Mona’s Festival of Music and Art (Mofo), now in its ninth year, is a festival that dances to the beat of its own drum. But over the last two years, since it’s been held on-site at Mona, it has riffed off the famous fictional parties of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Jay Gatsby, one of the greatest characters of 20th century literature, was a very rich man of mysterious origins who threw lavish parties at his Long Island estate. Many have tried to emulate his parties, but few have succeeded. Who has the means? Who has the money? Who knows all the interesting people?
This year, the Mofo program promised a “Gatsby-style Weekend at Walshy’s”, so we put it to the test. How did the festival stack up against the legendary parties featured in Fitzgerald’s classic book?
1. Transport
On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. – The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Transport to Mona Foma is by boat along the Derwent in purpose-built ferries. If you have a Posh Pit ticket ($55 return) you get all the champagne you can quaff and canapes you can cram. Staff in sexy boilersuits do the rounds, topping up your glasses as you sail under bridges and past factories. Some of my fellow Posh-Pitters were enjoying the ferry so much that they didn’t want to get off.
“I want to travel this all day and just drink champagne,” one Melbourne man told me. “Plus I can’t face climbing the enormous staircase to get into the festival.”
But what was a civilised journey in the morning could become raucous at night. On the last ferry on Friday night, Posh Pit guests tried to start a group singalong of Dolly Parton’s Jolene. It sounded like Tasmanian devils being tortured.
Verdict: Mofo outdid Gatsby on the transport front.
2. Crowd
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
Many festivals are now segmented along tribal lines, so you won’t usually see a wealthy Gertrude Street-style baby boomer (think: grey hair in an asymmetric cut, statement glasses and Comme des Garcons-inspired tailoring) at the same festival as a bush-doof hippie adorned with chest glitter. Except at Mona Foma, where the crowd is – for want of a better word – eclectic.
While there’s plenty of weird and wonderful art to look at, it was the festivalgoers themselves who made for the most entertaining spectacle, like one couple I saw walking through the vineyard one twilight in spray-on tuxedos and Gattaca-style masks, or the men in Bedouin dress standing next to Tasmanian farmers in flannel shirts listening to Tētēma.
There’s a broad range of ages, but also every conceivable type of person. Are they all fans of the experimental synth music that dominated the 2017 program, or are they there for the art?
Verdict: It’s a mixed crowd – very Gatsby.
3. Intimacy
And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
Music festivals often take place in a field – turn around at some concerts and there is the awesome sight of thousands of people packed in behind you. But Mona has enough nooks and crannies, lawns and pavilions to make each gig seem intimate.
Even at the main stage it was relatively easy to scoot down to the front and a bit of zigzagging was rewarded with the front row to watch the Mexican wrestling at Puscifer, or Kev Carmody as he played the didgeridoo.
In the James Turrell installation, around 100 people danced under the patches of exposed sky to Mdou Moctar – a Nigerian band that is one of the first to translate traditional Tuareg guitar music to electronic. While in the gallery itself, we sat in front of the magnificent Sidney Nolan panels of the Snake and watched Kelsey Lu channel Bjork through the cello.
Then there is the infamous afterparty in downtown Hobart. Faux Mo is a very large party that was held this year in a condemned office block on Murray Street. The space was enormous, but had been made intimate through the creation of venues within venues within venues. Dance in a room that used to be a stationery cupboard, or buy a drink in a bar in a tent in the basement that would fit four people at most.
Verdict: Gatsby did great parties, but Mofo surpassed him on the afterparty front.
4. Retreats
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
While listening to Circuit des Yeux, I overheard some fellow punters saying there is a hole in the ozone layer above Hobart, so even when it rains you can get quite badly sunburnt. Looking around, there were a lot of people doing just that: lying on the grass outside the main stage, drinking wine, getting sunburnt. What a luxury, then, to be able to retreat into the lair-like Mona museum, where it’s cool, dark, even silent and full of interesting objects.
The current exhibition, On the Origins of Art, is at turns thought-provoking and gross. Sitting in a darkened room watching a video installation by Patricia Piccinini – which appears to be footage of blood cells created by an inverted nipple – is both disgusting and weirdly soothing, and I almost forget I’m at a festival.
Verdict: Mona is just like Gatsby’s library if you want a break from partying, but more demanding on your brain.
5. Host
“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.
“I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille skeptically; “it’s more that he was a German spy during the war.” …
“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.”
Everyone has stories. The taxi driver who picked me up at the vineyard gate glanced back at the Mona building, looming fortress-like out of the hills, and said: “Somebody once told me that when they didn’t sell tickets, they bought up all the seats in all the planes and flew hundreds of people over to Hobart.”
A woman behind me, lying on a beanbag in the winery: “Someone once told me that there are parties here that get really wild.” She paused and searched for the appropriate descriptor. “Orgy wild.”
At breakfast on Sunday with another journalist: “Somebody told me that last year at Faux Mo, there were kidnappings. They’d grab you and put you on a bus that had blacked-out windows and they’d take you to the middle of nowhere where there was a party.”
Unlike Gatsby, who watched it all from a window, the man himself, David Walsh, could be sighted around the festival – striding across the tennis court in pink jeans, holding a glass of red wine; or sitting on the ground in front of Nolan’s Snake, listening to Ellen Fullman with Theresa Wong, playing her 20m Long String Instrument.
Verdict: Not really like Gatsby, even though the rumour mill runs hot. Walsh also actually spent time at his own festival.
6. Capturing the zeitgeist
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream … A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.
It’s hard not to feel the politics of Washington even at the bottom of the world. It was inauguration weekend after all, a time of ceremonies and global protests.
Trump-like figures haunted the videos that opened the almost-two-hour Puscifer show. Lead singer Maynard James Keenan of Tool fame, dressed in a blue suit and a gimp mask with his hair in a quiff, gestured like a circus ringmaster, controlling the action in a series of taut little hand movements. It was a powerful set that managed to both be entertaining and sinister at once.
A more gentle spirit of resistance was set by Kev Carmody: the man dubbed Australia’s Bob Dylan, who has been singing protest songs since the 1980s. He led a singalong of the track he wrote with Paul Kelly, From Little Things Big Things Grow. It was a song that didn’t get any airplay when it first came out, until he started performing it at gigs. People grew to recognise it and sing along live, as they did on that very sunny Saturday afternoon on the fields of Mona. When those now-familiar chords started, people walked to the front and held hands or hugged the people they were with. It felt poignant somehow.
Verdict: Nobody can predict the future, but there are some spooky parallels between Mofo and The Great Gatsby’s depiction of a golden age before the crash.
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