The preacher on the milk crate outside a Hobart bank is saying the end is nigh and the Mona owner, David Walsh, with his satanic crosses, is going straight to hell. The preacher is easy to ignore, even if the inverted crosses aren’t. They are everywhere: lining the waterfront, in laneways, in shopfronts, even at the gym.
In a citywide initiative to “paint the town red”, the glowing red lights of the Dark Mofo festival have crept up the hills and into the suburbs. They’re in the windows of houses and they light up a towering crane in the city centre. It gets dark at 5pm and, when that happens, the streets are bathed in an eerie red glow. It can feel like you’re trapped in a confessional booth (or perhaps in Madonna’s Like a Prayer video).
From the hills you can see the massive light beams of the work Spectra. Anyone who comes down to Dark Park or the Winter Feast returns home smelling of wood fire that has a chemical taint.
You carry the festival with you – in the smell on your clothes and hair, even when you’re not there. You can’t escape Dark Mofo, even if you would want to.
Apart from Edinburgh’s, few festivals transform an entire city the way Dark Mofo changes Hobart.
The transformation from a town where no one came to play (particularly not in winter) to the hottest festival ticket in Australia is not without its growing pains.
The growth has been so massive, and has happened so quickly, that, according to the lord mayor, Ron Christie, some locals feel both left behind and not consulted. There is also the fear that the character of the city is transforming to something unfamiliar and strange.
This year, the conversation and unease about the rapid pace of change is being transmuted through concern about the upside-down crosses.
This past week 17,000 people signed a petition that went to Hobart city council, protesting against the use of the cross as a design motif. While the petition originated in Brisbane, and was no doubt signed by many people not in Hobart, Christie is taking their concerns seriously.
On Friday he threatened to take away council funding (to the tune of $150,000 a year) from Dark Mofo, to which the festival’s creative director, Leigh Carmichael, replied: “It’s deeply concerning when community leaders attempt to censor art with cheap threats to cut funds. We can assure our Dark Mofo audiences that we will not accept any festival funding if there are artistic limitations attached.”
Walsh said: “If we acquiesce to curatorial influence and become tame, the festival will die in three years, so the money will be irrelevant.”
Many others on the council and in Hobart’s business community are furious at Christie’s comments. The festival is a cash cow that brings in $50m a year and causes a huge rush on hotel rooms and restaurant bookings at a time when the Tasmanian capital usually hibernates.
Michael Bailey, the head of the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told the ABC on Friday: “I think the lord mayor is very much out of step and out of touch with the community, and I suspect that there will be a significant backlash …
“It wasn’t that long ago Tasmania was known as being the backend of Australia, essentially inhabited by inbred people. Now we are the flavour of not just the country but the world.”
But Christie told Guardian Australia that this year the festival had overstepped the mark.
“For the first three years [of Dark Mofo] the theme was to activate winter and it was family-friendly. Now people are contacting me saying, ‘Which way is it going?’
“I react because I get complaints from the community. There are 116 nationalities in this city and, if it was another form of religion he [Walsh] was depicting, we’d get a lot of more complaints.”
Part of the mayor’s concern is the festival’s rapid growth. “Our creative arts strategy is to promote cultural excellence in the city and you have to control it. This event is moving at a very rapid pace and that’s what Mr Walsh wants. He wants a reaction and he does it well.”
Carmichael told Guardian Australia the festival’s growth is organic. “The attitude I’ve taken with Dark Mofo is to run with it while it’s hot – and it keeps growing each year. Most years at the end of each festival, I’ve said, ‘We don’t have to get bigger, it’s just about right,’ but we just continue to grow.”
This is “partly because David allows us to grow in terms of funding it. Artists didn’t used to come to Tasmania – now we get more opportunities to book artists like Laurie Anderson. We don’t have many restrictions that large organisations have. They have boards, sponsors and governments to appease – we are agile.”
Yet the council is still important to the festival, from a planning and permit perspective. Burying the performance artist Mike Parr under the road, for example, wouldn’t have happened without council approval.
And it is hard to imagine any other council in Australia agreeing to such a move.
With Dark Mofo now in its sixth year, the mayor acknowledges the positives: “Seven years ago I sat down on the waterfront and talked to the seagulls. Now down there at night, there’s people everywhere. It generates $50m into the economy.
“But we have to ask, have they pushed this boundary? And we have to ask, what is their agenda?’”
Christie is particularly concerned by Carmichael’s plan for next year.
“Leigh came out yesterday [in the Hobart Mercury] to say we want to turn it into a dark city next year and he also has plans to build a sky tower in the city. He’s talking to a developer. That won’t happen. Dream on, Leigh.”
(To which Carmichael responded via the Guardian: “We’re all allowed to dream, Ron.”)
As for changes to the city’s identity, that is much harder shift to pin down.
Matt Fishburn, the managing director of consultancy group The20, has been running a project with the state government to “find Tasmania’s story”.
“We’ve been interviewing a random sample of Tasmanians [one-on-one for about an hour] across the state to unearth it,” he said.
Mona and Dark Mofo have played a part in some Tasmanians having more confidence to take creative risks and be more entrepreneurial, Fishburn said.
“There’s a ‘have a go’ attitude but things have changed and are continuing to change in Tasmania and there’s tension in that,” he said. “I see Dark Mofo as an example of that tension. The festival is ultimately so different from what people have experienced in Hobart and Tasmania.”
It’s this singularity that is perhaps the secret to Dark Mofo’s success.
