“You can’t punch a guy in a banana costume!”: Clare Downes on ten years of Secret Garden

There’s nothing else quite like The Secret Garden on the Australian festival calendar. Held on the Downes family farm near Camden at the end of February each year, the two-night camping event is a fancy-dress “forest disco” almost entirely staffed by volunteers, with tiny, oddball stages scattered down bush paths, pop-up performances, DIY art installations and surreal light structures, craft tents, a colourfully curated queer stage on a tennis court, and a (usually) all-local lineup consisting of some of the most exciting up-and-coming artists in Australia. Proceeds from ticket and bar sales go to charity; the 2017 event featured an realwedding held at the main stage.

What’s more, the bill isn’t announced until every ticket is sold – and it sells out every year.

With tickets now on salefor the tenth Secret Garden, TMN caught up with co-founder Clare Downes to find out howthe festivalhad its start asa glorified 21st with an open bar, the importance of creative mates and monster mistakes, and how they keep it dickhead-free.

So 2018 will be the tenth Secret Garden – How fast has that gone?

It’s spooky. In terms of career, it hasn’t gone that fast – just in that each year is so exponentially different and certainly in the first sort of five to six years there was a steep learning curve. So, it sort of felt like I had a new job and a new product every year. It’s only in the past couple of years that we kind of have found our place, and repeating – not repeating the festival by any stretch, but repeating how it kind of runs, the behind the scenes stuff.

If you could sit down with 2007 Clare and be like, ” Here’s some stuff you’ve got to know.” What would you say?

It’s hard to say – all the stuff that’s gone wrong has ended up being right, obviously, because it’s got us to where we are now. And without those sort of monstrous learnings, and those monstrous risks, that’s the big thing. Because if I were to tell 2007 Clare like, you know, just, “Engage a contractor, a site manager who’s a pro and can do all your site plans, and advise you on everything.” You know, it would be a different festival because I’d have an industry professional sort of saying, “Oh, well you shouldn’t do that.”

I know it sounds so cheesy, but all those mistakes have kind of been the making of the event. And, you know, fundamentally, because I went in so blind for so many years, and didn’t understand the kind of magnitude of what I was taking on, that kind of gung-ho attitude sort of got us through those initial years. And I think with the knowledge I have now, I probably wouldn’t have, well no, definitely wouldn’t have been as gung-ho as what I was, you know, in those early sort of five years.

Talk me through the first year – where did the idea first come from?

So, I was working in a music management company, and my friend, who was also working there, came down the stairs in the music management company one morning and was like, “Hey, do you want to start a festival?” And I was like, “Fuck yeah I do!” Like straight away. I had been talking about it for a couple of years whilst I was at uni and stuff, but he was like, you know, “Let’s seriously do it.”

And so, then I was like, “Well I’ve got my farm. You know, Mum and Dad will be totally cool with it. Let’s just do it.” And it was so helpful to have somebody in those early stages because we really egged each other on, you know: “Let’s set the date. How long do you reckon it takes to set up a festival?” Like, no idea. “Let’s say, a few months seems alright.”

Because we were so young and we had so many mates around us, all starting out in various industries, whether it be, you know, for a wine brand or graphic designers, or whoever – we just did a huge callout and got all our mates involved in one way or another.

One of the kind of founding principles into the event, which has carried on ten festivals later, is to engage all of our creative mates – who have a whole bunch of bosses ahead of them or a whole bunch of clients, and [are] always told what to do – to give them the opportunity to work completely autonomously on the festival, to be given their own area in the forest, and their own budget, and can do whatever they want.

And so that’s what we did in that initial year, and obviously it worked so well just giving people that freedom, you know? I’m such a believer in that is the best work, when you give people freedom like that. Doing that really set up what would define Secret Garden.

And that very first one, how did that actually go when you were on the ground?

So, 300 people. And it was open bar.

Whoa.

[Alcohol] was included in the ticket. And the reason for that was, I’d only had my 21st a couple of years before… and so I was asking all the same friends back to the farm, but this time ticketed. So that was the reason we went open bar, was like, “We can’t ask our friends to pay for a ticket for just a glorified 21st on the farm and not give them free booze.”

So there was free booze, and it was just unbelievably epic. It was just, it was such an incredible vibe. I think the week before the festival, we sent an email out just saying, “Come fancy dress.” You know, like, it was just a split-second decision: “Oh yeah, might was well give it a crack.”

Something I think we got right in the first year, and has continued through, is that we’re a festival for mates by mates, and that vibe was really felt in that first year. And so much so that the following year they all brought their mates back. And it seems small but, you know, for us back then, it went from 300 to 900 really quickly, sold out in a couple of hours, and there sort of began the growth of Secret Garden.

