Live Review: Darwin Festival Opening Weekend

Adelaide Festival has just confirmed that for the third year in a row, the headline show in 2019 will be a big budget opera production. Dark Mofo is better known in some circles than the town that hosts it. So in comparison, Darwin Festival is a more modest event, but it's also an inclusive celebration that is eminently accessible.

Darwin is, after all, a city where board shorts and thongs will get you into almost any venue and the festival has a similarly laid-back feel. The opening night concert takes place in a natural amphitheatre in the Botanic Gardens, and the tropical sun slides down towards the horizon as we prepare to celebrate the overlooked legacy of First Nations country performers in Buried Country.

Many of the songs featured throughout the night were sparse in their original form, but were filled out by a killer house band in The Backtrackers, and Buddy Knox's take on Black Allan Barker's Run Dingo Run is a muscular brute of a blues number that bristles with attitude. The old cliche says that country music is nothing more than three chords and the truth, and there's plenty of truth when Leah Flanagan thanks Santos for sponsoring the opening night but adds that it won't buy her silence as she speaks out against opening the Territory up to fracking.

Even more eloquent is her performance of Brown Skin Baby, a plaintive bush ballad that chronicles the life of one member of the Stolen Generations. It's a haunting song and her voice soars as she performs it, a plaintive cry that too many people in the audience recognise. It's a performance of devastating beauty, and one that lingers in my mind long after the music has ended.

"His carefully crafted couplets hold the crowd enraptured."

The next day, I find myself sipping champagne in a robe with 15 other people in a hotel room for Joel Bray's Biladurang. The performance melds contemporary dance with autobiographical screeds and disarming audience interaction — try holding up the fourth wall as a performer gives you a hand massage and asks about your family history. Throughout, Bray skips effortlessly from flippant tales of sexcapades to barely concealed (and at times unconcealed) rage as he charts his search for identity as a gay, light-skinned Wiradjuri man.

Pathetic Fallacy is more lighthearted, a whimsical ode to weather systems and TV presenters that relies on a local stand-in to fill the role of creator Anita Rochon. In our case, that means watching Artistic Director Felix Preval try to hit his cues and explain the mechanics of flight in 45 seconds, as well as answering a number of quite personal questions. His willingness to throw himself in is in keeping with the spirit of the festival, which never takes itself too seriously.

Later on in the same venue, Omar Musa is performing multiple roles as MC, poet and provocateur. But above all, he's a storyteller, and his carefully crafted couplets hold the crowd enraptured. He conjures an apartment in Queanbeyan overlooking a river that once flowed unchecked and full of fish, but has become sluggish and swollen with detritus.

With eloquence, he spits venom at Australia's "parade of vulgarity" and the "tangerine fascist" offering a scary vision of our future, and then reflects on a childhood friend and young love, turning soliloquies into slow jams. He asks uncomfortable questions and explores the meaning of the slur "unAustralian" but what comes through is his love of this country, and his desire express that by demanding a better standard.

As we emerge into the warm night air, Baker Boy's multilingual raps ring out across Festival Park. The show sold out months in advance of the festival, but diners and drinkers in the park can still hear his rapid-fire delivery and joyful boasts coming from the open air colosseum of corrugated iron in the centre of the park.

Omar Musa's description of Darwin as "the laksa capital of Australia" is still fresh in my mind the next morning so I head to the Parap markets to sweat out any toxins from the night before with a laksa and a lime juice. Then it's off to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory to check out the winners of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Awards. The selected works are of a universally high standard, geometric designs that play with the power of repetition sitting alongside figurative flights of fancy.

Three larrakitj are painted of thousands of swarming mullet, a dizzying profusion of fish that tricks the eye into seeing more than the four colours of natural pigment used. On canvasses, dots resolve into lines as I step back, playing tricks with the eye and distorting like far-off figures in a heat haze and the overall winner, a large-scale work etched into an aluminium board, is composed of sinuous interconnecting lines and cross-hatched weaving that mesmerises and ensnares as it reflects the light.

Closer to town, the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair has works for sale from exhibitors representing 75 arts centres around the country. Vibrant textiles, intricately woven pieces and even lampshades sit alongside canvases, bark paintings and an astounding array of works that marry traditional and contemporary forms.

And on Saturday night, I find myself back at the Amphitheatre in the Botanic Gardens for the 15th National Indigenous Music Awards. While most awards ceremonies are for industry, this one is definitely aimed at the public and more than 2,000 people come to watch a ceremony where there are more bands playing than awards presented. The acceptance speeches are rambling and punctuated by yells from the crowd that are acknowledged to cheers, while Zan Rowe calls the NIMAs "the best music awards I've ever been to."

Each guest has a chance to play several songs, and one of the highlights is the Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir, which combines members from six communities. The massed chorus of voices is euphoric, a rapturous coming together of ancient traditions as they sing Lutheran hymns in Arrarnta and Pitjantjatjara. Yirrmal's crunching guitars introduce a stadium rock sound that is perfectly suited to the large arena and he throws his fist in the air as he lets out an impassioned cry while Kasey Chambers and her band, which includes Alan Pigram, deliver a touching, intimate version of The Campfire Song from her latest album.

Most presenters acknowledge that they are on the lands of the Larrakia people and pay tribute to elders past, present and emerging. Those three categories are also represented in the awards. For the second year in a row, the NIMAs pay tribute to the late Gurrumul Yunupingu, who wins the big three awards (Artist Of The Year, Album Of The Year and Song Of The Year). Every time his name is mentioned, a huge cheer goes through the audience, though it is rivalled by the noise that greets the name of an emerging talent.

Baker Boy admits that he is nervous when collecting the Best Video award, admitting that "I've never done this kind of thing before," but has another chance to practice later in the night when he is awarded Best New Talent. He celebrates with a blistering set that has him jumping '​round the stage and showing off some of his signature dance moves for the second night in a row before stepping up to the yidaki during an impressively high-energy performance of Marryuna. The adoring crowd copies his moves and clamours for photos while he grins, surrounded by his family. It's a reminder of the value of community, and the importance of not taking things too seriously, and Darwin Festival has got both of those just right.