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Hanging at the 2016 Deni Ute Muster
A candid look at what goes in at the Deniliquin Ute Muster.
I brought this on myself, of course. Go to that ute muster thing out bush, I thought. Observe the crazy parade, chat with the rurals, artists and organisers, partake of the flavour – curly potato here, can of XXXX Gold there – stir in research and writerly flourish. Solid plan for investigating our inland psyche, or at least a subculture therein. And indeed things begin smoothly, departing Melbourne's inner-city sunshine on a country drive in my little white ute.
But perhaps fate sensed something a touch smug in the premise. By the time my mate and I reach the Riverina region of south-western NSW, and then endure the two-hour car queue to get into this festival, our tents, bedding and clothes are soaked, and it's almost 11pm. But we're here, at the Deni Ute Muster, an event that sprang up in 1999 to celebrate "ute culture" and "Australian-ness" and now draws more than 20,000 people, 10,000 utes, Cold Chisel last year and Keith Urban tomorrow night. It has ultimately become Burning Man for bogans, Coachella for country folk, Bonnaroo for roo shooters, but right now, I see nothing but a few glistening floodlit "roads" and utterly dark mud paddocks. Oh, and pandemonium.
![Konrad Marshall goes to the Deniliquin Ute muster, 2016.](/web/20161030230836im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/c/0/d/7/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs2sab.png/1477620383901.jpg)
You see, Deni has just been served with an almighty downpour. Record rainfall, in fact. And when record rainfall tumbles down on some of the largest, flattest plains on the planet, you can guess what happens. It would be kind to say that the vehicles struggle for purchase. Most are at a complete bogged standstill, caravans are turned away, and finding a campsite becomes a survival game.
I see tents and take decisive action – a quick right over a culvert. Too late, I notice a grinning teenage attendant mouthing the words, "Don't do it." He giggles while I slide to an embarrassing halt. I spend the next five minutes engineering a white-knuckled three-point turn near a row of port-a-potties. A girl steps out of a loo and we make awkward eye contact. (I try to smile casually, but my face is pure panic.) I'm almost certain this is where I will camp tonight, in the mud, a metre from the toilets.
Yet somehow, we find our way out. My ute slaloms, gaining traction barely but bravely. My mechanic calls this little HiLux a "weapon", and that often makes me feel cool, but he also tells my wife that I understand less about cars than anyone he knows.
I imagine that the far edge of the festival will be less driven and chopped, so we crawl in the blackness past a grove of gnarled gums to a promising and largely empty field. We turn in and the wheels stick. Then they dig. Then spin. This is it. I step out into the mud and it swallows my Blundstones. Cold murk kisses my lower shins. I am livid. I leave my friend at the wheel, push from the rear, then the front, but it is no use.
Hope sits with a nearby group huddled around a fire. You're allowed fires here contained in metal drums, and they're everywhere, illuminating hidden rows of campsites like little garbage fires in a refugee camp. I walk over and offer a few fellas a stubbie for a push.
"What kinda beer ya got?" asks one. Boutique pale ale, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. "What?" he roars. "That's not a fuckin' real beer! Haven't got any Carlton Draught, do ya?" For a moment, I think they're going to ignore me, and then two big guys and a pretty blonde girl slap my back and march through the quagmire. They wear Akubras and Driza-Bones and gumboots, and I want to hug them. They rock the car back and forth, and scream instructions at my friend, barking at him to switch gears from reverse to first. "Faster, mate! Fuck! Faster, faster, faster! Come on, mate!"
The wheels finally start flinging mud. It hits my pants like paint on a Pollock, like puke on a bathroom floor, as if the very ground were telling my skinny jeans, Those don't belong here. Only this morning I'd asked my wife, "I look a little country, right?"
"Well," she hummed, "your beard is trimmed, your denim shirt is DKNY, your T-shirt is from a Radiohead concert, your jeans are from Gap, and your trucker hat is ironic. So, no," she laughed, "you look like a douchebag."
!['I see nothing but a few glistening floodlit "roads" and utterly dark mud paddocks. Oh, and pandemonium.'](/web/20161030230836im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/b/t/r/d/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gs2sab.png/1477620383901.jpg)
It's midnight when we finally stop on a patch of wet grass. The scene is miserable, but even if I wanted to abandon this ill-informed misadventure, I wouldn't get far. I'm stranded now, with no choice but to set up camp, so I thank the locals and offer the promised cans.
"Keep ya fuckin' beer, mate," says one, smiling. "Welcome to 'Straya."
You might go, ‘Why the hell would you want to be here?’ But for lots of other reasons, ‘Why the hell wouldn’t you want to be here?
Muster general manager Kate Pitt
That's when it starts pouring.
