So here we go again, another round of Esoteric Festival. For those that weren’t aware, my wife (Andrea) and I attended our first Esoteric festival last year (2023) for our honeymoon. It was a pretty revelatory experience for us, and I wrote the adventure up into a long and rambling blog post/ story which I posted up a few times last year. Although not entirely necessary as this is its own standalone story, I would recommend reading it first if you have just stumbled upon this blog this time around as I will be referring to the experiences within it a few times during this story. It is pretty long (as is this one, definitely worth viewing on a computer with a decent sized screen and headphones/ speakers if you can), but it was widely well received. I think you’d be entertained.
For those that really can’t be bothered reading it, or those that might just want a quick recap; We had planned to get married two weeks before Eso 2023 and attend the festival for our honeymoon. Andrea was diagnosed with breast cancer in the lead up to the wedding, which made for a pretty shitty time going into the festival, but we had a fantastic time at Esoteric and it changed our mood and outlook immeasurably for the better. I am now thrilled to announce that Andrea has been given the all clear from her cancer diagnosis (Yay!) But Esoteric happened to fall on a highly stressful time in our lives yet again, although stressful for a much more positive reason. After Andrea was given the all clear from her diagnosis we had one of those “Fuck it, life is short, so why don’t you just enjoy yourselves while you can” realisations and decided to put into motion something we have always dreamed of; “The Lap”.
For those of you outside of Australia, or even those within who may not be aware; there is a reasonably large movement in Australia where people will buy a caravan, quit their regular 9-5 jobs, take their kids out of school for a year or two, and travel slowly around the country. Living, working and schooling whilst on the road. This is generally referred to as “doing The Lap”, as it involves slowly travelling around the country vaguely in one direction until you get back to where you started.
This isn’t really a thing back in the UK. If you were to tell your average English person that you were moving into a caravan and just kind of winging it around the country with your kids you’d get some pretty strange looks and probably a comment along the lines of “So… like… a pikey? You want to voluntarily become… a pikey gypsy? Are you feeling ok?” And they’d probably back away from you slowly whilst checking their pockets to make sure you haven’t already stolen their phone or wallet.
To be fair, the circles that I used to move in would probably think it was pretty cool moving into a caravan and travelling around the country, but certainly the general consensus in Britain would be that its a highly strange thing to do. In Australia however it is something that is looked upon with great reverence, and thousands upon thousands of people do it every year. The campsites all around remote and regional Australia are practically teeming with either young families, backpackers, or another group of people whom I admire greatly (who are actually by far the largest group of people engaging in such an adventure); The Grey Nomads. Grey nomads are retirees who instead of taking up gardening or knitting or other such hobbies to pass the time, they buy large, luxurious caravans and travel round and round Australia, chasing an eternal 25-30C summer until they either drop dead or are no longer able to. What a fantastic retirement. Although I must admit that it is slightly disconcerting stopping at various petrol stations and watching some old boy hobble around the forecourt with his cane, and huge, thick rimmed glasses on his face. Back hunched over, probably pushing 90 years old, and watching him clamber into a 4.5 tonne Dodge Ram, towing a massive, armoured 4 tonne off road caravan. He can barely walk or see but he’s at the wheel of 9 tonnes of steel with what amounts to a huge reinforced steel battering ram (roo bars) on the front of his vehicle. It is a slight worry that these people are cheerily cruising down every major road around Australia, but they seem to be happy enough doing it.
I think a good indication of the different attitudes towards this kind of travel between Australia and the UK have come from our kids school. I’m almost certain that if you were to say to an English school that you were taking your kids out to drive around in a caravan it would be met with firm resistance from the education system “ooo… I don’t know, they’re going to be missing out on all this important sitting at desks we’re going to be making them do. We will have to report you to the government, and they will start fining you.” You actually do get fined $300 per day in the UK if your kids are out of school for an unauthorised absence, a law apparently brought in to stop families from going on term time holidays so they aren’t ripped off by all the school holiday pricing. Sounds like a massive power grab for control over people though if you ask me. The government recently released this super cheerful cartoon of happy families getting duly screwed by the government. It makes me so warm and happy inside reading this:
On the contrary, all the teachers at our kids school couldn’t be happier with our decision, and every time we saw any of them on the lead up to our trip, including the head and deputy head, they told us what a fantastic thing it is we are doing and how good it will be for the boys, and even how much they’d like to do it themselves. It’s definitely something that is enshrined into Australian culture in any case.
But before you can actually set sail on such a voyage, there is an immense amount of preparation/ planning/ packing/ work that needs to be done. Especially if like us you have a 4 bedroom house filled to the brim with all the kinds of crap that you build up having a young family. The house in question has a mortgage on it so needs to be cleared out and cleaned entirely so that you can get tenants in, and all of your belongings need to be put into storage somewhere.
Plus as this is such a popular thing to do, second hand caravans are ludicrously expensive in Australia. Just as an indicator on the difference in price over here; when we were last in the UK we brought a 20 year old caravan for 1500 pounds, around $3,000. When we first started looking into caravans in Australia I saw a similar spec van on sale for $20,000. Quite a difference. And that was for a very standard, no frills weekender type van. If you want one that is equipped to be lived in off-grid in the Australian outback for long periods of time you are going to be paying a hell of a lot more. So unless you have a spare $80-100k kicking around to be spending on a caravan, you are going to end up with something cheaper which will need a few improvements implemented on it.
We also set ourselves a very ambitious decision-to-embarking timescale of 6 months. People often plan for years to do this kind of a trip, and we were hoping to get everything together and ready in 6 months. You really want to be leaving Melbourne around March/ April to chase the warmer weather up the country, getting to the tropics by mid winter in June/ July so you can be there in the dry season and avoid the monsoons of the hotter months in December-February, when you would ideally be heading back down south again.
With this in mind we had set ourselves a departure date of mid April, just over a month after Esoteric 24. Several times through January/ February we talked about selling our Eso tickets as we still had so much to do. By the time Esoteric came around our house was half packed, with piles of boxes lining the walls in nearly every room, our caravan was still in pieces with a lot of upgrades needing to be done, and our 4x4 needed major work doing to it. Plus I had quit my work from home managerial job and gone back to FIFO (Fly In Fly Out) work to earn some more money for the trip and was working for two weeks straight after Esoteric. It was a highly stressful time with a lot going on. But with around 35 days to go until departure, we made the slightly irrational decision to spend 5 of those days attending a massive psytrance rave in the bush 4 hours away.
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I’d been following various Esoteric chat groups on Facebook and was aware that there had been a large gastro outbreak at the site during the week leading up to the festival. Some reports had even said that 200 of the 4-500 build staff were affected! This is a horrendous thing to endure the last week leading up to the festival, especially in a place with no permanent plumbing. If Esoteric is anything like the various festivals that I helped out with back in the UK then the last few days are always a mad, hectic rush to get everything finished on time. To lose half your workforce to a highly contagious stomach illness, and also keep them quarantined from the healthy half would throw a serious spanner in the works.
The other challenge that the staff were facing was that this was set to be the hottest Esoteric on record, with the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday all set to be around 40C. The site itself is fairly shaded by the trees, but temperatures that hot will no doubt need extra precautions and infrastructure to help people deal with the heat, not to mention the build staff setting up.
With memories of the chaos in the campsite looking for a space to park last year firmly in our minds we aimed to get to site as close to gate opening at 12pm on the Thursday as possible. Things never entirely go to plan and we ended up arriving just after 1pm to an already large queue of cars. We quickly realised that none of these cars had moved in a long time, and no one had been let into Esoteric at all for the last hour. We gathered this was likely a delay in getting everything cleaned down and inspected before the gates could open.
More and more cars kept arriving, backing up to the start of the main track. Luckily we have a reasonably modern car we could keep running with the aircon on, and we put up shades on all the windows. I actually fell asleep for about half an hour in the wait, but a lot of people were walking up and down the track and drinking in the sun. Although this wasn’t as hot as the rest of the festival, it was still a mid 30s day. I think we were waiting for 2 and a half hours in the end, and were pretty relieved to get moving again, although it was still almost another hour before we got through the queue and entered the campsite.
I was a little concerned about searches at security for a couple of reasons. Following on from last year where we brought a whole selection of freshly pressed juices in glass containers as part of Andi’s anti-cancer diet (which we had to get special authorisation from Jenny, the landowner and gate manager, to bring in), we thought we would do the same this year as it was awesome having those cold, pressed juices in our fridge all weekend. Especially as this weekend was set to be so hot, some fresh cold juice several times a day would go down a treat. We had been collecting various milk bottles, old juice bottles and any other suitable plastic container for the last few weeks in order to fill full of fresh pressed juice and take to the festival so we could avoid all the glass jars we brought in last year. I was aware that any alcohol in glass bottles needed to be brought to the gate sealed and decanted into plastic in front of the security. It occurred to me the night before leaving as I was filling my third milk bottle with brightly coloured juice that the reason for this is to stop people smuggling drugs (particularly GHB) into the festival, and that my highly colourful liquids in various odd and misshapen bottles probably looked remarkably suspicious in this regard. I messaged a couple of times on the Esoteric group chats about peoples views on this and received some mixed responses, with some people saying I could run into issues. I briefly considered contacting Jenny again to ask clarification, but figured that the night before the festival was due to start, with almost half the build crew down with gastro, that she probably had WAY more important things to be concerning herself with than me and my juice dramas again. As it turned out the security there couldn’t really have cared any less about my juice, so I needn’t have worried myself. The other thing I was concerned about was the amount of canabis we were attempting to bring into the festival.
After last years lecture from the Canabis doctor (Dr James Stuart if anyone is interested. I purposely left his name out of last years blog as I didn’t know if he would want himself associated with such a thing, but after reading it he asked me to tag him and put it on his social media, he’s a pretty liberal doctor.) we booked an appointment with him and were prescribed a range of different strains of weed, along with a pen stick dry vaporiser to smoke it with. Whilst we experimented with smoking a small amount every day, we decided this wasn’t for us and only really smoke it occasionally as needed, so the repeat prescriptions have largely sat there for the last year. As Esoteric was coming around again we decided to go back to the chemist and cash in on some of the repeat prescriptions. We had prescriptions for 3 different strains, which are supposed to be used at different times of day and for different things.
Its a very alien feeling for me going into a chemist and getting a bottle of multi-vitamins and some panadol, along with 30 grams of high grade skunk. I’m amazed that you get 10 grams in each container as well. In my days of smoking canabis as a skint teenager I would buy 2-3g at a time, maybe 5 grams at the most. To be handed 30 grams of fresh canabis across 3 containers by a smiling, cheerful pharmacist over the counter at a chemist is a very counterintuitive feeling.
What is even more alien to me however, is to drive up to the gates of a music festival with 30 grams of canabis in the vehicle and expect to be let in. (30 grams is over an ounce in oldskool UK drug speak). Walking up to the gates of a music festival with over an ounce of weed on you a few years back would certainly see you ejected from the festival, and depending on who found it you could even find yourself back at a police station looking at the more serious charge of “intent to supply” as the amount is so large. To be able to confidently stroll up to the gates of a festival with over an ounce of weed, safe in the knowledge that you have a little plastic card which says its ok is definitely something that will take some getting used to. Its a brave new world (which if you actually think about the storyline of that particular book is a very apt saying for this particular situation).
I was a little concerned over this large amount, as it was certainly WAY over what we were likely to consume over the course of 5 days, but we wanted to keep it in its original, sealed containers. Plus I noticed that on the prescription it says to have “one vape as needed, up to one every 20 minutes.” Every 20 minutes!? If you had one of those every 20 minutes of the day you wouldn’t be doing much else with your life. You’d barely be able to make it off the couch. But at least this ridiculous maximum dosage suggestion gave you a bit of wiggle room if ever questioned about it.
In any case, we made it into the festival with both our suspicious looking juice and huge amount of canabis unquestioned, and began the usual mission of finding a spot that hadn’t already been sectioned off by 20 different tarpaulins. This really is a nightmare, this every-man-for-himself hunger games approach to finding a camping spot. We pulled up in a couple of different spots before being shooed away by various people. The spot we camped last year had been sectioned off as powered camping, which I think is a good addition. I’m not sure how much extra powered camping costs, but you are guaranteed a much better spot, and it wasn’t anywhere near as crowded in there as in the main campsite area, plus obviously you get a power hookup as well. Might be worth looking into in future years.
We eventually squeezed in between two other sectioned off areas. Something I didn’t really appreciate last year was that people are only guessing how much space they will need to get their 20 mates cars and tents into. Sometimes people overestimate, but by the Saturday it became apparent that both camps around us had seriously underestimated the space needed. When we got back to our camp at around 3am on the Friday night/ Saturday morning someone had parked a car in a way I wouldn’t have even thought possible. It was completely inline with our car, along the fire track, no more than 20-25mm from our back bumper, with a tent set up behind it (which was already there when we left) so that its back wheels were pretty much touching the tent. It must have taken some serious manouvering to get it in there. It meant that the entrance to our camp was completely blocked and we had to walk through several other peoples camps to get to our own. They were very apologetic about it in the morning and shuffled all their vehicles around to get in a bit better the next day, but yeah real estate is in very high demand in the campsites.
I should probably add for anyone from the UK; camping is a bit different at bush doofs to UK festivals; you can drive your vehicle into the campsite and set up camp right next to your car, and there is no seperate motorhomes/ tent camping. So the campsites are a mix of caravans, tents, motorhomes and cars. At every large festival I've been to in England you absolutely can’t camp around your vehicles. You need to park in a car park and then drag all your shit with you to a seperate campsite within the festival site, unless you are in a special motorhomes only campsite. Wheelbarrows are a pretty handy and common tool to bring to a uk festival to assist getting all your stuff in. Obviously it is way more convenient to just be able to rock up in your car in Australia and set up right next to it. In England this is absolutely seen as a massive health and safety risk and isn’t allowed to prevent people driving over tents.
Its funny how some things here are more relaxed in terms of restrictions, but others are much more strict. The camping restrictions may be much more relaxed in Australia, but I find the police presence is WAY more strict than in the UK. Certainly you wouldn’t find packs of police with drug dogs roaming through the campsites in search of contraband. Even at Tanglewood festival, which is much smaller and more family orientated, there were police sniffer dogs walking all around the actual festival site itself, around the edges of dance floors, searching for drugs on people. It has long been the consensus in the UK that drug dogs used in this way creates more harm and danger than it prevents, with people panicking and taking all their drugs at once to avoid detection. I figured that there must be some kind of research study that was undertaken in the UK which police refer to as an example as to why they shouldn’t be using drug dogs in this way, but when I trawled through the internet for it it seems that the bulk of the research into this has been done in Australia itself. And Australian studies have been quoted in UK council and police reports as reasons to not use the dogs. It seems slightly odd that Australian police ignore all of this research conducted in their own country, at their own festivals, and insist on using dogs in this way. You may see a drug dog at the festival entrance in the UK (even this is rare), but certainly I’ve never witnessed one going through the festival or campgrounds.
It must be noted that we have now been to several bush doofs up in Queensland on our travels (more on that later). And there is nowhere near the same level of aggressive policing of these kinds of events up there. I actually don’t recall seeing any police other than the ones on the roadside on the way out doing breath and drug tests. It seems to be specifically Vic police that take this militant stance towards it. Victoria has a certain reputation within Australia as being a bit of a “nanny state” unfortunately, and I guess this is just what we have to deal with down these ways.
The other thing which unnerved me slightly about the police presence was the groups of plain clothed police. The thing which made this strange was the fact that they all had guns strapped to their thighs in very obvious external gun holsters. Perhaps it is a legal requirement that all police in Australia HAVE to carry a gun at all times, whatever the circumstances. To be honest I find the fact that police carry guns at all here a little unnerving as it isn’t what I’m used to. (Police in England never carry guns. If firearms are required it requires a special “armed response” unit to be deployed). Apparently the police this year were less heavy handed than last year, when they frequently would drag people off the dancefloors if they were seen taking drugs. Again, this is something that you would NEVER see at a UK festival. You do occasionally see uniformed police walking through festival sites, but they are very much there to just be seen. Certainly they are not going out of their way to track down and arrest people smoking the odd spliff on the dance floor. I realise that this is what you have to agree to in order to get licenses for this kind of event, it just seems entirely heavy handed on the polices side. We weren’t really doing anything that put us at risk in any case, but I guess I’ve just lived so much of my life on the “wrong side of the law” that the very presence of police unnerves me a little. This is probably my issue that I need to sort out rather than theirs.
I wont go over the individual sound system setups again as they were largely the same as last year. One of the things I would like to say about the sound systems though, which I meant to say last year, was that I think its really good that every sound system is a different manufacturer/ brand of speaker. Its great being able to hear the different sounds of each. They all still sound great of course, but I like the fact that the whole festival isn’t just function one or Martin audio. I was particularly curious about the Ascension sound system last year, which I later found out was modelled on Danely speakers. Danely don’t seem to have much of a presence back in the UK so I had not come across them before. They sounded great though, although that Martin audio on the Sun temple is still my favourite.
Again once we had set up our camper trailer we took to our bikes and rode around the festival to view the various setups.
Some photos around Moby dicks, the venue which is set up inside the campgrounds rather than in the trees with the rest of the festival. The theme for this years Esoteric was “The Esoverse”, kind of based on alien worlds and the universe. This stage looked like some kind of alien honeycomb. Although still the only stage with actual grass you can dance on, the grass was noticeably less green and lush this year, struggling with the heat much like everyone else at the festival:
Short video from Moby dicks, I love the didgeridoo in this, very Australian:
Next stop off was the Sun temple. Similar kind of alien looking decorations to the backdrop as last year, with a strange yellow digger type contraption as the DJ booth, which looked liked some kind of alien spaceship just come through a wormhole of some kind behind it. Overall a very impressive and imposing setup again, although I kind of preferred the waterfalls from last year:
A video of the daytime vibes at sun temple:
Next is the Bush techno stage, I really like the look and feel of this one up here, like some kind of alien church or temple nestled in the forest. Kind of a cross of the honeycomb design of the Moby dick stage, coupled with the portal to another dimension of the main stage. surrounded by various seats and sculptures. I liked the boxing around the sound system this year, helped it feel more like a part of the stage. I also liked the mock bus thing that you could go up to get a better view of the dance floor from up the top. I’m always a big fan of platforms/ viewing areas that look over dance floors:
Some day time vibe videos around the bush techno stage this year. My favourite tune I heard there all weekend was this one on the very first morning when the place was empty. I like this kind of bubbly acid house, I much prefer it to most of the minimal techno/ tech house stuff that usually gets played there, shame they don’t play more of this really, I'd probably go down more often if they did:
The ascension stage was the one most similar to last years, not a huge amount that can be done to change that shade sail, and I guess the rest of the colours of the backdrop have to match. Again some kind of portal to another dimension theme going on. I took a few more photos of those Danely horns as well. Its hard to convey just how huge they are.
Going over my photos it seems I didnt get a single video of ascension during the middle of the day, I got this one at twilight however:
The Ascension stage also had a nice viewing platform added to the back of the dancefloor. A lot more room to actually dance on this one as well compared to the one at the Bush techno:
And there was also the addition of some food stalls and a seating area at the back of the ascension stage dance floor, which I think is a wise move. It was a fairly long walk from there and bush techno if you wanted to grab a coffee last year, its a good idea to have some more stuff at the back:
It was whilst biking around the back of the dance floor at Ascension stage that we met our friend from last year; Jenny, the landowner. It was a lovely start to the festival in 2023 having a chat with her on the gate, and on the drive up to the gate this year we briefly considered asking to see her again to thank her for her hospitality the year before, but after the huge delay in opening and the large queues getting in we decided this wasn’t an appropriate thing to be doing.
It was somewhat of a surprise to find her back here as we assumed she would have been manning the gate again this year. What was even more of a surprise however was that we found her lugging hay bales around to set up the seating area near the ascension stage food stalls. And I don’t mean that we found her ordering a crew of workers around setting up hay bales. Literally just her and her husband (definitely her husband this time), with the old farm ute, throwing hay bales off the back and dragging them into position. Its worth mention again here that she is likely well into her 60s.
When questioned about whether she should have a small army of volunteers doing this task for her, her response was something along the lines of; “well, by the time I’ve got the volunteers together, explained the task to them, got them to do it, and then come back to check on it, I might as well have just done it myself, it will be quicker.” Thinking about it now however brings this rather amusing meme I saw the other day to mind. This was originally posted by some exhausted mum of young kids I’m friends with, but I think it could apply equally as aptly here:
Although this definitely wasn’t Jenny’s blunt wording, I feel the intention was subtly implied. But again it is great to see her as the landowner so invested in the everyday running and setup of the festival. And again she took a good 5 or 10 minutes out of her day to have a chat with us, at what must have been a very busy and hectic run up to the festival what with the gastro outbreak. We did talk about this briefly and she explained to us that although they have had gastro outbreaks in the lead up to the festival before it has usually been contained to a few of the build crew. But this time it also included every person in the upper management, who were irreplaceable to the setting up of the festival. Must have been a very stressful time.
