This essay celebrates the thirtieth Meredith Music Festival, held on 9, 10 and 11 December 2022.
On the way to Meredith 2022, I felt a little like I imagine Mikhail Bakhtin did in Leningrad 1929. The man obviously wanted to party. But lacking a conducive historic situation, he sublimated his desire into a classic work about carnivals and carnivalesque literature.
Which is to say, I was exhausted after having spent most of the year working for a socialist magazine and as a casual academic while, in my spare time, I volunteered for a socialist party and my union. You could almost say that I was sick from too many parties of the wrong kind. Going into Meredith, my spirit wanted to party but my body was lodging a wage theft case with Fair Work.
But perhaps I needed to listen to the socialists more, not less. Their main contribution is to emphasise the one factor simultaneously antithetical to fun and without which fun is impossible: the economic base. Because thinking about it now, although I’d almost certainly read more Marx than anyone else in my Meredith group, I was probably the least useful in the planning department. In my defence, it was my first one, and experience does count for a fair bit. And in addition to being about the most practical person I know, Sophie has been going since she was nineteen. She was there when the old magic was written. So naturally, I followed her lead. Not that I was entirely useless, mind you. I like to think of myself as something of a team player. I know how to drive (manual), camp and pack fashionably for unpredictable circumstances. Also, I’m good at drugs and I make a great Bloody Mary.*[i]
Anyway, before we enjoy the superstructure, let’s deal with the base as succinctly as possible, for a civilisation’s degree of culturation grows in inverse relation to the quantity of time it spends concerned with material things.
Here’s what I learned.
- Take a few days off to pack in advance, sort out the inevitable bullshit you haven’t thought of and get some rest. It’s going to be more fun that way.
- Get there early, like, as in, you get up at 3 am and leave straight away. Say hi to Luke from Trades Hall at the servo halfway there.
- If you can’t be among the first to arrive, hope your mates have set up a big enough spot, obviously in Bush Camp because it’s obviously the best.
- Set up neatly, efficiently and considerately.
And, if you’re a dickhead like me and insist on turning up already exhausted to a three-day festival in which the idea is to absolutely wreck yourself, I recommend a further step:
- Have some food, a hydralite and a Valium for a precious four hours of sleep.
Yes, I missed a few good bits. But I woke up at about 4 pm squinting, disconcerted and more ready to party than I had any right to be. After shimmying into a velvet shirt, Cuban-heeled boots and my M51 fishtail parka (with fur trim), I downed a couple dexies and sauntered forth.
“For proper understanding of carnival”, Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “one must take it at its origins and at its peaks, that is, in antiquity, in the Middle Ages and finally in the Renaissance” (1984:160). Apart from the implication that we live post-peak party, I feel like this is correct. Imagine a Venn diagram with one circle marked “Meredith” and two others representing the festivals held in Socrates’s Athens and Dante’s Florence. The bit in the middle where they overlap is the “Eternal Form of the Absolute Festival” and, obviously, that’s where I want to party.
These were the lines along which I was thinking as the sun set over Inspiration Point on Friday evening. I was so lost in the moment that I couldn’t help but wonder out loud: “Does anyone realise how Greek this is?” Soph smiled and kissed my cheek, and told me without words that she was not interested in that conversation. So I made a note in my phone and decided to circle back later.
And here we are. Picture maybe one thousand people sitting on a hill, wind farms gracefully giant in the distance, squinting as golden hour gives way to dusk. As the sun slowly nears the Western horizon, the sky gives way to a gradient of blessed colours and the first stars open their eyes. Then someone begins a slow clap. A few others join in, and then, someone cheers. In a moment, everyone is applauding to thank Helios (Sol, for the Romans) as he descends to his gold and amber palace by the river Okeanos, at the end of the earth, while his daughter, silver-haired Selene, gathers his stray light to illuminate our night. And, as a cloud of DMT smoke drifts above us, we become Endymion, and a dream begins.
This talk of dreams is not just a poetic flourish. As the German-Jewish social theorist Georg Simmel noted, “because of its place in our psychic life, a remembered adventure tends to take on the quality of a dream” (1997:222). As he explains, this is because adventures operate on a qualitative temporality — opposed to the quotidian and quantitative — as do their more accessible cousins, the holiday and the love affair. Festivals and their younger siblings, parties, are similar: their temporality is qualitative and dream-like.
