Which Is Sicker: Melbourne Shuffle or Sydney Gabber?

Little known fact: Einstein once described dancers as "the athletes of god." I find it interesting a man whose name is synonymous with "genius" loved dancing. Especially when so many people never dance, and just take the piss.

This is particularly true of people who hate ravers. It's the easiest thing in the world to rag on ravers, and it's even easier to rag on shufflers and gabber ravers. But I'm here to tell you that—while Australian rave culture may not be a high-brow cocktail affair—it makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. People like me.

I remember being 17 and getting into the Viper Room Nightclub off Chapel Street. Buzzing on a combination of angst and Coronas, I squeezed passed a couple of ProTec bouncers making cute passes at two marias in short dresses. Upstairs the space opened out, and there it was—a multicultural firework of bobbing heads and feet bouncing to militant drumming on a heaving floor. It was 3 AM. Crowd favourite DJ KAT hit play on Tiesto's "Adagio for Strings" and the shufflers were in full flight. The rest was history.

If you don't know what I'm talking about then, here, let me help. The Melbourne Shuffle, otherwise known as Rocking, is a dance birthed in the underground warehouse club scene of 1980s inner-city Melbourne. The basic manoeuvres were—and still are—a rapid heel-and-toe stomping action called the T-Step, combined with a variation of the running man, with very little to no hand movements (depending on the ravers preference). As the Age described it, the whole thing looks like "a cross between the chicken dance and a foot stomping robot." Think of it as the taekwondo of raving.

My mate Nick was a Hardstyle DJ in the early 2000s. I asked him what the Melbourne Shuffle meant to the city back then. "It was huge," he said of the scene. "There was so much love, probably because the bikkies were good back then and there were no heroes in the rave scene, everyone just rocked it and did their own thing. Whether it was Chasers, Heat, Mercury Lounge, Viper, Two Tribes, or the Mecca PHD, everyone wanted to just kick back to trance, watch the sun come up, and fuck shit up."

Pure Hard Dance, or PHD, was a Melbourne institution that housed the elite rockers from across the state—a recovery nightclub that opened its doors at 8 AM and ran through til 3 PM. And it was arguably more famous for its merch than its parties.

My cousin Hamoud, who used to be a PHD regular, also remembers the scene fondly. "When I think shuffling, I think people duct taping the bottoms of their Adidas Taekwondos or white Everlast shoes so they could glide through the dance floor like machines man. Remember the year Underworld headlined Summadayze? The hot weather, tops off, shuffling. Then Born Slippy came on and the whole crowd bounced and started gliding like crazy. Then back to the Apartment, then Chasers, and PHD. Brings a tear to my eye, cuz."

So that's the shuffle, but then there's Sydney's version: the Gabber. According to the ever eloquent Urban Dictionary, the Gabber is "a dance glorified in the underground Sydney 'Rave' scene by an 'Outlaw' youth contingent known as 'Lads' or 'Eshays'. This dance has been said to be similar to that of a 'Spamming reverse power walking man'."

I remember one Summadayz, SWIM was once force fed a water balloon charge of liquid G as Technotronic dropped "Pump Up the Jam." Suddenly, a bunch of lads in TNs, Roosters football shorts, platted rat-tails and Nautical polos, let loose the most disorientating dance I'd ever witnessed. And that's how I was introduced to Sydney's infamous Gabber. I can still picture the sea of upright contorted elbows and blurred Nikes schizophrenically locked to the beat of the Belgian electronic outfit. I didn't even know it wasn't the type of right music.

The aggressive stance of the Gabber dance, and the fairly unsafe radius for the spectators, adds to the brash aesthetic of lad culture. My friend Shahid travelled to Defqon and remembers watching one guy who was "cooked as." As he remembers it "the beat dropped to DJ Zany's "Pure Disco Shit, he started going as hard as his crack head body could go, and he literally king-hit this chick in the back of the head because he was going so hard. He didn't mean it, but who said raving was safe?"

The arena he refers to is somewhat the last colosseum of Aussie rave culture, Sydney's Defqon 1 Festival. Defqon is where ravers from across Australia make pilgrimage. As veteran raver and trance event organiser Jess puts it, "Everyone at defqon just moves spastically and actually has fun, not like all the other festival where you see thousands of people standing there showing off like bored cunts."

A quick YouTube search will provide countless compilations of lads exorcising their euphoria to the intense tumbling bass lines of icons like Headhunterz, Zany, and the Prophet.

In my experience, there's a strong relationship between Australian rave culture and the working classes. Most Melbourne Shufflers and Gabber ravers come from subcultures that flourish in lower socioeconomic areas.

The people that normally hate on ravers are almost always really shit dancers themselves, they're the guys who prefer to just point their index finger to the roof in sync with the beat (because THAT's "dancing") as they keep eye contact with bros who think it's really cool to pour beer on their own heads. I'd prefer to hang with those that feel the transcendent sufi-esque qualities of dancing, it doesn't have to be a breakdance headspin or a Grand Jete, it's wilding out with your fam, in those carefree moments, united by lasers, synthesisers and 909 drums.

As the poet Rumi wrote, "You believe he is insane, because the music he dances to cannot be heard".

Rave with Mahmood on Instagram