She also said how much she enjoyed reading my last story on Esoteric 2023 (despite the sections that she probably shouldn’t have been reading, as she put it). I can only imagine that she will end up reading this one, so I thought I would take the opportunity to say; Thank you Jenny for your hospitality. Both in terms of taking the time out to chat with us both years, but more importantly in your wider hospitality in making this happen every year. I mean, you’re throwing one of the greatest parties on the face of the planet in your back garden, you cant really ask for better hospitality than that. I feel like we ALL owe Jenny a huge thanks for her hospitality in not only allowing us all to come here and do this on her land, but in actively playing a part and working so hard to put on this beautiful festival. So on behalf of everyone who attends Esoteric, thank you for making this happen. And obviously that extends not just to Jenny, but to everyone behind the scenes who is putting this together. Whilst Jenny is the only one we’ve met, thank you to all of you putting this on, its a fantastic thing you are building here, and there is a lot of love for it from all of the attendees. So a big thank you to all of you Esoteric legends.
We carried on our trip around the festival looking at the various stages, making our way to the snakepit next. Having said that we spent virtually zero time here last year I’m happy to announce that we spent quite a bit more time there this year. Not nearly as much as at Sun temple or ascension, but there were at least a few sets that caught our attention and had us dancing here for an hour or more. Again very much a Bass music/ DnB stage:
A short clip of some typical Snakepit vibes:
After snakepit we made our way over to chill island. Kind of like some remote telecommunications outpost listening out for life in the whole Esoverse scheme of things. Quite an appropriate stage design to be placed out here on the edge of the desert. I seem to have only taken one photo of the stage, but have a better video of sunset on one of the evenings:
There was also the addition of a seperate tent/ area here called NAD RAD. We came across NAD RAD before at a much smaller and more family friendly festival called “The Town” a couple of years back. Like Tanglewood this again is a festival I would highly recommend if you have kids. Lots of activities for them to do and a generally very chilled vibe. The whole thing is a bit like one immersive live theatre performance, with lots of venues themed on various parts of a small country town, complete with live performers and actors. Plus the venue for The Town is absolutely epic, held in the small town of Licola, deep into the Alpine national park. Just the drive in there alone is undoubtably the most scenic drive to a festival that I’ve ever been on. I didn’t actually get any photos inside NAD RAD from Esoteric, so the photos inside are from when they were at The Town. I’m pretty sure it looked different inside there at Esoteric, although I cant really remember.
Video of the sunset over at Chill island:
I like that they are expanding this area over at chill island, it was one of the things that in my last blog I said that I hoped would happen. In fact during the course of the weekend we saw a number of improvements/ expansions which were in line with the recommendations I had during my last blog. Whilst I don’t have main character syndrome nearly enough to think that my blog had anything to do with any of these improvements, its good to see that my ideas align with the general mission of Esoteric.
I also like the fact that NAD RAD was a kid friendly space, it had a comfortable reading area inside with a few shelves of kids books in there. I think its a wise move to have more than just the specific kids area (called “The Shallows”) as a space that kids can enjoy.
Last year I didn’t take any photos of the shallows. I think as it was the first weekend away from our kids in 8 years we wanted to completely forget that kids even exist for the weekend and go out and enjoy ourselves as adults rather than parents for a change. But this year I went and had a good look around as we wanted to entertain the idea of bringing our kids in future years. Here are some photos from The Shallows kids area (It looks completely empty from the photos, this is because I am very wary of photographing other peoples kids when I'm not there with. my own, so only took photos when there were no kids around):
This is a great space for kids, and I love the fact that family camping is right next to it, and is pretty much the closest camping area to the festival, but still tucked away to the side to make it quiet. Theres nothing worse as parents at a festival where they have put the family camping in a “quiet and secluded spot” which just happens to be beyond all of the regular camping, right at the back. So you have to drag your kids for bloody miles just to get in and out of the festival. Little legs get tired quickly and by the time they have even made it into the festival they are fully over all the walking already. At Esoteric however the family camping is remarkably close to everything, and right next to the kids area. This is great for families.
Obviously bringing kids to a festival is a hugely different experience to just going on your own, and whilst I’m sure our kids would love the kids area, we would really struggle to get them to leave it and see the rest of the festival. They would probably enjoy biking around on their bikes, and playing in the lagoon, but we wouldn’t get to spend much time at any of the stages as there isn’t really much of interest for them, which is why it is good that NAD RAD is next to the chill out stage to at least keep them partially entertained so that parents can get to enjoy some of the music for a slightly longer period of time (more on this a bit later).
I’m going to talk about another festival now which I think has the kid friendly, but also still high energy dance rave vibe mixed together really well. When we were in the early planning stages of our lap around Australia we looked into other bush doofs and festivals that we could go to along the way. We don’t really have any friends from our group of mates who are into these kinds of parties (hence why we came for our honeymoon on our own last year). But I do know a fair few people from the rope access industry who are into Bush doofs. I asked advice from a good mate of mine who its fair to say has been around the block of all Aussie bush doofs. He’s played at pretty much all of them at one point or another over the last 20 years, including on the snakepit stage at Esoteric on a couple of occasions. He goes by the stage name Austero. Albino I know him as (kind of an ironic name as he is a dreadlocked Mexican, but it genuinely is his actual name). Here is a short snippet of footage I shot of him on the one occasion I saw him play, at Tanglewood a couple of years back:
I asked Albino if he had any recommendations as to family friendly bush doofs around the country and one name came up without hesitation; Earth Frequency festival. “I took my mum to Earth Frequency when she came over from Mexico!” Were his exact words “It’s super chill, you’ll enjoy it.”
This was also another reason for our rather rushed and hasty departure from Melbourne at the start of our trip; Earth frequency happens on the first weekend of May in South East Queensland, some 1800km from our house. We brought tickets for it months before we were ready to leave, cementing in our ambitious timescale long before we realised quite how much work there was to be done. This at least gave us a goal to work towards and although it was pretty stressful we did manage to make it to SE Queensland by the first week of May to attend Earth Frequency.
Earth Frequency is one of the oldest Bush doofs in Australia, coming up for its 20th anniversary next year. Whenever I see mention of Australian festivals on international events such as the eclipse parties it is always Earth Frequency alongside Rainbow Serpent festival which are attending and representing Australia. They’ve certainly been doing this a long time.
The thing which first surprised me upon getting to earth frequency, and in fact Queensland in general for our first week there, was the weather. I should probably add that there is a general misunderstanding of the Australian weather from anyone in the UK. It is widely perceived by the English that Australia is just one long, hot sunny day of beaches, surfing and BBQs. The amount of conversations I’ve had with people from back home who have enthusiastically asked “so are you going down the beach today??” And to which I’ve had to reply “It’s July. In Melbourne. I’m not leaving the house without a ski jacket on, let alone heading to the beach.” The fact that it does occasionally get cold in Australia is almost always met with shock and surprise by people from the UK, as it is very different to the lie we have been sold from all of those lovely curated tourism ads. A lie which general Australians will gladly perpetuate by constantly commenting on how shit the weather is in England and how much it rains there. (Its worth noting that every single Australian state capital city experiences substantially more rain than London would you believe. Even Perth which is a semi-arid climate gets around 30% higher annual rainfall than London. Its just that it seems to all fall in a few massive torrential storms, rather than the year-round relentless, dreary drizzle that the UK seems to be so adapt at producing.)
In much the same way that there is this myth that Australia is eternally sunny; having lived most of my time in Australia around Melbourne and Perth and only having been to Queensland once for a brief work trip, I had always viewed Queensland as this eternally sunny tropical paradise. Apart from 3 months during the monsoon season when it gets unbearably humid, rains for days on end and everything floods. May was not supposed to be one of those months though, so surely I should be expecting beautiful blue skies and sunshine? It rained every single day of our first week in Queensland, and was overcast and drizzling for a great deal of the festival. The thing it reminded me of most actually, was an English music festival. Although an English music festival in mid summer it must be said, not 5 weeks before the winter solstice like Earth Frequency is.
Luckily the soil here seemed to just soak it all up, unlike the thick clay we get in England where just one shower coupled with several thousand people walking over it is enough to liquify the entire ground and turn it into a mud pit. Which is a good thing as there seems to be a real aversion to the rain over here “the great Australian fear of the rain” I refer to it as. It made me laugh seeing pictures of another Australian festival “the big red bash” after some unseasonably high rain and lots of reports in the media whether it was safe for it to still run and should the organisers be cancelling it. (It should probably be added that the big red bash is the most remote music festival on earth, hundreds of miles into the outback on the edge of the Simpson desert, and the calls to cancel it were generally over whether it was safe for people to make it in and out). These were the pictures in question:
There wasn’t any question of stopping the festival after this however, the show still went on. I think we are just so used to being wet and soggy in England, its kind of embedded in the national psyche. When Andrea first came over to England she was amazed at the people just walking around in the street in the rain. “They’re just walking along like nothing is happening!” She exclaimed “They don’t even have jackets on, just walking around in hoodies in the pissing rain!”
In Australia when it rains, you just wait somewhere dry until it stops. This is most evident in the construction industry here, particularly it must be said in the rope access industry on large skyscrapers, which is nearly always happening outdoors. The amount of amusing conversations I’ve had with people back home about working in the rain;
“Yeah when it rains here we all stop work and go inside the crib hut and drink shitty instant coffee until it stops.”
“You just stop work and go and sit inside when it rains? What if it rains for ages?”
“Ah, well thats different you see. If it looks like it might rain for an hour or more, then we’ll all fuck off down the nearest cafe and get ourselves a decent cup of coffee. And if the rain is really bad, then we might order ourselves a cooked breakfast.”
“You just leave site and go and sit in a cafe?? What if it rains all day? You just sit there and drink coffee all day??”
“Oh no, of course not, don’t be silly. If it rains for more than 4 hours then we all get sent home on full pay for the rest of the day.”
“!!! So you just sit at home in the dry, still getting paid?”
“Damn right, its the Australian way.”
This isn’t even any kind of exaggeration either. I can literally recall times working in Melbourne, just finishing off my eggs Benedict in a cosy, warm cafe, watching the rain streaming down the gleaming glass skyscraper over the road and commenting something along the lines of “Yep, she’s fucked out there boys, better order another round of coffees, this looks like a 2 flat white kind of a rainstorm.”
You have to appreciate that if you are woking outside in England and it rains, you put on your waterproof jacket. If it rains harder, then you’ll probably put your waterproof pants (or trousers as we would call them over there) on as well. And if it rains really hard, then you’ll put on a pair of wellies (gum boots) also. Certainly if you were to say to your boss “I’m just going to pop over to the cafe down the road and drink coffee until this all blows over” then you probably wont have a job for very long.
Obviously this is by no means a complaint of the Australian working culture, I would much rather not work in the rain if I didn’t have to, but you folks in Australia do have to realise that no other country I’ve been to does this.
I'm just going to post a couple more photos from the big red bash here, the festival that was nearly stopped because of the rain. It's not entirely fair to it to say that it was nearly stopped because of a little bit of mud. Although I've often referred to Esoteric as being in the "outback" or on the edge of the desert, this isn't entirely accurate. In reality Esoteric is only a 5 or 10 minute drive outside of a small farming town. The big red bash however is out there. Like, really fucking out there. "The most remote festival on earth" is how they often market themselves, which I could quite believe. Its nearest town is Birdsville, which in itself is the remotest town in Australia. People plan 2 or 3 week trips just getting to the festival and back. Half the experience is just the journey there. Not my cup of tea music wise (its a rock/ pop/ country festival), but I respect the tenacity of putting something on all the way out there. These photos, taken from the air, show just how remote it is. If you get heavy rainfall and loads of people get stranded out there then it could become a real issue:
In any case, although light drizzle and overcast skies were not what I was expecting from a music festival in Queensland, it was actually quite refreshing. When the sun did come out it was pretty hot and muggy and in the end I was quite glad for the cooling rain.
The rain wasn’t the only thing that reminded me of the UK either, the music tastes were also a lot more “English” sounding, with quite a bit of speed garage, bass house, piano house and jungle being played over the course of the weekend. I think this is due to the fact that SE Queensland generally has a lot more of an “anglo” influence; most of the early immigrants here were from the UK. In Melbourne however there was much more continental European immigration, or “Wogs” as they affectionately refer to themselves. People from the UK will likely find this term quite surprising, as I did when I first came here. To call someone a Wog in England is an incredibly derogatory term, almost akin to calling someone a nigger. Not used to describe europeans at all, it was a slur generally used towards Indians and pakistanis, although is a bit of an old fashioned saying in itself now. But the Wogs in Melbourne wear this badge with a definite level of pride. Generally they will originate from Mediterranean regions; Italy, Spain, Greece etc, but will be second or third generation Australians. This more European past seems to translate to music tastes more similar to the techno/ trance/ psytrance vibes of continental Europe in and around Melbourne.
The stage which reminded me most of these English music tastes was the “Boombox stage”, and particularly the “concrete playground” takeover day. Concrete playground played a mix of hard acid techno, hardcore, gabba and breakcore. Very hard, fast frantic stuff. Concrete playground really reminded me of an event/ crew back in the UK known as “Bangface”. Bangface host wild parties in various underground clubs in East London and also stages at festivals, and more recently their own weekend events where they take over entire holiday parks. There are often large inflatable things being chucked around the crowds, balloons falling from the roof and confetti cannons exploding without warning. My first experience of bangface was when they did one of the large dance tents at Glade festival. I’d just taken 2CB for the first time and was standing in there just getting used to the visuals when a huge inflatable toboggan was launched from the front rows backwards and hit me end on square in the face, knocking me to the floor.
This is video footage from one of their weekend holiday park events, I never made it to one of these, not my cup of tea a lot of that high speed gabba/ hardcore, but they look absolutely hectic, particularly the bits in the swimming pool:
Heres some comparison footage from the concrete playground takeover on the boombox stage, pretty hard, frantic stuff. I actually quite liked this tune, some kind of weird 4x4 jungle techno vibes going on, it was better than a lot of the gabba they played later on at night in any case. Boombox was the third largest stage at Earth Frequency:
A few more pictures of the Boombox stage:
The sound system used in the boombox stage was the “Hex sound system”. Hex has been built and is part owned by a good friend of mine from back in the hedonistic illegal rave organisation days from the UK in the early 2000s, a guy called Richie (from Slack Banta, for those of you back in the UK). He’s been out here for around the same amount of time I have (roughly 12 years), but we’ve never met up until Earth Frequency. These are some pictures of his sound system, great CNC work on the speakers, I really like the hexagonal wooden grills. Richie was highly frustrated however that he had built a new pair of double 18’s in the lead up to earth frequency, but a faulty amplifier had blown all the cones in them, so he was unable to bring them along. Bit of a shame, but it still sounded good in there.
I got a brief bit of footage of Richie mixing some jungle at some point:
And I’m just going to post these few photos of Richies place, which we went up to a couple of weeks later. I’ve seen some pretty scenic outlooks on houses in Australia, but this is up there with the best of them. He lives in a valley up in the sub tropical rainforest near sunshine coast. Its fully off grid and rustic as hell up there (he has a couple of metre long lizards living in his roof, they keep away the snakes apparently so he leaves them there), but man what a spot:
And some photos of the rainforest above Gold Coast, this is only 30-40 minutes from the centre, but feels like another world. I like how you can see the skyscrapers of gold coast lined up along the coast in these first couple:
Gold Coast was surprisingly caravan friendly as well. If you want to stay in a caravan park in Melbourne, the closest one to the city is Coburg, which is pretty far out from the city really. One of the caravan parks we stayed in on Gold Coast was in Main beach. I’m amazed its still a caravan park, its massive, with around 150m of beach frontage, and every property around it is a towering 30+ story apartment tower. The land area that caravan park is on must be worth god knows how many 10s of millions of dollars. You could easily fit 5 or 6 of those apartment blocks on it, in a prime beachfront position:
You can easily bike or walk into Surfers Paradise from there (which is the suburb at the very centre of gold coast. When first hearing the name “surfers paradise” upon coming to Australia it conjured up images of sleepy little beach shacks lined with palm trees with a load of hippy surfers living there. The reality is as far from that as you could possibly imagine, apart from the fact that there is great surf there). One of the more simple highlights of our trip so far (there have been many, but this would definitely be up there) has been biking into the beach side night markets in surfers paradise, and then not wanting to take the kids on busy city roads in the dark on the way back, we decided to bike back along the beach at low tide. It was an incredible contrast in the twilight sky; towering skyscrapers of light on one side as far as the eye could see in either direction, with the darkness and roar of the pacific ocean on the other side:
Short video biking along the beachfront:
Earth Frequency was smaller than I had expected. Apparently it used to be larger and has been scaled back in recent years, a sign of the ongoing plight facing music festivals not just in Australia, but all over the world. There have also been a large number of UK festivals falling by the wayside along with the long list of Australian festivals. In fact one of the festivals I mentioned in my blog last year which would be one of the closest equivalent of Esoteric in the UK, Illusive festival, unfortunately had its last year this year. After my descriptions of the Esoteric sound systems in the last blog I thought I would post this photo from illusive this year of one of the sound systems, it may interest some of you. This is a setup from shakedown audio, which is run and built by another old mate from the hazy days of UK illegal raves. His family own a boat building yard, which he has converted parts of to a high-end speaker production workshop and he designs and makes PA speakers for a large number of people all over the UK. This sound system is his own personal rig which he hires out. Its grown every year and has always been one of the main sound systems at Illusive. This years offering just looked insane:
What you are looking at there is 20 x double 21” bass bins, along with another 8x double 15”s, all in one single wall of sound. This is almost akin to putting the Sun temple and Ascension stages speakers (the bass ones anyway) into one solid wall and putting it on a dancefloor of only 6-700 people. I’m amazed that more people over there aren’t having serious hearing problems by now.
Its certainly a very hard time for music festivals out there at the moment. In fact its quite remarkable really that Esoteric has managed to expand so significantly the last couple of years, a testament to its ongoing popularity and the hard work behind the scenes. Earth frequency was still a fair size however, probably around the 5000 mark I would say, and would be the biggest festival that we have taken the kids to thus far.
The main stage at Earth Frequen (called “Vertex”) played all 4 beat stuff, it went from more chilled house during the first day, through to techno and hard trance on the first night, then more psytrance influence on the second day and night, with even a bit of ascension sounding dark psy late into the night:
The second main stage (Axiom) played generally much more bass heavy music, the likes of which the snakepit would have played at Eso. Again, sounded slightly more UK tinged, with a fair bit of speed garage and breakbeat being played over the weekend. A few clips from Axiom:
The last of the main stages was “Love camp”, more out in the campground, a bit like Moby dick, and also was the only stage playing on the Thursday night. Most similar sound to the bush techno stage at Eso:
The reason I brought up earth frequency was to comment on its family friendly vibe. The kids area was fantastic, not nearly as visually appealing as the adventure playground at Esoteric, but there were a number of things they did really well. They had a huge amount of performers and staff in there carrying out various activities and entertainment. This was made possible by what at first seemed odd, but actually became one of my favourite parts about the place; the fact that it closed for 4 hours through the middle of the day. This caught me off guard the first morning as we had a slow morning, ate a cooked breakfast and strolled over there at around 10am, which was just as they were shutting the gates for the afternoon. Mildly outraged at this the first time it happened, I came to see it was a really good thing as not only can they cram a lot more activities and performers in that short space of time, but they make a big thing about all the kids going off to the festival afterwards. “Bye kids, time to go to the festival now, see you in a few hours”, and all the kids plod out of there and don’t have much of a choice but to go to the festival, which means that parents actually get to see it. As I said before, I think we would have really struggled to drag our kids away from the shallows at Eso, but at earth frequency they all just got on their bikes after the kids area closed and biked into the festival. And because all the kids come out of there at the same time they all go into the festival together also. There is a huge open grass area to the far side of the main stage where there are also a load of hammocks. Kids tended to congregate here and play frisbee and football together, whilst the parents also got to enjoy the tunes coming from the main stage. It seemed to work really well. Some photos of the chaos inside the kids area:
I guess this whole festival just seemed a bit more accessible to kids than Esoteric, partly because of its size, but there was a much higher proportion of families and older people there as well. Certainly by the second day we were pretty comfortable to just let the kids bike ahead through the festival and we would arrange to meet them at the hammocks next to the main stage (our usual meeting point) as we were packing up and locking the caravan. There’s no way on earth that we would have said to our kids if we had brought them to Esoteric “Ok kids, off you go, we’ll meet you at the far end of Ascension stage in 5 minutes time”, its just far too big and hectic for that. Esoteric couldn’t ever be as family friendly as Earth frequency because its just too much of a massive mental rave. Obviously I wouldn’t want to make it any more family friendly at the expense of being any less of a massive mental rave either, as its very good at doing that.
