Housetruckers are individuals, families and groups who convert old trucks and school buses into portable homes called housetrucks and live in them, preferring an unattached and transient lifestyle to more conventional housing. These vehicles began appearing around New Zealand during the mid-1970s and, even though there are fewer today, they continue to travel New Zealand roads.
By the 21st century these hippie nomads were found traveling independently and in convoys from town to town making a living from small cottage industries such as arts and crafts, or following various fruit picking seasons as they occurred throughout the nation. Other part-time housetruckers use their handcrafted rigs only when taking an extended holiday. Some older vehicles which no longer operate are lifted on blocks and used as permanent caravans or extra rooms on properties and in caravan parks.
New Zealand connection
There are few places left in the world where housetrucking can be an uninhibited lifestyle with the kinds of simple homemade rigs New Zealand boasts. In other countries stringent laws regarding the roadworthy standards of older vehicles have forced many old housetrucks and buses from the roads and into graveyards of isolated farm paddocks and wrecking yards. Other laws concerning where one may park or camp have seriously restricted life on the road. The Kiwi housetrucker, living within a culture which popularizes the benefits of preserving these old motor relics, appreciates their truckers' haven. That New Zealand transport law requires that all vehicles submit to a thorough mechanical Warrant of Fitness every six months ensures that these old motor-homes remain roadworthy.
Many housetruckers choose to travel in convoy, and in New Zealand there are trucker groups of families who travel together from city to city, and who assemble most weekends in different parks to hold markets from where they sell their wares. There are two separate groups who travel New Zealand today selling their market goods; these are Gypsy Faire and Gypsy Travelers.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s many housetruck conventions and grass-roots festivals of all themes were held throughout New Zealand where housetruckers would converge, not only for the event, but for the opportunity to connect and share information with other truckers from across the nation. These events were conducted around areas considers as alternative lifestyle zones within the country. Many a low-key festival circuit was held throughout the regions of Coromandel, Northland, West Auckland, the west coast of the South Island and around Tākaka out of Nelson. For two decades Mollers farm at Oratia west of Auckland, a popular venue for blues and folk festivals, offered an open house for truckers to park on a semi-permanent basis.
History
The idea of the nomadic styled mobile home was spawned from the international 1960s and 1970s counterculture movements, New Zealand with its unique Kiwi experience was fashioned from the early American and British hippie crusades and the then alternative music revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s hippie culture spread worldwide through a fusion of rock music, folk, blues, and psychedelic rock; it also found expression in the arts, specifically in literature, the dramatic arts and the creative arts. The early and modern housetruckers essentially derived their cultures and belief systems from these original influences.
The first groups of housetruckers to travel in a co-ordinated convoy was the Nambassa Winter Show with Mahana in 1978 and then again Mahana traveling with the Roadshow Fayre after the 1979 Nambassa festival.
Nambassa Winter Show with Mahana
The Nambassa Winter Show with Mahana was a musical theatrical production of 60 entertainers and crew who toured the North Island of New Zealand in a convoy of mobile homes, buses and vans, performing at major centres and theatres throughout September and October 1978. While initially four main shows were scheduled for this collective theatre company, repeat and spontaneous performances around the nation saw this number of live performances increased to over ten. This theatrical extravaganza was organised by the Nambassa Trust as part of its national promotion of the arts and towards promoting its 1979 three-day music, crafts and alternative lifestyle festival which was held in Waihi.