S Sorrensen
Canberra. Saturday, 10.05pm
The vampires are out. With top hats, long black coats and industrial boots, they haunt the festival bar, drinking Guinness, not blood. (Thank the heavens.)
A couple chases each other around the plastic chairs in a stylised dance, his top hat falling to ground as they eye each other across a barrel where wine and beer tremble in compostable cups. It’s sexual.
An older woman in a parka that looks like bubble wrap, steadies her drink, and smiles at the dancing vampire girl – who growls through her black lipstick.
Vampires on drugs.
Steampunk is big in Canberra. Here at the National Folk Festival, there is even a stall selling steampunk hats. Steampunk, as a fashion, is a modern take on the whole Victorian era – overcoats, bustles, corsets, waistcoats – and the paraphernalia of 19th century machinery aesthetics. It’s a sort of nostalgia: You can understand how a steam engine works, but a search engine?
Goggles are popular as hat ornamentation, as are buckles, metal bat wings, iron cogs, and feathers. One woman wears a steel feather stuck into hatless hair. Her leather vest leaves her shoulders exposed, the white skin reflecting the silver light of an eclipsing moon. Her belt looks like the rolling stock of a steam train.
Steampunkers are not vampires, of course. They just look that way to me, tonight. Must be the magic of the eclipse happening 380,000km above me.
At this time of night, when the older folkies have retired to the session bar for endless rounds of that Irish tune, or to their high-tech caravan for heated airconditioning (it’s cold) and a few snorts of the good whiskey, the young steampunkers come out to play.
The fashion requirements of steampunk make it a cold-weather thing. All those petticoats, vests and long jackets are not something for a warm climate. Hippies like Byron; steampunkers like the deep south.
Earlier today, I saw a steampunk family walking the festival street. Yes, they’re breeding. He wore hat, coat and cane; she, knee-high boots and cape. The child wore a black jacket-and-vest combo over his white shirt. He licked an ice cream which melted onto his spats as the family moved majestically through the folk festival crowd.
The traditional folkies with their Ned Kelly t-shirts, sensible shoes and accordion cases raised not an eyebrow at the steampunk family. That’s not surprising. Also in the street were a shimmer of belly dancers, a jingle of Morris dancers, and a swagger of black musicians from New Orleans. It’s a mixed crowd, this. And friendly.
Steampunkers are not vampires. Like everyone else here, they are humans expressing themselves. They’re having fun. They are allowing others to have fun. There are no police. When you treat difference with respect, there’s no trouble. Some people don’t understand this. (Some of them live in Canberra.)
The festival is five days of art, music and diverse people hanging together. Five days of the young people coming out at night like vampires to trade texts and flirts; to drink Guinness and dance strange dances; to stay up late till the session bar falls into stupor and the first folkies rise with the sun to search for coffee.
Five days of peace and diversty, with not one policeman to be seen.
A new group of steampunkers arrives at the bar. From them, a heat mist rises into a sky where a moon is still partially obscured by an earth shadow.
‘It’s the eclipse!’ a young woman, with a black petticoat on the outside, shouts as she follows the mist upwards.
A hundred friendly vampires take a hundred phones from their deep 19th century pockets to check out the eclipse.
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