Earth frequency was also much easier to traverse as well. There is some discontent among ravers in Queensland in that Earth Frequency for the last few years has been held in basically a car park for a race track on the edge of Brisbane, rather than deeper out into the bush where its traditional venue used to be (theres some issues with drainage there or something, I gathered from various conversations). Admittedly yes, it would be better if there weren’t 18 wheeler trucks thundering past the field just beyond the festival limits and it was much deeper into the woods, but to be fair it is a very scenic car park, with nice tall trees and lush green grass all around the festival site. Plus as it is basically a car park designed to be driven around in 2WD cars, its incredible easy for young kids on bikes to bike around. Although I’ve often mentioned biking around on bikes at Esoteric, really its an absolute prick of a place to bike around; large areas of soft sand which front wheels just collapse into, rutted tree roots everywhere, and so many fucking bindis. I must have had to get the puncture repair kit out 3 or 4 times at least during the course of Esoteric. Earth frequency was a comparative dream to bike around and there were loads of people biking around the place. But from what i gather its not a patch on their usual venue. The good news however is that Earth Frequency will be back in its original venue in the bush for its 20 year anniversary next year, so if you want to go up to Queensland to support them, next year would be a good year.
As with most bush doofs, it was a colourful, arty place. Here are some pics of the art dotted around the place:
And special mention goes to this fantastic visual treat. One of the things I mentioned in my last blog on esoteric was a chill out area called ID spiral that used to set up at various UK festivals which utilised white fabric stretched across metal structures with lights and projectors set up the insides to create a selection of colourful 3D shapes to wander around. I suggested that Esoteric could set up a similar thing over at Chill island to give it a bit more colour at nighttime. I imagined that with the technology advances that have taken place in the last 20 years it would be possible to set up something significantly more colourful and impressive. I came across this at Earth frequency which was pretty much exactly what I had in mind, and in fact was even more advanced than I had imagined as it was interactive.
Essentially this was a large metal hoop across which white fabric had been stretched and a projector had been set up a few metres away pointing at it. This projector was hooked up to a computer which could be controlled from a nearby touchscreen panel. The projector was programmed with a load of highly psychedelic moving patterns/ mandalas and the colours/ patterns could be controlled from the screen. Like some kind of portal or wormhole into psychedelia, plus the fabric was strong enough that you could push it in either direction. It was fantastic, and had my kids, along with multiple others, entertained for absolutely ages each night. Although I’m sure that come 3am there was an entirely different kind of clientele equally as enthralled and amazed by the pretty colourful patterns. Here’s a brief video of it in action:
I’m still highly of the opinion that Esoteric should build something like this up at Chill island. The fact that it was controllable was a great added bonus, but it wouldn’t necessarily need to be. You could definitely build several of these things out of different shapes of white fabric stretched between trees up there, mount projectors from other trees/ poles pointing at the fabric and have them controlled by some central computer so they all project moving patterns in sync with each other, and have some couches/ comfortable seats set up so you could lounge around and watch all the pretty moving colours. It would look awesome up there. Just a thought anyway Esoteric.
Back to Esoteric 2024. The Lagoon stage. After the reports of mass gastro outbreaks in the lead up to the festival we had already long decided that we most definitely would not be setting foot in that lagoon. Something about the combination of “highly contagious diarrhoea and vomit inducing stomach illness” and “large body of public water” didn’t sit quite right with us and we decided this was best avoided. It seemed that the health officials and organisers of Esoteric also held this view, and as a result the lagoon was off limits and fenced off for the entire festival, which is a real shame on a weekend of 40 degree days, but it was undoubtably the right decision to make. The music stage that was set up there however was still playing music all weekend, with a small dancefloor area fenced off from the rest of the lagoon. Definitely a shame for them and the DJs playing as there would have been a significant reduction in people around that lagoon. Here are a few photos of the area. I kind of preferred the sound system set up there last year with its mixture of homemade bass cabinets, it felt more like the ramshackle mixture of speakers which would be appropriate for a stage around a lagoon. Some photos around the edge of the lagoon stage:
There was one act playing here during the weekend which we had earmarked to go and see. That act was Mood swing and Chevy bass. I feel like Mood swing and Chevy bass have played at every single large Australian bush doof I’ve ever been to. They are certainly one of the most prolific acts on the Australian bush doof scene. They play a mixture of sounds, usually some kind of bass house/ speed garage/ psy sort of stuff, with samples of well known tunes and a few live instruments played over the top. I really like their vibe, lighthearted and fun, and its always good to dance to. We will always make an effort to see them if they are playing. We’d actually completely forgot they were playing on the lagoon stage and just stumbled upon them by chance as we were walking back into the festival one evening and we really liked the sound of the song that was playing as we passed. Unfortunately it was their last tune, a psytrance remix of Queens bohemian rhapsody, at least we got down there for it and got this video. There’s always a fantastic crowd vibe to their sets:
One of my favourite non-music related places at Esoteric last year was the amphitheatre. I really liked being able to sit down and chill out and learn something interesting in between the madness of the dance floors. We spent significantly less time here during the days this year, but more time at night (more on that a bit later on). The one notable lecture we stumbled across we happened on by chance as we just stopped to sit down and load up a vape just as it was starting. That lecture was by Android Jones.
Android Jones is one of the artists who’s works are shown in the massive art gallery. In fact there is a whole room dedicated to his works. He’s one of the most infamous psychedelic artists in the world. His pieces are incredibly detailed and multilayered, and huge. Here are a few of his artworks on display at Esoteric. The lighting didnt really come out great on the photos:
The talk with Android Jones wasn’t really a lecture at all, it was a question and answer session where members of the audience were just encouraged to ask him questions. Despite being in no way scripted at all I think there were only 5 or 6 questions asked in the entire hour and a half session. Each answer he gave just went off on wild tangents about his life, his work, philosophies, psychology, all kinds of stuff. He was a fascinating person to listen to. Some of the stuff he talked about was highly emotional. Just before Esoteric last year his art studio burned down. Naturally this incident came up in the questions. It sounded like an incredible place he had; his family owned a ranch in Colorado in America. His studio was a huge 2 story barn, with a music studio and a huge amount of artwork and all of his tools and materials. He sounded like a complete hoarder to be honest, said he picked up all kinds of weird stuff from government auctions. It sounded like the entire property was a dumping ground for all manner of weird and wonderful things that he used to make sculptures and art. He wasn’t just a psychedelic painter, he engaged in all aspects of art it seemed and the barn was full to the brim with racks upon racks and shelves upon shelves of bits of driftwood, rocks, antiques, old bits of metal, paintings, canvases, along with all of his digital computers, all of which went up in the fire. His entire life’s work up in smoke. It understandably must have been a very traumatic thing.
There would have been a good 20 minutes dedicated to this topic and several times he had to stop to wipe away tears and openly cried for much of it. Its clearly something which is still very raw and emotional for him, but something he was happy to discuss very publicly.I admire people like that who can just talk and talk, and not just chat shite, but genuinely engaging and insightful stuff, and talk so emotionally from the heart to a complete group of strangers. It’s a skill that I very much do not have. Despite being able to get my thoughts and emotions down in writing pretty effectively, when it comes to any kind of public or person to person expression of emotion I seem to have some kind of mental block.
I found him talking about his paintings quite amusing, as it seems he used LSD extensively to paint a lot of them. I couldn’t imagine trying to carry out such intricate work whilst under the influence of LSD. Those paintings are massive, and so detailed, with so many layers of complexity. The thought of picking up a paintbrush, whilst the entire canvas is moving and breathing and tessellating with kaleidoscopic colours, and attempting to create such intricate and steady work is an act that barely seems possible. He referred to his LSD painting sessions as a “complete white knuckle ride from start to finish”, which I could totally imagine, peaking hard on LSD and trying to control your fine motor skills to such a level, it would be a real fight with yourself. But then again, looking at those paintings, it seems hard to imagine that someone would be able to come up with the level of colour and complexity who wasn’t also as high as a kite on LSD as he was doing it.
Anyway, back to Esoteric; We arrived on the Thursday again and had a nice slow evening walking around the site and dancing at Moby Dick and Chill island and had an early night in preparation of the Friday. The Friday was the first of the really hot days, although not the hottest. There were a number of sprinklers set up around the edge of the dancefloor at Sun temple providing some much needed hydration. These weren’t exact dance floor misters however, more your repurposed agricultural farm sprinklers, so it was either a pretty drenching shower or nothing at all, and the dancefloor there soon had rivers and puddles of water and snaking their way through the sand. It would be better to get some more “misty” sprinklers here if possible.
We toured the festival site, looking at all the artworks, noticeably expanded since last year. Again a phenomenal amount of effort has gone into creating this. Its one of my favourite parts of Esoteric, the mushroom art/ sculpture walk tracking up the spine of the festival. Quite a lot of this is left and expanded on year on year, but a fair bit is new as well. I liked the new walled area up by Bush techno, and particularly liked the cob style wall which used empty nang canisters as part of the decorations. Such a horribly wasteful high nitrous oxide, its awful seeing the amount of those little canisters that are left at the end of a festival, its good to see them being used for something anyway. I liked all the painted ones on the hammock pole as well:
I made this montage of clips several months ago now to include in a different blog I wrote. There is a reason that this blog on Esoteric is coming so far after the festival this time around. Well, technically theres several reasons it has taken me so long to write this. Travelling around Australia in a caravan whilst also flying out for FIFO work every two weeks is a pretty time consuming activity (in fact the vast majority of this story has been written sat in various departure terminals and on multiple flights across the country to and from work). But one of the reasons it has taken me so long is that I have been engaged in work on an entirely different story.
During my last blog on Esoteric I included a sizeable section on the small but hectic illegal rave/ free party movement which I used to be part of back in the Uk in the early 2000s. Whilst this was likely a minor and not particularly engaging part of the story for those of you in Australia, it was highly significant for me. I mentioned that many years ago I wrote a set of stories all about that scene and my adventures within it, but that they were lost on an old blog site that shut down. After writing about Esoteric last year I was inspired to revisit those early stories and rewrite them. Back then they were largely just written stories as so few photos and videos exist of that time period (this was in a period way before camera phones, and plus as these events were entirely illegal there was a bit of apprehension surrounding recording them). To really do the stories justice I spent months contacting anyone I could think of who might have photos/ videos/ newspaper articles on them to include in the stories. It caused me to reconnect with dozens of people who I hadn’t spoken to in 15 years or more, which was a very pleasant and nostalgic journey. Whilst I know there is a lot more material out there which I’m yet to find, it was a good starting point and enabled me to rewrite the first story fairly effectively. The piece of multimedia that I was most thrilled to come across was the following news footage. The reason I was happy to come across this particular footage was because the first story I originally wrote revolves loosely around a single rave which ended in a small riot after van loads of riot police were sent to the location to clear us all off. I was arrested, charged and taken to court for the organisation of this party.
Its funny actually, I’ve never really discussed this chapter of my life with anyone in great detail in Australia. One set of people who I have regularly had to bring it up with however is immigration officials. I eventually ended up with a criminal record for organising said party, the only item on my criminal record back in England. I’ve now gone through the long and arduous process of gaining permanent residency and eventually citizenship into Australia and this offence has regularly come up in background police checks; “What is this? This “Organisation of an unlicensed music event”, what is that Mr Newton?”
The story that has been told to these various immigration officials is something along the lines of “Me and a few mates put a little festival together on someones land, a few of the local residents complained and we didn’t have a proper licence in place so I got this.” In reality, this is the news report of the event I was eventually charged with the organisation of. I find it funny how much of a big deal these events were in the rural location we used to live. This is the main news item on the nightly news, a full 5 minute segment on it, and there were another couple of smaller reports on it in the days that followed:
Obviously this is a highly negative report that doesn’t reflect well on us putting it on in the slightest (news coverage on these events was always resoundingly negative). This one was a bit of an organisational disaster in any case, for reasons I wont go into here but explain in the blog. But I was still really happy to have tracked that report down. It makes me laugh thinking back to it all now and watching the report again and reminiscing on that day 20 odd years ago; whilst the riot police were advancing and the melee in that report was unfolding, I was hurriedly throwing speakers and amplifiers into the back of a van and driving out through another entrance at the back of the field. Upon realising we were being closely followed by a police helicopter I promptly ate all of the remains of my MDMA powder before I was arrested with it, eventually being cornered by several vans of riot police in a packed beachside car park along with 10 or 15 other vehicles. I was arrested and handcuffed and bundled into the back of a van with a couple of police officers, peaking hard on the large amount of MDMA just consumed all the way back to the police station. I’m amazed we all survived those years to be honest (and survived them without serious criminal records which would have undoubtably prevented me from settling in Australia). Oh to be young, reckless and completely irresponsible again.
I needn’t have worried myself too much about this item on my criminal record however, I only received a caution in the end (which I was extremely lucky to receive, for reasons I go into in the blog). My friend Richie who I mentioned earlier on in this story who runs Hex sound system up in Queensland now, he was arrested and charged for helping to organise the following party, receiving a proper conviction and a large fine. He had absolutely no problems gaining citizenship to Australia either with this on his record, so I needn’t have worried myself really. This is the front, second and third pages of our local newspaper, which still covers a population of several million people. I remember it being a very surreal moment walking into my local newsagents the morning after that party and seeing stacks of these newspapers on the stand outside the front door:
Just on the off chance that anyone reading this happens to have a couple of hours spare and thinks they would be interested in reading such stories, the link to this first blog which is loosely based around the event mentioned above is here:
The footage of the 90s Trance played as the first set at Esoteric I posted above was initially posted to that blog to make a point I was discussing about commercial music, but I also used it to Segway into several paragraphs on Esoteric in that blog. I’ve been trying to promote it to anyone I can back England. I really like the bush doof/ music scene you have here in Australia, its very small in comparison to the UK or Europe, but highly artistic and friendly and in beautiful locations. Esoteric however is the first event I’ve come across that I can confidently tell everyone that it is worth the flight over from Europe for. This is a world class event that deserves checking out. Its been a huge source of inspiration for me really, firstly in terms of inspiring me to write the story from Esoteric 2023 down in the first place, which was the first piece of writing I’ve completed in nearly 9 years. And then inspiring me to get all my old video footage of those raves off the old tapes to include in the last blog, which lead to me reconnecting with so many people from that scene that I left behind in the UK and rewriting my stories from those times. And lastly, a question that plays on my mind quite heavily; “would we have quit our jobs and embarked on a journey around Australia if it wasn’t for the events of Esoteric 2023?” Although this might seem like quite an extreme result from attending a music festival, I can’t help but think that the experience played a significant part in our decision. Obviously being faced with the mortality of a cancer diagnosis makes you completely reevaluate what you want from life, so this totally played a big part in the decision of course. We gave a lot of thought to what we enjoyed in life, and decided that we love travelling, and also underground dance events. Whilst travelling around the country we do intend to support as many of these kinds of events as we can, which we likely wouldn’t have done with such enthusiasm had we not gone to Esoteric. I guess its a question I’ll never know the answer to, because we did go to that festival, and did subsequently quit our jobs to travel around Australia. Whist a trip around Australia in a caravan is something that we’d always discussed as a dream even before we had kids, it was certainly not on our radar any time soon before we went to Esoteric. I would go as far to say that through the last 20 odd years I’ve been attending music festivals and dance events, no other music festival has impacted my life as meaningfully and positively as Esoteric 2023 did (Aside from maybe the first illegal rave I attended where I first took ecstasy, which sent my life down this path). So I can only thank you enough Esoteric for putting this on, I feel it has done us an enormous amount of good and reminded us what we really enjoy in this world at a time when we really needed it.
After last year we worked out that the Friday is actually more of a warm up day, and the two main nights of the festival are Saturday and Sunday. So we took things fairly easy on the Friday this year, mainly just smoking vapes and drinking a few ginger beers. One thing which we didn’t do much of at all last year was sample the various food stalls. As Andrea was on her strict anti-cancer diet we only really ate and drank stuff that we brought with us (apart from multiple coffees, which I definitely couldn’t do without). But this year we really wanted to make the most of the food offerings. I should probably explain to people back in the UK that food in Australia as a whole is of an exceptionally high standard, but the place where it is definitely at its peak is in Melbourne. This is another side effect of all the “wog” influence; many cultures from all over Europe and the middle east have all converged on Melbourne and brought their various cuisines with them. Mixed with the generally very high standard of produce in Australia, the cafe game here is among the best in the world.
Just as an example of how pervasive cafe culture is here; we are all used to the idea of “McCafes” being attached to McDonald’s restaurants by now. Places where you can get a barista style coffee and cafe style treats inside McDonalds. Its worth noting that McDonalds chose to place the worlds very first McCafe not in New York or Los Angeles, or even Paris or Rome. No, the very first trial of a McCafe anywhere in the world was actually in Melbourne, way back in 1993. I’m not saying at all that McCafes are indicative of the kind of quality of food you are going to get in Melbourne because lets face it, they are shite. But you can say what you like about the quality of McDonalds food, they sure know a good market when they see one.
So food stalls at festivals in Victoria are far from your average burger and chips or pizza stalls you might see at festivals in England. At Esoteric there were Uruguayan steakhouses, Italian arancini ball stalls, Japanese Ramen noodle bars, Lebanese Mezze, German Bratwurst, huge seafood paella pans bubbling away, and a whole host of other magnificent multicultural options. We sampled many of the delicious delights presented there (Undoubtably assisted by the fact we had a massive bag of weed to smoke at this one, being stoned and eating tasty food go hand in hand).
I think my own personal favourite however was the cheese toasty stall. Initially I balked at the cost. “How can a single cheese toasty cost $21??” I found myself wondering “It doesn’t even come with chips or anything, $21 for two pieces of bread and some filling? Surely that cant be right?” But my god, if that wasn’t the best goddamn toasty I’ve ever had in my life. I had several over the course of the weekend, my favourite being the “Hippie Love” one. Its filling was something like puréed pumpkin, crispy fried Kale and goats cheese. At one point we spent quite some time analysing the makeup of one of our sandwiches (DEFINITELY highly stoned when that conversation took place), we came to the conclusion that they must have been fried in butter or something after being part toasted to make them that crunchy and crispy on the outside but still juicy and moist on the inside. Phenomenal cheese toasties in any case, I would highly recommend them. And since the end of Esoteric 2024 they have opened a full time shopfront in Mordialloc in Melbournes south east. No longer just a stall at festivals, you can go and sample them whenever you want. The link for their page is here, get down and check it out:
I’m going to give special mention to another establishment here, mainly because we just happened to randomly stumble across their main, full-time market stall on our travels around the country; Aya Earthfoods.
Aya Earthfoods is also where I generally go for my morning coffee at Esoteric. I mentioned last year that although the coffee stall at Moby dicks makes a sensational coffee, because it is the closest coffee stall to basically every campsite in the festival the queue there first thing in the morning is soul destroying. I tend to just walk the extra 100 metres or so back into the main festival site to grab a coffee there, and Aya Earthfoods is usually where I end up. I’m not saying that the coffee here is any better than anywhere else (although its all of a very standard), just that I can get served in a quarter of the time I can at Moby Dicks.
During the day they serve a range of Lebanese style foods; homemade falafel and Hummus style stuff. The falafel and Hummus there is amazing. It is all made freshly on site, no huge frozen drums of commercial factory hummus here. Very fresh and very tasty. I guess I’d never really given a thought to where these stalls were based before, and kind of automatically assumed that they were mainly from around Melbourne, so it was highly surprising to find Aya Earthfoods market stall nestled in a rainforest in Far North Queensland, in a beautiful little town called Kuranda.
