When it comes to your summer music festival camp setup, it can be really tempting to settle for a quick fix. But just because your experiences at a festival are ephemeral, that doesn’t mean your gear has to be.
Often, the biggest logistical priorities are keeping up the supply of fresh ice and ensuring your buddies don’t forget to re-apply the SPF 50, but the moments in between the music are spent at your campsite, perched on an esky or sunken into camping chairs – and the planning that goes into that environment is just as essential as the time you spend studying the timetable so you don’t miss your favourite band.
As I’ve lost tiny morsels of stamina each year, my schedule of summer camping trips and day festivals has significantly decreased. These days, I’ve stuck with one reliably memorable musical weekend at Meredith Music Festival. A festival packed with history and ingenuity, every time I arrive at the gates of the Nolan’s farm outside Meredith township in country Victoria, it feels like I’ve been away too long.
For a quarter of a century, Meredith has been self-sustaining and imposed as few rules as possible on its now-tens of thousands of punters. “Meredith is still BYO, is still held on the Nolan farm, the original organisers are still involved,” the festival’s website tells you, “and it is still a celebration of music, nature and humans having a wild time in harmony with each other and their environment. And the locals still do the BBQ.”
This year our site comprised five tents encircling a shaded gazebo. Two friends and I arrived in the first car, texted the others our co-ordinates and pitched the Flinders 4m Bell Tent. It was up and ready for a mid-morning nap before the others found us in the campsite.
That first day it survived hectic winds that saw tarps flying and structures come unstuck all around us. Our friends set up their tents around us before a flash storm hit and we hid inside. That night was the coldest in Meredith’s 25 year history, but the next morning the sun was high and it was as warm as ever. We unzipped the mesh screened windows around the perimeter of the tent to cool it down as we re-pumped our air mattress and got ready for another full day in the Amphitheatre.
We saw Melbourne artist Jess Rebeiro win everyone’s hearts, and UK musician/neuroscientist Floating Points blow everyone’s minds. We filled up on all our favourite festival foods – gozleme, Jerry’s famous veggie burgers, Hari Krishna feasts and Eric’s Terrace’s now-famous corn fritters for breakfast when we were feeling fancy and a little worse for wear.
With dozens of trips to and from the campsite over the weekend, being able to identify your tent from a distance is essential. Lucky for us, the roof of the Flinders stands out among a sea of coloured plastic tents – and there was another one being used by a neighbouring campsite, so even if we walked a little too far, we knew we were close to our site if we saw one!
One of the few things Meredith asks of its visitors is that they respect the site that hosts them. Every few hours across the weekend, a DJ plays a designated “housekeeping song” – a cue for everyone in the amphitheatre to get on their feet and collect any rubbish around them. This past year the cleanup song was King Kunta by Kendrick Lamar.
Upon arrival at the gates, each car is handed two garbage bags – one for general waste and one for recycling – and hand-sorting this rubbish ensures that anything in the annual 60 tonne garbage collection that can be reused is reused. There are 218 composting toilets on the property. These use zero water and, because they’re permanent, no emissions are wasted in transporting them each year. “In each decision involved in staging the festival, we consider how we can look after the environment,” Meredith’s site proudly boasts. “We don’t make a song and dance about it because it’s the way things should be, and, one of the best ways we can look after ourselves, each other and our natural environment.”
That’s all kind of happening in the background, though, and us punters don’t make any decisions when it comes to the solar powered sites or biodegradable plates we eat our gozleme from. What we do make conscious choices about are the things we bring into the site. Cheaply made (and bought) tents, gazebos, chairs and couches that get broken and left behind not only add one more thing on the organisers’ post-festival to-do lists, but they unnecessarily end up in landfill. They also mean you need to restock your supply each year … because there’s no way just one trip to Meredith is enough, you’re definitely going to be using this gear again! It feels like we’ve just packed up all the gear from the last trip, but the next one still can’t come fast enough.
