Big Red Bash: the Simpson Desert’s unique music festival
The masses descend on a pop-up town beside a remote dune in the Simpson Desert. Welcome to the Big Red Bash, a music festival like no other.
It’s teeth-chattering cold in the desert darkness as we rummage around our tent for coats and beanies, mittens and torches to light our way up the sandy incline of Big Red. Nearing the crest of the 40m-high dune we see that about 200 people have beaten us to it. They appear as silhouettes in the grainy pre-dawn light, all facing east in a thin long line, an air of expectancy permeating the low chatter. We move through the crowd, past groups popping champagne, others with yoga mats, kids with boogie boards. There’s a couple cracking their first beers of the day. We skirt around a few dogs and find a spare spot of sand just as the star attraction beams over the horizon, flicking a red and orange light over our world. On cue, a lone piper on the dune begins a reveille of Waltzing Matilda and somewhere below Here Comes the Sun blares from a loudspeaker. This desert sunrise is champagne-worthy but the smoky, hazy scene it illuminates before us is something else: a logistical miracle in the Simpson Desert.
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It’s an orderly looking town, this place that has emerged out of the sand in a just a few days and unfurled in the shape of a fan. Neat rows of campervans, caravans, utes, tents and swags are arranged along makeshift roads with temporary street signs: Burke and Wills Way, (Jimmy) Barnes Boulevard, (Paul) Kelly Crescent. There’s no running water, no connected electricity, no wifi, sewerage, concrete, pavement or any permanent structure at all. The nearest hospital or pharmacy is more than 600km away. Yet there are more than 9000 people here, a population vastly eclipsing the number of residents in the towns we’ve driven through to get here: Longreach, Winton, Boulia, Birdsville – place names burnt into the Australian psyche. This pop-up town at the base of Big Red is called Bashville. It’s the site of the world’s most remote music festival.
Thin smoke spirals into the air as the town below us comes to life. It’s time for a decision: a yak and a yoga session in the warming sun on the dune? Or a coffee from one of the food trucks and stake out a patch of desert to watch the drag race – 370 blokes in wigs and gowns sprinting down the dune to raise money for the Royal Flying Doctors’ Service? They’ve come prepared, these blokes; no outfit is too lurid, no look too outrageous: there’s glitter, sequins and stilettos, leery makeup, fishnets, black curly wigs stuffed down pants… “Is that a mankini?” my teenager asks in faux horror. “Is this even legal?” Away from the social strictures of city life, this is wildly, hilariously unhinged.
Meanwhile, up on the dune, there’s talk of a desert wedding courtesy of a celebrant in the crowd. And the headline event hasn’t even started.
In February last year an email arrived in my inbox announcing the Big Red Bash, three days of Aussie rock under the stars in the Simpson Desert. The Living End, Kasey Chambers, Eurogliders, Richard Clapton, performers from Aussie legends Choirboys, Noiseworks, Dragon, Boom Crash Opera. And the headline act, a one-off Midnight Oil concert. It’s in the NSW July school holidays and the idea of a family holiday grips me. The outback, the music, the Oils playing Beds Are Burning and The Dead Heart under a full moon. I might have used phrases like “bucket list” and “once-in-a-lifetime” to get the family over the line and once they were in, the planning started.
How to get there and back in one week? Driving from Sydney or Brisbane would eat up too much time so we reach a compromise: a flight to Longreach, where we’d collect a hire car for a leisurely drive to the festival. Single nights in Longreach, Winton, Boulia; three nights in a tent in the desert, then a long drive back to Longreach and home. A journey of about 1600km, a fraction of the average 4300km trip other festival-goers will make from all corners of the continent. We join a Facebook chat page for tips on dirt-road driving and must-see stops along the way. Some will take weeks, others months to get here – a welcome boon to outback towns.
It’s a slow drive – the desert dry we had expected has given way to spectacular landscapes fuelled by floodwaters that have brought the channel country to life. We stop for photos often, but can’t quite capture the vividness of wildflowers sprouting from red earth, fluorescent flashes of budgies and magnificent wedge-tailed eagles feasting on roadkill. In Boulia we savour our last shower for a few days, stock up on water and other basics and head for Birdsville, make an obligatory stop at the pub, and then join a convoy driving another 35km west to Bashville.
It’s a strange scene of dust and Akubras, campsites ranging from flash mobile homes with solar panels to sleeping bags under the stars. We locate our rent-a-tents, which come kitted out with sleeping gear and foldup chairs, and note with some alarm our neighbours working their way with noisy, foul-mouthed determination through a slab of beer. Their endurance will be legendary. Long nights are ahead…
Lines of composting toilets manned by good-natured volunteers who keep things tidy are nearby, and in another zone is a clutch of food trucks that have made the epic trip. There will be pizza and burgers. Fish and chips and kebabs. Hot coffee. BYO alcohol that we decant into glass-free vessels to take into the concert zone, a stage set at the foot of Big Red, down which kids and adults slide on boogie boards and bits of cardboard. Around us, people are dancing and singing, strangers are chatting. The vibe is friendly, relaxed; you’d never be lonely here.
It’s grey nomad season but the crowd is aged mainly in their 40s and 50s and they grew up to much of this music. About a third of them are families and kids perch atop dad’s shoulders in the mosh pit as the almost-full moon rises above us. Girls on the Avenue, Capricorn Dancer, thank you Richard Clapton; Heaven (Must be There), I love you, Eurogliders; That’s When I Think of You (1927…). On it goes, a roll call of great Aussie music over three nights topped by The Living End and then, on the last night, Midnight Oil. It feels like everyone is up on their feet, singing every song word for word at the top of their lungs. It’s only a couple of months since the federal election that exposed deep faultlines across Australia but the overtly political messaging of the Oils songs don’t seem to matter right now; everyone sings as one.
It’s a crazy idea; shouldn’t work, really. Bringing all these people through the outback to this remote desert location, an 870,000ha organic beef farm, Adria Downs, founded by David and Nell Brook. Hauling in the generators and gear and lights and stage. Organising food trucks, toilets, volunteers. “It’s silly, thinking something like this could even happen,” says Greg Donovan, the event’s founder, who still has an air of delighted bewilderment at its success. “People thought I had rocks in my head.”
It began as an accident. Donovan organised the Big Red Run marathon in 2013 and arranged for the singer John Williamson to play on top of the dune as entertainment for the competitors and volunteers. Word spread and about 500 people turned up. It gave him an idea – perhaps people were more interested in listening to music in the desert than running 250km through it. A redundancy payout from his insurance broking job the following year gave Donovan the cash to prop up the event during the first few loss-making years. By 2016 about 7000 people made the trip to watch Jimmy Barnes and Paul Kelly; by 2018 about 9000 turned up for John Farnham and last year about 9200 people were there for the Oils and the other great Aussie rock acts.
When tickets for this year’s event, again featuring Kelly, went on sale last year they sold out in about four weeks: there’ll be about 10,000 people this July. Donovan says the event can still grow. “It’s a big responsibility to look after this land, it’s such an iconically Australian environment, but everybody goes there in the right spirit,” he says.
And herein lies the other miracle of this pop-up town. Two days after the festival, the cars and tents have gone, the huge stage is taken down, all rubbish and grey water removed, 120,000 aluminium cans recycled. The wind is shifting the sand back into place, the land has been returned to any creatures hardy enough to live here. The dusty, smoky days of laughing, singing and dancing in the desert will soon seem like a dream.
This year’s event, July 7-9, is sold out; go to bigredbash.com.au for ticket resale opportunities.
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