inthemix | News | Waterlogged party prison - ITM speaks to the survivors!

As you might have already read about HERE, nearly 1,000 partygoers rocked up to the Freakreation Festival in Northern NSW last weekend only to discover that torrential rains that completely flooded the venue, with raging floods washing away the dirt road entrance to the island and trapping them onsite for days on end until they were finally freed by emergency services last Wednesday. But rather than panic and treat the experience as an unpleasant one, the crowd decided that if they were stuck there, they might as well party! Here ITM speaks to Dougan McMurray, who otherwise goes by the username of Desai, about his experiences over the five days.

According to Dougan, things started going pearshaped pretty soon after their arrival in the Northern NSW town of Tenterfield where the festival was set to take place. “Initially we weren’t actually going to the party, we just wanted to check if the road was open and if the festival had been cancelled,” he says. “All was going fine until we discovered we’ve hit the queue to get into the festival, which was basically a track about three-inches deep in mud and basically the width of one car. Next thing we know we’re stuck, and there’s no turning back. Mud and trees on both sides, hippies getting bogged in vans in front of us and now more hippies queuing up behind us, not knowing how bogged they are going to be getting 50 meters down the ‘road.’

“By about midnight the floodwaters had risen to the point where nobody was getting in or out in a vehicle, and any people planning on doing so on foot would be doing some serious swimming, so there was no getting back to town for us… Once the flood waters got too high for anybody else to get in, word spread pretty quickly and we found out in the evening that nobody was going anywhere for several days.”

For the punters that were stuck on the site, there was an overwhelming sense of making the most of a difficult (not to mention surreal) situation. “There were obviously hardships, but we were all there to have a good time and as such we made the best of it. There are worse places you can be stuck than at a party, and generally the attitude of everybody there was, ‘fuck it we’re here now, we might as well enjoy it.’ The music was playing right until the end, and everyone was having a good time.”

Helicopters with several tones worth of supplies were dropping in fresh supplies to the site several times a day, and one of the most quirky stories to emerge from the ordeal was that one of the choppers was greeted by a naked dancing raver waving them in. “There was this one Japanese guy who was getting around naked quite a bit,” Dougan laughs. “There was the usual type of suspects for this type of party. Really, it was just a bunch of hippies out in the bush having fun.”

And the vast majority of the people stranded on the island chose to just embrace the inherent ridiculousness of the situation. “People gave up on shoes by the first night, and you had a dancefloor that was at least two or three inches in mud with the consistency of pea soup, with the hippies just stomping around the way that hippies do. Mud splashing everywhere and everybody having a great time. And some really good psytrance, absolutely cranking. The highlight would have had to be Zircon, the Israelis who were there made sure that we didn’t miss his set and he was definitely the most impressive.”

And finally last Wednesday, the ordeal came to and end. “It was all a bit chaotic on the way out, a bit of a slow process… The State Emergency Service were really helpful and while they weren’t particularly happy with the organisers for going forward with the event, that didn’t filter through to any sort of attitude to the punters. Nobody was giving us any sort of attitude for causing trouble for the emergency services, which was nice… Everyone was pitching in to help everybody else, so I guess that really heightened the sense of community that you get at a bush doof.”

Sounds like you just had to have been there… But here’s some footage taken from the event!

i_have_ADD says...

on January 11th, 2008

fucking awesome! hahahhahahaaa. go hippies go!

i_have_ADD says...

on January 11th, 2008

fucking awesome! hahahhahahaaa. go hippies go!

ml2009 says...

on January 11th, 2008

Hehe - reminds me of Glade 2007 - where floods prevented people from getting in and then the local farmers had to bring their tractors to tow eople out (and charge up to $50 for it!!)