Rave Reviews: An Instagram Free-For-All That’s Too Big to Fail

What is Australia’s national obsession with le rave? Ze untz untz? The doof? 

Every weekend, illegal raves are held in green spaces across Melbourne. The rave infatuation isn’t a phenomenon special to the world’s second most liveable city – Sydney is well known for its underground doof culture, and even Canberra, allegedly, has a scene – but Melbourne is where I live, so that’s what we’re gonna talk about.

Australia’s party culture is quite something. Music people will look at a lusciously verdant park, filled with native flora, fauna, perhaps an iconic river, scents of wattle and eucalypt wafting gently by in the late summer breeze and say: “This secluded oasis of serenity in the heart of the CBD is the perfect spot for 500 gyrating, frenzied individuals, high off their tits, to get down to some lovely industrial gutter psy-swamp techno.”

I’m not going to pretend I understand music genres. I don’t. But I do love to party. 

We love to party. 

For much of the past two years, in the sticky little grip of the pandemic, partying has been an absolute no-go. Back then, we were “stopping the spread” and now we’re “living with it” – Read: “trying to go about our silly little lives, taking care in the vain hope that maybe, just maybe, we won’t get it”. 

Multiple bans on indoor gatherings have ensued, and the current one, while not explicitly banning nightclubs, does ban singing and dancing in indoor venues, which is pretty much the same thing. 

But last week, multiple people sent me an Instagram post. It was a flyer for a Saturday evening rave with a delectable lineup and the telling statement: “location TBA”. 

Now this was interesting. 

It’s one thing to put your illegal rave on Instagram Stories – sure, only people in-the-know would understand, and Stories expire. But on FEED? In a POST? Incredibly bold. It was an experiment, I guess, to allow the news to be circulated and saved by every person in this godforsaken city. I had to see whether it’d pay off.

I broached the topic with a friend, Clementine, who was one of the DJs billed to play. We agreed it would either be shut down immediately, or go all night and into the next day. Playing at 10pm, the opening set of the evening, Clementine suggested she “might even be one of the only artists who would get to play”.

“Or could it be too big to fail?” she wondered.

The rave scene across this country’s major cities isn’t anything new. There are countless Reddit threads on the subject, theses, documentaries, and websites dedicated to the vibrant history of underground doof culture. 

But during the pandemic it has taken on a different significance: Bans on indoor gatherings don’t stop people from seeking social environments, parties and music. Nor does the threat of getting COVID. Raves are a guaranteed way to come together, even when our usual spaces have been withheld from us for so long. COVID is generally the last thing on people’s minds.

Saturday’s event was located at a well-known spot in Melbourne. It’s relatively secluded, tucked away from residential areas, but close to the city with a nearby freeway and surrounding hills of dense shrub supplying a highly effective sound barrier. 

On the night, we trudged along a dirt path, through inky, hauntingly still blackness, the moon above shielded by dense foliage. The noise was well hidden: the ricocheting bass thrum and raucous shouts didn’t reach us until we made it around a final, winding corner. Then: boom! There it was. The air was electric.

Hundreds of people were already there. At the edges, shadowy masses poured into the clearing from all sides. In the deep dark there were no faces, only yells and the blinking lights of disposable vapes. Occasionally, a phone torch would flash, illuminating parts of faces: strangers, groups of men, assorted 20-somethings. 

Some raves are fun. They are small and intimate: fairy lights are strung up around trees and you can see people’s faces. Friends are everywhere. This was not one of those.

The hundreds-strong crowd hulked around the DJ marquee – the only source of light in the clearing save the dazzling light projection, which contorted above the booth in a blaze of ultraviolet, blue and green, twisting in the dim sky. Thrumming bass echoed around the clearing, competing with the yells and cheers and shouts and screams that emanated from the crowd, so loud you could have mistaken it for an applause track. 

People were continually flooding the space. Further out, the grass was blanketed with small groups, huddled around a single phone torch. This was the first introduction to the large-rave double bind: the music was only loud enough to dance close to the speaker, but the crowd crush was too insane to be close and simultaneously enjoy a dance.

After standing around feeling uncomfortable for a while, we decided to try and go in. Front left, we found a small nook, sheltered from the crowd’s shoving chaos. There was shit everywhere, all thrown off a stationary trailer in front of us that was now filled to the brim with men, sardined together and bopping simultaneously on the makeshift stage like some strange goofy beast. 

A ladder lay on the ground right in the midst of a high traffic zone. People kept awkwardly stepping through it, tripping over it, trying to jump over it and staggering, falling, moving on, oblivious, leaving it there for the cycle to continue. After watching for a while in wonder as people continued to cope, ignoring the hazard, we lifted the thing and moved it. Problem solving at the doof.

We chatted with some friends, Ava and Pants, who had just arrived.

“I feel a bit nervous about getting COVID, but I just wanna have a dance,” Ava said. 

Pants agreed, “I think that’s why there’s so many people here,” they said. “I generally don’t really feel that safe at a rave, because I’ve heard so many stories.” 

“Yeah,” Ava said, “I was so shocked coming into this rave, because it seems like the organisers market it as a super queer space, and this is just not it. I feel like a lot of raves and clubs do that. With raves it’s pretty hit and miss, usually a miss.” 

That was the thing: there were so many people there. The energy was distinctly masc. Hordes of unfamiliar men, masses of straight people, everyone drunk, everyone pushing and shoving and tripping and squeezing. It made us all uneasy.

“My favourite raves are the small ones, when you know lots of people and you just have a dance, and you can actually see the DJs… I can’t even see them here,” Pants continued, “I’m kinda regretting coming.”

A flood of 20 or so people shoved past us into the fray and we edged back, out to the cusp of the throbbing crowd. We stood chatting, as faces passed.

Mid-incoherent conversation, I realised the incredibly annoying, offbeat drum loop piercing my frontal lobe was not a weird mix from the DJ, but in fact a literal person sitting on the floor with a drum, right behind us. 

What in the Rainbow Serpent? Who the fuck brought the drum circle to the rave? 

Things were getting weird. I couldn’t comprehend it.

After a while, we walked up to the entrance of the park to refill our water bottles. Then we just kept walking.

The next day, a friend who had been there said something quite poignant: 

“I’d rather have to work to get into a small, tight knit scene than go to an overpacked, average doof. There are some things that we should gatekeep.”

This was a successful rave. Cops didn’t show up until 9am, and even then they didn’t shut down what was left of the party, which went until around midday. I had hoped to sleep through the worst of it and return in the morning, after the bulk of the shadow strangers had left. Of course, that was whimsical thinking.

Part of me wishes I had stayed on – my not-so-20-20 vision ensures my favourite part of any party is the moment when the sun comes up and I can actually see what’s going on. The lineup was incredible, I just wish we’d been able to dance without the fear of being disintegrated by a COVID-infused crush of sweaty randoms.

Nonetheless, any party still going as the sun climbs the sky is undoubtedly a good one.

I’ll give it 13/10. Excellent setup, talent and longevity. Shit crowd, but it’s a free party in a park, so…

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