I don't sleep, of course. Everything is drenched. The harmonic lullaby of V6 engines and country singer Tim McGraw doesn't help. At one point I get up in the darkness and step outside my tent. The panorama is stunning. Terrifying. It is fire and wind and rain, groups of men in high-vis jackets, guffawing, dirt bikes flying along ridge lines and 4WDs doing doughnuts in the slush. It feels like a scene from Mad Max, like I'm surrounded by the hordes of the Lord Humungus.
![The Deniliquin Ute muster, 2016.](/web/20161030230836im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/b/t/s/f/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gs2sab.png/1477620383901.jpg)
At 6.30am I begin exploring, hunting for coffee before the forecast thunderstorms arrive. The site is ravaged. The mud is no longer thick and cloddy, but a homogenous brown slurry. Cars and trucks are stranded everywhere in the dirty soup, ready to be pulled free by tractors with winches and snatch straps.
Inside the arena, the line for a latte is three dozen long, so I slump into a seat by the stage where a group of bush poets are reciting Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. But Jim, reading his own work, is my favourite. He talks of living out here with his dog and wife, one big adventure on a homestead …
Although creeks are dry for most of the year,
When the rains do come, it's beautiful out here.
Then when the storm clouds gather and rain starts to fall,
Everything becomes green and beautiful once more.
The dams start filling then the creeks start to flow,
And wildflowers appear wherever you go.
I struggle to share Jim's agrarian enthusiasm for precipitation, but by mid-morning the festival is in full swing. The Tradie Challenge is a crowd favourite. Four teams, including the Beer Nuts and the Big Swingers, are given some reclaimed wood from a shearing shed and instructed to build a dream bar – sawing, routing and drilling their way to glory.
There is a small carnival with a Ferris wheel and the Hurricane ride, and a man making balloon animals. Whip-cracking championships. A wood-chopping contest. Helicopter rides, monster truck rides, camel rides and (professional) bull-riding. And perhaps the strangest attraction of all, the Berkley Supertank, a three-metre by 15-metre mobile perspex fish tank on a truck bed. (The boast: "You will see what the fish actually sees from under water without having to get wet.")
Much of the festival is quaint like this, harking back to its birth, when Deniliquin was withering in the Millennium drought. The first event was a camp oven dinner with stargazing along an old stock route, and it still draws all ages for this brand of bush romanticism. I meet Sue, 72, from Wodonga, 200 kilometres east of here, who comes every year and is looking forward to hearing James Reyne play. I meet young husband and wife Jake and Brooke from Rochester, back over the Victorian border, happily pushing a pram through the mud, nudging 10-month-old Jayden through the mess.
Yet, of course, the utes take centre stage. Deniliquin, after all, is the Ute Capital of the World: a ute is mounted on a pole in the middle of town. The muster includes a world-record count of utes (abandoned this year – too tricky in the mud), and also the Show N Shine event, where people vie for Best Country Ute, Best Town Ute, Best Chick's Ute and Best Tradie's Ute.
The latter is a nod to the changing nature of this particularly Australian vehicle. Once they were primarily low-riding Holdens with tall antennas, but now they are best represented by the country's most popular car, the ubiquitous Toyota HiLux. (The cash once spent on big steel bullbars now goes into chrome toolboxes.)
Both compete in the centrepiece events, the Circle Work, Go to Wo, and what I'm watching right now, the Barrel Race. Ordinarily, cars would be flying around this enclosed dust bowl, doing figure-eights and drifting, judged on technique but also crowd reaction. But in the mud they basically hydroplane across the pit.
"Oh yeah, a little wham bam and thank you ma'am!" cries the announcer, as two utes nudge. "You're never close enough until you touch, I reckon."
It's time to visit the Ute Paddock, otherwise known as the Pigpen, where row upon row of serious-looking Rangers and Falcons squeeze into a kind of shanty town, knitted together by tent poles and canvas canopies. The horizon is dominated by flags. Australian flags, Boxing Kangaroo flags, Eureka flags and Confederate flags. There are flags for R.M. Williams and Wrangler, and one from an episode of The Simpsons (of a boot, kicking a hairy bum).
The cars have decals, too, from the playful (Put a Little Spark in Ya Life, Root a Sparky) to the righteous (When Injustice Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty). This place is about loyalties: Holden versus Ford, Bundy versus Beam, XXXX versus VB, blondes versus brunettes.
I remember something a guy said to me on the first night here. Deano had just driven nine hours from western Sydney because he loves country music but also, he said, "to hang with the hillbillies and meet the ferals".
And here they are. There's a guy in an inflatable boat, pretending to row through the mud. From the corner of my eye I notice someone mooning me. That's illegal, I say, citing a change in Victorian law that makes the baring of buttocks a sex crime.
"It's not illegal in NSW, mate!" he responds. "It's just frowned upon, like masturbating on an airplane."
