Housetrucker

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.

The Kiwi housetrucker, living within a culture which popularizes the benefits of preserving these old motor relics, appreciates their truckers' haven.

[3] 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.

[6] For two decades Mollers farm at Oratia west of Auckland, a popular venue for blues and folk festivals,[7] offered an open house for truckers to park on a semi-permanent basis.

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.

[1] 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.

There were just a handful of inspiring-looking rigs in 1978, these wonderful early machines prompting a popularity explosion in this unique trucking culture.

Nambassa is also the tribal name of a trust that has championed sustainable ideas and demonstrated practical counterculture and alternative lifestyle methods since the early 1970s.

In the 1970s a large number of derelict country farm houses from New Zealand's early colonial days were being demolished, these contained recyclable rare timbers such as kauri, totara and rimu.

Some early 1970s rigs experimented with homemade wind turbines for lighting; however these large units even though they were fastened to the roof during travel, proved awkward.