Take a look back at Perth’s long-lost music festival: Bindoon Rock 1989

Running for less than a decade between 1986 and 1995, no music festival looms so large in WA’s memory as Bindoon Rock.

Organised by the Coffin Cheaters, the festival featured headliners including Meat Loaf, Divinyls and the Angels – not to mention repeat appearances by both Chain and the Jets. However in 1989, the headliner was Jimmy Barnes – and a young photographer by the name of Steve Cook was unexpectedly thrown into the Bindoon throng to document the wild weekend.

Now based in Melbourne, we chatted to Steve over the phone to find out more about the photos he took at 1989’s Bindoon Rock – many of which had languished, unseen, in the photographer’s archive for 35 years.

You can check out more of Steve’s work on his website, or give him a follow on Instagram.

I’m a professional photographer lurking in the wilds of Naarm (Melbourne), though my journey started somewhere far less urbane. The beat press gave me my first taste of chaos back in ’88 after I’d traded my Navy whites for a battered leather jacket and a secondhand camera. Since then, I’ve slung my lens at every people-centered project you can think of — film, magazines, advertising, corporate gigs. The whole merry-go-round.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up a BA in Photography from RMIT. Fancy, sure. But the real education came in January ’89, when X-Press magazine sent me on a mission: document the Bindoon Rock Festival. My ride? A Coffin Cheater in a wheezing old Pontiac, tearing up the Great Northern Highway like it owed him money. We were scouting the festival lineup for promo shots — simple enough. Or so I thought.

We took some shots of them setting up infrastructure, and it was fairly normal at that point – it was just all run by bikers. So I didn’t have a sense of what kind of weekend it was going to be… I mean, you can put two and two together.

What followed is a memory fogged by Emu Lager and questionable life choices, though the photos tell a sharper story. Two days of debauchery: booze-soaked revelers, a smorgasbord of substances, and occasional scuffles that got swiftly snuffed by the festival’s ninja-like security enforcing their “No Aggro” edict. Oh, and there was music—Jimmy Barnes, Chain, The Jets, and the ever-glorious Painters and Dockers.

A post punk band, they came out of Melbourne, where they were well known – and had quite notoriety for the sorts of gigs that they would do. There was a lot of slam dancing that used to happen with them… So the people that came to see Painters and Dockers found themselves amongst drunk bikers, and started slam dancing. And the bikers thought they were being violent. So the bikers decided to get violent. And so it just turned into this big brawl in front of the stage. That clash of cultures, I found interesting.

As the festival slogged on, the landscape transformed. What started as paddocks and dams morphed into an aluminium wasteland, a metallic sea of spent Emu cans under a sunburned sky. The crowd wasn’t faring much better, sprawled out like casualties of their own excess. That’s when I saw the real story: not the lineup, not the headliners, but the entropy of it all—a festival eating itself alive.

It’s funny because you look at these photographs and of course I remember certain things – not in great detail but through the photography, it brings back memories of things. But I do remember feeling…  There’s one image I photographed in particular at the time and thought it was appalling, but when you’re a photographer, you’re there to document. 

It really did look like a war zone. I’ve never seen people so out of it.

I haven’t had the opportunity to do shots like that again. I was thinking if I were to extend it, where else would I get that sort of stuff? But it feels a bit exploitative at times. Obviously, I think it’s a bit easier when it’s men: there’s one of a girl lying down with guys all standing around her… That’s got a certain menace about it. But it’s documenting what was going on there.

The resulting photo essay? Raw, grimy, honest—and absolutely unwanted. The magazine hated it. The Coffin Cheaters hated it.

For 35 years, those photos have languished in my archive, unpublished and unrepentant. And you know what? Maybe that’s where they belong, haunting the shadows like the festival itself.

I’d like to say that it has changed, but really, it hasn’t in a lot of ways. The bad behaviour still exists. I have a love hate relationship with the music industry: I love musicians, I just hate the industry. Maybe hate’s a bit of a strong word… I obviously don’t make money out of it, it’s more of a passion – I make my money doing ‘proper’ photography gigs.

The last festival I went to was Splendour in the Grass in Byron, which was a while ago… But nothing had really changed too much, it was still pretty wild and wooly – but a lot better in terms of people treating each other with a bit more respect.

All images courtesy of Steve Cook