Back in the day, the women of Amazon Acres couldn't wait to get their gear off.

They swam naked in the river, scandalising the locals. They walked through rainforest clad only in gumboots.

They sometimes built their huts together in a pink and olive-skinned dazzle of communal nudity, using hand tools and wearing nothing but toolbelts.

Amazon Acres, also known as The Mountain, was a female-only community set up within a sprawling 400 hectares of remote mountaintop in northern New South Wales in the mid-1970s.

The source of much heated debate, men and meat were banned for the most part, and even machines at times — rejected as products of patriarchy.

The collective was a child of the counterculture, but it also belonged to the so-called women's land movement, which saw closed-off utopian communities spring up in different parts of the world — from the US to Wales.

They represented a determined — and largely lesbian — retreat from male culture and misogyny.

Nudity was part of shaking off the chains.

"The freedom to walk around without any clothes on and with no men to perv and leer was incredibly liberating," remembers Barbara Bloch, a regular visitor to Amazon Acres in her 20s.

"I've been to mixed nudist camps but I never felt as comfortable as I did there."

A swimming hole at Amazon Acres in the mid-1970s. ( Anne Roberts via State Library of New South Wales )

Amazon Acres, with a floating population of between 10 and 100 young women at any one time, was an attempt to live out what one-time resident Sand Hall calls "a girl's own adventure" — an arcadian dream fuelled on lentils, lust and a longing to put the theory of women's liberation into practice.

"I see it as facing greatest fears and greatest fantasies," says Ms Hall, who arrived there in 1978, aged 21, and has edited two books on this social experiment.

"Here we were on 1,000 acres and 12 kilometres from neighbours, with all the fun, the hardships, the weather and the isolation.

"It was pretty feral at times and quite wild, but it was about exploring the boundaries.

"We had sisterhood energy. It changes an environment when there are men."

Unwanted visitors

The remoteness of the community didn't mean the women's arrival went unnoticed. Amazon Acres became the talk of the district and some of the locals didn't appreciate their renegade neighbours.

A hut on the property of the Amazon Acres settlement, which was home to women from all walks of life. ( Anne Roberts via State Library of New South Wales )

"When they first came here they caused us a lot of trouble," remembers local woman June Coombes, now 92.

"You'd been here all your lives and they thought they were going to conquer the place and have us out. It didn't happen."

Tensions escalated when one local resident took exception to the women crossing part of her property to get to their mountaintop, the only feasible way in.

She began physically blocking the access road, initially by felling huge trees.

The dispute came to a head in what looms large in Amazon Acres' history as "Bulldozer Day" or the "Day of the Big Gash".

The Gash was bulldozed through the access road to Amazon Acres. ( Supplied: Kerryn Higgs )

"We'd heard they were coming to bulldoze the road to bits so we turned up to stop them," remembers Kerryn Higgs, one of the community's founders.

"There were women with sticks and stones, some of them on a high hill above, throwing stones.

"The bulldozer driver really freaked out and turned tail but only after he'd made the big gash. He completely bulldozed the ledge of road for 40 metres."

The access dispute went to court and dragged on for two years, during which time the Amazons were forced to carry in their supplies, and their children, on foot or on horseback.

Sand Hall builds her hut at The Mountain in 1993. ( Supplied: Sand Hall )

The local community was split between the handful who supported the women and those who made it very clear they wanted them gone.

"One time there was a dead wallaby left in our big mailbox dressed in a frock," Ms Higgs says.

"Another time, the women down in the valley who used to ride found a wire strung between trees at horseback height."

Ideological differences fuel internal conflict

The Amazon community eventually won the case and rebuilt their road, but by then many women had left, dispirited.

Those who stayed had to battle growing internal tensions sparked by different needs and clashing ideologies.

Shayne Kelly removes a diamond python from the chicken run in 1994. ( Supplied: Sand Hall )

There were no leaders on The Mountain and decisions were to be by consensus.

That became harder as the community grew increasingly disparate.

Open to all women, it drew everyone from academics, public servants and radical separatists to hippies, victims of male violence and survivors of mental illness.

Getting decisions made, and obeyed, became almost impossible.

Ms Bloch remembers, for example, the hardline attitude of certain factions when it came to much-debated "three Ms".

"No men, no meat, no machines," she explains. "That was it."

The devil was in the detail.

The Amazon Acres landscape of northern New South Wales. ( Supplied: Kathy Gollan )

Some women, like Ms Higgs, wanted to allow selected men to visit by invitation at least.

(She didn't have a problem with machines or meat either. "Some of us were really quite fond of a lamb chop," she recalls.)

Others demanded a total prohibition on, as Ms Higgs puts it, "anything with a penis".

"The men thing got complicated," Ms Bloch says.

"There was a move to ban male children after the age of six, or pre-puberty. I didn't agree with that but some people felt strongly about it."

Longtime resident Mei Ling, who had arrived as a strung-out drug addict, credits Amazon Acres with saving her life — but also acknowledges the discord.

Mei Ling Yuen credits Amazon Acres with saving her life. ( Supplied: Sand Hall )

"One time a four-year-old boy came for dinner," she recalls.

"Oh, it got very heated. My lentil patties were thrown around and he and his mother were asked to leave because he was a boy."

Former resident Susanne Hollis agrees it was vexed but not without reason.

"It was inevitable there were women who were completely traumatised and for whom men's presence was distressing," she says.

"It was a really difficult issue. I mean, men are part of the world, but you do want a safe place for women. So how do you resolve that tension? We were young and feelings ran high."

A space to heal

Amazon Acres never became the self-sufficient refuge some of its founders envisaged.

In the remote place with poor soil, the women tried everything from cultivating orchids to growing potatoes — they did allow chainsaws and a tractor eventually — but without success.

Yet for all the difficulties, the lands have been and still remain a "healing space" for a lot of women, says Ms Hall.

The women of Amazon Acres, now in their 60s and 70s, say they're proud of what they achieved and what they learnt.

They still recall the joy of living free, of nights spent around the campfire under brilliant skies, with youthful voices raised in women's song.

No-one lives at Amazon Acres full-time any more, but the spirit of the early vision lives on.

The land itself is still owned by the co-operative, ready to be handed on to the next generation if they ever decide to dream a mountain dream of their own.