Wild scenes as festivalgoers fight in mud at Aussie rural festival the Deni Ute Muster
Videos from a rural Aussie ute muster show attendees creating their own fun with drunken blacksmithing and wild traffic cone mud wrestling.
Videos from a rural Aussie ute muster have shown wild and rowdy crowds jeering men to mud wrestle with traffic cones on their heads and groups of festivalgoers hammering at searing hot metal.
The notoriously drunken and wild Deniliquin Ute Muster was held over the weekend in the small Riverina outback town in southern NSW. Photos from the event show crowds of attendees drinking copious amounts of alcohol, stripping their clothes and some even bathing in the mud.
The event, in its 21st year, attracted more than 20,000 ute lovers, who celebrated with two days of live music, ute parades, whip-cracking, drinking and animal displays.
But wild videos, shared by ute muster attendees on social media over the weekend, show the muster late at night, when the official program of entertainment and country western music acts had finished.
The festival, known for hard drinking as much as it is for utes, mud and leather boots, appears to have its own “after dark” program of events run by wild festivalgoers.
Videos show the crowd getting more and more rowdy, standing around a pit of mud, egging pairs of men on to run at one another and fight in a large mud pit.
The challenge soon escalated, as those in the scrum put traffic cones on their heads, running at each other at full speed until they collided and fell heavily on the ground to the raucous applause of the hundreds who’d gathered to watch.
Meanwhile, a smaller group shared videos of themselves online heating a rod of metal and attempting “blacksmithing Deni style” around a fire.
They heated the metal until it was bright red with heat, and then began hitting it with various objects, and pouring more oil on the fire to increase the heat.
Fires are permitted at the muster, but have to be contained inside a drum “no bigger than half a 44-gallon drum”, according to the festival site. The organiser also imposed controls on the size of wood brought inside the festival.
Another video showed a man sleeping in the dirt who is unresponsive when his friend shines a light on him and jokes, “Me and him are doing a beer bong!”
“Righto, where’s the stomach pump,” the man says as the young man rolls over in the dirt and continues sleeping on the ground.
The muster does boast a number of different events and attractions for the tens of thousands of attendees, including wood chopping, bull ride displays, pig and piglet racing, helicopter rides and numerous amusements for children.
The festival also attracts some of the biggest names in country and western music, with Tim McGraw and Lee Kernaghan performing over the weekend.
The festival was originally founded in 1999 to attract visitors to the struggling town of Deniliquin, when the area was badly ravaged by drought. The town now boasts the title of the Ute Capital of the World, and after the festival became successful, a ute was erected on a pole in the town, to commemorate the success of the event.
News.com.au contacted the organisers of the Deni Ute Muster for comment but did not receive a response.
News.com.au contacted NSW Police regarding the event but did not receive a comment.