A Short List of Festival DOs and DON'Ts For 2023

Festival season, baby. The time where we all come together to close off the best few months of the year, to have fun in the sun for the very last time, before winter shakes her dreary fist and bitter winds at us and the financially mobile ones piss off to Europe or South East Asia or wherever else and Melbourne enters its hostile period. 

Australia’s festivals are numerous, and each come with a different identity, crowd, and culture. At Pitch Music and Arts, held on Djap Wurrung Country in north western Victoria on the weekend, the vibe was… big. Big in a scale sense. Big stages, big personalities, big lineup, big mountains, big, heaving masses of people. 

The more festivals you go to, the better you are able to handle them. But even an old dog can learn new tricks, and I came away from Pitch with some refreshed knowledge, and a whole lot of gripes. 

So. Here’s my festival DO’s and DON’Ts – new, improved, and condensed for 2023. 

Baby wipes. Bad for the environment but great for digging copious amounts of grit, gristle and whatever else the fuck out of your facial orifices. I believe you can buy biodegradable ones if you want to do the right thing. They’re also the industry standard tool for a slut bath. Drag the moist towelette over your body, feel yourself born anew, and compare your own soiled cloth with those of your friends. Who is the grubbiest? Who among you had the birth of a new planetary system forming around a chunk of dirt inside their left nostril? Whose pits came back a disconcerting shade of chocolate? There are no winners here.

Alright. I have a treatise on this.

I understand that at some point, one time, doof sticks had a place in festival culture. A funny joke that sets you a cut above the rest. An intriguing, creative approach to the ancient artform of putting things on sticks. A way to locate your mates when buckeyed among throngs of the buckeyed and it’s dark out and all there is to assess is a heaving mass of anonymous bodies vortexing into the deep ether. 

Festivals can be terrifying. Even I can admit a doof stick has saved me once or twice, a beacon of recognition when lost among strangers in a sea of depravity. 

But it has gone too far. Doof sticks have gone from an interesting and fun festival feature to a pissing competition for who can conjure the laziest drug-themed pun. 

Whoa, go easy, the bois spent the last twelve months figuring out how to turn “You’ve been Terminated” into a ketamine joke… It says “You’ve been ketaminated”, and it’s Schwarzenegger with a bag instead of a gun, get it???

NO. 

Back in my day, you didn’t need a stupid visual joke on a pole to locate your friends. You’d stick with your friends, or risk losing them and spending the entire night trapped in an acid peak, wanting only to be with the people you love but not being able to find them and crying about it all and the unbearable lightness of being lost in the bush tweaking off your tits without your people until the sun comes up and you finally recognise a familiar face in the crowd. 

To be fair, we met a couple who had just moved here from overseas who hadn’t yet had the chance to become disturbed by the doof stick phenomena like I had. They shone a new perspective, calling the silly sticks “creative” and “amazing”, and pointing out that they were like physical memes. Which was nice.

But please, let’s be for real, for just a second: Does every campsite really need a three-metre tall liability that one poor sucker has to tout around? They’re not dancing, they’re holding on for dear life. Seeing the stage from anywhere else other than the barrier is impossible, obscured by a million of the middest jokes in the world bopping around.

There is no reprieve, not even at nighttime. The invention of solar charged LED lights will be held responsible for this. I didn’t drive three hours from the city to the bush to experience worse light pollution. Tell me exactly how you’re supposed to identify which of the thousands of waving lit up signs belongs to your group when the space above the dancefloor is the hyper nightmare version of Christmastime in the rich neighbourhoods.

It’s easy at a festival to get caught up in debauchery and forget you’re in a special, strange place, designed by countless artists who put in hundreds of hours of work to create pieces for an ephemeral adult playground, all to be dismantled in just a few days. Pitch, in particular, was home to many thought-provoking art pieces. Take a moment away from the terrible post-apocalyptic scenes at the back of the dancefloor, and explore. 

