watching Boyle Crescent closely. In an internal memo, Detective Inspector Perry from the Auckland Vice Squad called it ‘an address occupied by and frequented by known drug users’. 

The committee was unable to separate issues of drug taking from political protest. Dr Blake–Palmer’s correspondence, for example, shows that in June he was quietly convinced that members of the anti-war protest movement were high on drugs. In a letter to a colleague from the time he wrote ‘I must say that from my personal observations during the screening of a film covering the riot at the American Embassy some weeks ago, many of the close-ups did suggest that the demonstrators as opposed to the police appeared to show the sort of behaviour under excitement that one associates with amphetamine takers and takers of some other preparations’.

Committee member and Oakley Hospital Superintendent Dr Pat Savage, quoted the scriptures to describe recent events as ‘a horrible indictment of the gadarene swine-like behaviour of modern youth’. The resistance of youth to cleaning up their rooms and visiting a barber seemed to annoy Savage just as much as their embrace of the global drug culture. He pointed out that young users were frequently scruffy with long unkempt hair, unwashed bodies, and living in dirty conditions.

As part of his field studies at the end of 1968, Dr Blake Palmer toured parts of Auckland with the Vice Squad, including Boyle Crescent, now seen as Auckland’s cultural petri dish. By now the houses were falling into advanced disrepair, some even lacking front doors.

His unpublished memo to the committee foreshadowed the clash in generational values that was coming to a head in 1968. ‘Although the buildings were structurally sound, the condition of the rooms in which these people were living, two of them reputed to be university students, was appalling. There was a complete absence of even nominal standards of cleanliness. Garbage was stacked in one corner and unwashed clothing lay where it fell’.

Blake-Palmer said his experience of the very poorest districts of the London dock areas during the Depression failed to compare with what he had seen in Auckland. Yet the assault on hygiene being enacted in Boyle Crescent was a mere symptom of this infectious spirit of change.
Three months later this address would become a refuge for the early casualties of the spreading drug culture, when James K. Baxter, the iconic poet came North to take up residence at No. 7. ‘Hemi’ Baxter had emerged as an establishment rebel by the end of the 1960s, expounding a philosophy of compassion and tolerance based on Eastern religions and Maori spirituality.

An active member of AA since the 1950s, the poet believed that rather than be sent to prison  -or worse - mental hospitals, young drug users needed groups where they could help each other. Baxter’s biographer Frank McKay says the poet tried to ensure that everybody who came there - from street kids, to full time addicts to middle-class dropouts - was treated with kindness and aroha.

As many as 20 crashed on mattresses on the floor, sharing food, supporting each other. Eyewitnesses say there was a strong sense of caring in the house, with Baxter and two other adults listening to people’s problems, offering comfort and advice around the clock.

Poet Peter Olds flew to Auckland to join Baxter. He says: ‘Immediately I entered No. 7, Hemi, along with members of his ‘tribe’ embraced me. The Hemi I had known back in Dunedin had changed. He treated everybody who came into the house the same, including the police, who were frequent visitors to the street’.

Baxter himself painted an unforgettable picture of the living conditions: ‘Burst mattresses. Broken chairs. A sofa with half the springs exposed. A table littered with the remains of fifty meals. Cigarette butts trodden into the carpet’.

Baxter shared the extreme media-consciousness of many other 1960s heroes. He invited Thursday magazine to the house, leading to a report revealing a set of values different from Blake-Palmer and other committee members.

‘You the poet, you with your idealism, you see past the dirty beds in the dirty rooms. You see the sometimes love of the people living there. And perhaps it is sometimes a good love’. Baxter kept scribbling away, including the poem, the Ballad of the Junkies and the Fuzz.
For Olds, it was part manifesto; part religious text. ‘He used to recite it by heart every night at Boyle Crescent by candlelight. And the cops used to kick down the door around breakfast time every day’.
The poem sets out to give the user’s perspective, as the following verse shows:
In the rickety streets of Grafton where many gather
In a single house, sharing the kai,

sharing the pain,
sharing the drug perhaps,
sharing the paranoia

Bearded, barefoot or sandalled, coming out crippled
 the bin or the clink.
(The window painted black; yet the black paint was
scraped off again) -

In order that the junkie rock may crack and flow with
water
And the rainbow of aroha shine on each one’s face
Because love is in the look, stronger than lush, and
truth is in the mouth, better than kai….”

Baxter wrote of the benefits of the inclusive nature of the Boyle Crescent community. ‘One long standing user of drugs, a Maori woman, has come off them. One man, a user of amphetamines, who has been several times in the bin, has improved a great deal. I put my arms round these people and talk to them. They are often like children lost in the dark’.

