Aquarius did not begin in the hills. It was the fourth and last in a series run by Australian university students, a travelling arts festival that had pitched up in Sydney in 1967, Melbourne in 1969, and Canberra in 1971, where it first took the name Aquarius. For 1973 the organisers wanted something different: not a city campus but a place to actually try living differently. They chose Nimbin, a tired farming village in steep green country, and held the festival from 12 to 23 May. Co-directed by Johnny Allen and Graeme Dunstan, with the painter Vernon Treweeke among the organisers, it drew somewhere between five and ten thousand people to a town that had never seen a crowd like it.

Amid the tie-dye and idealism, Aquarius did something quietly historic. Prompted by activists, among them Gary Foley, who asked the organisers a pointed question, the festival sought permission to use the land from its traditional owners, the Bundjalung people, consulting with elders over the proposed gathering. It is widely credited as the first event of its kind in Australia to do so. The festival opened with what is often described as Australia's first Welcome to Country, led by Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dick Donnelly, a celebrated Western Bundjalung songman. In an era when Aboriginal people were still routinely ignored or worse, the gesture mattered. A ceremony that is now a familiar part of Australian public life traces a thread back to a paddock outside Nimbin in 1973.

The lineup was gloriously strange. Experimental theatre troupe the White Company shared the program with the South African pianist Dollar Brand, who would later become known to the world as Abdullah Ibrahim, and with the Bauls of Bengal, Indian street performers a long way from home. The New Zealand musical troupe Blerta turned up too, carrying a young Bruno Lawrence and Geoff Murphy, who would go on to make films together. And among the crowd walked a slight young Frenchman named Philippe Petit, tightrope walker and unicyclist. Just over a year later, in August 1974, he would string a wire between the unfinished towers of New York's World Trade Center and step out into the most famous high-wire walk in history.

The lasting legacy of Aquarius was not on any stage; it was in who stayed. The festival permanently rewired Nimbin's economy, because so many participants simply settled in the district and never left. The timing helped: the surrounding country had been a dairying and banana-growing region in steep decline, with cheap land and empty farmhouses waiting for anyone willing to try something new. They were not all hippies, whatever the postcards suggest; they ranged from eighteen to eighty and came from every kind of background. One group pooled their money after the festival and bought a 1,200-acre property at Tuntable Falls, an early experiment in communal living that helped define the region. Half a century on, the gathering still casts a long shadow. A 2024 documentary, Aquarius, directed by Wendy Champagne, returned to the festival and the village it transformed, proof that the ten days of 1973 are still being reckoned with.