Kuranda is a small, hippy tourist town in the rainforest covered mountains above Cairns, famous for its markets, and also the stunningly scenic train ride you can take up from Cairns to get there. We’ve ended up in Kuranda a couple of times now, once on the aforementioned train ride, and also once we parked up there for a few days in the caravan. Its a lovely little town. It just has a nice “village” feel to it, the highlight of which are the Kuranda markets. These have to be my favourite markets I’ve ever been to. Fairly unassuming from the road outside, the market stalls quickly descend into steep hillsides surrounded by lush, dense rainforest. The stalls themselves are little more than wooden shacks or sheds, but the colour and the feel of the place is amazing. Feels much more like something from South East Asia than Australia. Here are a few photos of the Kuranda markets:
And this is Aya Earthfoods market stall. This stall is pretty much at the lowest point of the market, next to the mini-golf course at the bottom, which our kids had a great time playing on:
This video shows the general vibe at the bottom of the markets, and inside Aya-earthfoods stall, with some beautiful seating out the back, and a nice techno/ Psy soundtrack. They always had some pretty good tunes going, very bush doof-y:
And I'm Just going to post a few photos from the train and gondola ride up to Kuranda from Cairns, as it is pretty epic. The train line was built in the late 1800s as Kuranda was a gold mining town which was only accessible by a dirt road up the mountain. After a particularly severe wet season the town was cut off for months and the town nearly starved, so a train line was commissioned. The engineering on it is incredible for the time. There are 15 tunnels and 37 bridges, all constructed with hand tools, as it snakes its way up the side of the mountain to Kuranda. There is now a much more modern gondola which makes the journey in less than a quarter of the time. People generally take the train up and then the gondola back down, or vice versa. We took the gondola up. The scenery is spectacular whichever way you do it. Heres some photos on the way up:
Back to talking about Aya Earthfoods; Aya Earthfoods isn’t just a food market stall however, it is run by the same people as “Orin-Aya”. Orin Aya is one of the larger bush doofs in Far North Queensland. It’s a bit disappointing really, but we didn’t get to any of the large ones up in the far north as we didn’t make our way up quick enough. I should probably explain at this point that there are a few major areas for bush doofs around Australia; Obviously Victoria, around Melbourne, is a major one, the biggest hub for such activities. These usually take place in the warmer summer months (November-March, although it must be said that in all of these areas there are some events all year around, but the major ones generally happen within these timeframes). Outside of this the next largest area would be South East Queensland, which covers the areas of Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and the surrounding areas. These tend to either happen in spring (September -November) or autumn (April-June). The next biggest location after this is Far North Queensland, around Cairns. These happen during midwinter, or the dry season as it is up north (June-August). Whilst there are smaller scenes around Perth and Darwin, these ones I’ve just mentioned seem to be the main three. Sydney, and New south Wales, seem to be conspicuously absent from the list of major bush doof areas, it doesn’t seem to be as much of a thing around there for some reason. There are some, but not as many as you would expect from Australia’s largest city. Its also worth mentioning that these areas are bloody miles apart. I always like to post this map to blow the minds of my European friends:
So in order to drive from Melbourne in the far south east, to Cairns in the north east, you are looking at a distance roughly equivalent to the southern tip of the Greek mainland, to the northernmost point of Denmark. So its fair to say that although there is a lot of cooperation between bush doofs within their specific areas, these scenes kind of operate largely independently within each major region. Earth frequency took place in South East Queensland in May, and our intention was to be up in far north Queensland when the major ones happened up that way in June/ July. However, things didn’t really go according to plan and we ended up in SE QLD for much longer than we had anticipated, missing most of the large bush doofs in the far north. Not that I regret this, south east Queensland is a fantastic part of the country, with a lot more to see than just bush doofs.
Saying that we missed all the major ones up north, we did happen to catch a smaller event in an epic location up in the mountains above cairns. This was marketed as a “Spring Equinox” festival, although I get the impression it was mainly put on because Captain Hook (who is a well known Israeli psytrance producer) happened to be doing a tour of Australia at the time. Esoteric put on an event in a warehouse in Melbourne for him (definitely way too cold down there at that time to be doing outdoor events), and a couple of days later he flew up to Cairns to play at the Nyx spring Equinox. Nyx are another one of the major events up here, although their big festival is in June, around the winter solstice. Rather than putting on a club night for Captain Hook, they instead organised a 3 day outdoor mini-festival, with him playing the closing set on the Sunday afternoon.
We were pretty fortunate to make it up for this actually. I knew it was happening, but I was rostered on to work that weekend so didn’t think we would be able to make it. I quit my managerial job and took up a FIFO (Fly In Fly Out) job a few weeks before leaving. I work on what they call a 2 on 2 off roster, I fly away for 2 weeks work, then fly back for two weeks. My work has been remarkably flexible in this regard to be fair, and they are happy to fly me out of whichever largish airport I am able to make it to at the end of the two weeks. My family tend to just stay still in a caravan park near to where I fly out for the two weeks I’m away and when I fly back we carry on the travels. This is a fantastic way of doing this trip if you ask me as I am earning just enough money to essentially carry the trip on indefinitely without having to spend too much of our savings (although the budget can get pretty tight). Because of our very rapid departure and the high costs of setting up such a trip we essentially left Melbourne with not much more than a months living expenses to hand and have been funding it as we’ve gone. If anyone else is thinking of doing such a trip and is in a position to do FIFO work then I would really recommend it as you don’t need to save like 40 grand before embarking or be constantly looking for shitty low paid work in small towns as you go.
So anyway, I was supposed to be working the weekend of Nyx spring equinox, but the weather at the wind farm was absolutely atrocious and they sent me home early on the Thursday afternoon. I flew back into Townsville on Thursday evening, which was still a good 3.5 hour drive away, with the festival due to start on the Friday morning. There was no way we could get our act together and make the drive on Friday, but checking over the website it seemed they did a reduced ticket price for turning up on the Saturday. I’m not sure if this is something Esoteric has ever considered? Selling just a Sunday/ Monday ticket for a reduced price? I do have to say, that if it wasn’t for the option to get a Saturday/ Sunday ticket, then we likely wouldn’t have gone as we were unable to make it there for the Friday. I guess Esoteric reaches capacity every year anyway with just the full weekend tickets so its likely not a very prudent option.
So we brought a ticket for the Saturday and drove up to the venue at Mungali Falls, on the Atherton Tablelands above Cairns. Beautiful countryside up here, very lush and green with large waterfalls dotted about all over the place, even at the end of the dry season. The festival itself backed onto one such waterfall, an epic backdrop for a dance party. Very small festival really, just the one stage and a few hundred people. It was pretty cool though. I got this bit of footage walking in to the site. You have to walk through that hut on the left and across this little bridge to get between the campgrounds and the dancefloor:
A few photos of the dancefloor and campsite:
And another small bit of footage during the night time, the trees looked great lit up in different colours around the place:
They are using this venue again for a New years eve party, possibly fairly risky that time of year what with the possibility of monsoon rains and all, but its a great venue. Feels like it could have done with a nice little chill out sound system either in that hut area or overlooking the grass near the waterfall playing some downtempo beats. Also, at night they had the waterfall lit up with a yellow light. It would look awesome to make this a colour changing light, cycling through red, blue, green etc. And maybe another one on the other side of the falls shining on higher up the falls. Wouldn’t be too much extra effort to set up and it would look great walking across that bridge.
Special mention also goes to this magnificent creature we found on the Saturday night. He’s a giant Hercules moth, the biggest species of moth in the entire world. You certainly don’t get insects like this down in Victoria. They only survive for around 10-15 days as they cant actually eat. They get all of their nutrition as a caterpillar and once they become a moth they just live off the fat stores until they can hopefully reproduce before they pass away. This one was very much on his last legs, but still an incredible thing to see out in the wild:
When we went up to Kuranda they have a large butterfly sanctuary with all kinds of species of butterflies flying about the place. Whilst they didn’t have any Hercules moths, they also have an incubation area full of caterpillars. This is one of the caterpillars which will eventually turn into a Hercules moth. He’s a big boy:
Despite having lived in Australia for 12 years now, the wildlife up here in the tropics feels very alien to me. Even the trees just feel that little bit more wild up here. I came across this absolutely awesome tree in Rockhampton botanical gardens. This is a banyan tree, a species of fig. The thing which makes this type of tree unique is that once its branches expand out from the trunk of the tree a certain distance, they start to send down vines spouting out of the branches. Once these vines reach the ground they take root and start to grow, eventually forming a secondary trunk for the tree, supporting the branch they grew from, often many metres away from the host tree. Theoretically these trees could just keep expanding like this indefinitely. This one in Rockhampton botanic gardens had very much been pruned to grow its secondary trunks in specific spots, but the effect was incredible. The first photo is the primary trunk, which doesn't exactly look too impressive, but in every one of the following photos, every vertical trunk you see is part of the same tree, and they all started off life as tiny vines sprouting out of one of the branches. If I had to pick myself a favourite ever tree that I've come across in this world, it would have to be this one:
I’ve got this one other small bit of footage from the NYX spring equinox, which shows the waterfall at the other end of the venue. This shows how high up we are here. Its essentially on a mountain plateau above the rainforest, very cool location. The bridge at the start of the video is the one you walk across to get to the dancefloor. This viewing platform was shut off during the festival (for understandable reasons), but I went and had a look on the Monday morning after it finished:
Its definitely a shame we didn’t make it to any other bush doofs up here, I think they would have a decent scene up here, with some cracking venues up in the rainforest. I was most surprised actually to see Esoteric announce that they were doing an event up these ways, in conjunction with the previously mention Nyx no less. The coincidence surrounding the announcement of this event couldn’t have been any more extreme for me actually. Esoteric and Nyx are doing an event in the Daintree rainforest, in Cape tribulation (although by the time I publish this the event will almost definitely have already happened). Cape Tribulation is one of the most iconic Australian destinations, nestled deep into the awesome Daintree rainforest, but on the coast. “Where the rainforest meets the reef” is the often used tourism slogan. The reason this was such a coincidence for me was that the very day it was announced, I was literally in Cape Tribulation, sat in the cafe just over the road from the venue they were going to use, drinking a coffee, thinking what an incredible place it was. What made this even more of a cosmically significant coincidence, was that not long after drinking my coffee, I snuck off into the Daintree rainforest to smoke a pipe of DMT.
I might just take this opportunity to talk about DMT, as it is a substance of great fascination of mine since coming to Australia. Although I had heard of it before, its not something I had experienced before coming here. And in fact it is the most Australian drug you will come across.
The first thing that makes DMT a little unlike most other drugs, is just how common it is in the natural world. Cocaine comes from one solitary type of leaf, Psilocybin comes from no more than 10 or 15 very specific breed of mushrooms worldwide, but DMT however is contained in literally hundreds upon hundreds of plants (although in the vast majority of these it is in minuscule proportions). The Human brain contains and produces small quantities of DMT, along with the brains of most of the living creature for which it has been tested. Its abundance in nature is staggering, although it is a mystery what purpose it holds.
DMT is most famous for its use in Ayahuasca, the herbal concoction that shamans in the Amazon rainforest prepare out of a specific type of tropical vine. DMT is the principle psychoactive compound inside Ayahuasca. It is because of its widespread use in this regard that people assume it is only contained within certain tropical plants deep in the amazon rainforest. So it may come as some surprise to hear that of the 50 highest known DMT containing plants in the world, over half of them are in Australia. And we aren’t talking about super rare, hard to find exotic plants or small grasses that you need to scourer the depths of the rainforest to find. There are several species of acacia, or wattle trees, on the the list. These are incredibly common trees all over Australia. I have a massive one in my back garden, almost 7 or 8 metres tall (definitely not a psychoactive variety however). Australia’s national floral emblem is the golden wattle, and there are pictures of various species of wattle on every single one of Australia’s bank notes. I’m not entirely sure how common the high DMT containing ones are as I’m not sure how to identify them, but its entirely feasible that there are suburban streets in inner city Melbourne and Sydney which are lined with DMT containing trees. Its a substance that is ingrained into the very fabric of the country.
It must be said that you’re not exactly going to go on a mind bending trip from chewing on the leaves of these trees, even the highest containing ones are only around 0.9% DMT by weight. But when you are talking about entire trees weighing up to hundreds of kilograms, then 0.9% becomes quite a significant amount. Seeing as pure DMT sells for around $300 per gram over here, there are undoubtedly single trees in a residential street near you worth in excess of half a million dollars. If you were to ring up your local drug enforcement agency and tell them that there is several kilograms of DMT in your street I’m sure they would be around pretty sharpish. If upon getting there you explained to them that said DMT was in fact in the form of a tree, they’d probably be pretty pissed off. Although technically you wouldn’t have been lying to them.
The next thing thats strange about DMT, especially considering how common it is, is that this isn’t some mild, caffeine like herbal-high that you might buy from a legal high store somewhere. DMT is the most powerful hallucinogenic drug known to mankind. Far eclipsing the psychedelic power of LSD or psilocybin, especially when smoked in a pure form. I’m unsure of how the strength of Ayahuasca compares as I’ve never tried this myself. Something about a large group of people vomiting continuously for the first hour or two kind of puts me off doing it (Ayahuasca almost certainly will make you vomit repeatedly for the first hour of the trip as it is taking effect). I’m sure the “purging” is a significant part of the spiritual experience, but its not something I’ve viewed with any enthusiasm. To put the difference in highs of Ayahuasca and pure DMT into perspective you could liken it to cocaine; Ayahuasca would be akin to eating unprocessed coca leaves (although this isn’t an entirely fair comparison as it is prepared along with other plants acting as inhibitors to stop your body processing the DMT, making it stronger), whereas DMT would be akin to smoking crack cocaine; the pure, ultra refined, crystallised molecule which gives the leaves its effect. DMT could very much be seen as the crack cocaine of the psychedelic world; a ferociously potent and powerful, but surprisingly short lasting high.
Which brings me to the next strange thing about DMT, how incredibly short lasting it is. Every other known psychedelic substance takes an hour or more to take affect, and the high lasts for several hours before tailing off slowly. DMT however is all over and done in not much longer than 5 minutes, leaving you feeling completely back to normal within 10 minutes or so. This is remarkable considering just how insane those 5 minutes are. You couldn’t ever explain it in words to someone just how strong this stuff is. The level of visuals and colourful fractals is incomprehensible. The thing which really got me the first time trying it however wasn’t just the colours and patterns, but the speed of them. It’s something I’d not really considered before, how the speed of the visuals changes with how strong the dose is. With a low (but still visually psychedelic) dose of magic mushrooms there is a slow oozing and breathing of shapes and colours, particularly around natural, rounded shapes like the patterns on tree bark or clouds. As you increase the dosage, the level of different colours and movement also increases, as does the speed of the movement. With LSD the visuals are a lot more jagged and fractal like, and again the more you take, the faster the colours and patterns will move. With DMT, not only is the level and range of colour massively ramped up, but the shapes and patterns are moving so fast around you it feels like being blasted out of a cannon into a world of pure psychedelia, like you’ve been shot through an infinite plane of kalaedescopes, all moving and tessellating unfathomable fast as you fly through them, entire hillsides and landscapes disintegrating into an unimaginable array of brightly coloured fractals and spirals, whistling past your head at lightspeed and cascading off into the distance. Its definitely not a substance for the faint hearted.
It was given the rather amusing moniker of “the business mans trip” in the 90s, on account of the fact that you could quite easily smoke a pipe of DMT in your lunch break from work, experience the most mind bending psychedelic trip imaginable, and then be completely back to normal in time to pop back into the office to carry on balancing bookkeeping accounts. I’m not really sure just how many businessmen in suits are leaving their gleaming glass skyscrapers to go and sit in the local park, smoke a pipe of DMT and watch the entire city crumble around them into a geometric world of tessellation's, before cheerfully carrying on their day, but I don’t think there can be many of them.
Although I had heard of DMT back in England, and indeed knew a handful of people who had taken it, there was a definite level of fear and apprehension surrounding it from my group of friends. “DMT? Ooo, Nick went on a bad one on that you know, must be strong stuff, I’d stay away from it.” Was a very common phrase I repeatedly heard. We had a friend Nick who was an extremely experienced tripper who had tried it and had indeed got very freaked out by it. The part of the story which everyone neglected to tell however was the fact that Nick had been up for the best part of a couple of days taking a huge range of substances, and for his first DMT trip he had chosen to take it in the lounge room of a squat, at nighttime, with 10 or so other people sitting around him in armchairs and couches, asking him and quizzing him on what was happening as he was undergoing it. This sounds like just about the worst situation for a DMT trip I could imagine, and I’m not surprised it freaked him out. I’m going to contrast this with the story and location of my first DMT trip, as it’s a pretty entertaining story which I’ve never got down into words before, and now seems like a good opportunity.
Way back when me and Andi first got together in 2013, we planned a road trip over to Esperance, in Western Australia. Again, for the benefit of those of you in Europe, this is a fucking long way. Around 3000km each way from Melbourne to be exact. The thing which makes this journey so momentous however isn’t just the great distance, its the fact that you have to “cross the Nullarbor”.
The Nullarbor is another one of those iconic Australian landscapes that makes you realise just how small you are and how vast this place is. The Nullarbor plain is a region which crosses the border of Western Australia and South Australia along the south coast of the country. Any drive between the cities of Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney on the East and Perth on the West will have to cross the Nullarbor (unless they are taking a VERY long way around or doing some serious off-roading). The Nullarbor plain is actually only quite a small portion of this journey, maybe 10 or 15% of the distance between Sydney and Perth, but the journey from East to West is always referred to over here as “crossing the Nullarbor”, indicating that it is something of note. Below is a map of Australia with the Nullarbor plain highlighted:
The word Nullarbor comes from the Latin “null” meaning no, and “Arbor” meaning tree. No tree is a pretty apt description for it. It might come as a bit of a surprise to those of you in the UK, but the outback in Australia is actually covered in trees. In my general ignorance before I came here I kind of assumed the centre of Australia was a huge sand desert, something like the Sahara. Whilst there are sand deserts within Australia, the vast majority of it is actually covered in trees and shrubs. This came as a bit of a surprise to me when I first started flying into remote areas for mining work. Standing at the top of tall structures in the processing plants looking out over it it looked like a sea of green in every direction, despite the furnace like conditions.
The Nullarbor however contains little more than a few ankle height shrubs. Low lying saltbush and very hardy small succulents are just about the only things that survive around here. This is due to the fact that the Nullarbor is comprised of limestone bedrock with virtually no top soil which nothing can grow in. The Nullarbor is in the Guinness book of world records as the biggest single piece of limestone in the entire world. It covers an area of 270,000km2. To put this number into perspective; the land area of the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland) comes in at around 245,000km2. So this single piece of featureless rock is significantly larger than the entire British isles.
The Nullarbor was once a seabed, and so is as flat as the eye can see in every direction, aside from the dramatic drop off into the ocean along the southern edge of it. This drop off into the ocean marks what is called the “Great Australian Bight”. A bight is simply the name for a long, sweeping bay or curve in the coastline, but in this case it very much looks like some giant creature has taken a large bite out of the southern coastline of Australia. Its a pretty surreal sight standing on the cliffs that mark the edge of the Nullarbor. The cliffs are 60-80m high and a near enough straight drop into the crashing ocean below. No nice sweeping beaches and bays, and no way down to the water for hundreds of miles. If you were to fall off those cliffs, even if you survived the fall you’d have no hope of ever getting back up again. Definite “end of the world” vibes around here. And considering this is the last landmass to the south until you get to Antartica, it kind of is the end of the world. We got the obligatory photo along the cliff face looking into the ocean, although its not as clear as some of the ones I’ve seen online. The second photo here I’ve got our car on the top of the cliffs to help gauge the height of them:
But to really get a sense of the sheer vastness of the Nullarbor and the dramatic cliff face which signifies the edge of the world down here you really have to get a shot from the air. I didn’t take this photo, but this conveys it very well. I particularly like that you can make out the Highway going along the tops of the cliffs. Although this photos makes it look like a sandy dirt track, this is in fact a very wide tarmac highway with large gravel hard shoulders either side that the enormous road trains that frequently ferry goods between the two halves of Australia can easily pass each other and also pull over whenever they feel the need.
You could call this place one of the worlds great wildernesses, but personally I’ve always felt that a wilderness is teaming with life. I’m not sure of the exact dictionary definition, but the “wild” in wilderness has always signified to me an overgrown and unkept area full of wildlife and nature. The Nullabor is almost the exact opposite of this; a place so devoid of life, plants or anything that it kind of inspires a quiet awe of its own. Bear in mind when looking at this photo that you can maybe see a couple of hundred square kilometres at most in this picture, so the Nullarbor would be around 1000 times bigger than this, but equally flat and lifeless the whole way through. In fact, the coastal area is seen as the most green and life filled bit, when you get further inland is when it gets really baron:
The sections where the main road heads further inland are where you feel the enormity of the plain whilst you are driving along. Looking in every direction, as far as the horizon, just this unceasing, uniform plain that looks the same in every direction. It’s something of a novelty when you’re cursing along in a car travelling at 110km/h with the air conditioning set on full, but you can’t help but wonder how utterly demoralising it would have been for early Europeans attempting to cross it on Horseback.
