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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Baxter Wants End to River Commune

Baxter Wants End to River Commune

Poet-philosopher James K. Baxter doesn’t want his Jerusalem commune resurrected, according to a Sunday newspaper.

It reported yesterday that three Jerusalem landowners wanted Mr Baxter back. They would let him establish a small commune.

Mr Baxter, however, was quoted as saying he didn’t want the commune, closed down only a week, to be revived. He would return there after Christmas to live with his ‘family’.

‘Though my family doesn’t mean only blood relatives, it won’t be an open door community. It will be like a Maori family group. The members will be predominantly Maoris.

‘I just want to go back and live quietly. It’s time for people who want to live in communes to establish their own elsewhere.’

page 378

Mr Baxter said some of the ex-commune members would form their own communities in other places.

‘A minority will go back to where they came from – to the jails and the mental hospitals where they will be supported by the taxpayers and the ratepayers. At Jerusalem they were self-supporting.’

Interest is still high in the commune – and its end – and both New Zealand’s Sunday newspapers discussed it in their editions yesterday.

Mr Baxter himself explained the background to the closing of the commune in a bylined article on Saturday. He is currently in the capital.

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