I’ve been on-site at the Deniliquin Ute Muster showground for five minutes when my truck gets bogged. After turning into a section of paddock set aside for parking, I drive into the centre of what appears to be a peat bog, and feel the wheels sink. Instantly, three men in large hats appear, wordlessly brace themselves against my front bumper and begin to push.
Part car show, part country music festival, part American-style county fair, the “Deni” Ute Muster sells itself as “one of Australia’s premier rural events that encapsulates the diversity, tradition and vibrancy of Australia”. Founded in 1999 as a way to bolster the stuttering economy of the south-western New South Wales town, the muster has grown into a two-day, all-purpose celebration of rural and regional Australian culture that attracts tens of thousands of people each year over the NSW Labor day and Victoria AFL grand final eve long weekend.
To get a proper feel of things, I’d driven to the muster in a rented Toyota Hilux dual-cab ute – a monstrous thing that, like a surly horse, seemed to sense it was being handled by an amateur.
Deniliquin, a 750km drive from Sydney, sits at the western edge of the Riverine Plain, one of the largest natural flats in the world. In the lead-up to the festival the plain was buffeted by remnants of the colossal storm that knocked out power across South Australia, and historically drought-stricken areas were utterly waterlogged. Every two-bit dried creek bed was swollen past bursting. Great sheets of water covered roads and fields, stands of trees rearing out of the floodwater like giant hydroponic experiments.
As a result, the traditionally dust-dry grounds of the muster have become a swamp, acres of clotted, sucking mud that stretch for miles. Imagine the largest, wettest outdoor music festival you’ve ever been to. Now put 10,000 large vehicles on top of it, many of them driven with the express purpose of churning up as much mud as possible, and you may have an accurate mental picture of the 2016 Deni Ute Muster.
As it frequently does, the Ute Muster has put an impressive entertainment schedule together. Keith Urban, Australian Crawl’s James Reyne and Troy Cassar-Daley are headlining. There are rodeo, woodchopping and whipcracking championships, a circus and rides for the kids, and a fireworks display on the closing night. The AFL grand final is broadcast on the main stage, and the yearly attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the most people wearing blue singlets in one place falls valiantly short of the 3,960 required.
But the organisers couldn’t have anticipated the severity of the mudbath. The mud creeps into sleeping bags and underwear, into mobile phones and food. Everywhere there are scenes of sodden carnage. A Mazda3 hatchback, cartoonishly outsized by the Brobdingnagian trucks around it, wallows helplessly in a mud pool, its engine bellowing like a dying buffalo. Dropped keys and wedding rings vanish instantly, swallowed by the lake of mud soup the fairground has become.
The only objects that will ever be seen again, forced back to the surface world by their sheer number, are the crushed cans of beer and UDL that blanket the ground, mummified in mud like Pompeii relics.
The heart of the festival rests with the thousands of utes arrayed on a vast stretch of ground adjacent to the festival area, appropriately called “the ute paddock”. Separate campsites are set aside for families, campervans, trailers and four-wheel drives, but the ute paddock stands apart. Only utes are permitted inside and usually it is where the festival’s serious business of inspecting, comparing and celebrating utes gets done.
This year, though, things are a little different. The rain, the stomping of gumboots and the endless spinning of wheels has turned the ute paddock into a gunk-soaked slum, and sent its inhabitants slightly loopy. Giving in to the hopelessness of trying to stay clean, people embrace the filth with the enthusiasm of converts to some maddened new religion. People sleep next to their utes, or in them, or on them. They huddle around fires in oil drums like homeless men in cartoons. Men rub their heads furiously against the ground, lathering themselves in muck. Their mates roaring with approval, they scull beer from mud-caked gumboots.
Driving through the ute paddock in an open buggy turns into a cross between a scene from Jurassic Park and one from Apocalypse Now. A knot of cheering punters surrounds us, trying to tie an inflatable dinghy on to the back of the buggy with a rope to hitch a free ride. Two women’s efforts to sit in the dinghy turn into a pratfall routine that goes on for minutes. By the end they are invisible, capsized in the mud with the dinghy on top of them, somehow maintaining a heroic grip on their drinks. Seeing my camera, one young man demands I stop and film him chewing the top off a beer can. I obey, on some level glad I left my reading glasses in the car.
The other half of the festival is slightly less surreal, though not for lack of trying.
The entrance to the entertainment area is guarded by a giant statue made out of oil drums, a larger-than-life farmer in requisite blue singlet and cowboy hat. He is unremarkable except when, on closer inspection, you notice the drum making up his head bears a flattened, unsettlingly specific likeness of a human face. It looks as though someone’s soul has been trapped inside the statue, like a golem, and is trying to get out.
Also, someone has wedged a crushed beer can into the gap between his legs and his torso, giving him a vestigial metal penis.
In a huge circular pit arena, ute drivers do what they came to do: make a lot of noise in their utes. One at a time utes enter, roar and skid across the mud like deranged ice skaters, and leave the way they came. This practice is called circle work, and it is highly regarded. The object is to drift around the arena making giant donuts and figure eights that can be judged, but due to the mud contestants are happy to make as much mess as possible while not getting stuck. Eventually the mud is declared victorious, and the circle work is prematurely shut down.
By late afternoon on the second day the sun is out, and something resembling normality has begun to surface. Familiar scenes start to play out. On one of the side stages, a local covers band launches into Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again by the Angels. When they sing the chorus’s single line the refrain comes back from the crowd, as inevitable as the tides: “No way, get fucked, fuck off!”
But insanity will have the last say. Over at the main stage, as it becomes apparent the Western Bulldogs have won their first premiership flag in 62 years, the large crowd watching the AFL grand final descends into delirium. When the final siren goes men joyously dive face-first into the slop, wrap each other in bear hugs, fling handfuls of mud into the sky. A young man in a Bulldogs jersey and an Akubra hat who has been the picture of hyper-masculine bravado for two hours bends double with his face in his hands, quietly racked with sobs.
As the sun goes down, the revellers return to their tents and their drinking, and wait for the music to start.
