Images by Ari Balle-Bowness, Senior Social Media Producer
Words by Samantha Winnicki, Public Relations Lead
In April earlier this year, the ACF team did something entirely new: sponsored and attended Australia's first climate action music festival, run by the band Lime Cordiale. Australia's pop-rock sweethearts — fronted by brothers Ollie and Louis Leimbach — built something that ran on joy, music and ease, with the climate work humming quietly backstage rather than making itself the headline act. But that was the point: prove a festival could put climate first without ever feeling like it was pushing you to think about it.
The ACF team's journey to Lime Green involved getting on a train for 9 hours between Melbourne and Adelaide — because of course, to be part of a climate-friendly music festival, we needed to commit to being as climate-friendly as we could ourselves.
Engaging in climate action can sometimes feel like a blur. Fires, floods, and nature destruction are a deluge on the screens of young people. Lime Green showed us that climate action can be joyous, and a climate-friendly future doesn't have to live in some distant, abstract “later”. It can be brought squarely into the present.
One of our highlights of the festival was seeing all the unique and creative signs people pulled together in the name of saving our climate.
Carly (National Organiser) painting glitter on Elke Bandt, to complement a similarly glittering cowboy hat.
Wren Bandt with a cowboy hat that is a sister, not a twin, to the cowboy hat worn by Elke.
Some of the ACF team part-way into the festival, showing just how cool you can look when you hold up a sign and a eucalyptus stem.
Not pictured: The 7am, 1 hour return trip Freya (Head of Media) and Tom (Multimedia Producer) had to make into Adelaide Hills to pick up local, fragrant eucalyptus stems to give away to festival attendees.
Adam Bandt (ACF's CEO) with Lime Cordiale brothers Oliver Leimbach and Louis Leimbach. Though Adam was invited to be the third brother of Lime Cordiale, he kindly let them know he had to return to his role as ACF's chief executive after the festival.
Adam with his daughters, Wren and Elke, before Adam's DJ set. This set ended with a fully choreographed dance from the family. Adam later admitted that he had only learnt the dance the night before, but we really couldn't tell.
It was very early in the day to be dancing this hard but Adam's sweet DJ skills really put the spirit of the boogie within Freya (Head of Media), Sam (PR Lead), and Jade (Social Media Producer).
Not pictured: The yells coming from all three of us as we belted the lyrics out to tunes like Treaty.
Ah yes, this is the choreographed dance you saw mentioned earlier! It was a very cute lounge room dance, and we were truly blessed to see Adam's dance moves. To be clear, these are not essential for the chief executive role.
The ACF climate action hub in all its glory. From the left, you can see several climate action signs which people were able to take into the festival itself. By that, there was a whole sign-making station, where people who felt inspired could make their own signs and take them and boogie or snap a selfie. In the middle, you'll see a queue to get to the eco-glitter station, and then further along on the right, an even longer queue for a photo booth (the climate action signs were very popular for this one).
Not pictured: the working bee the entire Melbourne office team at ACF took part in earlier that week to cut out hundreds of flowers, butterflies and other shapes to create a completely paper-based installation for the climate action hub.
This was one of our favourite signs created at our sign-making station. We were tickled to see it accompanied by a kookaburra, who always somehow sounds like it's laughing at you.
And here's a close-up of our glitter station — National Organiser Carly's arm covered in examples of glitter so that people could see what it would look like. We were genuinely delighted to see how many festival-goers ended up covered in glitter at the end of the night.
It took me ages to work out what the shirt says. I'll save you some time: it's “Toxic Surf”.
This is most of the ACF team after an incredibly long — but fulfilling — day spent talking to festival goers about climate, the work that ACF does, and how they could get involved. As you can see from (most of) our faces, we took so much joy from this and going by how busy we were the whole day, we reckon the festival attendees loved it too.
We loved being able to spend this time in our colourful booth, and it was a delight to see everyone's creativity with their signs. Seeing the thrill and concentration from festival goers as they made their signs showed us that sometimes, art and craft can really be activism.