At Meredith on the weekend, I was once again reminded of what a beautiful communal experience a music festival can be. But at another gathering just 100 kilometres away, a different truth was being thrust into the spotlight: the experience is built upon a compact between audience and artist, and it can easily be broken.

That is what happened at Good Things in Melbourne, when Shirley Manson, lead singer of 1990s indie rock band Garbage, turned on a fan in the crowd for the egregious sin of waving a beach ball above his head.

“Oh dude, you’re such a big f---ing important guy with your big f---ing beach ball,” Manson said in her Scottish brogue. “Ooooh. I’m so scared of you. So thrilled by you. What a f---ing douchebag.”

At first, Ben O’Brien, the object of Manson’s derision, thought it was a bit of harmless, if rather vicious, banter. But when Manson stepped the abuse up a notch, O’Brien told the website Blunt, he began to feel “very small and a bit afraid”.

Calling him “a f---ing middle-aged man in a f---ing ridiculous hat” and “a f---ing f---face”, Manson said she wanted “to ask people to f---ing punch you in the f---ing face. But you know what? I’m a lady, so I won’t.”

In case he hadn’t got the message, she added, “I would love to send my crew over to f---ing mess you up, but you know what, I won’t, because I pity you, because you’re a small man with a small penis.”

Manson is not the first artist to take issue with inflatable balls bouncing around while they play – the Pixies famously stopped their show at the Myer Music Bowl in 2007 when the organisers of the V Festival released a bunch of branded balls into the crowd, with frontman Black Francis saying “we’re not a beach ball kind of band”. But the viciousness of Manson’s attack was disproportionate to the “sin”. Yes, O’Brien is tall and his broad-brimmed hat and pink ball may have obscured the view for some behind him, but he was at the side of the stage. What’s more, it was mid-afternoon, there was plenty of room, and sight lines were not yet at a premium.

On social media, Manson copped a pasting, but refused to apologise. She doubled down, claiming she’s always hated the beach. She even tried to draw a line between the incident and the slaughter in Gaza. Her real issue, though, appears to be with the pittance artists earn from Spotify, and the way fans at festivals don’t value the artists, but treat them as mere circus acts.

Fair enough (to a point), but none of that excuses or explains the abuse she dished out.

It reeked of an artist who is just over it. And it was a breach of the compact between artist and fans: we’ll stand around for hours, maybe in heat, maybe in rain, we’ll queue for drinks and toilets, and you, in turn, will dazzle us, and make us feel we’ve seen something special.

Manson breached that deal, and the Good Things Festival audience responded in the most Aussie way imaginable, rocking up en masse with beach balls in hand to the next day’s show in Brisbane.

Meanwhile, at about the same time Ballgate was going down in Melbourne, an inflatable alligator was being passed around the crowd at Meredith. No one seemed too perturbed as it bobbed its way between rave totems, held aloft so that those in need of a pee could find their way back to their crew in the vast sea of punters.

As ever, the No Dickhead Policy was in full swing. It’s neither formal nor enforceable, but it’s the foundation of the Very Good Vibe that permeates Meredith and its sibling festival Golden Plains.

The music is important, of course, but it’s the crowd and the atmosphere that really makes a festival great. Walking around the Supernatural Amphitheatre (the Sup) on the weekend, I spied a heavily pregnant woman rubbing her belly and dancing, I saw the crowd part as a man got down on one knee to propose to his girlfriend (the crowd erupted when she accepted), I had a long chat with the daughter of an old friend, and I struck up a random conversation about the 1960s Japanese TV series Samurai with a woman from Ballarat. It was all so much fun.

I’m a newcomer to this world, having attended my first festival only in 2023. I went alone, and made friends on the Saturday night with a group of people I had never met before. And I have camped with them in the two years since.

They’re a gorgeous bunch, welcoming, funny, smart, and absolutely determined to make each year’s gathering an event to be remembered. And this year, they turned it into a celebration of Kieran, a long-term stalwart of the crew who sadly succumbed to cancer in April, aged just 44.

There was a life-size cardboard standee of Kiz, as he was known, which made its way into the crowd for a while on Saturday afternoon. There was a wall of Kizisms, some of his favourite sayings. There was an AGM – the first – dedicated to his memory. There was a cocktail party and cheese platter on Saturday in his honour, and a dress code in his style. There was a doof stick in the shape of a big hand-crafted K, lit up by LED lights and held proudly aloft into the wee hours.

Over three days, there was a lot of laughter and a few tears and a general sense of abiding by the tenet of WWKD – what would Kieran do? Mostly, that translated into having a good time. Looking out for your mates. Treating everyone with respect and kindness. And not being a dickhead.

And absolutely, positively, definitely not doing your nut over a frikkin’ beach ball.

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