Its worth considering that although people always mention the Nullarbor as a particularly harsh environment, the few hundreds of kilometres either side of it are not exactly lush areas of rainforest either. Its a very slow and long descent into the sparseness of the Nullarbor. In fact its pretty hard to ascertain exactly where it begins when travelling along the freeway. There is this very gradual but noticeable process of the trees getting smaller and smaller, and sparser and sparser over the course of many, many hours of driving until you eventually reach the start of the Nullarbor. This is a journey, even when travelling by car, not measured in kilometres or hours, but in days.
The Nullarbor was first crossed by a European in 1841, by British explorer Edward Eyre. In writing about his journey afterwards, he used the following phrase about the Nullarbor:
“It is a hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams”
Not exactly a glowing review. Eyre had a pretty hard time of his crossing. His first attempt was abandoned early on when three of his horses died from dehydration and he waited out the Summer in the aboriginal settlement of Yalata waiting for some cooler weather. The next attempt, undertaken with 3 aboriginal guides and one other European named John Baxter ended up in Baxters murder when a mutiny took place two months in over lack of water and provisions. Two of the aboriginal men killed Baxter and took most of the parties supplies and disappeared into the desert. Eyre carried on with the third aboriginal in what must have been a very uneasy remainder of the journey, eventually arriving safely in Albany 4 months after leaving.
They largely survived through the Nullarbor by collecting morning dew and sucking the moisture out of succulents. As improbable as it sounds for an area larger than the British isles, there is not a single source of water anywhere on the Nullarbor. Not even slightly lower divots where rain collects after heavy rainfall. The area is comprised of a porous piece of cracked limestone, what little rain does fall here soaks straight into the ground and down to the water table. Nothing stays on the surface.
The early explorations of Australia by Europeans must have been so demoralising. The thing which makes all of their expeditions so much worse is the fact that they were all absolutely convinced that there was some huge inland sea and green, fertile grazing pastures hidden within the centre of Australia. The enormity of Australia around the edge had been known for decades as numerous people had mapped the coastline all around it. But it was inconceivable to the European mind that an island could be this fucking humongous and not have other inland seas and islands within it. So during all the early expeditions this is what they were looking for; fertile green grazing pastures and idyllic seafront bays. One of Edward Eyres earlier expeditions before crossing the Nullarbor had him travelling in towards the centre through South Australia along the Flinders ranges in search of this mythical inland sea. He eventually ended up in what is now known as the Simpson Desert. Of all the hostile and wretched places you could wish to find yourself in Australia, the Simpson Desert would be one of the worst. To keep thinking to yourself that just over the next rise the landscape was going to change and you were going to discover a lush paradise, but instead over a course of days and weeks, it just kept on getting hotter, and hotter, and drier and drier, until you eventually ended up in one of the most inhospitable deserts in the entire country must have been absolutely soul destroying. I’m amazed he had the fortitude to tackle the Nullarbor after such an expedition.
Despite the harsh conditions there are a number of people etching a living out on the Nullarbor. The most visible of these as you are competing the journey are the people manning the roadside service stations spread out every few hundred kilometres along the highway. These are reasonably large places considering their locations. Obviously there’s no 20 pump BP petrol stations with a McDonalds and a KFC attached, but each one generally contains a very basic cafe, a small motel and a small caravan park out the back, and you usually encounter at least 5 or 10 vehicles at each one. Fuel prices are roughly double what you would pay in a city, and rightly so. I would like to think that those people working and living out here are fairly compensated for their time. They are providing an absolutely essential service out here. This stretch of the country is far too large to cross on a single fuel tank of any vehicle, and multiple stops are usually necessary. We carried a 20L container of fuel with us to not have to rely on the expensive fuel out here but we needed to refuel at least twice at such roadhouses.
Other than this there is very little sign of life or human habitation along the Nullarbor. For the vast majority of it the only signs that Humans were ever here is one single trainline and one single road. That single road is no ordinary road however. This is part of “Highway 1”, a road network which forms a giant ring road around the entire country. It is listed in the Guinness book of world records as the longest single road in the entire world. To set out driving along it in one direction and carrying on until you eventually arrive back at your starting point would mean covering a distance of 14,500km (9000 miles). Again to put this number into perspective; the circumference of the earth around the equator is around 40,000km. So the length of Australia’s highway 1 if taken as a “as the crow flies” distance would get you more than one third of your way around the entire planet. Even using the regular road system and typing in destinations on google maps, 14,500km would get you from London to the far east coast of Russia, and a fair chunk of the journey back again. It’s a pretty long road. Map of highway 1:
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But whilst in the UK you wouldn’t dream of jumping in your car and driving to the east coast of Russia and back, this is the very journey we are undertaking at the moment around Australia. To be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up traveling double this distance. We are already at almost 18,000km and have only really just travelled up the east coast and back down again. The distance above only counts that one main road (which would be a very boring trip if you just stayed on it). Once you add on all the day trips out to gorges, isolated beaches, various trips into major cities, detours into the outback and other such ramblings its not unusual to log well over 40,000km travelling around this enormous country, which would get you the entire way around the equator and back to your starting point, if it was possible to do so.
Anyway, this was meant to be a story about DMT. For our first DMT trip we engaged on a road trip across the legendary vastness of the Nullarbor plain. All the way to Esperance, which is the first major town on the southern coast in Western Australia. An hour or so from Esperance there is a national park called Cape le Grand national park, which contains a beach and campground called Lucky Bay. Lucky Bay is routinely voted one of the best beaches in the world by various travel magazines, but because of its remoteness it is nowhere near as busy as other equally stunning beaches near major cities. Its characterised by fine white sands, a long sweeping bay of several kilometres, and the ultra friendly kangaroos which populate the area. Photos such as this one are often used in tourism ads for it:
Whilst kangaroos inhabit huge parts of Australia, including larger suburban parks inside major cities, I’ve never come across Kangaroos in the wild as tame as the ones at Lucky bay. These are photos from our trip of a mum with her joey still in her pouch, quite happy to hop right into our camp in search of food. Normally in most animals, mums with babies in tow are incredible cautious and skittish, and I’ve never managed to pat any kangaroo outside of an animal sanctuary before, but this Kangaroo seemed completely fine with being right inside our camp and having us taking turns in patting her. The kangaroos are definitely a defining characteristic of Lucky Bay:
There is an epic hike which traverses the various beaches, bays and hills of Cape le Grand national park, called the Cape le Grand coastal trail. Its a sizeable hike, around 20km one way, but only around 15km if you stop it at lucky bay. Its a hike we really wanted to do as its rated very highly. We didn’t exactly plan this trip around taking DMT, we very much just wanted to do the road trip across the Nullarbor, but we had purchased some DMT and a pipe to smoke it with not long before embarking on the trip so took this along with us. We also took a few tabs of acid with us that we had left over from a bush doof a few weeks before. Hallucinogenics and missions/ adventures through the countryside go very well together. Back in the UK these adventures were always a lot more casual and not exactly along organised trails, but in Australia you have some absolutely incredible landscapes to go on long rambling hikes whilst tripping on hallucinogens. I’ve been on many hikes tripping through the bush in Australia now. Some of these hikes are pretty lengthy and arduous, but with some draw dropping natural scenery, and far less chance of bumping into normal, non-tripping people. Its a glorious way to appreciate the countryside, I’d highly recommend it. The Cape le Grand coastal trail seemed perfect for such an adventure.
The only issue was that it was a one way hike, you needed to get to the far end of the hike. Normally people would band together to do this, leaving a car at either end, but considering our plans for this hike we didn’t really fancy teaming up with fellow campers in the campsite. There is a full time parks ranger based at Lucky bay campsite to manage the campsite. When we were there he was a delightful old guy living there in his caravan full time. We were talking about the hike and logistics of it when he said “I’ll just take you to the far end myself, jump in with me at 8am tomorrow morning and I’ll run you over there.” So thats exactly what we did, got up early the next morning and he drove us the 15km or so to the car park at the far end, giving us a rundown of the national park and the sites to see in the area. He was a lovely guy, and I must admit I did feel slightly dishonest and irresponsible as he cheerfully waved us away with a comment of “bye kids, have fun!”
“Oh we will!” we said back, clambering out of his car clutching our bag laden with powerful psychedelic substances, dropping a tab of acid each as soon as we hit the trailhead.
It was a fun hike to do on acid as it wasn’t just a plain trail. There was some light scrambling up rocks and slopes and a lot of it was just along rocky cliffs and through bushland which was interspersed with little white markers marking the way which you really had to look for. The rocky landscapes were stunning; picturesque views over the bays and out to various islands amongst the coastal scrub. 15km is quite a full on day-hike really, especially when that 15km climbs up various peaks and cliff faces and winds back down into soft sandy bays, with the majority of the trail not actually a track at all, and especially when you are under the influence of LSD and stop to marvel at the majestic landscapes and pretty things whilst on your travels. I’m amazed we took so many pictures actually considering we were on acid for the entirety of it. In this first photo we had already walked several kilometres; the starting point of the trail was the other side of the large hill towards the right in the distance, so we had already hiked over the top of that, over the hill in the middle of the photo, down into the bay and along the length of that sandy beach.
I remember the LSD being at its peak by the time we were at this point. We sat down on that rock for a good 10 or 15 minutes marvelling at the colours and patterns of the surf crashing and swirling around the bay below. Just to the left there you can see one of the small white markers which were dotted around the trail every hundred metres or so to indicate we were on the right track:
We eventually made it all the way back to the far end of Lucky bay, some 15km of hiking later. It took us the entire day as most of these photos are around sunset and we set out at around 9am in the morning. This is a nice photo of us, taken almost 12 years ago now at the far end of lucky bay, looking young, happy, stress (or kid) free, and very much still slightly high on acid:
This is the exact spot we chose for smoking DMT for the first time. Literally that exact rock. We sat on that rock, looking over one of the best beaches in the world at sunset, after hiking 15km, on the tail end of an LSD trip, and loaded up a pipe with DMT, the strongest psychedelic substance known to mankind.
The come up on it was almost instant. Shortly after exhaling the smoke, the world as we knew it ceased to exist, collapsing around us into vividly coloured chaos. The thing which made the sensation odd was that as were sitting on a beach with a crashing, messy surf all around us, the sound of the waves distorted into a high pitched whine after smoking the DMT, something akin to a high pitched jet engine firing up. It might sound like an odd reference, but the thing it reminded me of at the time was the scenes from star wars where they go into hyperspace. The previously stationary stars in their field of vision suddenly start accelerating rapidly towards them as blurry white lines, quickly vanishing behind them as they power their way through them, accompanied by the whine of the hyperdrive. Smoking that DMT felt a little like this, but instead of little white blurry lines advancing towards me, entire hillsides around lucky bay rose up, rippling and accelerating towards me, dissolving into an unimaginable array of brightly coloured fractals and spirals, whistling past my head at hyperspeed and cascading off into the distance. Accompanied by the high pitched whine of the waves it felt like being blasted at hyperspeed into a world of unthinkable kalaedoscpic colour.
Theres no way to explain just how vivid the visuals are on this, even to someone who has taken LSD. The amount of LSD you would need to take to experience even a fraction of the visual field of DMT would be an incredibly uncomfortable experience. And yet despite the insane strength of the visual part of it, my head felt almost entirely clear. With high doses of other psychedelics it can feel like your brain is tying itself in knots, confusion and disorientation can set in, but on DMT my head was in an almost meditative state, not really thinking of anything, just experiencing the ride. Just about the only thought I can remember thinking was “My God, this is incredible!” Theres not really any time for thinking about it, all you can do is hold on for dear life and take in the earth shattering visuals before it slams you straight back to reality almost as quickly. Very curious stuff.
Just another couple of photos of the sunset at Lucky bay. We took 3 or 4 doses of DMT that evening as the sun was going down, each just as mental as the last. It was an incredible backdrop to take it against in any case. I’m a bit disappointed I didn’t get a phot of the rest of the bay to the left, as the hills on that side come most of the way around the bay also and were significantly closer and higher than the ones in the distance, but I think I was just trying to get photos of the sunset. Anyway, the moral of the story story is; if you’re going to take DMT for the first time, don’t take it in a crowded squat at nighttime, go and find yourself a beautiful beach at sunset, or a mountaintop, or a remote rainforest. You’ll enjoy it so much more.
I’ve only brought DMT twice in my life. Once in 2013 just before this experience, and once just before the trip around Australia we are now currently on. It seemed like a good drug to take with us on our travels. Partly because theres some incredible landscapes out there to look at, but also because its so short lasting its quite easy to fit into your day. When you’ve got young kids its not really feasible to be undergoing long journeys into psychedelia. DMT however is quite easy to fit in. In fact, as a bit of a revision of the “businessman’s trip” moniker it seemed to pick up, I have another DMT marketing angle I thought up the other day;
“Hey, tired and exhausted parents, do you require a release from the stressful chaos that is raising young children? Evening glass of wine not quite cutting it, and not enough free time to take anything else? Do you crave a substance that can send you on an earth shattering journey into another world? Where the very fabric of reality crumbles around you into an impossible cornucopia of colour? A substance which has all the subtlety of being blasted out of a cannon into the most insane trip of your life, only to be brought crashing rapidly back to normality all in the time it takes your child to eat a light snack? If so, DMT may just be the drug for you.”
Disclaimer: I’m certainly not advocating that people smoke DMT whilst in full care of their children, this would be entirely irresponsible, but even the most time poor parents can usually arrange some kind of childcare for half an hour here and there.
Personally, when we’ve been camping in a suitably scenic and remote location, I’ve been setting my alarm early before the rest of my family wake up, and walking off to find some isolated headland to sit on and watch the sun rise out of the ocean whilst smoking a pipe of earth-melting DMT. It certainly wakes you up more effectively than any triple shot espresso ever could. I feel like its a fairly unique way of enjoying the scenery on our travels anyway, and when the time is right, when we finally make it into the dusty red centre, I hope to be able to gaze up at Uluru in all its majestic glory, preferably at sunrise or sunset, and smoke a fat pipe of DMT and watch the entire monolith dissolve into a maze of fractals and tessellation’s.
So anyway, back to what I was talking about; The Daintree was one of the places I had earmarked as a promising spot to smoke DMT. I seem to have always gravitated to beaches and bays and places with long sweeping views to smoke DMT, but something about the idea of getting deep into the cool darkness of a dense rainforest to smoke it really appealed to me. So after having my coffee at cape tribulation I snuck off into the understory of the Daintree, smoked a few pipes of DMT to commune with the forest and the machine elves, and the next time I picked up my phone later on that afternoon I saw the first announcement from Esoteric that they were doing a Queensland launch party at the very location I had been sat at only a few hours earlier. “Is this some kind of massive cosmic coincidence or what?” I found myself thinking. “Is this some kind of sign that I absolutely should be attending this event for whatever reason?” Unfortunately the event in question was still 6 weeks out at this point, and as nice as the Daintree is, 6 weeks would be a hell of a long time to kill up there. Plus we had already travelled up as far as Cooktown and were on our way back down, so couldn’t spend a few weeks doing that. And our plans were to get back to Melbourne in time for Christmas, we really couldn’t afford the time to hang around there waiting for it to happen unfortunately, so we had to give it a miss. I hope it went well though.
Its an incredible place the Daintree however, kind of the complete other end of the scale from the Nullarbor; an area so diverse and covered in life that it contains almost 30% of the different species of the entire country, and yet occupies only 0.12% of the land mass (this percentage rises to almost 90% of the countries bird and bat species.) Its said that every hectare (2.2 acres) of the Daintree contains more different plant species than the entirety of the United Kingdom. Its the oldest rainforest in the world, and one of the best preserved as most of it is still completely untouched and under a protection order. It was most disheartening going to the Taman Negara rainforest in Malaysia 15 years or so ago, also one of the worlds oldest, and seeing just how much of it has been cut down for palm plantation. Hours and hours of driving through nothing but palm plantations just to get to the small patch of it which is left. The Daintree has been protected since the 1980s however so most of it is still intact, and in fact the areas which have previously been cleared, a lot of it is being replanted and left to turn back into rainforest again. Hopefully this continues as its a unique area that needs preserving. There is an awesome information centre inside the Daintree rainforest, called the Daintree discovery centre. Its kind of a museum all about the Daintree, but its very much nearly all open air and set on multiple different raised platforms and walkways which take you through different levels of the rainforest. You get given an audio guide book which tells you all about the rainforest, explaining different plants and habitats as you are walking around them. Its very good. The entry price gives you a week long ticket and as we were staying not far from it we went down on three different days and got different things out of it each time.
I’ve got somewhat sidetracked here. I believe I started out talking about the food offerings at Esoteric, and somehow ended up with smoking DMT in the Daintree. One thing that I missed out from my blog of last year was all the various theme camps dotted around the campgrounds. These are mini venues set up within the campgrounds by groups of attendees. At some point on Friday afternoon we made an effort to bike around all of these and actually come back with photos this time. The closest one to us was “the Citrus Union Nice Time Soiree” (or C.U.N.T.S for short). It was missing the weird entrance where you had to clamber through a tunnel around the back of a large bus which they had last year, which I felt was a bit of a shame. I’m always a fan of tunnels and hidden places to climb over and explore at music festivals. Again a bit more live music/ cabaret type stuff going on at this one:
Goldrush was the next one we came to, this was the largest of such theme camps, although not very busy when we passed through:
This one was called magic mothership:
And finally Lovelution. This one was the closest to the actual festival, not far from Moby dicks, and was often the most busy. Didn't get any photos, but got this bit of video footage:
Friday night was spent comparatively chilled, and then Saturday came the first of the really hot, 40 degree days. We did very little this day, that kind of heat really saps the life out of you. The plus side of it being this hot in the day was that it was still warm enough at night that you could comfortably walk around in shorts and t-shirt, there was no need for jumpers and pants. But I would much rather it was more manageable in the day time and just to change my clothes at night. Obviously this is completely out of the control of anyone and you just have to deal with whatever mother nature throws at you out here on the edge of the desert. As explained before, the festival site is nicely shaded for the most part, and the sprinklers around the dance floors definitely helped keep them cool, but it was a little hard walking around the place in that heat. It made us consider the possibility of bringing our kids here next time, I think they would become very grouchy and tired walking around in that, especially without the lagoon to cool down in. Our one saving grace in this heat was this fantastic pressurised shower bag we brought not long before the festival. I’m not sure how much we paid for it, but it paid itself off during the festival alone for sure. We were having cold showers 2 or 3 times per day, pretty much every time we went back to our camp. The good thing about this one rather than the standard bag ones is that you can leave it on the floor, pressurise it with a foot pump and the water just comes out a hand nozzle on a pipe, so that the whole bag doesn’t have to be placed above your head to use it. Survival tip for next year, get yourselves one of these (and definitely keep it out of the sun!):
We did attempt some of the more chilled out sessions/ workshops during the day, this lady with the harp was particularly relaxing, although again her gentle strumming was somewhat offset by the snakepit banging out bass music and not far from it:
At some point on the Saturday morning I ate some food from another venue worth mentioning, there is however a long and meandering story surrounding it: There is one kind of establishment from the UK which you cannot find anywhere in Australia and at times (very rare times it must be said) I do kind of miss - The “Greasy Spoon” cafe. Make no mistake, these are not quality establishments, but then thats entirely the point. Its not often that I wish for one of these places, but certainly in my days as a hungover backpacker not long after arriving to Australia there were mornings when I searched high and low for one but could not find one anywhere. Essentially a greasy spoon cafe prioritises quantity over quality and will serve you a full English breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, hashbrowns all fried up in one massive grease filled pan, served with 2 pieces of toast and including a cup of tea, for the steal of like 6 or 7 pounds, which is not much over 12 dollars. You cant even buy Jam on toast in most Australian cafes for $12. To be honest, I’m not sure if they are still this cheap anymore what with inflation and cost of living crisis and all that bullshit, but in any case I remember being exceedingly alarmed by the cost of a cooked breakfast when I first got to Australia. Yes, its nice to have an individual basil leaf grilled into my tomato, and that artisan, sourdough toast with olive oil and Dukka spices is fantastic, and sure the rarebreed, pork and fennel sausages are exquisite, but is all this really necessary? And do I honestly have to pay $29 just for breakfast? And then still need to buy a coffee on top of that. Some mornings I would just love it if you could pop down to Costco, get some cheap ass bacon, sausages, eggs and white bread and fry me something up really filling for like half that price. But there is literally nowhere you can get this in Australia. This is by no means a critique of the food over here of course. Australian cafe, food and general attitude towards produce and food is head and shoulders above anything in the UK, but on the rare occasion I do find myself hungover in a backpackers dorm (which to be fair hasn’t happened in 10 years), it would be nice for a cheap, shitty option.
