It’s Labour Day here in Aussie too, and I’ve been away at yet another long weekend music gathering thing. This one was at the site of the annual Christmas / New Year week Woodford Folk Festival (that’s mid-summer here).
This is the first time I’ve made it to the monthly Folk Club there, a 3-hour 4th Saturday open mic, with optional weekend camping on site. This time it got combined with another larger event called The Sprouting, an opportunity to reinvent a different annual event called The Planting that had grown too big for its britches, and had become more festival than volunteer working weekend.
The festival owns its own permanent site, Woodfordia, which had been a dairy farm when they bought it. Over the years, the festival organization and community of volunteers have been working to restore the site to something resembling its orignal native state and stewardship. And so The Sprouting offered multiple opportunites to contribute, by planting, weeding, bamboo harvesting, etc.
So yesterday, for the first time, I became a Woodford volunteer, working, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with a small crew, removing invasive weeds from the shores of the beautiful man-made Lake Gkula. The entire two hours, I peppered crew chief Roz with questions about the weeds and weeding, while “Weed me, weed me, weed me” to the tune of “Sunny Afternoon” by The Kinks played in my head. The moment the shift ended, I sat down and wrote out the song.
The song is in the voice of the Woodford Festival grounds, Woodfordia, singing to us, the campers and volunteers, imploring us to take care of her. Here’s “Weed Me”, recorded at the lake this morning.
