Like a Butterfly – Wintermoon 2011

Bruce Watson

Two impossibly bright and beautiful Ulysses butterflies fluttered by to greet me.  Welcome to Wintermoon! They were the first of several butterflies I saw flitting across the stage and crowd-diving during concerts at the intimate and rustic outdoor stages of this festival nestled in tropical Queensland rainforest.

The festival is located on a beautiful patch of land which borders the Eungella National Park between Airlie Beach and Mackay half way up the Queensland coast. Jenny and Chris welcome the crowds onto their own land. Over the years they have become almost like extended family.

While it has grown from an informal gathering, it is still small and intimate, with only three venues. The biggest would have only a couple of hundred in the crowd at peak times, and the other two are very much up close and personal. My personal favourite venue is the Lunar stage. It feels like an outdoor room, covered by a tarp for shade. I saw the best performances of the weekend there because it is such an intimate and personal space. Between songs you can hear the creek which flows right next to the stage. I took the opportunity to swim in its fresh cool water before and after my performance on that stage. You can’t do that at many festivals.

Wintermoon punches above its weight in terms of the calibre and profile of national acts. How can such a tiny festival get Shane Howard and his band, Pearl (Marcia Howard and Rose Bygrave), Damien Howard and the Ploughboys (yes, it was a bit of a Howard family get together this year!), Kristina Olsen, Tiffany Eckhardt and Dave Steel, the Ellis Collective and many more, including top Queensland acts?  It can only be that for everyone involved, it’s pleasure before business.

Everyone smiles hello as you wander around. It’s the friendliest festival I know. You feel like part of a community, not a festival goer. Free range children roam around, as the chooks do, their parents knowing that they are in a safe place. It caters wonderfully well for their children with a hillside maypole, a flying fox, a waterslide and of course the swimming hole.

There’s no mobile phone reception, and that really helps concentrate the energy and attention on the moment. Something all too rare these days.

Of course there was lots of great music and many spontaneous collaborations. More than one act at the festival was born out of muso’s meeting at last year’s festival.

There were too many great moments (musical and otherwise) to cover comprehensively, so here are some impressions:
Shane, Myra (his daughter), Damian and Marcia Howard together on stage with Rose Bygrave in one of Pearl’s sets, only to be topped by Kristina Olsen and Campbell the Swaggie arm in arm joining Pearl in another song (yes, really).
Alana from Vardos chasing an excited little boy through the crowd while playing some very hot fiddle.
Sharing great late night sessions.
Eight year old Obi from Twine dazzling with his drumming and again with his vocal rendition in The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
A snake on the path by the swimming hole.
So many lovely conversations in the chai house and by the swimming hole.
So many stars in the night sky that the Milky Way really did look milky.
Steady Eddy ‘educating’ the children in his comedy set – when he was not on stage he was selling hippy gear from his stall.
Kuranda’s Gudju Gudju charming us with their funky music and multi-lingual messages of unity and maintaining culture.
A killer version of Solid Rock by Shane Howard and band.
Belly dancers and the amazing trapeze artist Lucia Carbines.
The unflappable Carmen and Darren’s herculean effort on sound at the main stage, and excellent sound elsewhere care of Lee, Patrick, Chris, John, Frank and others.
Henrietta the free range chook doing a mad dash through the front-of-stage dancers during the final concert. You don’t get that at many festivals.

There was so much more, but you get the picture.

The love, trust and generosity shown by all the organizers, volunteers and punters is inspiring. Performers are bedded, fed and (if they’re lucky) even massaged. And they return the kindness with special performances. Does this all sound a bit soppy? Well, Wintermoon does that to you.

Someone said that the special energy at Wintermoon must be because songlines meet there. Whether or not that’s true, there is definitely something special – like those butterflies. And like a butterfly, Wintermoon appears out of nowhere, delights us with its elusive beauty – and then it’s gone.

But you know there’ll always be another one.

Bruce Watson