Cloaks, Pashminas and Berets... Oh My!

So, I have the technology. And we all know what that means: photos – secret photos at that. Yes, straight from the fields of Byron Bay Writers Festival I bring you Scenes From a Festival (Unauthorised Edition). This was partly an excuse to test out the resolution of the camera on my new phone and a good opportunity to get some shots of the usual festival goer. All this time I’ve been thinking about the usual stereotypes at writers fests and it seems that I’m not alone. Discovered this opinion piece by Kate Holden at the Age, encouraging Melbourne Festival goers to get into the inherent drama of the festival. Read the whole thing if you’re keen, but here are my edited highlights (and bitchy rantings in response):

"At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival I noticed a striking preponderance
of long velvet cloaks, smart fedora hats, thrillingly swathed scarves. It seemed
some wanted to assert just how artistic they were, even if they were only in the
audience. Melbourne can top that."

Gee Melbourne, you’re so big and strong and virile. Holden, you don’t need to lay it on so thick, we get it: Melbourne: good. Sydney: loner tryhards in cloaks and hats (what is this, a Dungeons and Dragons convention?). Elsewhere in the article she notes that Melbournians are notoriously stuffy audiences; Sydney-siders by contrast are the easy whores of audiences, giving it up at the drop of a hat (a fedora, no doubt). The strange thing here is that this is a complete reverse of the normal stereotypes we often read about. Sydney is meant to be all eye-rolling, too cool for school when it comes to the work of being an audience. Melbourne, by contrast, is genuinely engaged, transported and in ectasy when presented with the chance to engage with pure art. Holden, I think it's safe to say, is dreaming. Anyway. Let’s move on. Ah yes, the drama, the action, the pashminas.

"The atmosphere at a festival venue is giddy: audience members surreptitiously
eyeball guests; the guests fugitively eyeball each other (to avoid confessing
that they've not actually read each other's books); normally dignified people
gabble ridiculously at their heroes; ticketsellers are getting hysterical,
fights are breaking out in the queues, the cafe is selling 20,000 lattes a day,
and from time to time an auditorium'sdoors open to emit a puff of gesticulating
punters to swell the great mass of people. It's madness.”

Hmm. Giddy? Things don’t look too giddy here:

Well, maybe… if one consumed all 20,000 of those aforementioned lattes then things would really get giddy. The closest things got to giddy in Byron was when I looked up quickly to take this atmospheric shot:

As for eyeballing… there is certainly quite a bit of eyeballing going on though whether that has much to do with literature is questionable. Largely, that’s a fact of human nature. Get a group of people who don’t know each other, stick them in a room and then watch what happens – they start to check each other out. Hell, isn’t that the pitch for Big Brother? One of the panelists I spoke to at the festival mentioned to me that the nice part of a festival like Byron is that the emphasis on local talent meant that the uncomfortable eyeballing between guests was kept to a minimum. Apparently, there’s a pretty heavy caste system at the usual metropolitan fest. The international guests are treated like celebrity royalty which leads to the smaller fish starting to stratify amongst themselves: the novelists look down on the thriller writers, the journalists sniff at the children’s writers, the poets… well, what poets? Mind you, if sneaking pics on a camera phone can be considered the digital equivalent of eyeballing, then I think there’s definitely something going on in this picture:

As far as I’m concerned these two are the archetypal lit fest audience members. And you might be able to guess from the shot I’ve captured that they did their fair share of talking all the way through the session we shared. And just in case you were worried that there wasn’t a pashmina in sight:

When I get to Melbourne Writer’s Fest in a few weeks I’m gonna go nuts documenting festival berets. Might even get one for myself…