There is a veritable cornucopia of warehouse property lying around the industrial wasteland of Marrickville. Being just a bit further down City road past Newtown, it’s not too close, but not too far from the city at all.
Any sensible person can see that the best thing you can do in such circumstances is throw a fucking sweet ware-house party, and there is a growing scene in Sydney doing just that. The venues are often kept secret till the night of the event, and punters roll up in busses taking them to their mystery destinations. Once there, everyone locks down and boogies their goddamn hearts out for the rest of the night.
It is independent hedonism at it’s very finest. The people running the parties do so for the pure joy of it. They’re lucky to break even, but it doesn’t matter cos it’s not about the money. It’s about what life’s about – and that’s having the best bloody time you possibly can.
It’s funny to see places like the Ivy or Trademark spending millions on their decorations, yet when you walk into these warehouses you’ll see a couple of couches found left out for council collection. Shit one of the parties I went to even had a tire swing hanging from the rafters (..which very nearly took my head off). Big clubs will charge you up to $10 for a drink, here you can get $5 peronis or coronas all night.
The point, and this is something that can’t be emphasised enough, is that you don’t need heaps of money to have a good time. Society stands a lot to gain by learning from this.
There is something else that society can take from all this, and that is how to behave. Bouncers and Security Guards are a given in the entertainment scene – the accepted wisdom is that you can’t have more than 50 people getting intoxicated without some big beefy guy to make sure no cunts start some shit. Last Saturday there would have been about 400-500 people in this place – all getting well and truly lubricated. In the middle of nowhere. How many security guards do you think you’d need?
Fuck all.
Not even one. There was just no need – everyone was looking after each other, having the time of their lives. This should be held up as an example to the wider community, and I say that without hyperbole. I’m sick of our culture being cast as criminals – and it is true that if the police had come, we probably would have been in a fair bit of trouble. But the truth is that if that had happened, it would have been the Police who were the cause of the trouble. We got by just fine without them thank you very much, and it is mark of the responsibility and maturity of everyone there that we did. In reality, dancing is more fun than fighting. We all know this, in fact we just think it’s fuckin’ obvious. That’s why we come to nights like these, to find people on that wave length.
The music is delicious – each crew has their own brand obviously, some go for retro disco, some for soulful house, others take a more electro approach, while others go back to the rave roots. They’re all awesome.
We wanted to know more about what goes into these things, and what the people who run them have to say about the whole thing, so we had a chat to some of the people involved…
