Spend Your Public Holiday Reliving A Historic Aussie Music Festival

If you don't already have plans to protest, chill out, listen to the Hottest 100 or engage in whatever else this 26 January, you could always spend your public holiday reliving a classic Australian music festival on Foxtel.

Kicking off from the very un-public-holiday, un-rock'n'roll, un-Australian time of 6am (AEDT) this Thursday, viewers will be able to take a trip back 30 years to the 1986-87 Australian Made series of festivals. As DeciderTV notes, Australian Made consisted of six one-day events around the country, held in Hobart, Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Sydney between Boxing Day and Australia Day that summer.

Screening on pay-per-view channel Main Event, 1987's feature-length concert film Australian Made: The Movie examines the on- and off-stage drama of the historic touring festival, whose line-up boasted a smorgasbord of local latter-day icons such as The Triffids, Jimmy Barnes, Models, I'm Talking, The Saints, Divinyls and INXS.

Fellow Aussie legends Mental As Anything were also aboard the line-up for Australian Made, but did not appear in the film (sadly, saxophonist Peter Trotter collapsed on-stage while playing with the band at the final Sydney event and passed away a week later).

The festival was also enshrined in that year's book, Australian Made, Gonna Have A Good Time Tonight: The Authorised Documentary Of The Event, by Glenn A. Baker and Bob King.

Directed by long-time INXS collaborator Richard Lowenstein, the film's progressive re-releases saw footage of Barnes and, consequently, The Triffids, also removed, with the film ultimately re-angled as an INXS-focused work: Australian Made: Featuring INXS Live.

However, this 30th-anniversary special edition — also available on DVD and Blu-ray, following a brief return to cinemas at the end of last year — promises to not only restore the original feature in high definition, but also include never-before-seen performances and footage of the festival, as ambitious, impressive and plagued by competing egos as it was.

Foxtel subscribers will have multiple chances to see it on the 26th of this month, too, with the movie set to replay every two hours from 6am on Main Event (and again every two hours on Encore, from 6am the following day).

See Main Event's website for more information.