The Gold Coast’s answer to Vivid is a truly unique Australian festival
By Hannah Story
It starts at sunrise. Sunlight breaks through the clouds as a smattering of rain falls and waves crash onto the shore. I’m on North Burleigh beach with a few hundred other people for Heartland by Kalkadunga didgeridoo virtuoso William Barton and violinist Veronique Serret. It’s the opening event of this year’s Bleach festival, the stage set up in front of a rock formation lit by a single red light.
Veronique Serret and William Barton opened Bleach in a spectacular way.Credit: Claudio Kirac
What follows is a performance that seems to conjure up – and spirit away – the elements. Barton’s taps on the body of a guitar sound like rain; his breath into a didgeridoo, like wind. Serret saws at her violin, then delicately plucks its strings, evoking birdsong. They build intensity to a crescendo, then return to stillness, mirroring the rhythm of the waves. The pair also takes turns reading the poetry of Barton’s mother, Aunty Delmae Barton. Later, she joins her voice with their instruments.
“It was very special to share this moment with Mum and Veronique at sunrise, with the energy of the earth, waking up to the Australian escarpment, from the ocean to the desert country,” says Barton.
Barton says it was special to share the morning’s event with his mother, Aunty Delmae Barton.Credit: Claudio Kirac
Now in its 12th year, Bleach is the Gold Coast’s answer to arts festivals such as Tasmania’s Mona Foma or Sydney’s Vivid – an 11-day celebration of boundary-pushing visual art, theatre and music, like Heartland.
After Heartland we turn to the dunes for Heartbeats, a collaboration between three local drumming groups: the African duo Baala Baajo, Japanese drummers Kizuna Taiko, and Orana Dance Group from the Cook Islands. They were brought together for Bleach just a few months before the festival kicked off.
“It was really a mess in the beginning [of rehearsals]. But then, slowly, it just turned into this beautiful harmony,” says Rana Al-Melkarry from Multicultural Families Organisation. “It’s about how all the different drums from across the world can play in harmony together.”
The sense of joy and pride from Heartbeats reverberates throughout the festival and reflects the diverse demographics of the Gold Coast – almost 30 per cent of people living in the area were born overseas.
Japanese drummers Kizuna Taiko perform as part of Heartbeats at Bleach.Credit: Joanna Borgiel
This is a festival designed for the community, rather than for tourists, with most of the funding for Bleach coming from the council of the City of Gold Coast.
Since she took on the role of artistic director in 2019, Rosie Dennis says she has been focused on increasing recognition of the festival: “[I wanted] people to trust that if they see Bleach they’re gonna see something that is good, that’s different, and is connected to their community.”
The festival has Gold Coast artists at its centre – half of the 318 artists on the bill are from the area.
“It’s really important to have a festival for the employment of artists, but it’s more than that,” says Dennis. “It’s a concentrated period of time where there’s a narrative that we can wrap around the work and the stories that are coming out of Gold Coast, from Gold Coast artists.”
Speaking to Dennis and to artists, there’s a sense that the process of making work – often with support from Placemakers, the organisation that runs Bleach – is equally important as the outcome.
That feels especially true while watching Roller Coaster, a musical about the Gold Coast’s avid roller skaters made by community arts organisation Everybody Now. It is inspired by these skaters’ experiences and created in consultation with them; many of the songs were devised in community workshops.
The Gold Coast’s community of disco skaters participated in Roller Coaster.Credit: Joanna Borgiel
The original concept comes from Monie Bones, a local roller-derby player, and her pub choirmaster Nadia Sunde, a frequent collaborator with Everybody Now.
After Bones lost her home in a fire in 2011, she says she found solace and joy in roller derby: “Roller skating and roller derby really gave me a space to rebuild myself and heal from the grief of the loss.”
Roller Coaster started out with Bones’ story, but was expanded to include those of other members of the community, including Dead Meat, who skates on stage while her avatar, Sam (Claire Atkins), sings.
Claire Atkins starred in Roller Coaster as a woman putting on her skates again.Credit: Joanna Borgiel
While Roller Coaster’s Thursday and Saturday night performances fall victim to rain, the stands outside Gold Coast venue HOTA’s outdoor stage are full of people excited to watch the friends and family perform at the Friday premiere. Community skaters fill out musical numbers, sometimes distracting from the central action but mostly bringing colour and a feeling of pride.
As a little girl behind me says: “I could bring my skates up there!”
Roller Coaster shows how the festival takes narratives of everyday life in the Gold Coast and turns them into art. This is true, too, for the return of Acoustic Life of Sheds by Tasmanian arts and social-change organisation Big Hart.
Locals share their sheds with an audience and with artists, who make music in response to it.
On Saturday, at the first shed, we meet Brisbane musicians Sam Pankhurst and Ritchie Daniell, whose soundscape features the voice of blues musician Skip James and the sound of local birdsong, and is played on a reel-to-reel tape machine.
At the next shed at the Veterans Organic Garden, Selve – a young Gold Coast alternative rock band, on the cusp of releasing their debut record – play an “electric life of sheds”.
Gold Coast alternative rock outfit Selve are about to release their debut album.Credit: Joanna Borgiel
Led by Jabirr Jabirr man Loki Liddle and Anaiwan man Reece Bowden, the band use the history of the mountains and the valley – including the felling of red cedar trees to clear the land for settler farmers – as the basis for their songs, which span psych, alt-country and jangle-pop.
The back half of the day has artist Christine Johnston (the Kransky Sisters) in front of a pottery shed, explaining a family’s story in vivid detail – and demonstrating her talent for impersonating birds. Down the road, Brian Ritchie, best known as a member of the Violent Femmes, and the artistic director of Mona Foma, closes the event in an open shed in a farmer’s-market fruit garden, showing off his skill on a variety of instruments including the Japanese stone flute.
The aim of his set is for meditation and communion with the environment, which is felt when he blows into a conch shell and the sound echoes around the valley.
Brian Ritchie from the Violent Femmes blows into a conch shell at Bleach.Credit: Claudio Kirac
It’s not dissimilar to the aims of Bleach as a festival – one that brings people together, to hear untold stories about the place they call home.
Bleach continues until Sunday.
The writer travelled to Bleach as a guest of the festival.
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