On exploding cars and ginger beer: This Is Not Art 2007

But across Darby Street and within collapsing range of the festival, it’s as though an invisible curtain has been draped. Past stalls manned by cute young Melbourne things selling poetry zines, past Tomas Ford beating a pinata of bad writing hung from a tree, past the quote generator girl who will only speak to you in quotes from television and film (fully referenced, of course), we’re not in Newcastle anymore. We’ve passed not just through Newcastle’s looking glass, but through the country’s (and Tomas may beat this piece hard for mixing my fantasy references, if he pleases).

Against this backdrop of madness and lesbian ferals holding parties in abandoned hotels, you’d be forgiven for thinking TINA was the kind of horrid neo-hippy festival that took over country towns around the country through the seventies and into the nineties. Though many of those people do show up, something entirely different is going on; the people gathered here are a self-selecting crowd of some of the most creative and inspiring folks in the country, from amazing record labels such as Spunk and Popfrenzy, publishers and authors of books that have sold in the millions, innovators of the electronic music scene running workshops on circuit bending, to various workshops on open source and its place in community activism. This ain’t no Earthdance.

The National Young Writers Festival, Electrofringe, Sound Summit and whatever other festivals decide to latch on create a different kind of space. Here, the thriller writers sit and drink beer with the laptop punks, Brisbane zinesters sit on panels with representatives of AC Nielsen discussing the state of the publishing industry from a level footing. Shaun Tan, magical illustrator of heartbreak, depression and wonder, shares a panel with Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, and Henry Reynolds while upstairs, nervous young poets share genuinely wonderful non-performance pieces with an attentive crowd and Community Cultural Development workers share tales from the frontlines of war and disaster and explain how they translate into work with youth on Halifax streets.

There is a common thread that unites the participants of the festival — they are creative people, who believe, generally very passionately, in the idea of DIY, that the practise of any art, be it a solo endeavour or a community cultural development project, is a political act and occurs within the context of a broader community. We’re all working towards the same thing, from a thousand different angles.

There are, for the most part, no wankers here. They don’t come. There are bad artists, yes, and idealistic young socialists. But the hipsters; well, for some reason they seem to stay home. I think they know they wouldn’t be tolerated—the only thing TINA seems to demand of you is that you participate, that you celebrate. That, in whatever it is that you do, you accept that to change the world or to change your mind, you’re going to have to do things yourself.

My first panel of the week was on exactly this topic, how to make a life from “keeping it real" (if you will), living a DIY ethos — a roundtable chaired by Adelaide zine-guru Ianto Ware, with myself, a radical craft activist from Christchurch, the folks from Sticky in Melbourne, Tom Civil (a street artist I actually have time for), and partner in Breakdown Press with Lou Smith.

The room was packed and between the panellists, many fundamentally different, mature and practised takes on the concept were thrown around. The audience, too, joined in — a tradition from the early TINA days of roundtables in pubs over beer, is that everybody has an equal position in a debate, that no one person is more authoritative than any other, just because their bank balance or CV says so. None of this is directed — there is no wan statement of equality that needs to be pinned to a wall (and proofread by the texta-wielding poster grammar checker), there are no directive that need to be laid down. It’s just that, almost without fail, roundtable panellists will fold up the table they’ve been provided, and move the chairs into a circle, and everybody will shuffle up a little bit closer.

Though discussions will, as they do at any festival, degenerate into whinges about the decline in arts funding, there are at least constructive contributions to this debate. One of the most constructive is festival founder Marcus Westbury’s new ABC series Not Quite Art, which manages to sneak a sound and well considered political message about the difference between nurturing the creation of art and the exhibition of it, about the intangible places culture really comes from that don’t tend to cost a lot of money. It’s on sometime in October. It’s really quite good. Even a little bit angry.

There were other panels, equally interesting, equally strange. There were nights spent listening to laptop drone, talking at length about stuff that doesn’t matter, with an overwhelming feeling that it really mattered to do so. There were strange interventions by performance artists during panels. There was public urination, and drinking of same from a cup. There were strips. There was a burning car and a bad indie dance party. There was champagne sweet-talked from barmen at Irish pubs when no other alcohol was forthcoming from the town. There were mercifully few veejays and proponents of rave culture, which made things a litle more bearable than previous years.

Over the course of the weekend, in this strange temporary autonomous space, I was continually struck by how my cynicism was being beaten down in the face of genuine talent, or at least genuine intellect. A poet or a comedian or a guy who makes music from Darth Vader masks and Barbie dolls would take the stage, and I’d be ready to hate. And yet within minutes I’d be enraptured, or laughing, or clapping wildly. These same people I could see on any other night of the year, in any other place, and mutter dismissive sarcasm under my breath, but here, in this space, I couldn’t get enough. It’s the energy of seeing people having fun. Or maybe it’s because I’d been drinking beer instead of water since sometime before lunch. The world is full of wonder until you run out of beer.

It’s tough to put a finger on the precise import of TINA in Australia’s cultural and political landscape — it’s just not that kind of festival. You can’t quantify what it does to you. But, as everybody packs and trundles with their packs towards the train, not quite prepared to burst the bubble and face big city streets once more, something has shifted. Each and every one of us knows that literary and artistic culture is not moribund in this country, and it is not dominated, as is lazily and loudly claimed so often, by elites who float on pretentious clouds above us. It is not owned by the multinationals who bought our publishing houses. It’s right here. It’s with us. It’s in the streets of every town and every city, and we’re taking it back there, renewed once again. Now, have you got anything to drink?