This isn’t just because everyone is high, although obviously that helps. Parties and festivals suspend countable (casual academic?) time in favour of an aestheticised time which we fill with intensities that are more valuable the more they transcend that quantitative valuation. As an aside in the spirit of Simmel, this is why we are all willing to spend so much money on drugs. It’s not that four hours of work equals the price of four hours on MDMA — that would be a very expensive cap. Rather, four hours on MDMA are beyond quantitative valuation. You can’t put a price on the infinite. But you can buy tickets to a festival where you’re more likely to encounter it.
Carnivals also exist within an altered space. This space depends on the culture and law of the city, but, at the same time, it is irreducible to the city and inverts the city’s spatial, cultural and legal logics. It’s like a “clearing” in the cryptic, Platonic sense of the word (in the Greek, χώρα, or khôra). As Plato explains in the Timaeus, the khôra is a territory outside of the city proper, a “third kind of space”, suspended between opinion and truth, between self and other. It is a substratum or a container, within which the ordered world can be generated 1977:1251).
It’s hard to explain, but you know it when you feel it, kind of like acid. Hence, metaphor, metonymy and so on. Plato likened the khôra to a fine sheet of gold — some sort of Golden Plain, if you will. “We look at it as in a dream when we say that everything that exists must of necessity be somewhere, in some place and occupying some space, and that which doesn’t exist somewhere, whether on earth or in heaven, doesn’t exist at all.” (1997:1251).
Anyway, this really dawned on me later that night while I listened to Sophie tell a story. Beside and beyond her words, I realised how glad I was to be there and then, with her, within a clearing in a third space that held us — namely, the Pink Flamingo.[ii]†
We watched people passing by, performing their imaginations and enjoying others’ performances. It was, as Bakhtin described, a “plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world”, who “combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (1984:67).
*
Space and time don’t just invert themselves by chance or magic — it takes careful planning and a strong ethic of care and respect. For one, Meredith’s organisers are not cops or bosses, but people like us who have made this their vocation. For two, the small army of volunteers are everyday heroes, forgoing hours that could be spent pinging helping create a safe environment for those who are. The crowd understands and respects this; it’s why the “no dickheads” policy works. The police also understand: they’re over there in a tent, minding their own business, which is really the best you could hope for.
Indeed, the ethic of respect and care (cf. “no dickheads”) has been a remarkable success. When you think about it, it’s a big achievement to run a thirty-year-old festival, now attended by around fifteen thousand people, without corporate funding, and for it to be a consistently safe, welcoming place. As Mao wrote, “we must have faith in the masses and we must have faith in the party” (1966:3).
More than an inversion of modern life, the festival is also an allegory of utopia.[iii] What I mean by this is that it gives us a model of subjectivity that, I think, cultivates and encourages the best of modernity, and pushes back against some of the worst. This is partly because, within the festival, “there is a weakening of [the normal world’s] one-sided rhetorical seriousness, its rationality, its singular meaning, its dogmatism” (Bakhtin 1984:160).
It’s fun. And the more you give yourself over to the whole, the more the division between performer and spectator is broken down, and the more you have fun. This doesn’t abolish the individual as much as it allows the individual to feel self-certain as they perform themselves, through music, costume, dance and so on, while partying with thousands of others doing the same. It’s radical cosmopolitanism, and it’s simultaneously collective and free.
Music is obviously the main thing. I particularly liked The Comet is Coming, Yothu Yindi (more on them later), Babe Rainbow, Sharon Van Etten, Private Function, Caribou and not Courtney Barnett. The music you like calls you to dance as you submerge your body into the whole, but according to your own body. This is why bands call together people who are distinct, but who feel the same emotional resonance, and express it bodily by dancing together. To dance with others is to share via movement of your body your affect, your physical expression, and ideally, in a way that is attentive and responsive, and not forced. This is why if you dance well with someone, it’s a good indication that you’ll work as lovers. It’s also why the secret to moving through a dense crowd at a festival is to dance — your sick moves are your passport, and the rhythmic sea will part as you pirouette to the toilet.
Of course, partying is about all the senses — and who could forget sight? You get to dress up in weird, cool outfits that would be too much in pretty much any other context. For example, Sophie had some denim with cool little moons printed on it. She made matching outfits for us and gave the rest to a few friends who worked a similar magic for themselves. Come Saturday afternoon, we formed a crew of moonlit denim safari raconteurs, and boogied in sartorial unison while passersby scattered compliments in our path like over-enthusiastic five-year-olds tasked with throwing confetti at a wedding. And this is basically the point: you feel good, while everyone else gets a bit of a visual treat. And in return, you get to look at other people’s cool and fun outfits.
Maybe the best outfit I saw was worn by Sophie’s friend Kyle, who’s really a gem of a human. His costume had these built-in wings that he could unfold and bring down in a beautiful, fairy-lit circle around the both of you, creating a shimmering space apart from everything where, for a delightful moment, it’s just the two of you, dancing and smiling. And best of all, his outfit was robust and compact enough to last through the night.
*
But what I’m trying to say is more than costumes and music. Festivals (and parties, at their best) bring out the best in us, and they do so in a way that can shed light on the cultural values that are best in our society. The point isn’t to make society a festival, obviously. The point is to have a great time and to learn from that great time, so that maybe, we can have a bit more of an OK time the rest of the time.
To explain what I mean, let’s look at Ancient Greece again. Imagine Meredith, only at midnight someone leads a white bull to the centre of the Supernatural Amphitheatre, whereupon twelve priestesses of Demeter lay into it with golden sickles, until thrashing around and no longer white, it dies. Because that’s the kind of fucked up shit they were into.
It was a patriarchal, slave-owning and militarily-expansionist society. Yes, citizens were free — hence the cool poetry, drama and philosophy. But most people weren’t free — hence the insane shit. For example, in Greek religion, the gods were meant to actually appear, and this generally happened at festivals. Take the Eleusinian Mysteries, for example. After days of pageantry and fasting, initiates would drink Kykeon wine (full of psychedelics) and then lose their shit as the goddess Persephone was literally reborn. It’s not just that they were cooked enough to mistake a priestess for a goddess. They really believed in the gods. So, when they got off their tits in the middle of a dark temple and watched as a priestess was hauled out of a pit with chanting and a fire show, they drew the obvious conclusion: the goddess has appeared! Spring is coming! It was literally a religion built around theatre and festivals.
As sick as it sounds, it’s also batshit. But the more concealed, sad and oppressive part is that the Eleusinian Mysteries were the religious institution corresponding to the patriarchal Greek family. The point was to create an aesthetic-ecstatic experience that aestheticised, legitimated and cathartically released the trauma entailed by the domination of citizens over their wives, and of the wives of citizens over their daughters and household slaves. Greek festivals were beautiful. But they weren’t free — and that lent them a terrifying darkness.
The fact that we’re beyond that kind of thing has definitively improved the quality of our festivals. Even so, as I’m sure someone will point out, our festivals also occur in a society that’s pretty fucked up, just in a more modern way.
One key difference, I think, is that our best music festivals (Meredith and Golden Plains, basically, and Boogie, RIP) are not part of the official ideology, but instead occupy a space to the side, neither sanctioned nor persecuted. But perhaps this is a necessarily modern configuration; perhaps festivals are related to the whole insofar as they compensate for the rise and grind of neoliberalism. Perhaps their radical-liberal recognition of marginalised subjectivity conceals the empirical, non-symbolic exclusion of everyone who doesn’t have the money or cultural capital? When you were at Meredith, did you run into the guy who delivered your Uber eats or picked the tomatoes in that caprese salad?
I don’t know.ÊIt’s necessary to criticise. But I distrust this kind of thinking. It’s just too political, and it tends to negate everything. Politics is fine and good, obviously, but a society in which everything is political is a society where there’s only one party, and it’s not very fun. Besides, as one of the twentieth century’s foremost philosophers of The Party said, “politics is merely instrumental — culture is the goal” (Lukacs 1970:21).
*
Later on, as Sophie told me the story of how Meredith began, my mind returned to ancient Greek stuff. Modern festivals also have their rituals, and while we tend to hold ourselves aloof from admitting their divine element, there it sometimes is, hidden in plain sight. For example, festival-goers receive the warm and genuine Wadawurrung welcome to country with a combination of respect, gratitude and friendship as plumes of eucalyptus smoke clear the air. And there are also modern heroes and gods. Every year, when the founder of Meredith opens the festival, a human attains mythic proportions; he becomes a hero. Maybe one day, his festival will apotheosise him.
Gods also sometimes appear: when Yothu Yindi began their set, waves of sound from an amplified didgeridoo resonated from the natural amphitheatre, silencing for a moment idle talk: the leaves and the grass held still in the breeze, and every spirit was drawn slightly apart from its body, towards the stage.
At the time, I was very tired. It was late Friday night, and my Valium-nap was a distant memory. My whole chest and back hurt. My eyes saw nothing but calamity and darkness wherever I cast my filthy gaze. But when I heard the music, it immediately lifted me above my over-tired nihilism.
Which is to say, Yothu Yindi are very good. I didn’t really realise before, maybe because they made me sing “Treaty” in high school. But what made me pay attention now was a new feeling evoked by Aboriginal language and instrumentation, in contemporary electronic arrangement. It felt incomparable and a little beyond understanding. It’s like it came from the end of the world, while also existing in all times at once.
As they stopped playing, I caught a whiff of kool pineapple krush vape smoke. A tradie-looking guy walked past, hands in his pockets, on his way to the torrlet. My brain resumed its apocalyptic train of thought, and I started to worry about the grim future for philosophy in an age of civilisational collapse.
And then the realisation hit me: I had catastrophically depleted my brain’s store of the neurotransmitters that make life tolerable, and quite possibly this had something to do with my maleficent outlook. I was neither having nor being fun. It was time for bed.
I woke up on Saturday feeling a lot better. I breakfasted (brekky burger, a lot of coffee), showered, cleaned my teeth and made Bloody Marys for everyone. Then, in the evening, I took a generously dosed cap of MDMA. I simply cannot explain how much that was a good idea.
*
You can distinguish humans from animals in many ways. Animals can look around them and think “this is good”. Humans, however, are the only animals who can look around and think “this is good, but it could be better”. Countless Meredith-goers have proved this by looking at the Ferris wheel and saying to themselves “yes, this is good — but what if we smoked a joint while on it?”
After some assistance from Opal — whose portable joint-rolling kit is a testament to their superb party manners — Soph and I boarded the Ferris wheel late on Saturday night. Looking down at the lights from a distance, hearing the music across the void, talking excitedly with Soph — it was a moment that punctured time; instead of acquiescing to finitude, it flew upward into the night sky, to take a place among the stars.
After the ride ended, an old mate let us off the machine. He looked like Charon, ready to ferry the next boat of souls to the underworld. Which is to say, he’d had more than enough of opening that gate for cooked dickheads. My mind’s eye thus firmly returned to ultimate things, I walked with Soph down to a red tree, where we continued earlier discussions about the future. Only, this time it was the kind of future that made us smile.
When we party, we’re all seeking something. Sometimes, you don’t find it, and you leave the party dissatisfied — or you stay too long for your own good. Bands, drinks and thrills aside, what we’re really looking for is the heart of the party. Some lose hope of ever finding it. But don’t let the Lacanians lie to you — sometimes, you do find it. When you do, it’s usually towards the end.
At about 5:58 am on Sunday morning, Soph and I took our leave of dancing, to stroll around the grounds.
There I was in a thoroughly sweat-drenched singlet, my parka draped around my shoulders, boots dusty, hair slick, a dart hanging from the corner of my mouth, eyes glazed and pupils two black saucers in a ketamine sea, a key clutched in one hand, and a little baggie in the other. Soph looked similarly unhinged, tinny in hand, tasteful turquoise eyeshadow still somehow in place and chuckling like a maniac. We ambled through the grounds arm in arm, surveying our vast, stately estate of tents and munted peasants staggering back for a sleep. Selene watched from a distance as rosy-fingered Eos spread a high-vis vest over the concrete-slab sky while we glid back over a carpet of velvety yellow dust and exasperated grass, graciously smiling and waving deliriously at grateful subjects as we passed them by — for at the end of the party, we were Trash Royalty.
Obviously, we went back for a last dance. The ground was littered with empty tins, ciggie butts, lost vapes and an absolute bounty of goodies for those on clean-up duty. There was a group dressed like East European mafia, in vintage Adidas, fur caps and gold chains. One of them caught my eye. I nodded my respects to fellow Trash Royalty. It is good to be the king.
Afterwards, walking back from the Sup’, we passed an older couple who were maybe in their 50s or 60s, sitting arm-in-arm on a blanket, watching with a smile as a few hundred absolutely trashed sick cunts extracted every last drop of joy out of the night.
Then, the music stopped and “Happy Birthday” played to celebrate Meredith’s 30th.
“Every time the sun comes up I’m in trouble”, sings Sharon Van Etten. I know the feeling. But it’s not always like that. Sometimes, it’s correct to stay out all night. As you walk home, the birds will tell you if your decision was right. When it’s wrong, they laugh at you.
But sometimes, as you stagger home at 6:30 am past Saturday Paper subscribers jogging in lycra, the birds tell you that you’ve chosen well — Êand they sing to the heavens of your triumph.
*
The next morning, we grimly packed up. As we did, the sky started slapping the earth’s cheeks with big raindrops: the plants were thirsty. All the signs said that it was time to leave. So, we got out before rain set in.
In the weeks that followed, I started thinking about this essay. When I mentioned it to Soph, she was uncomfortable. That was my first Meredith, and she’s a veteran. It’s obviously a special thing and should be protected. So, should it be written about? And by whom?
I’ve thought about this, and here’s my answer. This isn’t a closed culture or an oppressed or marginalised one. There’s no danger of erasure, appropriation, orientalist fetishisation, or anthropological condescension. There are no systems of power or violence that well-intentioned writing might inadvertently reinforce. At the same time, however, this also isn’t a purely open culture: it’s not the Christmas windows at Myer or an Elton John concert. There is an element of initiation. It occupies a strange, liminal space, outside of normality but not isolated from it. Yes, it’s in Broadsheet and the Saturday Paper, but those reports — quite correctly — say very little[iv]¤
So, while I don’t see a reason to not write about it, I’ve tried to avoid speaking lightly. I want to speak respectfully and lovingly. But why do I want to speak about it at all? Firstly, I had a good time and want to tell people what I like about it. Secondly, I think a bit of theory (not overdone) might help encourage a culture that thinks about itself carefully, so better to preserve and extend what’s good. I think consciousness helps us all. And thirdly, because whenever you write about one thing, you’re really writing about another.
So what else am I writing about? I’m writing about the way that time and space change sometimes. Parties make this happen — but then, the problem is keeping the party going afterwards. Kick-ons are a double-or-nothing gamble. They can be great, but in the same way as it can be great to re-inhale a nang two or three times without coming up for air.
Whoever desires an endless party risks becoming the infinite partier. Like Simmel’s adventurer, they aestheticise their luck — only with the partier, it’s the luck of their body holding out against the drugs, darts and drinking. Beware haggard party-veterans wearing outfits meant for 22-year-olds: they live only for the party. But the party was made for life, life was not made for the party.
My alternative? Cultivation. The ideal partier is someone who knows how to host a great party, who is great fun at parties, and who knows how and when to finish a party. That’s someone who can cultivate a life that allows them to party, in changing ways, for many years — like the old couple we saw as we left.
The best way, in my view, to conclude a party like Meredith is with a recovery day spent eating pho in the bath, laughing and talking with someone you love.
Works cited
Bakhtin, M 1984, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, University of Minnesota Press, London and Minneapolis.
Mao Tse-tung, Selected Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Foreign Language Press, Peking.
Lukács, G 1970, “The Old Culture and the New Culture”, in Telos no. 5.
Plato, Timaeus (ed. J Cooper , trans. DJ Zeyl), 49a in Plato: Complete Works (ed JM Cooper) Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis and Cambridge.
Simmel, G 1997, “The Adventure”, in Simmel on Culture, Sage Publications, London.
[i] The secret is Woolworths brand tinned tomato juice. It’s all tomato, not too sweet and it doesn’t violate the no-glass rule. Beyond that, what you want to do is to balance your pre-made spicy mix to taste. Of course, you keep it in a nice, tight plastic bottle so you can vary the spice level to your friends’ preference. Test it with your pinky-finger, and you should be able to taste a hint of Worcestershire, lemon, salt, pepper, pickle juice and at least a few different types of burning. I like Tapatio and Valentina hot sauces as well as some cayenne pepper and something with chipotle. If you’re feeling fancy, a finely minced anchovy. As far as vodka goes, I like Stolichnaya, but honestly, when it’s all mixed up, you can’t tell the difference. Oh, and don’t hold back on the garnishes: cucumber, celery, a pickle or two and even some olives and chives are all a treat (and excellent sources of electrolytes.)
[ii] A great bar overlooking the Supernatural Amphitheatre. Try the cocktail of the same name.
[iii] Admittedly, a very inner-north Melbourne utopia.
[iv] While reading the draft, Soph explained: “It’s a bit like having your favourite bar, where the pool table’s free and staff look the other way when you hoon a line of coke off the table in the smoking area. And then it’s in Lonely Planet and suddenly the pool table is $4 a game and they’ve got cameras in the courtyard.”
