When I was 15, I told my parents I was staying at a friend’s house after my KFC shift finished but what I really did was hitch a ride 30km down the road and attended the Port Fairy folk festival.
Sadly, my cover was shabby. This was before mobile phones – and I hadn’t told my friend I was pretending to stay over at her house. Dumb! She rang my parents looking for me. “Isn’t she at your house?” they asked.
Everyone who’s been a teenager ever and broken their parents hearts knows the car feeling. The car feeling is when you’ve just been caught doing something TERRIBLE and you are going home in the car with your parents after the fact. I’d rather go home in the back of a divvy van.
The atmosphere is as thick as soup. It’s all there: rage, indignation, shame, disappointment, anxiety. I tried to invoke the Footloose defence: “There’s a time to weep. There’s a time to mourn. And there is a time to dance. And this is our time!”
But – just like a kid in a 1980s teen movie – I was grounded. And folk music never sounded the same. (I still can’t listen to Kev Carmody to this day without a shiver.)
Since pagan time, festivals have exerted an almost spooky lure. Like the mermaids who sing to sailors, we’re drawn to the noise coming from a far-off field. Why else do sensible adults pay hundreds of dollars to pitch a tent in a muddy field and eat $16 paella from a cardboard box? Why would teenagers run away from home, climb under fences and dance with strangers? It’s not because they’re into folk music.
We pretend they’re a cultural experience, at one remove from our essential selves, but festivals are really conduits of joy.
They’re one of those sanctioned spaces where we go all Footloose, at any age. I’m talking about dancing for days, talking to strangers, lying on a blanket in the sun all afternoon listening to some band you’ve never heard of, but whose music you’re going to buy later.
I am writing this from Adelaide, where the city is in the middle of festival fever. It’s Adelaide Festival and fringe festival time. Last weekend was the car race, Clipsal 500, and Adelaide writers’ week; this weekend it’s Womadelaide.
The entire city is demob happy.
Thursday night was warm and the streets and gardens were packed with people leaving one event and going to the next. Music drifted from … somewhere. People seemed happy. Come the weekend, the centre of Adelaide will be so packed that we’ll be walking on the road and strangers will be swapping tips about what great music or acts they’ve just seen. This is how it should be all the time, I’ll say to people. Adelaide in March is our Utopian ideal.
I used to wonder why Adelaide jammed everything into one month. Why not spread it out thinly across the calendar like low-cal margarine so a little bit of this joy can be tasted for longer?
But then after speaking to a few of the city’s bigwigs last year it was apparent that they were deliberately aiming for this heady mix of EVERYTHING FUN AT ONCE.
Rob Brookman, a former artistic director of the Adelaide festival and a founder of Womadelaide said it wasn’t realistic to replicate the joyful festival feeling for long periods of time.
“People find it hard to remain in love 12 months of the year – you can only be ecstatic for a short period,” he told me. “The phenomenon of the audience coming out at unprecedented levels in February and March – you cannot sustain that for 12 months. And one should not want to or hope to; there is something glorious about a month where culture takes centre stage. You want people to feel like it’s something special.”
And it is special. In 2006’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, the writer Barbara Ehrenreich uses the term collective joy to describe group events which involve theatrics, music, dancing and a sense of loss of self. She argues that for at least 10,000 years humans have made space in their lives – at arranged times – for festivals. In Australian Indigenous culture, you see it in rock art, it’s there in the ceremonies. For other countries, it’s the town square and the maypole, or going into the desert and taking ayahuasca and forgetting your cares for a few days.
These festivals invigorated and strengthened communities. Ehrenreich charts how the practice went out of fashion by the 17th century, as puritanism and capitalism stifled our habits of collective joy. Worship became less loud and Pentecostal, and more stifled and silent.
In the late 20th century – with the help of technology – entertainment moved from the active into the passive. Here we are now, entertain us – and all of that. Our screens give us our break from the daily grind. And we don’t even have to leave the house.
Yet festivals have made something of a comeback. Crowds are bigger than ever at the South Australian festivals. And the folk festival I ran away to as a teenager is still going strong, now in its 41st year.
Despite so many technological innovations, there’s still a hunger for this old thing, this collective joy, this permission to just let go.
Kate Ellis shows why politics needs to change
It’s depressing that someone of the calibre of Kate Ellis has to quit politics because of family commitments. It shows we need to think about reforming the job so that it is truly representative. We need men and women, with a variety of situations and backgrounds, in the house representing our interests.
Yet look at the bind. If you have young kids, political life can be too demanding, and if you don’t have kids, it’s a chink in your armour.
Dedicated, committed female politicians on both sides (I’m thinking Gladys Berejiklian and Julia Gillard, and in the UK, Theresa May) are routinely questioned about not having children, the implication being they don’t really understand the people.
“Why don’t you have a family?” they are asked in press conferences or across the chamber. But these women are not sui generis – they don’t just materialise out of air. They have parents and siblings, nieces and nephews, godchildren and friends in their lives. They also have the time and energy to commit to a political career.
So two things: let’s make parliament friendlier for women with young children. And let’s stop asking childless female politicians why they don’t have “families”.
