Deep red walls covered in posters from shows old and new and long shadows cast on the ceiling. A black-clad crowd starts towards the back of the room with head-nodding solitude, here where I am standing on a fold-up chair near the curtain that divides us from fluorescent light and the highway. Closer to the band, the audience becomes silhouettes raising longnecks in brown paper and hair whipping back-and-forth; bodies bumping and pushing and twisting and stomping.
She is at the mic stand. She probably twists it towards her lips. In a loud voice Lena recognises the indigenous owners of the land and stresses this point: sovereignty was never ceded. She repeats it. And regarding the name of this festival, Decolonise, on the first night of the Queen’s Birthday long weekend 2011, she raises this point: perhaps a festival whose name, inadvertently or not, references the struggles of the first people of Australia should address these very struggles. Or not. We could find another name and simply enjoy a punk festival full of punk music. Someone makes a friendly remark I don’t quite catch, but I hear a patter of applause and some more banter and then the band, Lena’s band, Tangle, begin playing. I think of how easy it would be to say that DIY happens for one reason, and these autonomous, independently organised festivals have similar aims, but the truth is that the reasons are varied – a ‘tangle’ – and the people who make up these communities often have different agendas. There should be no ‘shoulds’ in what autonomous performance achieves, but Lena’s words trigger the question: what are the various aims of autonomous performance? To brutally simplify: why DIY? In a record shop along the stretch of road that is said to have once been a pathway for local Aboriginal communities prior to colonisation, the first night of the festival rambles on and when the bands lug gear away, the festival moves on to liberate an ex-squat above a shop on a main artery in the Inner West.
The Decolonise (Decol) festival, came off the back of Alex’s idea (another festival with the same name, largely organised by Alex Szorka), of building a festival around independent spaces, says Jason who sits on a drooping lounge in the living room of his Inner West squat. On the walls and along the staircase, clippings of dewy-eyed seals and seascapes are tacked up – the decorations vestiges of this space’s time as a marine science office. Nearby sits housemate Fez, whose Native American features are accompanied by clusters of earrings. A bullring that is a delicate silver curve through her nostrils glints as she leans forward, elbows in her lap. She crafts her arguments with the cornerstones of Marxist and anarchist rhetoric and Jason disagrees with her on almost every point. It is not DIY/punk lifestyle as a response to the waste in society, as oppositional, or as a means to escape capitalism that the two agree upon. Instead, their DIY punk festival is an opportunity for people to come together under a space or to impose an ethos on a site – a paddock, a warehouse, an alley way in the industrial area. An autonomous festival is living to the fullest potential. Sunk into the couch and sitting beside me, Jason refers to the festival as a ‘spot of fun’, a chance to bring friends from all over Australia to show that Sydney does have something to offer. That first night at Blackwire, Fez says, between those deep red walls and the reminders of a long DIY punk legacy in the form of hand-drawn posters on the wall, she characterises the festival’s first night as like “a family reunion”. It is the festival as opposed to the standalone punk/DIY show that is an invitation that draws interstaters and out-of-towners together again. On this winter’s night, the conversation moves onwards as Fez presents neat answers, articulate and clear in her aims, while Jason resists, tugging at the torn elbow of a black hoodie. His answers are frayed at the edges in comparison to his housemate – almost non-committal and he apologises for this from the get go – but he speaks more directly of plans for next year’s festival. I am surprised by his conviction. It will happen. It is happening. I’m hoping it’ll be more centred on one space; this year’s festival felt like renters coming in on another space, though it is not about the space, as such, but bringing the ethics and ideas to the space, he thinks and Fez adds. Like the Such Is Life festival, Fez mentions, where the organisers hired out a paddock – some patch of land on the stretch between Melbourne and Geelong – and the paddock becomes everyone’s and the festival builds to be something ‘magical’, with over 300 people converging on a site away from the wails of sirens or the orange haze of pollution that appears as the sunlight fades, the streetlights brighten and the city’s night creeps in – “it creates an intensity you don’t see anywhere else,” Jason says. Then the conversation settles at the point it always would, on the contention over the name that I can’t quite shake the memory of. Of their friend, Lena’s voice, amplified and popping in the mic as though close and fizzing in my ear and the question posed, as I saw it, in not so many words: what do we as a community want to achieve? To this, Jason concedes he’d be interested in politicising the festival next year, and he and Fez mention another punk festival, a one-off event in Brisbane, Live and Let DIY, which featured a schedule of three days full of workshops. It is both festivals, one ‘messy’ and ‘magical’ and the other ‘intense’, ‘powerful’ and ‘political’ that are held up as inspirations.
There were all these venues springing up, Alex says when I finally speak with him about Decolonise, and he puts himself back in the context of January 2009. But it was a precarious situation, with the semi-legal venues getting in trouble with the council and a couple – Louie’s and Cosmo’s Rock Lounge – pulling out of hosting some of the festival’s events which were planned to spread across the vibrant new “colony”. There were articles in the Inner West Courier about ‘raves’ happening in the local area and the pieces published referred to the very streets some of these venues were located on. Living at Mgtvle at the time, a venue and residence for the DIY punk community in Sydney, Alex’s Decolonise festival grew into a means to get a dialogue “happening between other venues in the Sydenham/Marrickville industrial area that were all, at one time, within walking distance from each other, down wide streets smothered in potholed asphalt, streets of utilitarian brick facades, an area that reeks with the sweetness of commercial bakeries and dim sum factories. Venues that catered to different scenes came together to share information and found out how to survive in a climate hostile to semi-legal operations.
