Gympie Music Muster madness sows the seeds for love

There’s a kind of musk that hangs over the Gympie Music Muster.

It was love at first sight when Laurel Edwards and Troy Cassar-Daley crossed paths at the Gympie Muster. Picture: Glenn Hunt

There’s a kind of musk that hangs over the Gympie Music Muster, beyond the clinging wraiths of mist creeping down the hills and across the valleys of the Amamoor State Forest.

Perhaps it’s the music — both kinds, country and western — a sturm und twang of torch songs, someone-done-me-wrong songs and ain’t-love-grand songs, or the campfires, starlight and flowing booze, or the simple need for shared warmth as temperatures dip to near freezing.

But as headliner John Stone took to the main stage at 9pm last Saturday, the rolling grassy slopes of the natural amphitheatre of the 35th Gympie Music Muster were packed with people looking for, and finding, love in all the right places.

Quite why this muster, more than other bigger country music festivals like Tamworth, has ­become the place to hook up — a Bachelors and Spinsters Ball writ large — no one is sure. But the hills are alive, from the Bra Bar to the Crow Bar to Dolly’s Lolly Trolley, with cowboys and cowgirls getting boot-scootingly, achey-breakingly jiggy with it.

Poster couple for muster love are country music king Troy ­Cassar-Daley and television and radio personality Laurel Edwards. Cassar-Daley, a last-minute ­addition to this year’s bill, says he loves the muster love-in so much he just couldn’t stay away.

“We met right here in 1993,” he says, gesturing backstage as he warms up for his Sunday set. “I’d played the main stage and I was eyeing Laurel off, thinking she was bloody cute.

“And this mate yelled out ‘hey, Troy, have you got a girlfriend? I’ve got someone I want you to meet.”

Edwards, presenter on Channel 7’s The Great South East and Classic Hits 4KQ, takes up the tale: “I had told the same friend I thought Troy was a spunk. We fell in love at that muster.”

Two years later, in the same spot, while Laurel ironed his shirt for that evening’s performance, Troy dropped to one knee and proposed. “I’d done the right thing, asked her father’s permission. It was very romantic.”

Later that year the pair tied the knot twice: once at St Matthews in Brisbane, and again in a chapel in Nashville, the US country music capital. (Fun muster fact: Gympie was originally named Nashville, after James Nash, who discovered gold in nearby Imbil in 1864.)

Cassar-Daley, launching his autobiography and new album, both titled Things I Carry Around, muses on why the muster is a magnet for romance: “It’s had that reputation for a long time. You’ve got the music, the friends who come every year, so there’s a warm, fun vibe. People sliding down the hill on eskies when it rains.”

“Campfires and alcohol,” ­Edwards interjects.

Campfires and alcohol were key to the meeting of this year’s Muster Men Calendar “Mr ­December” Clinton Anderson and his wife Michelle. They locked eyes across the Crow Bar, the rowdiest of the five muster stages, late one night in 2006. They married in front of the Crow Bar seven years later, and haven’t missed a muster since meeting.

Now mother of five, including baby Ariya, who is with them today, Anderson recalls: “It was all a bit hot and steamy. Clinton looked so handsome, there’s something about a man in a Drizabone and an Akubra hat. You have this incredible atmosphere, great music, people having fun and inhibitions going by the wayside as they have a few drinks.”

Dave Gibson, executive director of the muster, said there had been “hundreds” of hook-ups, ­romances and weddings as a result of the muster.

“I was in the campground yesterday, and one couple asked if they could get married in their favourite spot next year,” he said.