The closest thing to a greasy spoon cafe you have in Australia however is a scene so hilariously Australian I don’t think you realise quite how stereotypical it is: The Bunnings sausage sizzle.
Bunnings is an Australian hardware store, much like B&Q warehouse would be in England. Every Saturday and Sunday outside every Bunnings up and down the country they will have a little marquee by the entrance with a barbecue set up underneath selling cheap sausages wrapped in basic white bread for 4 or 5 dollars apiece. These makeshift BBQ marquees are usually ran by a local scout group or some other local charitable organisation to raise funds. They will usually be staffed by young kids or delightful old retirees who will happily tell you all about their cause whilst they serve you fresh barbecued sausages. Although generally referred to as a Bunnings sausage sizzle, you can get these at most large shopping centres on the weekend around Australia. I find it highly amusing that you can just stop off for a quick BBQ’d sausage whilst doing your DIY shopping at the weekend, it plays into the Australian stereotype of BBQs and beaches so well. We’re in Australia, of course there are BBQs stationed outside every shopping centre.
What I find even more amusing however about the stereotype of Australian BBQs is the fact that there are publicly available BBQs in pretty much every single large park and beachfront up and down the country. Again, this won’t come as any kind of surprise to those of you within Australia as its such a common part of Australian life that it seems entirely normal, but those of you back in the UK will find it amusing I’m sure. Essentially these BBQs just consist of a simple metal hotplate and a single on/off button, mounted into a stainless steel workbench. There is a locked gas bottle underneath which ignites when you press the button and is set on a timer. These are maintained by the council and are free for use in pretty much every major park and beachfront around Australia. This is a nation that takes its BBQing very seriously. God forbid you should find yourself in a park on a nice sunny day and not have the facilities to fry yourself up a quick steak if you feel the need. I just don’t feel like these would work in the UK at all. I think the various cash strapped councils would leave them to run out of gas and rust away, whilst bored teenagers would vandalise and break into them to steal the gas bottles and blow shit up with them. These have become such a fascination of mine that I’ve started taking pictures of some of the more scenic ones on our travels around Australia:
The best BBQ station I’ve found so far however has been in Yeppoon, in Queensland. This bad boy had 6 different hotplates to use, all in a nice tropical style gardens. I can imagine these gardens are a hive of activity during sunny weekends:
Yeppoon foreshore deserves a special mention of its own. Its the kind of small town, beachfront foreshore that makes you wonder what the hell you’re doing living in the suburban sprawl of a massive metropolitan city when you could just as easily be living in a place like this. Tropical paradise vibes going on here for sure:
The crown jewel of Yeppoon’s foreshore however is the infamous “Yeppoon Lagoon”; a massive, free to use, infinity swimming pool overlooking the main beach and river estuary of Yeppoon. Its fantastic that this place is completely free to use and open to the public all year round. You’ll notice that its almost completely empty when we went, as this was during the “winter”, when temperatures were a positively bone chilling 20 degrees up there. Its funny, I got chatting to an old woman the next day as I was walking along the beachfront dressed in a singlet. “You must be from Victoria. Only Victorians dress like that up here this time of year.” She opened with, as she squeezed her thick down jacket tightly around her:
Large public swimming pools like this are somewhat common up here in tropical northern Queensland (although Yeppoon’s was the nicest one we came across). Most major towns/ cities have a free to use public pool of some kind, which is fantastic of the councils up here to provide such a facility, but then the downside of areas with such facilities is that these are provided because we are now in “Croc country”. Yeppoon and Rockhampton mark the lowest point where you are likely to find saltwater crocodiles in Australia. The saltwater crocodiles also go hand in hand with venomous Jellyfish. So from here on further North, although the beaches look absolutely stunning, and the temperatures and humidity are stifling, you cant really go in the ocean or river estuaries anywhere without the very real risk of facing an incredibly violent and painful death. People from England always ask if all the venomous and dangerous creatures bother me. And my answer is always, no they don’t at all. Whilst they are out there and are potentially deadly, they will do their damndest to just stay well the hell away from you. If you do come across some kind of snake or spider, they will just slowly back away and try to get out of your way.
The only creature that genuinely scares me in this country however, is the saltwater crocodile (affectionately known as “Salties” over here). Rather than do their best to stay away from you, these fuckers will actively track you, hunt you, and eventually ambush you and drag you down onto the riverbed with them until you drown. Even the sharks in the ocean (of which there are many) generally mean you no harm. They often bite people mistaking them for seals, and spit them out when they realise their mistake. They don’t want to kill you. The salties on the other hand; you are nothing but prey to this creature. Completely un-evolved in 200 million years because they have no need to change; they’ve been the absolute apex predator in this country since the time of the dinosaurs. A perfect hunting and killing machine, incredibly fast and agile in the water and yet weighing up to 800kg, they are not to be underestimated in any way. The most unnerving thing about them is that they are an “ambush predator.” These aren’t just giant lizards laying around sunning themselves on rocks out in the open. Every river and beach we’ve been to in northern Queensland we’ve looked for, and failed to find, crocodiles. You will almost never see a crocodile in the wild, but they are there for sure, watching you. They lurk in muddy, cloudy water, just their eyes poking above the surface, watching, waiting, and stalking. Ready to launch themselves several metres out of the water to drag any unsuspecting animal or person into a watery grave. Obviously people aren’t being dragged to their deaths everyday up here, its quite a rare occurrence, but still a distinct possibility anywhere you go near the water.
So its because of this very real threat of salties pretty much anywhere that councils all over northern Queensland build huge free swimming pools to use to stop bored kids swimming in rivers and getting dragged to their deaths. And even if you are happy to risk the crocodiles in the open ocean (they generally hang out around river estuaries, although have been known to occasionally venture into the open ocean) then for 6 months of the year you definitely cannot go in the sea anyway as it is full of tiny, deadly jellyfish, which are almost completely unavoidable.
Although we didn’t manage to see any crocodiles up north, we did find a significantly rarer and more illusive creature which only inhabits small parts of far north Queensland; the cassowary. The cassowary is a large flightless bird, the third largest species of bird in the world after ostriches and Emus. But whereas Emus inhabit quite sizeable parts of Australia, Cassowaries are only found in a small sliver of land along the far north east coast of the country. They were a creature that we were hoping to find on our travels. We stayed in a lovely little town called mission beach just after the NYX spring equinox party, again, massive topical paradise vibes coming from this place, but it is also known as one of the best areas to find cassowaries. Unlike the more common Emus, Cassowaries are notoriously aggressive and unpredictable, with attacks on humans fairly common. They have really sharp claws on their massive feet which they will use to slice at people if they feel threatened, or if they just think you might have food for them. Upon speaking to locals about best places to find them we often got strange looks and comments such as “are you sure you want to find one? Don’t go anywhere near it if you do, they’re crazy.” We definitely did want to try and track one down however, and went for a series of early morning hikes and drives through parts of the rainforest they were known to inhabit, but without any luck. Then on our fourth day in mission beach, we had given up on the early morning walks and were just hanging around the caravan park for a day when one walked right through the middle of our camp. We spotted this one 2 or 3 times over the next day or two. So if you are looking to try and view cassowaries, I wouldn’t bother with early morning hikes through remote rainforest, just check yourself into the big 4 at south mission beach and ask for a spot near the back where the rainforest starts as they seem to have one which lives there:
Now that I’m basically an Australian, I get to engage in the great Australian past time of freaking everyone out with the terrifying and deadly wildlife we have here. I certainly take great glee in reposting this photo to my Facebook feed whenever the memory comes up. As any Australian will tell you, this is a huntsman spider, and we actually quite like these ones. They aren’t venomous and in fact will hunt and kill all of the other more deadly spiders. “So we often keep them in our homes as pets”, is the lie that often gets told to startled foreigners. Its more like if you do get one of these in your house you have a very low likelihood of catching and removing it as these fuckers are faster than you would possibly believe when provoked, able to scale a wall in your house from top to bottom in a couple of seconds. This particular one I found on the car door after I had just driven 20 minutes, so he was inches away from my leg for all of that 20 minute journey. Just for scale, that round thing above him is a car door speaker, so this lovely little creature is about as big as my hand:
Anyway, I’ve got sidetracked again here. I was talking about the Bunnings sausage sizzle and local community organisations raising money by way of selling sausages from a marquee. At Esoteric they had one such local organisation; the Donald Lions club. Sure, this wasn’t the fanciest food available at the festival, but it was quick and easy and cheap (Esoterics version of that “greasy spoon cafe”). On my first morning at Esoteric I purchased a bacon and egg roll from the Uruguayan steak house. Whilst it was a very tasty bacon and egg roll, complete with a seeded brioche bun and some kind of handmade tasty chutney, it took nearly half an hour to get served, and cost me $16. The lions club marquee had a simple bbq hotplate set up which was bulk cooking bacon and eggs and putting them in ready made sandwiches under hotplates so they could just be grabbed instantly. Sure it was made with the simple white bread and generic sauce bottles you’d see at a sausage sizzle, but there was just as much bacon and egg in there as the steakhouses, it was 40% cheaper, available instantly, and was served to you by a group of delightful old retirees whose average age was probably around 70, and who looked completely out of place and mildly terrified to be set up no more than 20 metres from a massive, psychedelic Sun temple pounding out psytrance for 18 hours a day. It would certainly have been a slightly different atmosphere to the local Bunnings which they would have been more accustomed to setting up shop in. But at least you also felt that your money was going back into the local community, which I’m sure helps garner favour among the Donald locals.
In fact, this seems to be something that Esoteric excels at; gaining favour within the local community. I read an excellent newspaper article in the weeks following the last festival. It has to be one of the most positive newspaper articles I’ve ever read on a music festival/ bush doof published by a mainstream news organisation (it was written by the ABC, Australia’s version of the BBC). Most mainstream articles regarding parties like this unfortunately centre on noise complaints, drug arrests, and a general intolerance for those weird, colourful hippies dancing in the bush. This article however revolved largely around interviews with members of the Donald Lions club and other Donald locals who worked at Esoteric, and it concentrated on how much it does for the local community and how much support it has within Donald. It was a very encouraging newspaper article to read, especially as quite far into the article it quietly comments that 43 people were arrested on drug charges. It would be incredibly easy (and lazy) journalism to lead with this fact and create some kind of moral outrage and sensationalism to try and gain clicks or views. Drugs are talked about quite a lot within the article, but more from a harm reduction perspective than a criminal one, which again is great to see from a mainstream news outlet. The full article is here, I would encourage everyone to read it (it’s not particularly long):
Esoteric festival support by Donald locals article
As if to reinforce this stance of support within the community I also stumbled across this second article, this one written by a local newspaper, The Buloke Times. This is the actual front page of their newspaper a few days after the festival, what a cracking photo and headline. This is without doubt a community that fully supports its weird, colourful hippies dancing in the bush on the edge of town:
The full article for the above newspaper can be found here:
Its very encouraging to see this level of local community support for Esoteric. I’m not sure if everyones ads are the same, but in that earlier ABC newspaper article that I posted I seem to be receiving 3 other headlines relating to various bushdoofs around Australia. All of them resoundingly negative and centring on noise and disturbance to the local community, who do not want them happening anywhere near their rural communities at all. So next time you’re at Esoteric, pop down to the lions club marquee, get yourself a bacon and egg sanger in the morning and have a friendly chat with the old guys there. I’m sure it will help the ongoing good relations with the town of Donald no end.
I like little country towns like Donald. I think to really get a feel for a country, you need to get out of the cities and explore small, regional country towns. This is where you find the real locals. One of the things I like about working in the wind turbine industry is being sent out to weird little towns in the middle of nowhere that I would never normally thought of visiting. Some of these are great (Mudgee, Inverloch), others, not so much (Wellington, Mortlake). In Australia however, no country town is weirder than Nimbin.
It’s a little unfair to compare Nimbin to any other country town really as it is quite unique within Australia. I’m unsure now if I had heard of Nimbin before I came to Australia or not. Certainly for many years I’ve heard of its reputation as “the Canabis Capital of Australia”, but really knew absolutely nothing about it, other than they smoke a lot of Canabis there. I wasn’t really expecting much, and to be honest wasn’t exactly impressed by it when we went, but what piqued my interest was looking into the history of it after we left. This blog would have actually been released a week or so before this, I had it complete well before Christmas and was in the final stages of editing the photos and videos when we stopped through Nimbin in mid December. Upon looking into the history of Nimbin however I felt like I really needed to add the following story of Nimbin.
In the early 1970s Nimbin was a dying dairy town. Half the shops in the high street were boarded up, the once busy butter factory had closed down, even the small hospital there had shut its doors as all the doctors had left town. Young people were leaving in their droves and the council was close to bankruptcy. Then in 1973 the town was approached by the Students Union of Australia looking at the possibility of holding a large music festival there. Nimbin wasn’t their first choice, several other towns had already turned the festival down, but seeing as they didn’t have much else to lose, the town of Nimbin chose to accept the offer of holding a music festival in their town. That festival was known as “the Aquarius festival”, and this single event is widely credited with starting the counter-cultural hippie movement in Australia.
The emergence of counter culture and the hippies in America is a period of great interest to me. I’ve read numerous books and watched various documentaries on the subject, and even written long sections on it in previous blogs myself, but I’d never really given much thought to how it all evolved in Australia. By 1973 the Hippie movement in Europe and America was largely in its dying throes, but Australia always seems to be a half decade or so behind the northern hemisphere in cultural trends so was just about ready for it in 1973. Aquarius is often referred to as Australia’s Woodstock, but this isn’t really a very accurate comparison, as it wasn’t exactly a traditional music festival. The organisers were looking for a large Greenfield site to hold the festival on, much like Woodstock, but upon stumbling across Nimbin and its succession of abandoned and derelict buildings, they decided to make the town itself a part of the festival. A phrase that was used by one of the organisers was that they hoped to “recycle a town."
Various properties were either purchased outright by the festival or agreements were reached to use the vacant space as venues. Hundreds of volunteers descended on the town in the weeks before the festival and all of the shop fronts had colourful murals painted on them. The bakery was hired out for a month to produce “Hippie bread” (which was really just wholemeal bread, but its amusing how many interviews and accounts I’ve read on this from the 70s that refer to anything wholegrain as “Hippie food”). Even the disused hospital was reopened and staffed with festival medics. The area around Nimbin is really quite beautiful, it sits atop a small hill, surrounded by much larger hills and mountains covered in native rainforest, with a small valley and creek running along one edge of the town. Most of the camping was set up in the valley on the edge of town, or wherever people could fit, and the town itself became the festival site.
You have to imagine what a culture shock this must have been for the town of Nimbin at the time. The comparison between Esoteric and Aquarius would be quite a fitting one; both festivals were attended by somewhere around 5-10,000 people, and the towns of Donald and Nimbin at the time had populations of around 1,500. But where the two differ is that Esoteric is held a good 10 minute drive out of town, on a large private and secluded property, whereas Aquarius was literally set up in the town itself. Whilst the town of Donald no doubt experiences an influx of strange looking people wandering about the town for the few days the festival is on, the disturbance to everyday life and normal farming folk would have been nothing like Aquarius. Imagine setting up the Sun Temple in Apex park, installing various smaller venues inside empty shops up and down the Donald high street, and putting the campgrounds all around the edge of the town centre, along the Richardson river. Now imagine that instead of taking place over a public holiday weekend, the festival lasts a full 10 days (Aquarius lasted for 10 days). A week and a half with 10,000 people inhabiting the centre of a town of only 1,500, whilst local people are still trying to go about their business, then you can start to see what a culture shock this would have been for the dairy farmers of 1970s Nimbin.
Aquarius wasn’t exactly a normal music festival. Whilst there was music there, it wasn’t the full blown huge stage blasting out rock music that characterised Woodstock. There were theatre performances, poetry readings, craft workshops, but a lot of the impact and legacy from Aquarius was from the various talks and lectures. As this event was set up by the students union, a large section of the attendees were liberal students and intellectuals from universities in major cities around the country. There were large scale talks on communal living, anti-consumerism, environmental activism and permaculture, along with talks on canabis cultivation and psychedelics. Whilst this sounds almost exactly like the standard lineup in the amphitheatre at Esoteric, at the time these were pretty groundbreaking topics.
Where the legacy of Aquarius really differs from a regular music festival however is that once it ended after the 10 days, large cohorts of attendees decided that they really quite liked being in Nimbin, and decided not to leave. Coupled with the fact that the town was basically bankrupt and land and house prices were ridiculously cheap, large sections of the attendees, inspired by the talks on communal living at the festival, started up co-ops or communes and brought huge sections of land all around the town and started building makeshift settlements there to house everyone. The first one of these was known as the “Co-ordination co-operative”, which contained several hundred members who all pooled together and were able to buy 1200 acres of land in the next valley. This commune is still active today and contains 120 permanent houses, a community centre, a school and other such public buildings. This was the first such instance of a large scale private property co-operative being set up in Australia, and this inspired waves of other similarly minded people to converge on Nimbin, also buying up land and setting up their own communes.
This idea of communally buying up land and living together with a load of your mates interests me greatly, as many years ago we tried to do a similar thing. Back in the days of illegal rave organising we started our own co-op, known as the Community Collective. We were part of an organisation in the UK called Radical Roots, which could be seen as a co-op of co-operatives. It linked together co-ops and communes from all over the country, and had large scale meetings which were always held at one of the existing co-ops. These meeting usually went on for an entire weekend and discussed all manor of things such as sustainable living, obtaining funding and assistance setting up co-ops, social activism, and a whole host of other topics which wouldn’t have been out of place at either Aquarius festival or Esoterics Amphitheatre. We went to some amazing places, and it was very inspirational to see the properties that people had brought. And because we were widely known for organising illegal raves and had access to a large amount of sound equipment we were often invited to bring speakers along and provide a party on the Saturday night after all the formalities. We took sound systems to a range of places, including tower blocks in central London and a farm on top of a mountain in Wales. We were very much modern day “Techno Hippies” (complete with the dreadlocks and long hair) although I guess these events were 20 years ago now, so I can hardly call them modern day any more. Our dream was to buy our own plot of land, with a barn big enough to throw a small scale weekly rave, and all grow old together in our own alternative community.
Needless to say, this dream was never realised, because here I am in Australia. But it is still something that greatly interests me. And if I had known more about the founding of Nimbin and the history behind it whilst I was there then I would have viewed it through a different lens and maybe tried to track down one of these communes still living in the hills up there. Its quite cool really that the birth of counter culture in Australia can be traced to this one place. It’s also worth mentioning that Nimbin is tiny. The population today sits at a little over 3,000 people. For those of you back in Norfolk/ UK, this is significantly less than the village of Mulbarton, which has just over 4,000 residents (and also happens to be the small village where I largely grew up). Its funny how this small, isolated village in the hills, nowhere near any of the large cities of Australia holds such significance for the emergence of this culture. You can imagine the excitement for those early settlers of Hippie Nimbin though. Just to put it in context again for those of you back in Norfolk who were part of that early rave scene; imagine if after the Weybourne festival on the cliff tops back in 2004 we decided that we really quite liked Weyborne, and decided to just stay there. Then imagine that Weyborne was basically a bankrupt, derelict town and we were able to chip in together and buy up huge plots of land all around it for next to nothing and build up a community there. Then imagine that rave crews from all around the UK saw this and thought it was a great idea, and they all brought up plots of land as well and built other raving communities on joining properties, turning Weyborne into some kind of raving Mecca. It would have been awesome. This is kind of what happened to Nimbin in the 70s
And really, this culture translates directly to bush doofing culture. Whether it sits comfortably or not, bush doofers are very much modern day hippies. This is the current alternative, counter culture. With your colourful outfits, and your long hair, and your healthy vegan food, and your propensity for psychedelic drugs. These aren’t new fashions or ideals, but back in 1973 they were. Nimbin, Aquarius, and the birth of the hippie movement can very much be seen as the very start of the scene which eventually morphed into Esoteric. Pretty cool stuff.
Another lasting legacy from this movement was that of environmental activism. Not long after the formation of the co-ordination co-operative the forestry commission had earmarked a large section of rainforest near Nimbin for logging. The co-ordination co-operative set up the first large scale protest against such activities, creating a lot of media attention around the destruction of rainforests in Australia. This lead to the formation of the nearby Nightcap nation park, protecting the rainforest in question from logging. But more importantly than that, this was the first time that anyone had stood up to the forestry commission and essentially won the battle, and it happened very publicly. This inspired later protests when logging began in the Daintree in the early 1980s, again these protests were victorious and the Daintree was sparred and protected. So you can thank those dirty, tree hugging hippies from Nimbin for the fact that the Daintree is as pristine as it is.
