Overheard at Meredith Music Festival

At Meredith music festival, held on Wadawarrung Country on the weekend, VICE overheard a bunch of shit.

It’s possibly Australia’s most beloved festival, and you only need to spend a weekend there to see why.

Despite the harrowing weather conditions – aggressive gusty winds on Friday that lifted marquees clean off their poles; torrential rain on Saturday that pounded for 11 hours straight – Meredith was amazing.

And between the sublime acts, the woofing, thrumming festival speakers, the churning mud, the slipping rain, and the insightful interstitial DJs, cooked conversations penetrated my earholes from all around.

It takes several colliding fates to bring you a good overheard. You need to be lucky enough to be within earshot of a cooked conversation, you need to have capacity to write it down or, God forbid, remember it, and, of course, you need to be not too cooked yourself to understand what they’re talking about in the first place. You have been there: on mushrooms, watching two people conduct a wholly intractable conversation before you. “Apples”, “that’s crossing the line”, “toothpaste”… on their own, the words are understandable, but together, they string an unintelligible story.

As the rain poured down, relegating us to the comfort of struggling marquees, or on the dance floor during Kraftwerk’s hour-long set, or bouncing around to Eris Drew and Octa Octa as dawn stretched across the sky, chats ranged from party stories to dumb ways to die. And VICE was there, hearing it all.

Person 1: At 2am last night Steph and I saw this 40-year-old woman out at the stage just rolling on the muddy floor. Steph almost stood on her head. She was just rolling… back and forth. It was on the main path where everybody walks through and she was just rolling back and forth across it.

Person 2: What do you even do in that situation?

P1: We stopped, looked at each other and said what the fuck. Then waited for her to roll past and kept walking.

P2: Did she look happy?

P1: She was covered in mud.

Girl: Does anyone have a cap I can borrow?

Random guy: Yeah I’ve got some MDMA!

Girl: No like a hat-cap.

Girl: Dameeeela was DJing on a bed. It was a huge, king size bed, brass headboard, satin chaise vibe with so many pillows, you didn’t see that?

Guy: Couldn’t see ten metres in front of me.

“I’ve heard this is a very special place. When I was in Japan I went to this temple and I felt so safe, there was this energy there. I think there’s this animal instinct you feel when the place is just right. I get that feeling here”.

[everyone goes wild]

“I remember when I was, like, 20 and I had too many pingers and I was guerning my face off and I remember things started coming out of my mouth and it was bits of my teeth.”

“Some coke to warm me up.”

Person 1: I remember seeing clips from Inner Varnika and the rain, I was so glad I wasn’t there, it looked so fucked. But now here, sitting in this rain, I’m like, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad?

Person 2: No. Inner Varnika was not like this. Inner Varnika was beyond anything, beyond even a festival at that point. Inner Varnika was survival.

“Hey man, have you seen my friend? He’s about my height and looks kind of like a pig.”

“I love the mood lighting, it’s so tasteful.”

“MILO EASTWOOD. I WANT HIM DEAD.”

“I’m standing here, with my arm in the air, having a deep conversation. It reminds me of when I lived in Berlin…”

“He was talking about convergent evolution and how fish originally came out of the sea to walk on land but then some went back into the ocean and became octopus and dolphins and fins are arms and legs and mammals came from the ocean and then went back onto land and then went back into the sea and he just said ‘it just makes me so grateful to be alive like imagine if octopus were in trees’.”

Person 1: I just went to get my car and there is a massive, gargantuan shit on the ground right next to it and I was like oh gross who didn’t pick up their dog’s poo then I was like… wait… there aren’t any dogs here.

Person 2: Oh my god…

Person 1: There is a giant human poo next to my car. That’s sinister. Like, a targeted attack.

Person 1: Really nice to meet new people at Meredith. I met this random person, then had a bit of a chat, then she said apparently, I think her name was [redacted], she pissed off the top of the ferris wheel.

I don’t know what happened to the people below the ferris wheel… Like, is it just pissing in the self-contained little bit or is it going out the side?

Person 2: Well, it’s raining, right?

Person 3: Yeah, but what about the wind though. It’s just blowing it back though?

P1: It’s just blowing it back on everyone else.

P3: That is so fried.

“So, I had a house party in Perth, it was in the middle of winter so we had a fire pit in the backyard – oh this story is really fucked – there was about 100 people there, and everyone was really cooked and I was going to bed, and I said to my housemate, ‘if I go to bed, is everything under control?’, and he’s like, ‘yep, absolutely’. So I went to bed, I woke up a couple of hours later to an explosion."

“Woke up, was a bit dazed, and just hear a few people go ‘oh fuck’, fell asleep again. In the morning I woke up, heard voices downstairs, so started making my way downstairs, and was just following, like, a trail of blood, downstairs and through the living room. I walked outside, and there’s ten people sitting around this fire, cooked, bendering. And then there’s just this white plastic chair just caked in blood, and a pair of sunglasses covered in blood.

“My housemate came up to me and I was like ‘what’s happened’. His eyes were sideways, and he’s like, ‘Micks had to go to the hospital’. I was like, ‘why????’. He’s like, ‘oh, someone threw a nang in the fire’. And it had exploded, hit Mick in the face and sliced his nose ‘kind-of-off’. And then, I was like ‘well how the fuck did he get to the hospital’, hes like, ‘oh the ambulance came and got him’. I was like ‘ohhh my god’. Then he goes: ‘don’t worry, the fire brigade came and put out the fire, but we’ve got it going again!’.

“Mick got his nose stitched back on. The local newspaper heard about it and wrote an article on it, and wrote ‘NANG BANG: Out of Control Party’.”

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