Honk! Oz (No 1)
Welcome to The Gong, a weekly-ish column on Wollongong life.
I'm launching this column at the start of February 2024, fresh from two weeks away holidaying with my family. But I wanted to start my new column with an account of the amazing farewell party that the Gong threw me before I took off ;-) Well, I'm cheekily claiming it here but in reality it was the amazing annual free street music festival Honk! Oz.
Honk! Oz is organised by an all-volunteer crew of local legends, based mainly in and around the Wollongong Conservatorium of Music. First held in Wollongong in January 2015, the festival takes its name from the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Sommerville, Boston, and Honk! Fest West in Seattle. Each year, street bands from Wollongong, Sydney, and further afield (pandemics permitting) come to Wollongong to play and dance loudly in our public spaces.
As my friend and Honk! organiser Matt tells me, the prominence of street bands in the United States is in part a product of the school marching band culture over there. Many American teens join school marching bands and learn to play and perform, meaning there are plenty of adults available to join activist street bands. Fans of the HBO Series Treme will have seen representations of the amazing street music culture of New Orleans and might recall how knockabout trombone player Antoine Batiste finally gets a real job when he is hired by a local high school to teach band.
Street bands have a long history in Wollongong activist culture too. For many years a pipe band has led the annual South Coast May Day March from Lowden Square to the corner of Church and Crown Streets in the Mall. Back in 1930 the Kurri Kurri pipe band were at the centre of the free speech movement, a campaign for the right to demonstrate in the very same streets. The band came to collect money for miners in the northern coalfields who had been locked out. The council refused them permission to march. With the support of local labour union officials, however, the band marched in defiance of the ban. The Illawarra Trades and Labour Council protested council’s decision and the South Coast Free Speech Committee was launched to defend the right to free speech. The campaign lasted for eighteen months.
Groups like the Femme Fatales, Rising Tide Street Band, and the Radical Drum Corp continue in this tradition by participating in street protests, defending our right to the streets with their noisy and colourful performances. At last year's May Day, when we marched in Port Kembla for Peace, Jobs, and Justice against the nuclear submarine base proposed for the harbour, many of these street musicians turned out to drown out the war-mongers.
Honk! Oz combines local musical and activist cultures to create a real festival of street culture. The centrepiece of their effort is the Grand Parade, where participating street bands and local activist groups bearing banners march from Globe Lane through the mall and down to the Arts Precinct outside the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre. Of course, not everybody is happy with this merging of the ludic and the political. Last year when I volunteered as a marshal on the Grand Parade, I was accosted by an angry old white man who had been watching the parade. He told me we shouldn't be mixing music and politics. I told him we could do what we liked; but I think he was just cranky because he had been bopping along before he saw the signs calling for climate action and realised that he had been hijacked into supporting a bunch of riff raff!
The rise of insurance and risk have taken a heavy toll on community festivals and protest marches, which now have to contend with overlapping risk regimes imposed by the police, and local and state governments. Honk! Oz manages these regimes skilfully. The festival has permission, Council approvals and the like, but there is nevertheless something gloriously unauthorised about it. On Saturday afternoon in the Arts Precinct, as the the HOOT Pickup Band came to the end of their set, band leader Ken Field turned to the audience: 'we can play one more song can't we?' 'Who's in charge here?' 'Are you in charge?' he said, pointing at random to a girl in the audience, 'can we play one more song?' She nodded and they played one more song; revelling in the anarchy of the moment as darkness gathered for our lantern parade.
Honk! Oz is one of those moments when I am filled with gratitude for living in the Gong. Everyone is welcome, but it retains a close-knit community feeling. I run into friends I might not have seen all year and old high school friends. The festival captures something we have in common as part of Wollongong culture. Its where the culture we could have becomes the culture we do have, even if its just for a weekend. It gives me an energy that sustains me well after the festival comes to an end, as I am sure it does many of the participants. That energy spills out again in different forms, from street marches, to the daily grind of ferrying small children to music class at the Con each week, and to the ways in which we inhabit space in Crown Street.
Honk Oz also provides an opportunity to rediscover the pockets of beauty that exist around the Town Hall and Arts Precinct; little lane ways like Ethel Hayton Walk that link the Precinct with Crown Street or the playground next to the Town Hall which you only remember exists because you are there for Honk! There children play with new friends whom they might not ever have met if we failed to venture out from our private castles. It was astonishing how cool we remained under the plane trees in the Arts Precinct, enjoying the way urban trees lower the ambient temperature. Its also the perfect opportunity to eat the delicious Vietnamese food from An Chut Chut, perched on a little table out on the paving listening to the music in the Arts Precinct or huddling inside the little restaurant talking with friends.
When I hear the beat of the drums at Honk! and gather there with my people, even the ones I don't know, I feel connected to them and to this place. I feel a sense of re-enchantment, of the making of a place and of a community. Where once the Kurri Kurri pipe band and the labour movement turned the loose assembly of migrants who came to Wollongong to work the mines and mills into a movement and a class, today Honk! enacts some new form of community, looser somehow, more precarious perhaps than some of those that have gone before us but powerful nonetheless; and perhaps suited by their very flexibility to these precarious times in which we live.
Honk! Honk!