Bindoon Rock, 1989 - Entropy series
What follows is a memory fogged by Emu Lager and questionable life choices, though the photos tell a sharper story. Two days of debauchery: booze-soaked revelers, a smorgasbord of substances, and occasional scuffles that got swiftly snuffed by the festival’s ninja-like security enforcing their “No Aggro” edict. Oh, and there was music—Jimmy Barnes, Chain, The Jets, and the ever-glorious Painters and Dockers.
As the festival slogged on, the landscape transformed. What started as paddocks and dams morphed into an aluminum wasteland, a metallic sea of spent Emu cans under a sunburned sky. The crowd wasn’t faring much better, sprawled out like casualties of their own excess.
That’s when I saw the real story: not the lineup, not the headliners, but the entropy of it all—a festival eating itself alive.
The resulting photo essay? Raw, grimy, honest—and absolutely unwanted. The magazine hated it. The Coffin Cheaters hated it. For 35 years, those photos have languished in my archive, unpublished and unrepentant. And you know what? Maybe that’s where they belong, haunting the shadows like the festival itself.
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