The highlights included an ethereal, whimsical chrome planet with rotating rings suspended in the trees, an interactive light cube, and some sort of spiral-wall-tower, like something conjured to life off the pages of a Doctor Seuss novel, rendered in sandy plaster. 

One evening, leaving the main stage, we wandered into the Doctor Seuss tower, wondering what was inside, past a couple seated on the ground at the entrance. Inside was like being inside a circular, roofless room, with windowed walls. It smelt like piss in there, so we walked out. The couple were still sitting there. The conversation went like this:

Are you guys ok?

Yeah we’re all good. Hey, what’s in there?

Nothing, it smelt like piss.

Why do people keep walking in there?

I think to see what’s in there, or to piss, cause it smells like piss in there.

But what’s it for?

It’s an art installation.

Why, though?

It’s art, I think people are meant to walk in there. Like, designed to be looked at, and experienced.

But what’s it for?

I don’t know. It’s art.

They seemed afraid of the art. Do not be afraid of the art. The art is your friend.

Tell me you grew up in the south-east without telling me. I don’t know you people, but setting up some game you used to play with grand-aunt and daddy on the mansion lawn, at the festival, in the middle of the dancefloor, with your backs turned to the stage, while artists are performing, is an inconceivable level of douchebaggery. The Inner-Varnika-pilled Suit Sunday garb only makes me want to throw hands. You want people to look at you? Fine, it’s working. But you don’t look cool. You look like assholes.

A classic. There’s so much to see. Not up there, the Grampians aren’t going anywhere. Look DOWN. There are so many questions to ponder. How does one lose a single shoe? How can the people who discard their busted-ass doof sticks on the ground for the poor vollies to pick up live with themselves? How did they clean the baggie out like that without tearing it open and licking it out? Why so many nangs? Why? Why why why why

My first time attending the medical tent was a wholly calming experience. You go there, have a brief triage with a medic, they tell you to have a seat, and they send a doctor or paramedic out to figure out what you need. My photographer had forgotten their antidepressants, and I had aching ovaries. The paramedic tent did, in fact, have painkillers, and antidepressants, but not the right kind. The paramedic told my companion that if she started getting manic on the second day, she could come back, and they’d write her a script for a single dose, so we could drive into town and pick it up from the pharmacy. Now that’s care. That’s harm-reduction. That’s lovely. Luckily, we were leaving the next day, so it wasn’t a massive issue. But yeah, don’t forget your meds. But, in the case that you do, the medical tent has got you.

If you’re on any kind of medication, and plan on doing drugs at the festival, you need to take that into consideration. As one festival-goer told VICE, they knew the antidepressants they were on did not mix well with uppers, so they “tried doing the research to find out how the two substances mixed or didn’t mix”. 

“Almost every resource I found online just said not to mix, as they should, but they were all examples from health advice webpages and government citizen advice resources which also said you shouldn’t mix alcohol, which I do frequently and have no negative side effects personally.”

“Out of not wanting to admit defeat I decided to dig deeper, looking for papers that gave the specific details of tested amounts of each drug mixed and find results of the amounts in milligrams of each drug to try to figure out if small doses have the same potentially lethal side effects.”

Basically, they carefully figured out an altered dosing strategy that wouldn’t land them with serotonin syndrome.

“Obviously I made sure to know the symptoms of serotonin syndrome well and check on myself as the night progressed for signs of it, starting with low doses and building up slowly.”

“Test your drugs, obviously.”

Dancing behind the DJ is one of those things that looks like the upper echelon of existence, but now I have experienced it, I can confess, it is really quite the opposite. While the front of the dancefloor is a fucking mess, at least people there are dancing. Up on stage, people are working. You’re in the way. The sound quality from the booth monitors is tragic in comparison to the big phat beauties pointed out at the crowd. The only time dancing up on stage is better than with the masses down below is when your friend is DJing and you and all your friends get to have a dance and enjoy it together without the fear of being wiped out by a rogue doof stick. If that isn’t you, don’t worry about up there. The grass is always greener. Just enjoy the dancefloor.

And look after your friends.

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