Which brings me to the modern day version of Nimbin, the “Canabis capital” of Australia. It’s no secret that Hippies and Canabis go hand in hand, and this huge influx of alternative people to the area brought this with them. Although I was a little surprised to find out that the first canabis/ hemp based shop in Nimbin wasn’t set up until 1992, almost 20 years after the hippies arrived, the Hemp Embassy. It seems that most of the shops in town these days in some way mention hemp or canabis in their shops. Although it feels like a lot of these are just cashing in on the trend in town. I do like how shops such as the hemp embassy and the northern rivers hemp co-operative promote different uses of Hemp. I’m not sure if this comes as a surprise to anyone, but Hemp is a fantastically versatile material. It can be made into paper, rope, clothing, plastics, even concrete (Hempcrete). All of these products have a fraction of the carbon footprint of the more common alternatives and are largely sustainable. Its likely we would be using them all a lot more regularly were it not for the 50 year blanket ban on hemp as governments around the world were unable to distinguish non-psychoactive and highly productive hemp from the psychoactive canabis which got you stoned.
Thats obviously not to say that the psychoactive version is ignored in the town. There were at least a couple of the cafes around town which were as thick with weed smoke as any coffee shop in central Amsterdam. Which is slightly odd, as it is still very much a criminalised substance in New South Wales, and there is a small police station on the edge of town. Its a little telling that one of Nimbins sister cities is Freetown Christiania, the squatted army barracks in the centre of Copenhagen where weed is sold quite freely in the streets that I mentioned in my last Esoteric blog (Nimbins second sister city is in fact Woodstock). Perhaps much like the government in Copenhagen the local government here just accept that its such an identity of the town that there’s no point trying to suppress it and they just turn a blind eye to casual canabis use in the town.
As a town which was essentially brought and occupied by Hippies 50 years ago, its unsurprisingly a fairly colourful place. Here are a few photos of the various colourful shop fronts around Nimbin. There are no photos signs inside nearly all of the shops, so I didn’t get any photos inside them (aside from one of the rather alternative reading material inside one of the book shops):
And a few more photos trying to capture the rainforest covered hills around the town:
Its certainly a visually pleasing place, but personally, I felt there was something edgy about the vibe around town. I was offered harder drugs 3 times in the street just during the 15 minutes I strolled around on my own without my kids. Admittedly I was wearing my Esoteric Esorverse psychedelic singlet and probably looked like a prime target for the peddling of such wares, but we met up with a friend of ours in Lennox heads the next day who said she was offered drugs in the street there when she was pregnant. There are also certainly a fair number of people sleeping rough in makeshift tarpaulin shelters on the street just behind the highstreet, and a number of people around the town who look like they are engaging in substances significantly harder than canabis. Its quite telling that there are large informative posters in all the public toilets around town which detail exactly what to do if someone is overdosing on heroin.
When we went to the previously mentioned Kuranda up in the rainforest above cairns, where Aya Earthfoods have their market stall, that too felt like a very hippie town, and I definitely smelt the familiar whiff of ganja in the air on at least a couple of occasions, but it didn’t have the same rough around the edges feel that Nimbin had. I guess this is what became the hippy dream for a lot of people; the ability to not have to work, sleep rough, and take and sell drugs to people every day. Personally I’m much more interested in the communal living, health food eating, alternative music and environmentalism aspects of the hippie movement (plus maybe just a little bit of the mind altering substances). It was an interesting place to visit, but its certainly not somewhere I would want to raise my kids.
2023 saw the 50 year anniversary of Aquarius festival, and a documentary all about Aquarius has very recently been created and shown at various film festivals. There is an outdoor cinema on the edge of Nimbin which was showing this documentary twice per week, although we didn’t get to see it. I’ve tracked down the trailer for it, posted below, but would be pretty keen to see the movie when it gets a wider release. It’s an interesting piece of Australian history:
Somewhat of a central story of our last journey to Esoteric 23, was the LSD trip we underwent on the Saturday night. This was pretty much the best psychedelic experience I’ve ever had, certainly the best LSD I’ve ever had in my life in any case. (Its worth reading this section of my last blog just for this story). We were understandably quite keen to relive that experience from last year. Contacts were exchanged and this year I had arranged to buy 10 tabs from the same person as last year. Obviously not with the intention of taking all 10 at Esoteric, but my thinking being that if I’m ever going to take LSD again in my life, I want it to be of a similar calibre to stuff we took at Esoteric 2023. It being a year later it wasn’t the same batch, but I was assured it was the same strength and just as good. We stuck with our plan of taking it around 6pm on the Saturday, as that also seemed to work very well last year; We got to watch the sunset in the early stages of the acid, had an incredible night tripping and still got to sleep before daylight. So we took it again at around 6pm on the Saturday night.
We ended up at snakepit stage waiting for it to take affect this time. We spent a lot more time at the snakepit this year, and this set on Saturday evening was my favourite I heard there all weekend. A nice mix of bass heavy tunes, journeying through funk, breakbeat and drum and bass. I’ve made a small montage of tunes from that set below:
Again we walked over to chill island to watch the sunset. It was by this time last year that we were really starting to feel the acid take effect. It was a pretty good marker of the time of the start of the effects last year. Unfortunately this year there was no sense of euphoria or tingling that we received last year. I talked a bit last year about the unpredictability of hallucinogenics; with alcohol and Ecstasy (and nearly every other drug) you can be pretty certain of the feeling of the effects. LSD however is a complete mystery. Kind of adds to its magic I suppose. I had a theory last year that maybe our intense stress going into the festival and the trip resulted in some kind of release of tension or energy which made it so phenomenal. Perhaps there was more credence to this theory than I gave it credit for last year. This year it was like taking a completely different drug again, nowhere near the same strength and power that we felt last year. Just after sunset we ended up going back and taking another one of the tabs. An hour after that it just left me feeling tired and strung out, it was most disappointing. Perhaps we just felt drained from the intense heat that day, I’m not sure. I wish there was more rhyme and reason to these things so I could improve on it for future experiences. In any case, I felt very tired and not really up for dancing, this funk in mood however coincided with something we wanted to go and see sitting down in the amphitheatre; the cabaret.
I should probably explain at this juncture that in last years blog I briefly mentioned meeting up with a friend I had from rope access in Melbourne. That friend of mine has been coming to bush doofs for almost 20 years, and performs at a lot of them under the name “Katy Kerpow”, or Kat I know her as. Kat was performing as part of the cabaret this year so we thought we would go down and show her some support. I was a little nervous about this however, as we also went to see her at Tanglewood festival at new years 23-24. We had gone to this festival with my brother and mum, who had both come over from England for a month and seeing as we already had tickets to Tanglewood we thought we would drag them along. My mum is 70 and had never been to a music festival before, so I’m sure it was an eye opener. Anyway, knowing that we were going to be sat watching cabaret for a good hour, I had taken a large amount of THC oil just before it, thinking that I was just going to be sitting around stoned and laughing at Caberet. However, upon seeing me sat there, Kat is suddenly climbing through the crowd with her microphone, saying that she is very honoured to haver her coach in the crowd who taught her everything she knowns, and the next thing I know I’m being dragged up onto the stage to be a part of the act. Public attention and performance are definitely well outside my comfort zone, especially when stoned, but I got through it fine, despite the extreme anxiety. However, with this mild trauma from a couple of months back still fairly fresh in my mind, it was with a definite sense of trepidation that I approached that cabaret stage, now two tabs of acid deep.
Fortunately it was dark this time, and no audience participation was required. Kats act involved her contorting her body through tennis racket heads with the strings removed, it made my back feel sore just watching it. The highlight of the cabaret for me however was the Swedish/ German (I think even he didn’t know which one he was supposed to be) announcer who was on between the acts. He was hilarious. He adjudicated some kind of catwalk model show which was manned by kids from the audience, although it was not intended as a kids show. It was very funny anyway and his ad-lib, spur of the moment comments were great. I’d definitely go down again next year if it was happening.
We spent some time walking around the festival looking at the various stages and UV artworks before ending up back at the Amphitheatre when the nighttime cinema was on. I think we were only really looking for a comfy place to sit down and load up a vape, but ended up pleasantly surprised. Last year in my blog I commented that the one complaint I had about the festival was the nighttime screenings at the cinema. They seemed incredibly dark and menacing pretty much every time we walked past during the night, which was a shame. If ever there was a point at Esoteric 24 where I felt that they took my advice from that last blog, it was walking into that cinema at that exact moment; BAM! Muppets in space!! Fantastic tripping movie, I couldn’t have planned it better myself. This is exactly the kind of movie you need to be stumbling into at a bush doof with a head full of acid. Weird, colourful, funny, and not traumatising in the slightest. And despite having seen a muppets Christmas carol pretty much every Christmas for about 20 years, somehow I had never seen muppets in space so had no idea what was coming next. I laughed my ass off for a good 40 minutes. Great job on the choice of movies this year. We went past later on in the night and a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was playing. Again; weird, colourful and funny, just what you need, more like this next year please.
It is worth noting however, that last year I also commented on the proximity of the cinema to the family campground. In the days following the festival there were a number of complaints online from people within the family campground about the violent movies being shown and how loudly they could hear them. Although the movies on the next night weren’t exactly violent, they did show Stargate, which someone had turned up super loud. I’m pretty sure this would have been the cause of complaint from those people as there are a lot of explosions and gun battles in that movie. To keep everyone happy, might I suggest some kind of sound deadening wall behind the cinema? For festivals in the country back in the UK we often used to use walls constructed out of hay bales behind soundsystems. These are cheap, quick and easy to construct, are easy to find in the countryside, and also provide excellent sound deadening. It wouldn’t be too much effort to construct a curved hay bale wall just behind the amphitheatre to shield some of that sound. It would also probably help project the sound outwards from people talking in lectures on the stage during the day, as these are sometimes quite quiet. Just a thought anyway.
I will however go over my one complaint that I have from this years festival. Again, I only have one real complaint, and I was quite surprised that in the days that followed esoteric, nobody else had mentioned this online. I was amazed at the range of things that people had found to complain about (none of which bothered me in the slightest), but nobody mentioned the thing that irked me the most. I should probably explain my preferred location for dancing at these stages; I feel that for anybody who really appreciates a good quality soundsystem, you’re not going to find them hanging off the barriers at the front of the stage. You’re going to find them in the dead centre, around 3/4 to nearly all the way towards the back of the dancefloor, somewhere just in front of the sound engineers at front of house. This is where the sound system sounds at its fullest and warmest. You’re not going to get the overpowering high ranges of the tops as you might nearer the front, and standing dead in the centre you're going to get the sound from both sides of the soundsystems equally. Standing back here was especially effective at the Sun temple because the visuals of the projectors look way better from back here also as you cant make out the parts of the stage which aren’t lit up by the projectors, which you can from further forwards, which slightly detracts from the effect. The issue this year however, was from my usual spot, this was the view:
The object in the foreground is a projector, with what felt like an unnecessarily large tower built to mount it on. This might not seem too obtrusive in the daytime, considering that most large stages often have a large pole in the middle to hold up the shade sail, but during the nighttime it really obscured the view to at least half of the dancefloor in some way, beaming away in front there like the eye of Mordor. The thing I really liked about the Sun temple last year was that it was like viewing some giant, psychedelic IMAX screen from everywhere on the dancefloor, only with a sound system 20 times the power. Wherever you were stood on the dancefloor you got this perfect, unobstructed view of the visuals happening on the stage.
I’m really not sure why it was placed there to be honest, it almost feels like some kind of technical malfunction at the last minute led to its placement there. It seems a very odd thing to do intentionally, especially considering the other two projectors for either side of stage were right at the back, near the sound engineers cabin, where they are not any obstruction to anyone. I feel like this projector annoyed me way more than it should have done over the course of the weekend, but definitely annoyed I was by it. Please don’t do this again Esoteric, and if it absolutely has to be placed there, could I suggest it was hung in some way so its not such an intrusive tower? I realise there is nothing but shade sail above it, but having worked as a rigger for a few years I know that a couple of riggers would froth over the challenge of mounting it on some kind of floating platform, with 4 way tensioned steel wire ropes heading off diagonally to the large poles of the shade sail at the sides to keep it from moving. Just an idea anyway, but please don’t stick it where it was this year again, I feel like it massively detracts from the visual appeal of that stage. Iv’e got a bit of footage here taken in the night which shows how much of the visual field it blocked from further back:
After being cheered up by crazy muppets at the cinema, we made our way over to an act we had earmarked from last year. To be honest probably the only act in the whole festival that we had made a concerted effort to go and see this year. I’m pretty happy at esoteric to just wander around and take the music as it comes, but there was certainly one group that stood out from last year; Global Party People.
We first saw global party people last year in the hammock fractal tent towards the end of our acid trip and their infectious and energetic style really caught us. We also saw them again on the Sunday afternoon, although their set was a touch mellower in the daytime. We only caught the last 20 minutes of their set on the Saturday night last year so this year we made sure we were there from the beginning. We were there so early in fact that there was one of the hammocks around the edges still free, and as I was still feeling pretty tired we lay down in that for the first 20 minutes of the set. The music soon got us on our feet though and we danced there for a good hour or two. They really do create an excellent vibe in there, its intense, definitely worth checking out. I love the energy of these two. Its worth mentioning that their set goes on for like 4 hours, and they give the same amount of energy and enthusiasm to the last tune as they do the first. I would highly recommend looking out for these guys next year, they always seem to play the closing set in the Hammock fractal tent on the Saturday night, go and check them out:
I’ve since befriended Joakin online, the happy drummer at the front of the stage. We’ve had a few chats this last year, he sent me this mix he did at some point, worth a listen if anyones looking for a new set to listen to. Its not a live set with the added instruments they play out, just a mix set of the kind of tunes they play. I joked with him after listening to it that they should be playing on Sun temple next year instead of the hammock fractal, but I don’t think their vibe would translate as well to the Sun temple, its much more suited to that small, intimate space where they can interact with the crowd more effectively.
Again, the nighttime visuals all around Esoteric are outstanding, both the stages and all of the artwork nestled around the festival. Here are a few photos of some of the night time UV artwork. Again, the photos just really don't show the vibrancy of this place at night, it feels so much brighter when you are there :
Heres a small montage of clips from around the Bush techno stage. I love the addition of the bus viewing platform looking over the dancfloor this year. I think they had something similar last year but it was more in the corner and the view of the stage and dancefloor wasn’t as good.
And a clip from Ascension stage:
This is a montage of clips I made from Sun temple over the weekend, again absolutely fantastic visuals on this one this year, if slightly obscured by the projector in the middle of the dancefloor. I’ve done my best to include ones here which weren’t obscured in any way, but I don’t think the positioning is optimal:
I’d like to talk about a different festival now which we’ve managed to make it to on our travels, and which I think the nighttime visuals on the main stage are up there with Esoterics Sun temple, perhaps not quite as polished and impressive, but then the festival itself was about a quarter of the size.
During our travels around Australia we have frequently used a website called Hip-camp to find camping spots. For those of you unfamiliar with this particular website, it could best be described as airbnb, but for camping. Anybody can list any vacant piece of land they have for use as a campsite. These can range from someones large back garden in the suburbs of major cities, to hundreds of acres of bushland with creeks running through them and extensive facilities such as showers, toilets, barbecues, electrical hookups and even outdoor cinemas and swimming pools. You can book specific days through the hip camp website much like you can through airbnb and go and camp there. Its generally much cheaper than staying in caravan parks and you often get pleasant interactions with the land owners, who are often running some kind of farm with animals that the kids enjoy at the same time.
We came across an interesting campsite on this website which is the venue for the bush doof Mushroom valley. Its in a bit of an odd location really mushroom valley; its a 12 hour drive away from Brisbane, and yet also still seven and a half hours drive from Cairns. It doesn’t fall into the SE Queensland or far north queensland categories, and there are no other large bush doofs anywhere near it as far as I can make out. I would have thought they would struggle to get support where they are located, so far from the main hubs of this kind of activity. Although I’d heard of the festival before and was aware it was in Queensland somewhere, we didn’t really know the exact location and just stumbled across their booking page on the hipcamp website. I’m not sure if Esoteric would be interested in letting people camp on the festival site when its not in use? Could be an extra source of income through the year. Although it must be said that Mushroom valleys venue is infinitely more appealing to caravaners and campers as it is only a 6 minute detour off the main Bruce highway which connects all the major cities on the east coast. Plus its a very lush and green grassy site with a lovely creek running through it. I’m not sure if Esoterics parched, edge of the desert vibes, nowhere near any kind of main highway to anywhere would have quite the same appeal. Although it would seem that a lot of the positive reviews mention the art work and interactions with the landowners. Like Esoteric, Mushroom valley owns the land that the festival is on, so a lot of the artwork stays there all year around. Just a thought for Esoteric anyway, I’m sure there would be some people out there who would appreciate camping at the festival site. This is a link to Mushroom valleys hipcamp page in case anyone is interested:
So we found ourselves in the Airlie beach area where the festival takes place about a month before it was due to happen. We were going to just camp out at the site initially on our way north but after considering our options we changed our itinerary and decided to stay around the Airlie beach area for the next month until the festival happened. And hey, theres much worse places in this world that you could be looking to kill a month than Airlie beach. Again, this place is a tropical paradise, if highly touristy. Its main draw card is as the “gateway to the Whitsunday Islands”.
The Whitsunday islands, are largely uninhabited mountainous islands covered in rainforest, one of which is home to the infamous “Whitehaven beach”, often voted the best beach in the world by international travel magazines. Its one of the most iconic Australian destinations and we ended up taking a boat/ snorkelling trip out to it on one day, and then flew over the top of the whitsunday islands and out to the reef in a small plane on a another day. The boat trip was fairly average if I’m honest, very much felt like a package tourist destination just chucking you around the main sights for 15 minutes at a time along with hundreds of other tourists on boats. We had a thought about it afterwards and if we were going to do it again it would be best to hire your own boat for a few days and travel around the islands slowly. Obviously its a considerably more expensive thing to do, but if you’re going to come all this way to see it it would be good to not feel rushed and take it at your own pace. The plane ride however was spectacular. If you’re ever in this part of the world its worth doing the scenic plane ride. It wasn’t cheap, but its one of those bucket list items that just has to be done. Heres some short clips of the flight over the Whitsunday islands, Whitehaven beach, and the great barrier reef:
After killing a month enjoying scenic sights in Airlie beach we made our way to Mushroom valley. It was a bit of a shock getting there on the first day, as we had paid for early access and got there just 10 minutes after the offical 12pm opening. When we first got to the site we we met a rather irate reveller who also had a caravan, much smaller than our own, who commented “Good luck finding anywhere to park that! I’ve been driving up and down here for an hour now and theres no space left at all!” And it did seem as if the entire field was already pretty much full. This wasn’t a small field either, and by the comments from this guy it seemed as if it had been full for an hour or more. I think as this place operates as a camping ground all year round that the 12pm opening was more of a guideline really, and hundreds of people had already arrived and set up camp long before we got there. I should probably post a picture of our caravan at this point:
This isn’t the kind of vehicle that can be just “slotted in” to a packed campsite. In fact it can be a bit of a mission to park even in some purpose built caravan parks. Just the length of our caravan including the bikes at the back is almost 10m. We really need at least 70 square metres of space to set it up in comfortably. Its a completely ludicrous thing to bring to a bush doof really, an unwieldy whale of a vehicle. Even the little filter lanes they wanted me to drive into to get wristbands and stuff, I took one look at the turn they wanted me to make at the other side and told them theres no way I’m going to make that turn without taking out half your fencing, I’ll park up over there and walk over to see you. But seeing as we are living full time in this whale of a caravan we don’t really have much of a choice. And to be fair, it is 100% the most comfortable I’ve ever been at a music festival going in that thing.
As it turns out, the guy we spoke to on the way in who couldn’t find a park was trying to get into the general camping, there was still loads of space in family camping so we were able to set up easily in there. Eventually another field was opened up which was further away from the festival, but yeah, if you intend to go to this in future years, get there early, the 12pm opening seems to be a loose guideline rather than anything which is remotely adhered to.
