Nestled safely well above sea-level is The Farm, home to Victoria’s most unique three-day music, comedy and camping experience, The Hills Are Alive.
What started off as an invitation-only welcome home party for brothers and co-directors Aidan and Rhett McLaren, has evolved into something neither one ever expected. “We’ve always kept it really low-key – even secret at the beginning,” Aidan says.
For the first seven years, tickets to the one-of-a-kind affair were hard to come by – you had to be personally invited by the McLaren family or be friends with someone who was, or a friend of a friend, and so on. Before long the hilly, picturesque property, located ten minutes from Loch Village and 95 minutes south-east Melbourne, was alive with the sounds of music and laughter across multiple stages. Featuring everything from karaoke and cocktail bars, to BYO free-reign, field games, food stalls, chill out areas, the annual gumboot toss, morning yoga sessions, art installations, Earth Hour celebrations and so much more – it’s hard to believe that this larger-than-life event was born in a place on the other side of the world on a cold and miserable night.
“Myself and my brother Rhett have always done things together, and before The Hills came about we were both travelling musicians. We’d relocated, with a band we were in, to Europe to chase a record deal, we were both broke musicians,” Aidan says. “I remember it was our third Berlin winter by then, and we were all sleeping on the bedroom floor of this old Eastern Bloc apartment building. It was coal-heated and there were three mattresses, all end to end on the ground, and we lived like that for over a year.
“One night we couldn’t sleep, and we were talking about how I’d always dreamed of putting on a festival on the property where I grew up – but when you’re a kid it seems almost impossible, like wanting to be an astronaut I guess,” he says. “At that time in Berlin I thought about what it would take for me to give up chasing this dream, and go home and do something else.
“I knew we had all these amazing friends with bands in Melbourne that would sell out 200 or 300 tickets, but radio wouldn’t touch them and they wouldn’t get asked to play many festivals. I sketched out a rough plan at about two in the morning with pen and paper, and the next day we converted it into a very rudimentary Microsoft Paint document of what a sitemap could look like. We pitched the idea to our parents and they wanted us to come home, so they were happy with anything we said,” he says.
Soon Aidan and Rhett were back on home soil, planning what they hoped would be a house party on a larger scale. “It was a welcome home party initially, and we contacted 12 bands that we loved, people we’d played gigs with or were friends with, and said ‘Hey, we’ve got this idea – would you like to come and play?’ and everyone was like ‘Yeah, we’d love to.’ I think the entire budget for the festival was about $1500 – and away we went. That was the first year.”
Now in its ninth year, and open to the public, a ticket to The Hills Are Alive is worth its weight in gold, as people from all over are packing their tents and picking up a few tins ready to delight in what has become known as the ‘Hills vibe’. “It’s a very exciting time – obviously I’m very biased, but for me this event draws out my favourite crowd of people to be around. It’s a really diverse group of people, but they’re united by their love of music and being good to one another,” Aidan says.
“We have under 18s, but they can only attend with a parent or guardian. There are quite a lot of families that have been coming for years, and friends that didn’t have families but now they have kids that want to come along.
“The diversity is great and it changes the experience. When you first show up you’ll find there really are no egos. You look around and think everyone is there for a good time. There’s no pretension. It’s like the best house party you’ve been to, on a hill, which goes for three days, with no dodgy gate crashers.”
Over the years the much-loved annual gathering has become known as a launching pad for Australian acts whose careers sky-rocketed after a performance on The Hill. Artists like Remi, Tash Sultana, Vance Joy, Courtney Barnett and Tkay Maidza, as well as bands like Safia, Alpine and DZ Deathrays, were all part of the festival’s alumni before gaining national recognition.
“I’m very proud of that, and thankful to the bands and artists that do want to come and play, because they’re what makes the whole thing possible. It’s also great because we will forever have a personal connection with a lot of artists that do play, or we’ll get to see them when they go on to achieve things that can be quite incredible.”
By Natalie Rogers
