Splendour In The Grass
Pros:
Largest Winter Music Festival in AustraliaCons:
Potentially Cold WeatherSplendour In The Grass is the largest Music Festival in Australia during the winter. Keep in Mind if you are a Northern Hemispherian, Australia’s winter is opposite that of the North. Splendour In The Grass is also one of the most lengthy music festivals in the Southern Hemisphere. Most festicals held in Australia and New Zealand are multi-city tours that are [...]
Splendour In The Grass is the largest Music Festival in Australia during the winter. Keep in Mind if you are a Northern Hemispherian, Australia’s winter is opposite that of the North. Splendour In The Grass is also one of the most lengthy music festivals in the Southern Hemisphere. Most festicals held in Australia and New Zealand are multi-city tours that are typically no longer than 1 day in length. Splendour In The Grass is a full 3 days long, which is more typical duration of a European or North American Music Festival. The Festival is hosted in the beautiful Byron Bay and offers on site camping for $100 for the duration of the festival. One thing to watch out for is the weather, given that it is the Australian Winter the festival can sometime encounter some rain and cold temperatures so be prepared to bundle up for this epic music festival.
The Australian Experience
Thanks Ri for your introduction to Splendour In The Grass, now i’m going to give you a little bit of a different perspective, I have been to splendour for the past five years consecutively. So I have a decent grasp on the feel for this epic three day weekend of music, arts, and culture. Why don’t we start at the beginning.
My first year of splendifferousness was 2007. Splendour was still a baby (compared to other worldwide festivals such as Glastonbury), it was still a two day festival. I was still a slave to the one day summer festivals such as the big day out, parklife and all the others. I was young, naive, had never experienced a festival that went longer than 12 hours and didn’t realise the possibilties that a camping festival offers, this was about to change.
In 2007 there was a mere 16,000 tickets for the general public to snap up, this pales in comparison to the bigger festivals in Aus but less is more, right? Anyway, it’s 830am, myself and five of my closest friends are all sitiing in front of computers waiting for the tickets to go onsale at 9, I am nervous, I know that there is only 16,000 tickets and I know that the rough population of Australia is 21,181,000 (Australian Bureau of Statistics), I can sometimes be a little dramatic, but that’s how you need to think to aquire a ticket to paradise and glory. 9am rolls around and I find myself in an online queue of little stickmen, i’m a little green guy in a sea of red guys and I am nowhere near the front, oh shit. I sit, I wait, I wait, about 920 my screen reloads, I begin to feel a rush of adreanaline, I think it is time for me to get my tickets! It’s not. The page reloads with my little green man, only it reloads with my little green man at the back of the queue. WTF? I panic, I try to refresh the page, it tells me that if I refresh I will lose my line in the queue, well i;ve just been booted to the back of the queue, what the hell is going on? I stay on the page. Eventually it loads to a purchasing page and I am able to purchase the tickets for me and my group, I call them all with the exciting news that they all have to either get holidays from work or quit their jobs as we are about to lose our splendour virginity!!!
Now you may be wondering why I have told you this long winded story about sitting in front of a computer and waiting to purchase tickets, why is that important Karl? Well I told you that story because being kicked off the website is a common occurrence for splendour in the grass, it happens almost every year, so you need to be prepared not to get tickets, I wouldn’t book a flight or accomodation before I have received my payment confirmation. This can be a bit more expensive as flights and accomodation increase in cost by a staggering amount once the tickets have gone on sale, but if you have already booked these things, it will hurt your back pocket for nothing and add to the mental anguish that you already feel because you didn’t get these glorious tickets.
Flash forward. August the 2nd 2007 and I have begun packing the car with all the neccessary items. Tent, flashlight, booze, more booze. Now it’s time to make the nine and a half odd hour road trip from Sydney to Byron Bay. I drive through the night, I always drive through the night, there is less traffic, less cops, less roadside construction, less restless people AWAKE in the car to keep pestering you for things. “Hey Karl, I need to go to the toilet”, “hey Karl, i’m hungry”, “hey Karl, I have this cyst on my shoulder, can you take a look at it for me?” When you’re making a long drive like this you need to concentrate, the road to splendour (the Pacific Highway or National Highway) is statistically a dangerous road, many people die each year making this journey, the Pacific Highway is the main route between Sydney and Brisbane and is always busy with semi-trailers, holiday makers and people going about their daily business. The point i’m trying to make here is that you need to keep your wits about you, nobody wants a nasty start or finish to their festival experience.