I meet a group who've built their own bar on a truck bed. The sign on top reads Hill Top Grubs, because they come from the NSW Southern Highlands town of Hill Top, and, well, they're grubby. They show me the "Morale-a-meter", a handmade timber dial with an arrow they adjust according to their mood (from "Fucked up" to "Wet as an otter's pocket"). They ask if I want to get a "thonga" in me. A thonga, they explain, involves pouring rum and cola down a luge made of orange and black thongs, into the mouth of a mate below.
I meet "Freo", who looks like the villain of Wolf Creek as a young man. He's here in his 1975 Landcruiser, he says, to catch up with the boys and chase the lovely ladies: "I was trying to get 'em into a bit of a mud wrestling, but they weren't really interested."
He probably should have tried Bonnie. Bonnie is here with her friends, family and fiancé Shannon. The Pigpen is the reason she comes every year. "It's where anything can happen, anything does happen, where everything happens," she says. "Learning how to crack a whip, doing beer bongs for breakfast, cutting mullets, and nudie disco tents."
She and her crew have commemorative Ute Muster tattoos. Instead of buying a stubbie holder, they got a pair of cowboy boots and a hat branded on their bums. As a cool wind blows, they pull down their pants to show me. Shannon looks me square in the eye.
"I've got another tatt," he says, winking. "I've got your name tattooed on my arse."
That's unlikely, I reply. My name is Konrad.
"Yep, that's the one," he says. "I've got your name
tattooed on my arse."
No, you don't.
"Wanna bet?"
Sure.
"Then let's get some sun on the moon!" he says, dropping his pants. And sure enough, there in blue ink, in capital letters, is his tattoo-slash-punchline. It reads "YOUR NAME."
I'm getting cold now, so I retreat indoors for an interview with the musician John Williamson. We've scheduled a short chat in one of the demountable trailers brought in for the talent. A heater blows blissful hot air, and there's a couch, and coffee, and I don't want to leave.
Williamson has played Deni a handful of times, and used to drive through here between Quambatook, in northern Victoria, and Moree, in northern NSW. He has owned utes and hurled around bush tracks like many of the hoons in this crowd. "There's freedom in that," he says. "Bitumen roads aren't quite the same. People at the muster would know the feeling."
As night falls, it occurs to me that the muster is an extension of the B&S; (bachelor and spinster) balls held in Australian towns for more than half a century, initially as a way for the sons and daughters of landed gentry to meet and pair off.
Williamson has been to more than a few B&Ss.; They're a bonding ritual and a rite of passage, he says, and yes they can get out of hand. "I've seen some wild things, like people driving a ute into a hall in the night. I remember them playing rugby league on the bowling green."
Bumper stickers everywhere here tell the tale, celebrating the Deni G&D;, the Cootamundra Boots 'n' All Ball, the Finley Apex Ricestrippers Ball, the Elmore Summer Send Off, the Heyfield Lumberjacks B&S; and the Dustdrinkers B&S.; Most have a catchphrase but some have poems, like the Eel Skinners & Duck Pluckers Ball (Let's make a deal, said the eel to the duck, The louder you squeal, the harder I pluck!) and the Mallee Root Round-Up (Rolled up in me ute, Drinkin' out of a boot, Tried to pull a Mallee root, But had brewer's droop).
Others prefer one-liners, like the Titpullers Hoot'n'Nanny (Hot utes and heifers, the stuff of wet dreams) and the Longerenong Seeders and Strippers B&S; (Direct drilled into a moist seed bed).
I ask Williamson if all of this might easily be misunderstood by city folk?
"Yeah, but city people are probably misunderstood by country people, too," he says. "I think country people do worry a little too much about what city people think of them. I don't think they should worry at all."
I venture into the ute paddock once more, at night, after Williamson and Urban have played. They're the headline acts but they are not the sound of the festival.
That's out here, where boys are drinking booze from jerry cans, standing in a throng as a bloke revs his engine to a high whine and backfire. Girls wave their arms as if responding to the house DJ. Nearby drivers and spectators follow suit, and the ritual spreads until it seems the entire field is gearing up for some midnight death race.
I ask what they're doing, and why.
"Holdin' it flat, not givin' a fuck," someone answers. "They'll do this all day, all night, until it ends. Just to make noise. This is the soundtrack of Deni."
Nudity is also the order of the evening. Groups of men willingly pose for photos, but have to be asked to deposit their shorn scrotums back inside their unzipped jeans. A pair of girls walks by and a rhythmic chant rises up: "Get your tits out, for the boys – tits out for the boys." They comply.
Despite all this, I don't see one fight or harsh word in hours of meandering. The place is filthy and loud, but people are in the highest spirits. "It's like Soweto," says an organiser, "but they're mostly good-natured."
