Hundreds of thousands of Melburnians gathered on a gloriously warm Saturday evening to celebrate White Night, the annual citywide gala of art, music and nebulously-defined “culture” which is now in its third go around. By all accounts, it was a roaring success, as it has been since its inception.
Having attended the first two, I sat out this time, mainly for fear of the crushing crowds and not wanting to reset my alarm clock. Previous White Nights stick in my memory primarily for my inability to get near any of the main action amid the pressing swarms. But no matter – my social media filled to overflowing with carbon copy images of this year’s festival, effectively boiled down to “prominent Melbourne buildings covered in pretty lights”.
There are, of course, various other entertainments that go on during White Night, but generally the queues are too long and people have better things to do than wait in line to see, among other things, more lovely lighting inside the State Library. Melbourne isn’t even the only city at it.
This coming weekend, the Adelaide festival has Blinc, a “free public event of unprecedented scale and significance” that promises to transform the city’s Elder Park and surrounds into “a giant spectacular outdoor digital art gallery”. And later in 2015, Sydney’s Vivid switches back on.
These shows are becoming de rigueur for cities that wish to be seen – locally and internationally – as modern and “cultured”. Now there’s a word that connotes refinement, education and sophistication; that connotes class. But how classy can these events be, these maximalist ventures into splashing a city’s biggest buildings with the brightest colours?
Are White Night and their ilk not the bourgeois equivalent of Summernats?
For the uninitiated, Summernats is the annual car-and-breast fest that takes place in Canberra, our fair nation’s capital, and tends to attract wide ridicule for its boozed-up rev-headedness (“noisy, anti-social and sexist” runs the typical attack).
At its heart though, what is the difference between Summernats and White Night, unless you judge that liking brightly-lit buildings and musical performances is superior to appreciating the mechanical skill and derring-do of machine-makers like Nathan Borg with his (frankly gorgeous) 1977 Datsun Ute?
The longstanding foundation myth of Australian egalitarianism has left us with a strange relationship to the notion of class. When asked, many Australians will insist it does not even exist in this even-handed, fair-minded wonderland. There is some kind of hierarchy at work, of course, but one that rests on questions of aesthetic taste, rather than how much money you make or which school your dad went to.
Half a decade ago, the push was on to look with a critical eye and curled lip at the lifestyle choices of those who represented, for want of a better term, “middle Australia”. The aggressively striving, aspirational Australian whose choice of tattoo was on the lower back, whose choice of car was a lime-green Holden HSV Maloo, and whose choice of drink was anything with an enormous, tattoo-like font on an enormous, energy-bearing can, was, for a brief moment, a figure of scorn.
The “bogan” pendulum has swung back in recent years. We’re more enlightened today – or so we think. Then we had the insecure scorn of Things Bogans Like, the short-lived blog and book I contributed to, which tried to point out that Australian aesthetics tend to defy income or social status. We had the carefully contrived mockery of Kath and Kim.
Now we have the politely inoffensive Upper Middle Bogan, whose comedy lies not in the behaviour of its characters so much as the various shenanigans they all get caught up in. We like to believe we embrace this unknown, possibly non-existent slice of Australiana. But the scorn still lingers.
Each and every year, in the ACT, Summernats sees a slice of this Australia gather to drink and spend time together enjoying one common interest: making huge, fast, loud cars even faster and louder, and revelling in the results. I imagine a survey of White Night attendees about the artistic purpose of their beloved light show would throw up discussions of its artistic beauty and appeal. A world away from the visceral appeal of a hotted-up car – or is it?
Having attracted a “mere” 450,000 people into Melbourne’s city centre, there are rumblings about White Night’s future, but while the premier, Daniel Andrews, appears reluctant to extend further funding, the lord mayor, Robert Doyle, has thrown his considerable weight behind the project. Either way, a fourth White Night very likely hinges on its cost, rather than popularity, which is clearly enormous.
Years writing for Things Bogans Like taught me that many, many people want to attribute the dreaded b-word to other people and other behaviours – “this is not bogan, THAT is.” But class in Australia is not determined by form so much as style. Summernats, with its V8s and VBs, is not so different from a public light show. Just because the Canberra crew drink beer and the Melbourne crowds a cheeky cocktail or Pinot Gris doesn’t elevate one entertainment over the other.
