History of Rave in Austrailia

So not knowing much about the history of Australian rave culture I read a few articles to familiarize myself. What I found was quite interesting as I away though we just adopted the culture straight from Britain. Whist the rave communities did adopt a lot of the ideology from Britain.

Here is a excerpt from Austrailian Dance Culture by Micheal Park and Gareth Northwood about how the rave culture started in Sydney:

While the English rave culture stemmed from an island off the coast of Spain called Ibiza - "everyone goes there on holiday, does ecstasy, and stays up all night. We got back to England and decided we didn't want to give it up and started raving on weekends"⁵, Sydney's (concentrating on Sydney as the dance capital of Australia) rave culture came from a slightly different angle - emanating mainly from a combination of the infamous dance parties at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney, and drawing a lot on the inner-city avant-garde crowd and the gay community. Once the Hordern had been ruled by the authorities off limits as a venue (an indication of things to come with the rave scene), the rave scene became fully-fledged (while the gay community branched off) in the early 90's.

What I found interesting about this article is that it steamed from one main venue and that there where only a smaller communities attending these events.

Back to Sydney - and by 1992 the rave scene had exploded. 1992 is regarded by all who were there, and even by those who weren't there and joined the scene later, as the 'peak' of the rave scene. When interviewing DJ Jim Jams, who is one of the few DJ's to still remain in the scene throughout the last 5-6 years, we encountered both nostalgia and bitterness towards the past - "1992 was the year of the 0055……(referring to the phone lines ravers had to ring up to find out the locations of the parties)……it was a fantastic time but people have got to realise it's over and it's not going to come back, stop complaining about the present condition and try to move in new directions - or just shut up". Parties in 1992 such as Happy Valley, Ecology, Prodigy and Aztec are now part of rave folklore.

The author describes when raving in sydney gained more popularity and that the scene and that it's current state is getting to commercialized and popular and that the rave culture cannot handle it.

This is where "bush doofs"fit into the puzzle because they are promoted mainly via word of mouth and there location is not revealed a few days before events this helps them be more underground than raves which are also normally held in easyer to get to locations than "doofs"