What I hadn't realised is that the festival opening night is, like, a thing. For the duration of the night, a huge swathe of central Sydney, including treelined Hyde Park and the parklands of the Domain, were closed off to traffic for an immense free festival, with a good proportion of the acts that will take part in the ongoing festival turning out to perform for the night.
Of course there's no such thing as a free lunch, and ANZ bank (who have just completed one of those rather limp rebranding exercises which no doubt has the brand experts privately raging about their clients' lack of vision and the clients wondering why they embarked on the project in the first place) were sponsoring the whole shebang with free filtered water bottles and odd little electric hand fans which projected eerie They Live!-style messages when you switched them on. And proving the effect of good marketing on raising brand awareness, here I am telling you all about ANZ and their selfless dedication to free festivals.
There's a great atmosphere to a city when the streets have been closed off. At Martin Place, people were dancing among the road markings on Philip Street; at Chifley square, slightly dizzy lines of people milled around the tarmac waiting to have their water bottles refilled. Add to that the warm night air, the fruitbats circling the clouds of insects swarming the illuminated pinnacles of the buildings, the stars coming out - beautiful.
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