meredith music festival: that “hedonistic paradise”
Meredith Music Festival is the calling card that sends me back to a time in my life where I was a manically anxious 20 year old, a state of being that manifested itself into wanting to party as hard as I possibly could at every available opportunity. I would think about that hedonistic paradise Meredith all year, waiting impatiently for it to roll ’round so I could lose myself in the endless opportunities for madness it provided for three solid days. I was the person getting kindly asked to ‘please leave the festival; it’s over now’ year after year. Whenever story time came up at dinners with friends, the conversation inevitably turned into a Meredith anecdote hour, with each of us trying to one up the other with the party injuries, both good and bad, they’d inflicted upon themselves. We were all wild, ambitious and almost scientific in our search for a higher plane of existence. Meredith became our nirvana – our desire for out of body experiences brought on by music was completely insatiable – it was the thing that drove every interaction in our small lives and made us feel connected to a broader band of worldwide renegades, singing our experiences back to us, and allowing us to communicate more freely with each other. The amphitheatre transformed itself into something of a church, and once a year never felt like enough opportunities to pray.
A lot has changed over the eight years since I attended my first Meredith. I don’t look for answers to my woes in the arms of the party monster any more, so my experience on the weekend became contemplative, as I found myself sitting at the top of the hill gazing down at wild apparitions of my former self, always in the front row, always up for anything and everything. It gave me, at times, a sadness, seeing the passage of time that has crawled past – Meredith is the yearly mark of the calendar of my growing up, the barometer by which I can measure just how much I’ve become the adult which seemed so impossibly far away to the 20 year old self that first drove down that long dusty driveway.
A perfect example of this is how my festival packing has changed. Gone are the couple of plastic bags filled with sequined costumes, peanut butter and almost nothing else. In those days I wouldn’t even pack a bed roll, believing (and rightly so) that it would add an element of adventure to the weekend, making me less likely to want to go to sleep. Sleeping was a party foul I simply could not abide. One year, two friends and I took only one yellow Queen sized sheet and two tent pegs between us to sleep under, which we tethered at a 45 degree angle to the ground with the other side jammed into the windows of the car. It’s always been one of my favourite Meredith memories, thinking back on how dusty and hot it was, and rather than getting pissed off at our stupidity we simply pretended we were in the Sahara desert, laughed our arses off for hours and absolutely refused to get any boring shut eye. The absurdist ingenuity of party logic is the steam I ran under year after year.
I realised, however, just how much this attitude has tempered when we rolled up on Friday mid-afternoon, rather than attending our usual nightly camp out in the queue to get the best camp spot and upon arrival quickly revealed the bourgeois cheese we’d all decided to bring. We unpacked our sensible tents and I my triple thickness ultra comfy sleeping apparatuses. I had a bag of things like bandaids and panadol ‘just in case.’ Costumes still made it into the mix, naturally – the need to dress in ridiculous outfits in order to party properly will never, ever change.
Comfortingly, even after all this sensible preparation, the sight of the cheeses floating obscenely on the final afternoon in the murky water of the esky, next to the bobbing remains of forgotten mixers, pale and grotesque enough to make me almost puke, definitely made me realise I hadn’t quite made it to adult territory just yet. The ultra-bed was slept in only briefly, and the costume I’ve proudly worn to every single Meredith and Golden Plains that I describe lovingly as ‘tie-dyed with party’ (read: dirt and red wine) reigned again.
The entire weekend I felt a disconnect, as I knew I was meant to be recording events to relay back to the world in some sort of logical, sensible fashion. From almost the moment I arrived, however, I knew it was going to be impossible. The bands that I enjoyed are completely superfluous, as I loved immensely those in the style I already like and partied at my camp to those which I didn’t. I had one of those beautiful almost metaphysical moments in the front of Spiritualized, where you realise you’re watching something that speaks directly to your soul, with none of the barriers language creates, only the chaos of noise connecting you to something ethereal you struggle to explain.
Back at the campsite later that night I heard others describe that same experience in relation to the Sunnyboys, at which my friend Zibby and I spent the entire time punching the air and cheering with the most mocking sarcasm we could muster. This is why I chose not to reveal how I felt about specific bands, and also why Meredith continues to be one of the best events in this country. For every band I didn’t enjoy I had a conversation with someone else directly after asking ‘wasn’t that the best shit you’ve ever seen?’ The Meredith organisers’ continued commitment to providing a little something for everyone is an undertaking I greatly appreciate, even if it means I’m seeing a bunch of acts that I really don’t care for every year.
Meredith holds a spirit that has grown to become an integral cultural experience for its almost cultish followers. Because of this, we discuss how it’s evolving over the years and what this means to us. I had many conversations over the weekend about whether Meredith has ‘changed.’ It’s been a popular topic of discussion in our circle in the last few years, and as a space that was once the epicentre for my personal brand of magical realism, is one very close to my heart.
The question we were all debating over the weekend was ‘has the festival really changed or have we?’
It feels tangibly different in a way that is difficult to define. A rougher, almost machismo vibe, fake tan galore and a palpable feeling of expendable incomes being splurged in the pursuit of killing all available brain cells permeated the grounds. But was this always there, and was I simply too focused on my own party train to notice? A friend suggested when we get older we become more aware of ourselves, so it grows more and more difficult to really let loose and abandon your anxieties at the door, resulting in a feeling of discomfort that can be easy to pin on the crowd around you. Am I just less able to let myself go? I don’t really know the answer, but I know the question makes me really uneasy.
I feel as the years have gone on most festivals in general have become less and less about experiencing music and more frequently a convenient vehicle for people to cram as many drugs into their faces as possible. This has shifted the mood of crowds into a more volatile, unsure space, often with a sense of latent violence or sleaze. It’s the way all events seem to be heading and feels at times enraging and disappointing. Meredith has staved this off far longer than most, which I have generally attributed to their eclectic music tastes and distance from Melbourne city centre. This time around however it seems that they too have reached that tipping point. This was most obviously represented through the sheer number of racist Native American Indian headdresses that popped up with disturbing regularity. They’ve been marring other festival landscapes for years and Meredith had always been the place of the more homemade outlandishly dorky costumes, but here they were. It signaled that times indeed are changing, and it felt sadly as though many of the wilder, creative Meredith-goers have moved on. Or perhaps they’ve just gotten a little older as I have, and the new generation of partiers are a little less obscure and a little more self conscious.
Again, I don’t have any answers, but I do know that the older I get the more I understand that the parties you enjoy are a state of mind. I hope people claim, or as it might be, reclaim the festival space as one of joy, abandonment and adventure, care less about how their fancy tent is holding up and more about the music they’ve paid silly amounts of money to see. Meredith is a solid institution that I appreciate and respect and I hope they can hold the fort against the wave of mediocrity which has permeated so much of our cultural experience in Australia in recent years, where the general public still expects to be passively entertained rather than pushed to create their own fun. It’s an uphill battle, and I wish you Godspeed, and don’t forget to pack the sequined outfits – nobody ever had a bad time in one. I guarantee it.
By Audrey K Hulm
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