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Canberra Today 13°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Griffiths / No phone, no keys, no wallet

IT was Sunday night on a dirt track out to the west of Wagga.

The Juicy Carrots had plugged their wheelie-bin-mounted speaker set into the Rat Patrol’s party bike and generator. The lasers were twirling through the Matong State Forest and a crowd, grown bored of bogan karaoke at the Dirty Birds, came in for the DJ set while fire twirlers span and a beer keg was set up.

John Griffiths.
John Griffiths.
It was the back end of a long Burning Seed festival and all completely unplanned.

When arty types drone on about emergent art they’re dreaming of something like this happening.

So I survived six days and five nights as a burner and lived to tell the tale.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Burning Man festival started in San Francisco in 1986. In the US it has grown into a vast and sprawling affair with nearly 70,000 participants in the Nevada desert.

Unlike other festivals there are no headline acts or any planned entertainment at all put on by the organisers. The only thing for sale is ice for eskies, the only services toilets and a water truck keeping the dust down (with a permanent crowd running behind it getting a quick shower). Everything else the participants have to bring themselves.

When I heard about it something twigged. The best part of most music festivals isn’t being in a big crowd passively consuming a band you’ve barely heard of, it’s mostly meeting new people and hanging out.

Burning Seed here in Australia (what is known as a regional burn) is a much smaller affair than its US cousin with 3500 tickets sold.

The sense I got was that this smaller size harkens back to the best early days of Burning Man and the fact many Nevada burners make time for the local event would seem to bear it out.

Aside from the joys of a glittering succession of parties and being in a crowd that had largely been self-selected to exclude knob-ends, there are a number of pleasures to a burn that surprised me.

With no commerce or branding allowed on site, it was bliss to spend six days without anyone trying to sell me anything or being subjected to brand marketing attacking my brain like an assassin’s ice pick.

The gift economy was another joy. I brought food and tools to make 30 meals a day.

I’d been worried that such a right-on crowd might all be vegetarians but in fact hot, smoked, beef rolls went like hot cakes.

It was a big job the first time, but as the surrounding burners figured out what was going on many hands piled in to make light work.

The most satisfying moments, in my experience of the festival, were when others were appreciating what I’d brought to give, rather than in gratefully receiving anything else (for all that was usually very pleasant, too).

On arrival, mobile reception crapped out so I turned the phone off. For six days I didn’t need phone, keys or wallet.

Radical self-reliance, inclusion and gifting might seem to be a strange basis for a society, but in the US libertarian oligarchs are famously as keen on the concept as are socialists.

Conversations about real estate were, in my experience, non-existent. What you’ve done in the rest of your life seems to matter much less than what you do and contribute at the event.

I don’t know if it’s possible to live our lives this way all the time. But I’d like to try. And I’ll be going back as soon as I can.

John Griffiths is the online editor of citynews.com.au

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