During the 1960s and 1970s a lot of young Australians followed their contemporaries in search of counterculture and peace. This search to forget the war and materialism of the West lead most of them on a romantic journey in the ancient cities and beaches of India.
According to Dr. Agnieszka Sobocinska, Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University: the hippies imagined India as the opposite of West - if the West was boring, India was exciting; if the West was grey and bland, India was imagined as full of colour and excitement - an amazing technicolour sort of place!