I arrive hatless to my first rodeo. I’m otherwise looking the part in Levi’s, a flannel shirt, and black boots. But the missing hat is a big mistake. My black curls stick out conspicuously in a sea of tan Akubras, felt Stetsons, and wide-brimmed straw numbers. I stare longingly at a weather-worn leather one studded with crocodile teeth. It is moulded onto an old cowboy’s head as naturally as a body part. If he changed hats would he still be the same person?
I head to the merch stand to see if there are any head coverings for sale. A young guy is contemplating the cattle tags, those plastic clips used to identify livestock. Here, they come in a variety of colours, printed with hillbilly-pride slogans like “Luv My Ute,” “Bundy Mode,” and “If You Don't Love It Leave It.”
“I’ll take a ‘Go Feral,’ ‘Aussie Pride,’ and a ‘Rum O Holic’ please,” the guy says to the attendant. His girlfriend whispers something in his ear.
“Oh, we’ll also take a ‘Cowgirls Rule,’” he adds.
“Thanks babe,” she says, fastening the clip to her taffy pink cowboy hat.
They don’t sell cowboy hats at the merch stand. I settle for a chocolate brown trucker’s cap with a leather badge on the front that reads: “Melbourne Muster 2024.”
*
A “muster” refers to the labour of gathering up livestock from the open range. Once upon a time, cowboys performed this gruelling work on horseback. Now they use quad bikes, helicopters, and drones. More recently, a muster has also come to describe festivals that celebrate rural lifestyles—like a bush doof, but instead of psy-trance, LSD, and mud-encrusted hippies, it is country music, Bundy, and rodeo. Such events are usually held in country towns. The best-known is the Gympie Muster, a country music festival and rodeo in the lush hinterlands inland from the Sunshine Coast. And then there is the Deni Ute Muster, where tens of thousands of proud ute owners converge on the flat plains near Deniliquin, NSW, to rev their engines and shtupp.
The Melbourne Muster, in its inaugural year, is being held at Caribbean Park, a suggestively named yet mostly soulless business village in Scoresby, just a 25 minute drive east from the city centre. The park is built around an artificial lake that was constructed on a dairy farm in the 1960s. It was originally used as a boat testing facility, but then, as the city sprawled eastward, the owners developed it into an amusement park and flea market, which gained some notoriety when the Motion Picture Association of America designated it one of the world’s “most notorious marketplaces” for pirated DVDs. The markets closed in 2020, during the lockdowns, and since then, the real estate has been repurposed as a suburban business hub, where companies like Telstra, Hallmark, and Thermo Fisher Scientific lease office space.
This weekend, though, Caribbean Park is returning to its rural roots. Amidst the mid-rise, glass-facade buildings there will be bucking bulls, Monster Trucks, BBQ meats, and a makeshift camp-ground where I’ll spend the night alone, in a borrowed Subaru Forester, beneath the light-blotted skies.
*
The festival gates have just opened. Retired couples unfold their camping chairs to face the main stage. Young parents line up outside food stands to procure provisions—fried chicken, calamari rings, pizza—for the hungry young’uns. Eager-looking cowboys mill about the bar, not quite drunk enough to approach the equally eager-looking cowgirls, who shiver in the biting Autumn breeze.
Towards the back of the festival grounds, a couple watch with keen interest as a Bobcat breaks up a patch of lawn into spattered mulch. The man is tall and broad-shouldered, with a delicately trimmed handlebar moustache. She is short and sturdy, wearing boot-cut, diamanté-studded Wranglers and a pink trucker’s hat. They hold hands, fingers woven together.
He tells me that the machine is softening the ground up for the rodeo tomorrow.
“You been to a rodeo before?” he asks.
“No,” I answer. “This is my first one.”
“There is nothing like it,” he says. “Not jumping out of an aeroplane. Not drinking. Not sex.”
His wife looks at him and scrunches up her nose.
“He stopped riding after his kidneys got smashed to pieces,” she says. “He’s got kidney failure now.”
He nods somberly and retrieves his left hand from his pocket. His index finger juts out at a right angle—wrenched out of place by the saddle rope, he explains.
“Do you miss it?” I ask.
“Every day of my life,” he says.
*
There is a mechanical bull in the festival grounds. His name is Chainsaw and he has demonic red eyes. Some grip onto Chainsaw's neck with both hands. Others are more performative, throwing their hands and hats up in the air. The crowd rewards them with whooping cheers and whistles.
A mob of young men arrive on the scene. They look dapper, in a farmy kind of way. Their chequered shirts are tucked neatly into their jeans and their hats sit proud and high on top of their heads. A tall and handsome cowboy with sandy locks and distant eyes straddles Chainsaw. The bull lurches and jolts, but he sways with it, almost as if he's controlling its motion with his groin. He makes it look easy.
“I give up,” the operator says. “You win.”
“Onya chief,” a man standing next to me shouts. His name is Clancy. He works for the rodeo, convoying around from town to town, setting up stables, tending to the animals.
“So it’s kind of like a travelling circus,” I offer.
Clancy narrows his eyes. “Nah, mate.”
Rodeo is a sport, he explains, and a way of life. Some of the cowboys compete for the thrill, but others are professional. They follow the circuit around the country, and try to eke out a living through prize money and sponsorship deals. In the summer months, rodeos are held around Victoria and NSW, then, as it gets colder, the show moves up north to Queensland and the NT. Sometimes, the champion riders head over to America to throw their hats in the ring at rodeos in Fort Worth and Las Vegas.
“Do you ride?” I ask.
“Fuck no,” Clancy says. “I just like the lifestyle. Hard work, mind you. I hardly get home. I've got a six-month-old and only seen him twice. Miss him.”
Clancy gazes back towards the mechanical bull. Now, a rotund cowboy is hauling himself onto Chainsaw. He makes exaggerated humping motions, up there on the bull, while grunting with sexual overtones. The others heckle him. “Don't break it fat boy!” The bull lurches and he is flung off the front, landing on his head. The crowd roars. He climbs out of the ring and limps back to the group. He grabs the handsome cowboy by the crotch. “Let’s get a drink faggot.”
Clancy chuckles. “You can take the boy out of the country…”
*
The sun sets and the temperature plummets. I head over to the main stage to see the headline act. “He’s your boy, he’s my boy, he's everybody’s boy,” the MC hollers into the mic. “He’s mother-flippin’ Lee Kernaghan.”
Kernaghan, one of Australia’s biggest country music stars, looks slick in his all black, slim-fit cowboy get up: tight black jeans, a leather button-up vest, and a broad-brimmed ebony hat. There is something at once youthful and haggard about his physique, like a rural Rick Owens. His platinum blonde wife, Robyn, is a back-up singer. With their well-oiled band, they run through a set of upbeat country-rock numbers about outback roads, sexy cowgirls, trucks, utes, helping out your mates, and so on.
There is a relentless, insistent positivity to their performance. The message is: “Aren't we having fun? Aren’t we lucky? Don’t we live in a great country?” I prefer sad country songs—lonesome nights, lamentations, and heart-worn highways. But Kernaghan’s posi country boy persona (he is 60 years old) is uplifting. The crowd is hooting and hollering. I’m tapping my feet.
“We’re the boys from the bush and we're back in town,” he sings.
“We get high when the sun goes down,” we shout back.
The only melancholy moment comes when Kernaghan plays a commemorative ballad about the time he met Slim Dusty on an aeroplane.
“It was Ansett 603,” he croons, “He sits down next to me.”
The crowd take out their phones, turn on their flashlights, and sway from side to side.
“We’re a community now,” Kernaghan says, after the song concludes. Some country love in the big city.
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