If you’d told me a few years ago that I would drive into the bush to spend four days at a country music festival I would have laughed my ass off. “Country ? You mean songs about creeks and horses and dogs ?” I might have asked incredulously. But the National Music Muster at Amamoor, just south of Gympie is no regular country festival. It’s almost equal part blues festival these days and getting more mainstream by the year so I could find myself there for many reasons.
Camping has never been at the top of my list of things that I love doing. I don’t like dirt much. But the atmosphere of 30,000 camp sites crowded together in a field for the sole purpose of partying like there’s no tomorrow is something I can get behind. Some of the camp sites really are amazing. They have competitions for the best dressed camp site so people really go all out. Rustic street signs with funny slogans are the norm. Some people bring whole fences with them to go around their site and a few people had fully clothed straw men sitting around in deck chairs partying.
The “Muster” related jokes are thick and many with one camp site having a large carved wooden sign that said “MusterLeftMyBrainAtHome.com”. I was disappointed to find it wasn’t a real web site. I would have put up a site to go with my placard if I’d had one, but I was soft-core compared to these people. To get a good camp site, everyone had to stake out their spot a month before hand and even then it was well and truly packed. Some people have their sites marked out the year before.
I’ll say one thing, it wasn’t truly “roughing it”. There were excellent toilet and shower facilities with amazing hot showers to rejuvenate you after a hard night’s drinking. The telcos drag in a portable base station so there’s full mobile signal for the hundreds of thousands of people passing through the gates. Optus even had a free “bush internet” cafe setup, but to me it was being able to browse the web on my iPhone at my campsite in a deck chair in a cow paddock in the middle of nowhere that really made me feel like we had the comforts of home, although the data speed was miserable and only 2G internet was available, but hey – being able to read xkcd in the morning really made me feel more at home.
I went prepared to party. I was only planning to spend two nights there at first but I still brought along two 40 ounce bottles of Inner Circle rum. I had my first bottle premixed in a 2L Coke bottle and I actually made the astounding move of finishing the whole bottle before breakfast, just after arriving at the camp site. That made the first day a little bit of a blur and I crashed out early just after dark. The second day wasn’t much better although I spaced out my rum consumption a little more, finishing the second bottle by the end of the second day. I totally bombed out on Friday night as well, asleep before the night acts came on stage due to too much alcohol and smoke.
Extending my visit for an extra day for the princely sum of $100 I was determined to get more out of Saturday and I swore off the grog, although I think my stomach probably made that decision for me. I didn’t touch a drop on Saturday and as a result I stuck in there for the long haul. The long haul of course lasting until about 9pm, not 4am like the real diehards. The whole time we were there we never caught a single act on the main stages, preferring to hole up in the Blues Tent or the Wine Bar and enjoy some of the lesser known artists. In fact, I think I only recognised the name of one of the acts we saw there the whole time which was Jeff Lang on Saturday night and who put on an absolutely stellar performance. He can really play a mean guitar – and so fast !
I’ll admit that most of the music was a little more country than I normally would choose but it was still all good music. There was one artist who was a 19 year old kid called Liam and he put on an awesome show as well. Like many of the artists, he was a recent winner of the Talent Search that runs all week at the Muster. I would have liked to catch the finale of the Talent Search but it wasn’t on until Sunday and by that time I was begging for a warm bed and a hot bath.
I think one of the reasons I went is to do the Muster in Josh’s honour. Josh loved the Muster and the camping and the whole deal like he was born into it, but then he was always the cow-cocky of the family. I couldn’t find my Akubra among all my stuff so I wore Josh’s instead. Wearing his hat and camping with his dog it almost felt like he was there. He might have had a go at me for not drinking Bundy like a real cowboy but other than that I think he would have been proud of me for toughing it out with the best of them and knocking back two whole bottles of rum without being sick.
We packed up pretty quickly and got home in good time. Sadly we had to bring all our wood back with us because there was a total fire ban for the duration of the event. There would have been a lot of wasted wood there when everyone left I’ll wager. After a shower and a shave at home I almost felt ready to go back for the last day ! Now we just have to look forward to the next event. I think it’ll probably be the Woodford Folk Festival next although I’m looking forward to Blues on Broadbeach next year.
Anyway, all up I’d have to say – MusterHadARealGoodTime ! Josh would be proud of us.
