19. Visit to Clunes Booktown Festival_TMBTP

Urban Broadcast Collective

This Must Be The Place In this episode of “This Must Be The Place” David and Elizabeth visit the small Goldfields town of Clunes for the annual Clunes Booktown Festival. As you may pick up from the introduction, Elizabeth was slightly confused about the distinction between “Booktown” and “Booktown Festival”. Whereas (she realised later) “Clunes is a Booktown all year round”, the weekend Festival in May is in addition to this appellation and sees the town taken over by book stalls, author talks, and book-related seminars. The festival attracts around 18,000 visitors to Clunes – a town of largely intact Goldfields-era heritage you may recognise from such films as Mad Max and Ned Kelly – as in “Mad Max”, and “Ned Kelly”, although “Mad Max and Ned Kelly” might have a certain appeal in the style of “Alien vs Predator”. The Booktown/Festival can be characterized as a revival effort for the town. Other big changes in Clunes over the past decade or so have been the return of the passenger train service, and the arrival of the Wesley College Clunes campus. Amongst the features at this year’s festival, David was invited to speak on his book “Dig: Australian Rock and Pop Music, 1960-85”. The episode features David’s author interview, undertaken on a chilly outdoor stage with Professor Keir Reeves of the Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History at Federation University.