I feel like an outsider but a welcome one. They respond to genuine curiosity. Like Dave, who explains how "keybanging" works. Apparently this can only be done in cars with carburettors. You rev-rev-rev, turn the key off, pump the gas, turn the key back on, and wait for a little explosion in the exhaust. "Wom-bom-bom-BOM-BOM, then BOOSH!" says Dave. "I'd wake up to it and I'd go to sleep to it, whether it's a Holden SV6 or a $70K Cruiser dressed to the nines. It's stupid, but it's not my ute, and it sounds fucking amazing."
Across the way, acrid smoke billows as a man pours fuel on naked flame. I ask whether this is safe, or sensible. "Okay-okay-okay-okay," he says, smiling. "The mix is half sump oil [old engine oil], a quarter petrol, a quarter diesel. So you can dump it on the fire but it doesn't go bang and blow you up." I'm learning things.
The popular Big & Rich hit Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy) is playing well past midnight when I find Rob. Rob is a gun-shop manager, and has been to eight consecutive musters. He has a beautiful ute: a 1979 Holden HZ five-litre V8 with four spotlights the size of dinner plates. The feature I'm most interested in, though, is the paint job: a gleaming Confederate flag motif, exactly like that on the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard. The ute muster is, undeniably, the whitest event I have ever attended. The solitary brown-skinned presence over three days here is a security guard from Canberra. But this ute paint job is not born of racism.
"I grew up with the TV show, which is about rebellion and protest," Rob says. "It's also about moonshiners, motorsport, mischief, causing trouble, doing skids and gettin' a bit loose." He has flags attached to his ute, too, including the Southern Cross. But again, Rob is no balaclava-clad Reclaim Australia member. "Australia is what you make of it, and the Eureka Stockade is part of our story," he says. "It's significant. That's all."
Kate Pitt is the general manager of the muster, but this sells her short as one of its key founders and creators. She's a big personality, too, who addresses you by name and pats your hand when she wants to make a point. Around midday on Saturday – after she finishes an interview with the BBC – we take a spin around the site together in a four wheeler. It's light and has big round tyres, so we speedily float over the mud and can barely go 100 metres without somebody asking for a ride, begging or faking injury.
The festival now garners international interest. The New Zealand Herald came last year and named the muster one of the top five things to do in Australia. It doesn't happen without work. More than 50 farmers have been here every day for a month, digging trenches for run-off surface water. The local council spent weeks hauling in crushed rock. Pitt points to a man on a tractor who has worked to pull people out of ditches and puddles for two days straight.
The reason for all the help, in corporate-speak, is social and economic capital. It allows Deni to be proud of something beyond their Peppin merino wool heritage centre. "For years we proudly rode on the sheep's back," says Pitt. "We now ride on the back of the ute. It's all rural, it's all fantastic, it's all wonderful."
And the roughneck ute paddock?
"Well," she says. "You put a heap of young people together, with sunshine or mud, their mates and music, and you get larrikinism at its best. It's not politically correct, and you might look around and go, 'Why the hell would you want to be here?' But for lots of other reasons, 'Why the hell wouldn't you want to be here?' "
I don't want to be here (any more) because I'm beaten. Not in a bad way – just windblown and chapped, dirty and tired. I am perhaps one of the least-prepared people for this kind of thing. My days are spent at a keyboard. This is a place for self-sufficient people, tradies and farmers who carry Leathermans and wear Caterpillar boots.
No, I feel chewed up and spat out, like the protagonist of the 1971 film Wake in Fright, about a schoolteacher stranded in the outback, drowning in blowflies and booze and menacing frontiersmen. I see so many Australian movies here. The men dressed like drovers could easily be extras in The Man from Snowy River. The blokes in blue singlets with hairy shoulders are reminiscent of the shearers from Sunday Too Far Away. The playful hook-up culture of the teenagers is like a scene out of The Year My Voice Broke. And if these strange and souped-up vehicles aren't The Cars That Ate Paris, then what are they?
The only way I can escape the festival, it turns out, is to be pulled out by a tractor. It's an ignominious end, leaving one day early, my little two-wheel-drive weapon dragged out in reverse by a hulking John Deere machine, campers staring. But I learn later that I was just one of hundreds of people facing the same end to their muster. Rob, of the General Lee, was another. Apparently his friend keybanged too hard on the last night, and blew up the motor. That's Deni for you.
Rob has been here in 40°C weather with no sun cover, when he got slowly barbecued over a long weekend. And he's been here in a sandstorm so blowy that it destroyed all shelters, creating a "gazebo bone yard", forcing him to sit in the shadow of his ute, drinking beer in a loathsome silence. There's no shame in an early exit.
"All I'm saying is, don't take it too hard," he offers. "The muster's beaten some serious people."