On Taking a Seven Week Old Baby to an Interstate Music Festival

We took our seven week old baby on a plane across the Bass Strait to attend Dark Mofo, Tasmania’s mid-winter arts festival.

If I’m honest, my partner and our friend Greta took the baby on the plane, I was on a separate flight an hour later, being upgraded to Economy X which has a skerrick more leg room because I had a glut of frequent-flyer points.

When I arrived, they were already checked into the hotel and baby was happily feeding. The trip down was seamless, baby sleeping happily strapped to mum the whole flight, and he happily slept some more as we went out for Udon noodles to warm us in the icy Hobart evening.

We wandered into Pablos Cocktail Bar and I had a solo beer in the beer garden with the baby while the girls watched some jazz inside, then the girls took the baby home and I went to see Clown Core, an equal parts horrific/satisfying/awe-inspiring mix of hectic breakbeats, AI-generated art, and post-apocalyptic themes. It’s music for the Tiktok generation, constant chopping and changing between ideas. Every 10 seconds something new is thrown at you, an absolute barrage of information and dopamine hits. Highly enjoyable. I had a couple of beers and got back to the hotel at 11 to find baby absolutely cracking it. He proceeded to scream and feed and shit until 3 am, when he finally passed out letting me and my partner get a small amount of sleep. Tears were shed, mostly not the baby’s.

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The next day the rest of Gusto arrived and we headed to Winter Feast, where we were playing as part of Dark Mofo. The festival had taken over one of the wharves in the bay and there was a giant warehouse full of wild food and drinks: jellied sea urchin, wallaby pitas, char grilled squid etc. Winter Feast curates five or six bands per night so we were hanging out in the green room with some 30 or 40 other musicians. Tons of people we knew. A good hang. The festival had six little stages scattered throughout the grounds, and at any one time there would be three or four bands playing in separate areas. Gusto played a hilarious acoustic set, which I opted out of. It was the first time I’ve ever got to see them play without me, and then we headed back to the green room for a couple more beers.

About 30 minutes before our set the stage manager arrived to let us know it was raining and that we could either play in the rain on an uncovered stage in the middle of the Tasmanian winter, or we could move to one of the smaller stages inside. The band trundled down the stairs and out into the parking lot to hold our hands up and assess whether the rain was too much. We made the decision to bring it inside, which was a little bit sad because we’d been looking forward to the full light show and smoke machine experience on the big stage. Instead we had a harried 10 minute change over where we had to bring entire drum kit and backline into a tiny tent, get everything set up and play without a soundcheck. Main downside? No fall back. Main upside? A couple hundred people crammed into the tent with us. It was a sweaty sticky mess, an awesome fun time, a great gig after a month off.

We finished up at 10 pm and then got to see a bit of Desert Melody Makers, an Indigenous reggae band from Yuendumu, a town of 800 people a couple hours west of Alice Springs. I headed back to the hotel room to find the girls exhausted and the baby wide awake, so I put him in a pram and took him out to explore town. By now it was midnight, and he was wide-eyed and ready to party.

A couple of blocks away from the hotel, I ran into the rest of Gusto who were using their artist passes to get into the Night Mass, an all night rave in an abandoned department store in the middle of town. They went raving and I walked baby around in the rain for another hour, finally getting him back to the hotel room to sleep just after one. The band partied till 4 am, and then got up at 7 am for their flight home. The group chat was not very happy.

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Greta saved us in the morning by taking baby in the pram to a bookshop while Grace and I got an extra hour of sleep. Genuinely would have probably died without her, eternally grateful, then we spent a couple of days exploring Hobart.

It’s a really beautiful town, particularly when the festival is on – there are so many little installations and activations, so much to do and see, and a lot of really delicious food. We got Melbourne-level Sichuan food from Jungle Restaurant, a couple of levels below Sichuan-level Sichuan food, but delicious, although the mouth-watering chicken wasn’t quite as mouth-watering as I’d hoped. The waitress warned us away from ‘maoxuewang’, the spicy duck-blood tripe soup my friend Damien really wanted us to eat, but we were over-stuffed and sweating and happy by the end of the meal.

I took baby to his first bouzouki gig. MONA puts on a series of lunchtime shows, normally out on the lawn of the musem, but torrential rain brought the show into a weird cafeteria area. Baby was unimpressed, sleeping soundly through the gig. I read Liam Pieper’s Sweetness and Light while the girls explored the museum.

On the last morning we got coffees from the little café down the road then the festival shuttled us back to the airport for our flight home. All in all a delightful first trip with our baby, although it was pretty exhausting.

When I told my Mum about it, she told me that at six weeks I did my first international travel, from Karachi to Melbourne. She said she’d never do it again.

I am grateful for modern Australian airports with fold out change tables and hand sanitizer.