The Final Frontier

31 July 2014 | 2:59 pm | Mitch Knox

After five years in the Artistic Directors' chair, Edwina Lunn is saying goodbye to the Darwin Festival

For the past five years, Edwina Lunn has lived, breathed, and bled all things Darwin in her role as the Artistic Director for the city’s annual Darwin Festival. Now, as The Music touches base with the former associate director of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (and Edinburgh Fringe alumnus) in the lead-up to 2014’s celebrations, Lunn is straddling the nebulous line between stress and enthusiasm as her final stint in charge draws nearer.

“This is the time of year that we just start to go, ‘let’s make this festival happen’, so we can be part of it,” Lunn explains over the phone from the Northern Territory. “It’s kind of a long lead for the payoff; most people who work in festivals do it for the great festival environment, and it just feels like it’s a long year between festivals, so it’s a ‘bring it on’ attitude now… bring it on, we’ll fix it on the night. If we haven’t fixed it now, we’ll fix it then!”

Lunn’s fix-it-on-the-fly attitude is somewhat deceptive – such events as the annual Darwin Festival, which this year features a stunning music line-up of acts including the likes of
Gurrumul
,
Courtney Barnett
(pictured left) and
Seekae
, require a tremendous amount of planning, and were Lunn not exeunting the Darwin Fest, she’d already be up to her neck in planning for 2015, she says.

“Sometimes we start planning more than a year ahead, because… this is my last year – I’m not working on 2015 – but if I had been, I’d have already been working on the big stuff for 2015,” Lunn says. “But you say that, and then I remember that quite a lot of the program was actually pulled together in May this year, just before we went to print.

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“We didn’t confirm Gurrumul until a week before we went to print. So you can work on something for more than a year, but probably the vision of what you start with or what the program will look like, by the time you get to the festival, or you get to the print deadline, I reckon only 30 per cent of it is the same. Things fall out, you have better ideas, people become not available, people do become available - like Gurrumul all of a sudden knocks on your door and says, ‘I want to be a part of this festival,’ you kind of drop everything and go, ‘Great, let’s make this happen!’

However, even having a star so renowned as Gurrumul come knocking on the festival’s door, fortuitous though it was, created its own set of challenges for the veteran organiser.

“The hardest part about Gurrumul was to find an orchestra; if you’re knocking on orchestras’ doors in April for a gig in August, many of them are booked up, and many of them were in Europe. The Camerata Orchestra, from Brisbane, were available and so super-keen, so it was like, ‘Great, we can make it happen,’ – but for a while there, we thought we may have left it all a bit too late.

“It was [lucky]. And we’re all a little bit starstruck and overexcited about it now. Certainly, having Gurrumul perform in Darwin… he’s clearly one of Australia’s most important voices – magnificent and beautiful and powerful and all of those things rolled into one extraordinary performer. And to have him performing with his full band and his orchestra – he hasn’t in my time in Darwin performed in Darwin, so this is probably opportunity that is not going to come up again. It’s the biggest concert he’s ever performed in Darwin.”

It’s fitting that Lunn should have orchestrated such a drawcard in her final year with the festival, an opportunity she first took up in 2009, following eight years of living between Melbourne and Edinburgh. After feeling the toll the arrangement was taking on herself, her friends and her family, Lunn made the decision to settle full-time in Australia.

“I lived in Melbourne for eighteen months before I decided that actually I needed another challenge, so that’s when I moved to Darwin to come and work on this festival,” she says.

It was a decision that would come to completely redefine the way she conceptualised what it is to live and work in Australia, she says.

“I would easily say it’s been the biggest, most rewarding, most challenging, greatest learning life experience I’ve ever had, has been living and working here in the Territory. It’s one of those things that you just say that everyone should do.

“It’s kind of like a tour of duty, and almost like an experience of coming to one of Australia’s final frontiers that everyone should have the pleasure and the joy, but also the experience, of living and working in this quite amazing place that really is very, very special to Australia.”

Increasingly, a greater number of people are coming to understand that specialness, a fact supported by Darwin Festival’s ability to attract high-profile talent to its line-up – a talent it’s boasted for several years, Lunn says, and which it capably demonstrates with this year's roster, including renowned multi-instrumentalist Bobby Alu (pictured below).

“I think we’ve always been able to attract high-profile, interesting music acts in particular,” she explains. “We’re an interesting place to come to; it’s never, ever been hard to talk to artists and say, ‘Hey, would you like to come to Darwin?’ Yes, they would always like to come to Darwin; it’s just about whether or not their schedules will allow them, and our fees are good enough.

“We’re a well-funded festival, in Territory terms, but in national terms, we’re not, so we have to use our small amount of funding quite wisely, but we want to make sure that we bring the best possible program here. And there are lots of artists who know Darwin who come here, who love it here, and they always want to come back, and they’re doing great advocacy for us, because they’re out there, at other music festivals all around the country and internationally, and going, ‘Oh, I’ve just been to Darwin Festival, or I’ve just been playing in the Territory, and it’s such a great place,’ so we do often have people who know or know of other musicians who’ve had a great time up here with us.”

One of the biggest boons to come out of those relationships, Lunn says, is the willingness of visiting musicians to genuinely embrace the people and culture of the Territory, to the point of specifically making the effort to create collaborative works while they’re in the region.

For example, Lunn says, this year, “Joelistics (pictured below) is doing what will be an amazing show … with James Mangohig from Sietta, and that’s a show that’s called In-between Sounds, which will be – I’m tipping that this will be one of the best festival successes in terms of the show touring nationally”.

“These two musicians have come together and are creating a spoken-word, hip-hop kind of edgy music show based on both of their cultural heritages. They both have Chinese fathers, and as young men who grew up in Australia, for them it was unusual that, being from a mixed-race family, the father was Chinese, or Asian – in most mixed-race families, it’s the mother who isn’t white Australian.

“So the two of them have bonded, and that’s what this show is essentially exploring. In fact, before the show had a title and we were talking to James about putting the show in the festival, it had a working title, and we were calling it Chinese Fathers. It’s quite a nostalgic way of referring to the show… but that’s going to be a big hit. I’m tipping that that show will go national. I’m really excited about that new collaboration, and that Darwin Festival is able to part of supporting those artists to have that collaboration for it.

“Another one we’re hoping will be launched is the Choir Of Man, which is something that’s been part of the festival for a few years, featuring our own country-rock star David Garnham (and The Reasons To Live), and his Choir Of Man – we’re hoping this show… this is the beginning of their path for going global,” Lunn continues. “They’re getting the West End treatment from director Wayne Harrison – he directed Tap Dogs – and Chong Lim is the musical director. He’s Farnesy’s musical director, and also he’s the MD on Dancing With The Stars – I don’t watch that much TV but apparently that gives him some cred.

“Anyway, all of these Northern Territory boys in their flannies and thongs are getting this crazy, West End musical theatre treatment, and they’re creating a full, extravagant show that’s on the first weekend of the festival. They do genuinely have plans to take this to Adelaide Fringe, and then Edinburgh Fringe, and then the West End. So we may very well see some rough Northern Territory boys in what is the next Tap Dogs… but Northern Territory-style."

“They don’t like it, but I say they have voices of angels, and I’ve been to enough rehearsals to know that that’s true, but they don’t like it. Territory men don’t like to be referred to as ‘angels’. But they can sing very sweetly. We’re very proud of that show.”


The 2014 Darwin Festival will run from August 7-24, featuring an A-list roster of performances, events and activities in celebration of music, arts, culture, cabaret, dance, comedy and family.

Tickets are available now. See the Gig Guide or The Music App for more details.