During his time there, Baxter endeavoured to set up pioneering meetings of Narcotics Anonymous, an organisation based along on AA lines, where addicts help each other stay off drugs. Because of the police attention, the addicts who needed the meetings mostly stayed away.

But not everybody signed up to the caring, sharing approach. Alan Brunton, still at No. 5, recalls in his memoirs from the period a visit by what he called ‘a disturbing little man with bare feet and a beard’. ‘He said Trix had left next door and he was the boss and therefore our rent collector and he wanted five dollars. I thought he was either Rumpelstiltskin or Mephistopheles. I had never seen anyone so deeply aware of the nature of evil. It was everywhere around him. He despised the world. He was less of a ruined column than a fallen arch’.

‘Over the next few weeks, he opened No. 7 to any freak who could stand the anomie. One of them sold my Collaro record player to architecture student Bruce Cavell, who sold it back to me for a fee. When Baxter got tired of casualties screaming out their demons, he would come over to us to get some rest’.
Tim Shadbolt is kinder. ‘He gave them the rest they needed, and he put people up when they had nowhere else to go’.

By August, Baxter had had enough. Peter Olds puts it down to ‘drugs, newspaper reports, cops and public opinion’. Baxter fled Grafton to establish another kind of tribal community, at Jerusalem on the banks of the Wanganui River.

But the brief Boyle Crescent experiment had made a mark, passing some kind of a message to the authorities. In October, the Blake-Palmer committee, still mulling over these complex issues, approached Baxter as someone who could help articulate what the young were thinking. A memorable letter seeking his whereabouts was sent to the Medical Officer of Health in Wanganui. ‘The Committee wishes to write to James K. Baxter who passed through Wanganui late last month on his way to plant kumaras in Jerusalem’.

In his handwritten nine-page submission, dated 22 December, Baxter talked of a ‘rebellious’ sub-culture with its own customs, music, religious preferences and nuances of feeling. ‘I wish neither to defend or attack it. I wish only to point out that, as in the international sphere, ethnocentric prejudices are useless and lead only to greater tension and misunderstanding’.

He addressed the police’s emotional fear and contempt for the younger vagrant population of drug users. ‘Accidental issues – cleanliness of houses and people, unusual dress and speech, regularity of employment, de facto sexual relationships, hair length and so on – play a vital part in the police view of drug users, and the view of a good many doctors. This leads to the blind alley of a battle over lifestyles’.
Baxter was especially keen for civic authorities to set up and finance halfway houses where recovering drug addicts might help others break the habit.

When the Blake-Palmer committee reported back at the start 1970, it contained a whiff of Baxter philosophy, recommending a new emphasis on treatment over punishment for drug abuse. But the prejudices of the committee members were still evident in its profile of members of the drug culture. ‘Most expressed a dislike of violent exertion and the heartiness, competitiveness and hero worship they associated with sport’. And it was clear that drugs, especially cannabis, were still of major concern.
‘Suggestions of involvement of cannabis of persons accused in connection with the bizarre California murders, My Lai massacre, private political armies in Nigeria, and adverse effects on driving on motor vehicles are entirely in keeping with the known properties of the drug’.

Until his death in 1972 – at the age of 46 – Baxter spent most of his time in Jerusalem. But he was back at Boyle Crescent to see his old house and its rickety neighbours demolished. ‘When I saw the bulldozers crash through the walls of the house, for the first time in years I began to weep. In the dust-laden cloud, a great wild bird rose and fluttered and died…. The weeds are growing high on the site where the house stood. The landlord has not yet erected the new honeycomb of concrete in which people will be able to watch identical programmes at different tellies, not knowing their neighbour’s names. When he does, he will get four times the rent that he got from the house that stood there. Where are the tribe of the young to go?’

So what does a quiet Sunday afternoon walk down Boyle Crescent in October 2002 tell us about all these dramatic events? Today this is valuable inner city land, bounded by Medical School buildings and carparks. The only physical clues to what the place might have looked like back then can be seen over the road at No. 2 and No. 4, in the little wooden villas housing the Department of Maori and Pacific Health. You certainly can’t miss Domain Lodge at No. 1 Boyle Crescent – now the new HQ of the Auckland Cancer Society.

No. 3 to No. 9 are Baxter’s detested honeycomb of 1970s concrete block apartments. Known as the Turrets, this is an eruption of Roger Walker-esqe noddy flats, all wooden windows and little toy spires. Thirty years on, it is crumbling away behind bamboo and banana palms.
 
Yet the tribal flame lit at the old Boyle Crescent has not been fully extinguished. A decade after Baxter’s death – as the treatment ethos took root, active chapters of NA began in Auckland. Today more than 100 meetings a week up and down the country are helping people stay of drugs.

Redmer Yska This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it