Mgtvle was evicted sometime after the festival – photos on the internet showed a warehouse gutted of its personality, just a bare concrete floor – but in 2011, venues that are fiercely protected or somehow legitimised and utilised as venues allowed a second Decolonise festival to take place. Outside one such venue, Blackwire Records, huddled in the nook at the shopfront of a hi-fi systems retailer along the wind tunnel of Parramatta Road, I speak with Ben, a member of Thylacine, which will later play its final show on the final night of the festival. He tells me that this festival would not have existed without Midian, a space which caters to an “interesting intersection” of music cultures and communities. “Together with Blackwire it became a staple,” he announces, a longneck balanced in the crook of his arm. “Decolonise I and II were intended to be celebrations of DIY spaces, a celebration that the community has enough venues, bands, people – resources to pool and be self sufficient. A celebration of what we’ve got and a call out for what we can do”. Though the Sunday event was hastily moved to Midian due to bad weather, in someone’s handwritten print, alongside a simplified map of the Inner West area demarcating bottle shops, venues and Lebanese pizza joint Manoosh, the festival’s program had included a Punk Outside event, which is an ongoing affair Ben describes as “generally an afternoon event where people would come along, lay down and drink a few beers” with music taking place in a lane between warehouses. There was one particular show where two Irish brothers played songs, some about construction workers dying on sites back home, ferocious breath through tin whistle and the strum of an acoustic guitar. The sun had slipped behind the horizon and the cold had crept in to the brick and concrete laneway and the still body of murky storm water. It was freezing, he says, and people had to huddle in real close to hear.
I think of the Punk Inside event held on the last night of the long weekend and I am disappointed that the streets were slick with a June drizzle and that I wasn’t part of a huddle in a laneway surrounded by empty buildings and long weeds, watching bands perform as sensor lights flickered. It is on this final night of the festival, next to the screen printing section, that I speak to Lena, beside freshly printed patches of the bands that had performed over the three days and nights, and in Midian, an autonomous space made available to the punk community but not quite their own. Around us and amongst the festival-goers in black hoodies are the venue’s organisers: a man in a leather jacket and greying pony tail ensures patrons leave and enter discreetly, a women serves snacks and beverages, another man with a leather wrist cuff sits at the sound desk and another member rushes about wearing a bowlers cap and patchwork denim pants. Lena’s voice is in my ear again, “In 2009 there were discussions, workshops, film screenings – it was much more about the varied communities and the spaces involved,” she says. “This year, from what I observed being an interstate contingent and someone asked to be involved with contacting bands, it was very much focused on having a DIY punk fest in DIY spaces: DIY punk enthusiasm.” Near us, the severed head of HR Pufnstuf is propped up and leering from the corner. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a DIY punk fest for the sake of having a DIY punk fest,” she continues. Later, when I ask for comments on her vision for DIY spaces and communities she sends me an email clarifying what she said that night, an almost stream-of-conscious chunk of paragraphs in lower case lettering ending with this: “I think DIY and all ages spaces are so important and we need to take care of them. people need to be challenged so that we can progress in our communities and in our lives. staying stagnant is not punk, being apolitical in these communities doesn’t work. we can’t have community that is just about looking at stuff and getting drunk and not talking to each other or taking care of each other when we think we’re wrong. we’ve got to grow up together.”
And I think of the night I spoke with Jason and Fez and the conviction they had in the need for autonomous spaces, especially to make these festivals happen. EBL, the ex-squat which was liberated that first night of Decolonise, will become a non-residential, after hours space, they had revealed. And spaces are already set up, serving various communities, hosting art and bands and zine fairs. There is Carrier, a venue in Rozelle which takes its name from the bold lettering on the roof – the name of a company that vacated the building years ago. I’ve seen photos of the space and the buildings surrounding it, surrendered to the inevitable decay. An office building turned greenhouse, chlorophyll green blooming from dull grey carpet and mildew flourishing across walls. There is Midian, there is Shirlows: and now in my memory I am speaking with Alex over the phone in my lunch break after a morning of sorting through press releases for tours and upcoming festivals, speaking with syrupy PR girls and hovering on promoters’ websites – the slick machinery behind productions, especially the various Australian music festival that have proliferated, fresh in my mind. He speaks on DIY, on organising an independent festival, on supporting all-ages spaces that are not as “stifling” as pub venues, as the winter sunshine streams down. Above the sound of children playing in the park around me he agrees that the DIY festival is inherently political. “It’s really empowering to know that you don’t need someone to validate you to do the things you want, even if it’s just putting on shows,” he says. “I think it’s an important thing to know and I think for a lot of people it’s not that obvious”.
(Photographs by Yifeng Ni)
