The Ohu Movement in New Zealand An Experiment in Government Sponsorship of Communal Living in the 1970s

New Zealand is a country of great contrasts; long and thin, it stretches from the sub-tropical to the sub-Antarctic, has mountains that are snow covered all year round, lush vegetation from which it is possible to step onto the only two growing glaciers in the world, and barren hillsides kept that way by millions of sheep.Settled by Maoris some thousand years ago, Europeans became aware of it late in the period of discovery, and Europeans only settled it in the last century.Among the earliest colonists were people intending to create a Utopia out of this new land, some wanting a conservative, somewhat hierarchical one, others wanting an egalitarian one.Initially, the conservatives were the more successful, but from the beginning the hierarchy was supposed to be without the very top, an aristocracy of wealth, or the very bottom, the poor.Hence, there was egalitarianism even in the conservative Utopia.In the early years of this century, New Zealand gained a reputation as a center of serious social experimentation on a large scale.Edward Bellamy and Henry George were widely read, the single tax was seriously debated, and land nationalization was put into practice with the intent, carried out at least in part, to break up large estates. 1 New Zealanders seriously tried to create a society without class conflict and many believed that they succeeded in creating a Utopia.But for some of a later generation, the Utopia created by their parents and grandparents grew stultifying, and they became convinced that they lived in a deadening dystopia rather than the good society they were told they inhabited.In 1951, James