HEMI / JAMES KEIR BAXTER

Hemi / James Keir Baxter (1926-1972) was one of New Zealand’s most prominent poets. Baxter adopted ‘Hemi’, the Maori transliteration of his first name James, in 1969. In September that year Baxter founded the first of two rural communes at Jerusalem on the Whanganui River. Consistent with an international counter-culture movement the commune rejected the materialism of consumer culture. More interestingly though, Baxter sought to form a community that embraced Maori spirituality and social concepts, suggesting values lost within New Zealand Pakeha urban society might be recovered in this way. Baxter chose to work with ‘nga mokai’, the fatherless ones‚ young people alienated by urban society who often arrived at Jerusalem with addiction problems.

Warren Olds, July 2007
Tamaki Makau Rau/Auckland
Aotearoa/New Zealand

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A Cast-Iron Programme for Communal Activity, at Jerusalem, in Crash Pads, or in People’s Homes

Feed the hungry;
Give drink to the thirsty;
Give clothes to those who lack them;
Give hospitality to strangers;
Look after the sick;
Bail people out of jail, visit them in jail, and look after them when they come out of jail;
Go to neighbours funerals;
Tell other ignorant people what you in your ignorance think you know;
Help the doubtful to clarify their minds and make their own decisions;
Console the sad;
Reprove sinners, but gently, brother, gently;
Forgive what seems to be harm done to yourself;
Put up with difficult people;
Pray for whatever has life, including the spirits of the dead.

Where these things are done, Te Wairua Tapu [the Holy Spirit] comes to live in our hearts, and doctrinal differences and difficulties begin to vanish like the summer snow.

James K. Baxter
Jerusalem Daybook (1971)