And what’s the capacity now?

6,000.

You probably don’t want it to get much bigger than that, do you?

No. How we’ve grown it every year is: how does it improve the punters’ experience? Obviously we’ve grown it incrementally every year, but it always has to be: “Will it make the experience better? Or will it take away from the experience?” And only then do we grow it. And so, you know, obviously by having an extra 500 onsite, you know, we can open up a new stage, we can open up a new bar, we can have better programming, all that kind of stuff. But we’ve always done it very slowly, and just ensuring that that growth makes the festival better.

It seems the volunteers and the creative team behind it is really central to that as well.

Yeah. Totally. I think if at the core the team are really happy, the people that produce the event are really happy –if there’s love being put into, you know, a sign that’s being painted for the loos, and the volunteer manager is so stoked and passionate about what they’re doing, and then they share that with the 250 volunteers that do all the bar work, or it’s the security manager or whoever… If at the core it is a really happy, positive, sharing, caring, supportive environment, then that will filter all the way through to the entire festival. That’s my theory.

Yeah. And the dress up vibe could make everyone go a bit silly, you know, like school muck up day – but for the most part, everyone looks after each other a bit and there’s a very loose and positive feeling.

Well, you can’t punch a guy in a banana costume, right? You just can’t. Like, who could get aggressive in costume?

And I’d also like to think that because of what we hero at Secret Garden – which is, you know, women and queer culture – that fist-pumping jerks are alienated, you know? They cannot feel comfortable at Secret Garden. They don’t feel comfortable, because they are alienated, they’re not heroed at all. I think that’s sort of been quite significant in keeping Secret Garden dickhead free, and the positive atmosphere of the whole event.

Creating an environment where dickheads don’t feel enabled or comfortable.

Exactly. And, you know, there are plenty of kind of group gatherings where they are heroed but not at Secret Garden.

You issued some more guidelines around culturally appropriative costumes and stuff like that this year. How was the response to that?

Pretty good. Yeah. It’s just so important that everybody feels welcome at the festival. And so, I think because of that, it sets a really nice of tone of like, who we want at our event and who we don’t want. And so, of course there’s feedback like, “Secret Garden’s being too politically correct.” But, that was fine, because we don’t want those people to agree with us, you know? Like, we’re not around to please them. We want to encourage and welcome people who get behind, you know, our stance on cultural appropriation. Yeah.

And with other festivals, having a certain act there might attract certain types of people, but you guys don’t announce the lineup until after the tickets are sold out. How do you think that changes the character of it?

Well that was another really great sort of founding principle of the event, is to not announce the lineup until we’re sold out. And the reason we do that is if everybody is there for exactly the same reason – ie. not for one or two bands, but exactly the same reason – then you have the most incredible festival atmosphere, rather than a disjointed festival atmosphere where some people are there for this, and some for that, you know, those kind of people can clash a little bit. But everybody’s there for exactly the same reason, and it really does create the most incredible festival atmosphere.

And we are super fortunate that we do have a loyal following that do trust our curation. And the curation is obviously very much about discovery – whether it be the bands, or seeing a drag queen performance for the first time, you know? Pushing people out of their comfort zone and what they know is really important. And then always celebratory as well.

So long as people are up for those two things, then they’ll have a hell of a time.

What do you think is the most Secret Garden thing that’s ever happened at the festival?

I mean, broadly it’s when the punters start creating stuff that we haven’t orchestrated at all but is so in-line with what we find funny or engaging, or whatever. So, whether that be, the guys who dressed as running of the bulls, so they had a couple of bulls and a crew of 15 Spaniards. And they had this whole performance kind of thing, where they’d run through the festival and be chased by bulls, and tackled by bulls.

Or when somebody posed for a photo in the main stage area, and then a group of people were walking past and so they kind of joined in the photo, and then another group, and soon there were like 300 people, just impromptu, all joined to get a photo.

This year we built a house on the farm, and it was called Dave’s House Party. We just kind of left it there – we built this house, we had pictures on the wall, we built a kitchen, we had a PA with an output so people could plug in their iPhones and play their own music, and just kind of left it there

But it was the punters who took it to a whole new level – I walked in, and there was this guy standing on a table going, “My mum’s going to freak when she comes home!” Or I heard there were a couple of girls who went up to this dude and were like, “Dave. Thanks so much for having us. You’re the best.”

It’s excellent when our ideas work and punters really embrace them, but it goes to a whole new level when they start creating their own stuff without prompting from us.

All images by Tim Da-Rin for Secret Garden.
Secret Garden 2018 will take place from February 23-24 at Brownlow Hill, NSW. Tickets here.