Mushroom valley has two stages, and the second of these is much, much smaller than the main stage. This however meant that the main stage was always packed and was a multi-genre stage, which I quite liked in the end. It reminded me a bit of the one sound system, one dance floor parties we used to do with a range of sounds and genres. There was a good bit of planning had gone into the sets so there was a definite build up and cool down throughout the weekend. One of the names I was most surprised to see on the lineup was Chali-2na. Chali-2na is a hip-hop artist, most well known for being one of the vocalists from the 90s group, Jurassic 5. I used to be a huge fan of hip-hop, particularly early 90s stuff, so I was interested to see how he would fit into the lineup at a bush doof. In the end he was the very first set, straight after the opening ceremony, which was a nice chilled way to open the festival I thought. Something a bit different anyway. I have this bit of footage of him playing the opening set. The backdrop and work that had gone into this stage was pretty impressive, I liked the animals and mushrooms and stuff on there. Although the Sun temples geometric patterned stage is very pretty and the projections look amazing, I quite like the natural pictures and images of this stage:
Although it might have been a bit unusual to hear hip-hop at a normally dance music heavy bush doof, it's not entirely strange when you consider there is a really big hip-hop scene in Australia. One of the things that first struck me when first coming here was the amount of decent Australian hip-hop, as none of it seems to make it over to the UK. In fact one of my favourite ever hip-hop tunes, from any era, featured the just mentioned Chali-2na and was produced by Australias biggest hiphop act; The Hilltop hoods. This song was released not long after I first came to Australia and was played pretty heavily on the radio at the time, it holds happy memories for me. It's a fantastic track; great breakbeats, positive message, good use of instruments, whats not to like? Reminds me a bit of 90s hiphop before it went all urban and grimey:
I'd never heard of the Hilltop hoods before coming here, even though they are probably within the top three biggest acts within Australia from any genre. They've made some absolutely cracking tunes. Its not just hilltop hoods either, theres a lot of great hiphop that is made here. It just feels a lot more positive, upbeat and lighthearted than the Gansta rap of the US or the bleak grime of the UK, its a bit like Australia really, generally jovial and lighthearted. For those hiphop fans back in the UK, stick an Australian hiphop playlist on your favourite streaming service, I'm sure you wont be disappointed.
I'm just going to stick one more of hilltop hoods songs up here as its one of my favourites, but not a well known or popular one at all that might show up in online playlists. Having said that Australian hiphop is fairly lighthearted, this one definitely isn't. Its fairly harrowing really, especially with the animations on the music video, but the musicality and story telling on it is great.
As with all bush doofs, there is an impressive amount of art work nestled around mushroom valley:
The piece of art work I found most impressive however, was the second stage itself. I absolutely loved the look of this. Way, way smaller than the main stage, but I loved the creativity of it. This is a dragon which has been made out of parts of dried out tropical plants; various dried out palms and grasses make up the main body, coconut husks make up the coloured detailing around the face, bits of the bases of palms make up his claws, all held together with sticks and bits of natural fibre rope. It must have taken absolutely ages to do. I love how he seems to cradling one of the stacks of speakers to one side as well, like some ancient treasure he is keeping guard of. I dont think I got any photos of it, but at night his eyes and mouth were lit up orange and a smoke machine was ejecting smoke out of his mouth to make it look like he was breathing fire. Fantastic workmanship on it:
One of the highlights of this venue however was the fact that it had a fresh water creek running along one side of it, just behind the second stage. This is a bit of video footage I took down there, taking in the second stage and heading down to the creek.
There was also this second section of creek you could swim in, which was much shallower and better for kids and also had a large platform you could lounge about on:
Something we noticed about the market stalls at doofs up in Queensland was that there was a bit more arty/ crafty stalls, but not as much good food as there is down in Victoria. Some of the stalls were selling some pretty strange stuff. This stall sold only marionette dolls, the kinds the you control with bits of string like a puppet. They had some incredible detail on them, most were based on some kind of 80s or 90s movie, which reminded me of my childhood. They were fantastically realistic and close to what those original characters looked like. Heres some of them:
Then in the art gallery they had some incredibly ornate axes and swords made from gems and bits of metal twisted together. Again fantastic craftsmanship, very impressive, but I cant help but wonder how much of a market there is for this kind of thing. Here are the pieces in question.
If you look at the pricetag on that last axe, it is $45,000. I cant imagine there are too many people out there who think to themselves “you know what would make my festival experience complete? A creepy-ass lifelike chucky doll and a 45 grand jewell encrusted axe. Yes, thats just what I need.” I guess there are enough people out there buying this stuff, there were certainly a lot of other stalls selling hand crafted wares.
One of the reasons I wanted to talk about mushroom valley was the impressive stage and use of projectors. This was a small festival really (3000-ish I would say), but the main stage, particularly at night, was almost as impressive as the sun temple at Esoteric. Sure it was slightly smaller, and the projections weren’t quite as intricate and technically dazzling (and felt a bit glitchy at points), but I particularly liked the ones where they showed you the animals/ trees with faces and birds moving around. The faces occasionally opened their eyes to look at you, the bird frequently flapped its wings, and the happy trees waved their branches around. For some reason this just appealed to me more than the faceless geometric patterns on the sun temple. Obviously the Sun temple is epic and highly impressive, but I talked in my last blog about being slightly disappointed at the lack of animal motive when seeing the sun temple for the first time as past Esoterics had always had some kind of animal/ plant theme going on there before with an Owl, Venus fly traps and a phoenix all making an appearance. I liked the natural faces and nature scenes on the main stage at Mushroom valley, and I think it would be good for Esoteric to try to incorporate something natural back into their designs. Anyway, here is a selection of clips taken at night at mushroom valley. This also shows the broad music selection played on that stage:
I've got a couple more bits of footage here of individual tunes. These are from a set by a DJ called Saija. This was my favourite set of the festival, and my favourite set of psytrance I've heard for quite a while. I'm not really sure how you would pigeonhole this, maybe "uplifting full-on"? or something like that. It's very much the style of psytrance I'm into however; pretty uplifting and trancy in the breaks, but very hard and driving beats, bit more 4 beaty than a lot of other psytrance which seems to have some kind of breaks sounding bassline going on. Anyway, I really enjoyed this set, and Saija was actually one of the people who entered the "so you think you can mix" DJ competition that Esoteric posted a few motnhs back. I voted for her on the strength of her set at mushroom valley, as I didn't think the one she put up for the Eso competition was nearly as good. Its again a pretty good example of the projections there as well, but might appeal to you if you fancy a bit of driving psytrance:
The thing that I ended up liking the best about Mushroom valley, certainly from the viewpoint of a parent, rather than a raver, was the fact that they had structures for kids to climb on at the edges of both dancefloors. Obviously we’ve been bringing our kids with us to these last few bush doofs, and hence I’m viewing them much more through the eyes of a parent than I did for Esoteric last year. Its also made me think a lot more about what Esoteric could do to make their festival more enjoyable from a parents/ families point of view as its almost certain that the next time we go to Esoteric it will be with our kids in tow. The kids area at Mushroom valley itself was tiny, with only a few activities aimed at kids, but just having somewhere else that could keep them entertained nearer the dance floors made it so much better for us. Its definitely something that Esoteric could improve on.
There was this huge pirate ship just to the back of the dance floor on the main stage, down a slight slope at the back. It was close enough that kids could happily play with other kids on the climbing frame and go down slides, whilst we could still stand on the edge of the dancefloor and dance and keep an eye on them at the same time:
Then at the second stage they had built this structure out of loads of rope lashed together into some kind giant, sprawling spiders web which doubled as a large chill out hammock. It wasn’t exactly comfortable to lay on it just on the ropes, but they had scattered pillows all over it so people could lounge around and chill out on it. To be honest, I’m amazed at how much enjoyment my kids got out of this thing, it sometimes kept them entertained for two hours or more. It certainly wasn’t intended entirely as a kids climbing space, but because there were a couple of slightly higher up spots, my kids took great enjoyment out of scavenging any pillows they could get their hands on and building themselves nests as high in the structure as possible:
When it was busy we kept having to explain to them that it wasnt really fair that they had 5 pillow each when there were like 15 other people on there, but overall they were thrilled with it. Sure there were a few people on there who looked like they just wanted to peacefully slip into a K-hole and would rather have not had a couple of excited kids jumping about the place looking for pillows, but then these are the hazards of an all age bush doof I guess; my kids have to work around the K-heads scattered about the place, and the K-heads have to put up with the entire structure wallowing around like some kind of waterbed as my kids clamber around them on the hunt for pillows. I’m sure we can all live together in peace and harmony in any case.
Both of these structures kept my kids entertained for hours at a time and we were both able to take it in turns going for a dance while the other one kept more of a close eye on the kids, but even if one of us was standing with the kids, they could still hear and see the dancefloors. It got me to thinking that there is literally nothing like this at Esoteric. Sure there is a very impressive playground in the actual kids area, and the addition of the Nad Rad tent at chill island is a step in the right direction in this regards, but there is nothing to keep them entertained at any of the other stages. I feel like if we took kids here we would not really be able to spend any kind of time at the main stages until the nighttime when we got them in bed (maybe thats by intention?) I realise that its a very fine line and as I said earlier I wouldn’t want to make Esoteric more family friendly at the expense of it being any less of a massive mental rave. I do have one suggestion however.
There are a couple of raised structures now at Ascension and bush techno which you can view the dancefloors from. I’m a big fan of raised platforms overlooking dance floors, especially at night. Theres something quite awe inspiring about looking over a packed dancefoor with all the lights and lasers shimmering over the top of it. The sun temple however doesn’t have anything like this. There also seems to be a large, bare patch of real estate at the back right corner, behind the sound engineers to the right hand side (right hand as you are looking at the stage, opposite side from the food stalls). There may be some kind of small art works here, but I definitely remember there being a pretty large patch of empty space. I’m proposing that you could build some kind of multi-level structure, something with standard viewing platforms that you can stand or dance on, but also cargo nets and rope ladders, stuff to climb up between levels, and maybe a large cargo net style chill out area to lay down in. Adults could use this at night time as a viewing deck and chill out area to look over the dancefloor, and kids could enjoy climbing up it in the daytime. Fuck it, you might as well stick a tunnel slide with disco lights installed in it going from the top to the bottom. I’m sure that adults at 2 in the morning would enjoy a good light-up tunnel slide just as much as kids would in the daytime. I’m sure theres room back there to build something pretty awesome, the packed sun temple dancefloor with the projectors running would look incredible from back there, and it would keep my kids entertained for at least an hour during the daytime so I could have a dance at the back corner without being dragged back to the kids area. Just a thought anyway, but yeah as a parent I would love to see this happen more so than any other improvement I can think of at the moment.
Just one more bit of footage from mushroom valley, from our old friends mood swing and chevy bass. They played on the main stage Saturday day time to a pretty packed crowd. They played this gem of a tune. As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of vocal piano house, and this one was a corker, especially with that live saxophone over the top halfway through:
Back to Esoteric; Again the Sunday day was roasting hot, another 40 degree day with no real respite from the heat. We took the day very easy, brought a number of iced coffees/ smoothies and just tried to stay out the sun. I’m pretty sure this was the day we listened to the android jones lecture, which caused us to go straight back to the art gallery and have a good look through his art work again. There were quite a lot of classes on in the art gallery this year in a large open space at one end of it, Andrea learnt to crochet for an hour or so and I think I just welcomed the opportunity to lay in the shade for a while. I was highly appreciative of the sun finally getting lower in the sky and the temperature dropping a bit. Sunday is the second main night of the festival. Last year we took mushrooms on the Friday, before the extraordinary LSD trip on the Saturday and we assumed that Sunday was going to be a bit more chilled, but the festival goes a lot harder on Sunday than it does on Friday, so we got this a bit wrong last year. This year we had a more relaxed warm up night on the Friday and planned to go a bit harder on both the Saturday and Sunday. We still had the rest of the 10 tabs of acid we brought, although it didn’t really provide us the buzz we were looking for the night before. Its a bit of a one hit wonder LSD, it doesn’t really add to the affect when you take additional ones, just makes it last longer. LSD is also notoriously tolerance building, it takes nearly 50% more to give the same effects if you take it two days in a row. With these things in mind we made the executive decision to just eat all of the rest of our acid in one go, 3 tabs each at once. This is certainly not something I would ordinarily recommend with acid, but at the time it seemed like the most appropriate thing to do.
This was definitely closer to the kind of high we were hoping for, although still nothing like that single tab we had last year. It certainly put an ear to ear grin on my face and gave me a lot more energy for dancing, which is something it didn’t do the night before. We went over to ascension stage this time. It still perplexes me a little just how much I enjoy dancing to the music over here. I’d never heard dark psy played over a sound system before Esoteric (or any of those other darker, faster genres; hi-tec, forest etc, I still have absolutely no idea which is which). Its not something I would have ever thought I’d be in to. Its probably been the biggest surprise of Esoteric just how much I enjoyed dancing to it, especially when high on acid. Our early plan was to go back to the cabaret and maybe try to track Kat down afterwards to say hello as phones weren’t working and we hadn’t bumped into her yet, but we just couldn’t drag ourselves away from that dance floor and all its weird, squelchy goodness. We must have stayed there for three or four hours at least before we ran out of water and dragged ourselves away to go and see something else. Some footage from the viewing platform at the back of the ascension stage:
We walked around looking at all the art works again, you always view them in a new light when on a decent trip of some kind. At some point we passed the hammock fractal tent and caught another great act in there; DJ goldilocks. Kind of similar to global party people the night before in that there was a guy playing instruments over dance music, but this was more kind of disco/ cheesy house orientated. It was still a top vibe, very upbeat and happy stuff. Wasn’t on par with global party people the night before in my opinion, they really smashed it, but I would still recommend going to the fractal tent. I like the hammock fractal late at night, its a much more personal, intimate vibe, with some great acts who are able to interact with the crowd really well. This is a video of DJ goldilocks playing with her instrumentalist on the Saxophone:
And I got a good bit of footage of us walking up the length of the art walk, starting from a bit further back this time and ending on Ascension dance floor. I like how you can hear the different genres of music coming from snakepit, sun temple and eventually ascension fade in and out over just a 4 minute walk:
I saw something on one of our trips back to Ascension which had me chuckling to myself for the next few hours. Quite often at these dancefloors people will drag along various homemade trolleys for their crews. Some of these are pretty elaborate, containing beer kegs and all sorts of flashing lights and umbrellas and platforms to rest drinks on. Some not so much. I’ve got a couple of pictures of such trolleys, I took these on the Monday in light of the one which gave me so much amusement on the Sunday night, so they aren’t the best examples at the festival, but the only ones I found on Monday:
The one that gave me so much amusement on the Sunday night, deep into my acid trip however, was this one:
Now the base trolley for this one is a shopping trolley. A shopping trolley. I could not imagine a mode of transportation more hopelessly out of its depth in this environment than a shopping trolley. An item that only really works as intended on the perfectly smooth, polished concrete surfaces of a supermarket. As soon as you even take it as far as the car park and attempt to push it off a small curb it lurches wildly and crashes down as each wheel drops off the curb. Even an item as insignificant as a small piece of bark mulch is enough to lodge under one wheel and lock it up dead in its tracks. Even in its intended environment of a smooth, polished supermarket, once it is loaded up full of shopping it can veer off and take some force to steer in any direction. So to bring one of these items to a bush doof, load it up with several cartons of beer and water and whatever else you might need for an entire night in the festival, and to then strap some massive novelty light and lampshade onto one corner, just to make the entire thing even more unwieldy and cumbersome than it needs to be, and to then drag this contraption through the camping area, through all of the sand patches, over the twigs and tree roots, and into a crowded dancefloor. Man, that must take a special kind of perseverance and dedication. I wish I could have seen it. It feels like it would have taken 2, maybe 3, people all working together to guide it on its way through the festival. Surely shopping trolley wheels would have just sank straight into the sand? It would have needed to have been dragged, wheels stationary, most of the way. And this wasn’t found at the sun temple either, this had made its way all the way over to ascension. Thats a hell of a journey just to make it that far, let alone if you were attempting to move this between stages with you (although it must be said that the ascension regulars very much look as if they set up shop on that dancefloor and just stay there for the entire weekend). Just the image I had in my head of 2 or 3 people wrestling with this ungainly contraption, dragging it all the way here through the festival loaded up with drinks, it provided me hours of amusement every time I thought about it. Granted I wouldn’t have found it nearly as amusing if I wasn’t on acid, but it had me laughing out loud to myself throughout the rest of the night, so thank you if this was your trolley, you really brightened up my Sunday night.
Monday again was stinking hot and hard work. I’m not sure what we did, we meant to catch the comedy again at the amphitheatre on Sunday afternoon but somehow got the timings wrong and got there just as they were finishing up. I still think this is a great thing to have in there on the Monday afternoon, an afternoon of standup comedy. They should definitely do this every year. We even didn’t make it all the way to the fireworks closing this year, and were asleep some time before it. I feel like the heat was a very draining factor this year, it made everything seem that much harder. Even in the nighttime I felt like we were still suffering from heart stress during the day, and we were pretty lucky really that we had a fridge full of refreshing juices to drink throughout the festival. It definitely becomes a bit of a battle with the elements when its this hot. This has been the hottest year on record, hopefully next year will be cooler.
With regards to next year; when we first went to 2024s edition, and indeed when I first started writing this blog, our plans were to travel up to Cairns/ Cooktown, and then head over the top, down through Alice Springs and across the Nullarbor to Perth in time for Christmas this year. We had it set in our minds that there was no way we would have been attending Esoteric 2025. That plan seems to have been wildly ambitious however and we have recently had to rethink things and are just coming straight back down the east to Melbourne in time for Christmas, spending the hotter months down in Victoria before embarking again to South Australia and up through Alice, getting to Darwin around June, in time for the start of Winter next year. We didn’t make it up to far north Queensland until midway through spring this year, which wasn’t ideal timing. In order to make this work we would leave Melbourne substantially earlier next year, probably at the start of March. This would work out perfect timing to make Esoteric our first stop off, before continuing our journey west into south Australia. We would love to come back and experience it from a different angle from the shallows family area, it would certainly be a fantastic way to start our travels off on the way up to the centre. However, we haven’t brought any tickets yet, and have missed the first three rounds of cheaper tickets and really cant afford $1000 on festival tickets this side of Christmas. If anyone out there thinks they might be selling a couple of first or second round tickets in the new year, please get in touch.
Also, if anyone knows of any larger, family friendly bush doofs happening in NT or WA, then please get in touch also. So far on the list to look out for I have Wide Open Space near Alice Springs (I really hope they do this one again next year, the venue looks amazing and it seems they struggled to put it on last year due to low ticket sales), then up near Darwin I have my eye on Aetheria. The area around Perth seems to have quite a few; Blossom, Lost in between, Burning Swan and Meloria. We definitely won’t make all of these but hopefully one or two might line up on our travels. The more I’ve got my eye on the better. If anyone knows of any others around Darwin or Perth (Or maybe even in south Australia, I cant really find mention of any large ones in South Australia) then I would appreciate the recommendation.
So all in all it was another fantastic year at Esoteric. It hadn’t changed massively since last year, but then this isn’t a bad thing, it was near enough perfect the year before. From what I gather from various conversation with people at the festival there had been a huge ramp up in the general size of things between 2022-23, it can’t expand like that every year. Although its always great to see things grow and expand, I’m not sure how much bigger I would want it. It might end up losing some of its magic if it gets too big, certainly the amount of people for the space of the festival is just about perfect at the moment. If it was to expand too much more then some of the crew might have to give up that nice, cushty crew camping space in the woods to make way for more art and stages through there, I guess that does mean there is room for expansion in the future if need be.
The effort that goes into this is incredible, I love all the art and colour, and am looking forward to seeing the evolution of it again next year to see what else they’ve added. I’d love to see some more moving, visual projector style artwork around the festival, like the kaleidoscope portal at Earth frequency festival (that thing was awesome), and a mental climbing frame/ chill out structure/ dance podium at the back behind the sun temple stage to keep my kids entertained. And I would DEFINITELY like to see that projector in the middle of sun temples dancefloor moved someplace else (seriously, please move this Esoteric, its fucking with the Feng Shui down there)
This is a world class festival, as I said earlier the first one I’ve come across that I can confidently say its worth the flight over from Europe for, and I’m amazed just how many people do seem to do that. Theres a significant group of French and Spanish seem to fly over to Australia just for this event. Whilst I’d love to see some of my mates from the UK come over for this, I realise that with cost of living crisis and all that bullshit people barely have money for music festivals in their own country, let only ones on the other side of the world, but one day I hope to get a crew of people out here to experience it.
As of writing this, I’m still 2000km away, and don’t have any tickets yet, but I’m reasonably certain we will make it back for next years instalment, along with our whale of a caravan and kids in tow. If anyone who reads this is camped in the shallows next year, please come and say hello. It will be a very different experience for us going with the kids next year (long LSD trips into the early hours of the morning will definitely be out of the question). I'm a little unsure how the kids will take it, especially if its raging hot again, but at least they are pretty seasoned bush doofers now.
Keep up the fantastic work on this Esoteric, I can't wait to see what the Psychedelic Circus has in store for next year
Just as one last thing, I'm going to include the aftermovie from Esoteric 2024. Personally I kind of preferred last years with the trippy animations layered over the top of it, but this is still a great selection of footage which captures the festival well:
