No Dickheads, Please

I.

I’m at Boar Gully, an hour outside Melbourne, trying to score a good camping spot at a three-day music festival called Golden Plains. I moved to Melbourne in 2008 within two weeks of a tight group of Brisvegans, pronounced “vayguns,” from Brisvegas, an affectionate term for Brisbane. In the three years since moving here, my friends and I have felt something like proud when we’ve finally met someone from Melbourne, only to learn usually that they’re from Perth. But on the eve of Golden Plains, we’ve been persuaded by a group of confirmed Melbournians to stay the night at nearby Boar Gully.

It’s lightless when we set up tents between deep streams of rainwater. We the Brisvegans pack our wet selves into, and so wreck, a lone Winnebago; the Melbournians seem fine in ponchos, smoking spliffs. At two a.m. the rain clears and they draw us through a fence, and we tramp through bush that is the densest with koalas of anywhere on the continent. Soon, the bush breaks over a vast, ghostly, treeless valley. It’s lovely here, and Sean, a Melbournian, starts to politely vomit where he stands.

I am speaking with James, another Melbournian, about his work in IT, when he excuses himself in the middle of his sentence. He begins to run around Sean and is joined by several others. I don’t know who is the first to shout,“Chuck!”

My Brisbane friends and I watch the proceedings uncertainly. Is this a healing ritual? Is it an accusation?

The shouting—“Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!”—syncs as the circle shrinks. When the circle is as fast and tight as it can be, a Melbournian, Dylan, punches Sean in the stomach and shouts, “Chunderstruck!”

Sean holds his knees and moans, “Oh, oh.”

He asks, when he’s recaptured his diaphragm: “Can I wipe my mouth on you?”

Dylan touches him.

“What are ponchos for?” he says.

 

II.

Due partly to a recent confluence of the U.S. and Australian dollars, our country is undergoing a mixed renaissance of festivals. It’s so cheap to slap some bands together that it seems anyone can do it, whether they’re Richard Branson, with his V Festival, or the curators, ages twenty and twenty-three, of the ­Blueprint Festival, which failed so dramatically these curators went into ­hiding from creditors “somewhere in regional Victoria.” Blueprint was poorly managed, a downside of how easy it’s been to throw on a festival and say your event has a “boutique feel.” But like all of Branson’s enterprises, V Festival was managed well; most people assume it failed due to a festival fatigue.

This March’s Golden...