The descent into Queenstown, Tasmania, is one of disparate and formidable beauty. As the Lyell highway wends its way through hairpin bends, the surrounding mountainsides shed world heritage forest, shed trees of any kind, becoming the region’s famed lunar dreamscape. The magenta, ochre and smoky-green hues of the denuded hillsides are remarkable to look at, cast in a slightly different glow at every turn, recalling the mesas of New Mexico, or the Painted Desert (Arizona or South Australia, whichever you fancy).
But this beauty is complicated by its genesis – more than a century of extensive mining has decimated the area: minerals are hauled out of the earth, and decades of sulphurous smelter fumes allow little in the way of regeneration.
Beauty and devastation is but the first of many incongruous pairings to be encountered over the course of Queenstown’s three-day arts festival, the Unconformity.
A remote and depleted mining town may seem an unlikely location for an arts festival. Previously called the Queenstown Heritage and Arts festival, the biennial event’s latest iteration was held in the wake of the 2014 Lyell copper mine closures that brought an eerie quiet to the streets, and spurred the departure of many residents. The 2016 name change references one of the geological phenomena of the area. Geologically speaking, an unconformity is an abrupt shift in strata, an eroded age – in the case of the Queenstown unconformity, about 35m years.
The name doubles as a mission statement, encouraging an embrace of the paradoxes that make this festival distinct.
The sky is starkly, coldly clear for the opening-night event, The Rumble: a large-scale sound installation by the Hobart-based composer Dylan Sheridan, who incorporates salvaged mining machinery. The procession of mining trucks was once an annual Christmastime happening. Tonight, the distant thunder of the trucks and the initial hammer chimes of the composition resonate ominously through Queenstown’s streets before headlights appear through the first dark and The Rumble grinds towards the heart of the town.
“The rock crusher emits a very distinctive major third – F and A – which I based all of the harmony around,” Sheridan explains. “The idea was to start with a menacing, harsh sort of sound world of hammers and drills and horns and machinery, and turn it into a sort of cacophonous celebration of what the town was and is. Ultimately I wanted it to be hopeful.”
One of the festival’s greater successes is much of the program’s calibre and tenacity. The Unconformity does not suffer from the underestimation of audience that so often undermines regional arts festivals.
The festival director, Travis Tiddy, has stressed the vitality of an artistic program that responds to the region. The percussionist Matthias Schack-Arnott’s immersive, elemental Fault Traces is visually and sonically exquisite. Using subsonic frequencies and a plethora of organic materials, it evokes tectonic murmurings and the frenetic desiccation of shell, wood, stone and metal, giving way to the late, mechanised pound of heavy industry – the audible memory of a mountain.
This focus on deep time is revisited and refracted throughout a number of the works. Rock is “full of slower, longer thoughts than mind can have”, Mish Grigor and Zoe Scoglio tell us in We Are Mountain, giving a shout-out to Ursula K Le Guin.
Their participatory performance begins with the audience being bussed up to Iron Blow, the open-cut mine where Mount Lyell’s mining industry began. The en-route scripting makes for a idiomatic audio guide. The earliest thing we know about this area … It’s an imagined sequence of oral histories, staggering back through the strata of inhabitants and their relationship to the mountain, past mineral industry and the prospectors who came in search of it, past the West Coast Range’s first people, to the Cretaceous organisms that form the fossiliferous rock.
For We Are Mountain’s conclusion, Scoglio and Grigor have enlisted the help of locals Fiona Ebert – the baker of much-coveted banana cakes at the Queenstown markets – and the sculptor Carol Murphy, to create an edible Mount Lyell that the audience is invited to descend upon with dessert spoons.
“This goes against all my health and safety training,” a local nurse says, grinning and digging her spoon into the iridescent icing.
The multi-disciplinary performance Geologies makes reverent use of the fading Masonic Hall in which it is staged. Somehow the old pews and blistered paint seem in accord, so too the eight hanging overhead lamps shaded by milky glass, the lone fluorescent bulb illuminating the violinist’s solo. The dancer Wendy Morrow’s final movements are performed by torchlight, the beam directed by the composer, Leigh Hobba.
The ethos of working with available materials extends to the performance itself; Morrow’s gestures presented as in immediate response to Hobba’s delivered litanies of words, technical instructions – how to tie a sheet bend, for instance – and crashing impromptu piano.
During this performance it occurs that a face is never more compelling – or beautiful – than when listening, intent. This is true of both audience and dancer; and the still, reflective intensity of Morrow’s inward gaze is as arresting as gesture.
Each night the festival club resembles the late hours of an unlikely wedding, with boundaries between locals and incomers dissolving on the dance floor where Bruce Springsteen, as ever, proves the great unifier. (Try not dancing to Dancing in the Dark in an underground club with pink-carpeted walls. Just try.)
The festival culminates on Queenstown’s infamous gravel football pitch for the Unconformity Cup: the West v the Rest. Ours and Theirs are intermingled in the grandstand. Up close, the gravel is mercifully finer than imagined. It rains steadily throughout all four quarters, underscoring why a turf pitch might prove impractical here. There was an early-morning attempt to paint in ground markings but the rain has soaked the paint into the pitch, where it has leached out into wide magenta stains, mirroring those of the mountains.
The Hobart writer Michael Blake, ostensibly of the Rest, was a late recruit to the West, playing half-back flank. “I was a bit trepidatious, going in,” he says afterwards. “But there was much less savagery than expected. A lot of blood, though – they were pretty laissez-faire about the blood rule.”
The final score: 46-30, the West. The way it was always going to go, but perhaps at a slightly more respectable margin.
“Mining is full of the unexpected, of sudden wealth and rapid decay,” the historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote, six decades ago, in The Peaks of Lyell. “All mining fields must eventually die and most old men of the west know this bitterly.”
Following the Lyell Highway back east, amid the mountains and their long, slow thoughts – their secrets – the sense of deep time lingers. No small thing for a town to imagine itself differently, towards a future in which industry and place are not exclusively synonymous, and the view from the Unconformity feels anything but bitter.
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