Preparations underway for Festival One, a Christian music festival at Hartford Farm in Karapiro. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Steve Braunias previews a Christian music festival at Karapiro.
An estimated 5000 Christians are about to travel to a three-day music festival held in a beautiful valley near the shores of Lake Karapiro. Scaffolders were building one of the stages on Wednesday. It was a day for sunscreen lotion and any kind of hat. A cooling darkness was available behind a line of pine trees. Bush tracks led down to the Karapiro Stream, which forms lagoons that make very good swimming holes. There were dragonflies and stick insects in the sunlight. It was all so lovely, a Waikato idyll, in farmland decorated with signs advising NO TO 3 WATERS and, painted on the Te Ara Noa bridge suspended above State Highway One, ARDERN OUT.
The venue for the festival is a farm signposted with the name Hartford. The T has been carved into a cross. A man with abundant grey hair worked at his laptop on a picnic table in the middle of a field. Graham Burt, executive director of Festival One, which he established as an annual Christian music festival in 2014, was masterminding the logistics leading towards next weekend’s three-day event. Sometimes he spoke in long, rambling monologues, other times with as few words as possible. Everything he said stayed close to the most important things in his life: faith, God, family, clusters.
The first subject he started talking about brought him near to tears. He relived the shock of last year’s festival being cancelled by lockdown just five days before it was due to open; Festival One 2022 was supposed to mark its debut year at Hartford, a new dawn, after years of staging it at Mystery Creek. Everything was set.
And then: “I turned on the radio and it was her.” He meant Jacinda Ardern. “In our heart of hearts we thought we were safe, because the festival was being held the same weekend as the wedding.” He meant Ardern’s wedding. “And then she said what she said. I don’t think anyone said a word. We just started taking everything down. Full heartbreak.”
He spoke at great length about the devastating moment when Festival 2022 was cancelled. One small detail of his glum speech was his reluctance to say Ardern’s name out loud.
I asked, “What do you make of Jacinda Ardern?”
He said, “No comment.”
Festival One 2023, finally, marks the debut year at Hartford. It’s surely going to be awesome fun, and perfectly safe - no drugs, no alcohol, camping in a gorgeous valley, games for kids, a disability tent, a free barbecue on Saturday night with two tons of sirloin steak provided gratis by Waikato farmers. There will be bands from around New Zealand, as well as headliners Switchfoot, veterans of US Christian rock.
“The reason we do this for people,” said Burt, “is to bring together people with a shared heart and a shared faith. We are all pilgrims walking towards the light. We love bringing clusters together.”
I asked, “Is it a small pocket of goodness?”
He said, “I hope so. I wouldn’t phrase it like that, though.”
“How would you phrase it?”
He looked into the distance. A speech was heading his way. He said, “The past few years have been tough. It’s been hard to get people together. Lockdown prevented that. I’m not saying lockdown was wrong, but it prevented that. People found that tough. And so the outpouring of grief when we had to cancel last year - people were saying, ‘We feel terrible for you, but also for ourselves.’ Because they were really looking forward to it. The pent-up emotion of people was higher than ever.
“I’m not criticising lockdown, but it changed people. It changed all of us. Most churches are only at 70 per cent capacity now because people discovered they can do church online, or not at all. Church on Zoom has been a real substitute for a lot of people.
“And so it’s a reaction to all of that why this event is so important. It’s my intuition that people need to be together. We are all pilgrims,” he repeated, with a little twist, “walking towards the sun.”
Of course he was criticising lockdown and saying it was wrong, but it was a good speech. It was his Woodstock moment. It elevated him when he told it, transported him. He was a man with a vision. Psalm 150, verse 5: “Praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals.”
Hartford farm is owned by kiwifruit grower Mark Gardiner, who worships at the Raleigh Street Christian Church, and lives in a big white house with a swimming pool. He was interviewed at his kiwifruit packing shed. There were beard nets for workers, and kiwifruit cushion covers in his office. A chat about farming practices gave me an opportunity to contrive a reference to Jacinda Ardern; I was curious to hear his opinion. “We’re all a bit over her,” he said.
If the Festival One mood anticipated the Prime Minister’s decision the next day to step down, Labour has never been regarded with much affection in the Christian scene. Parachute ran an annual Christian music festival from 1992-2014. Phil Goff, as Labour leader, showed up at Parachute 2011 to say a few words. He brought along a young list MP by the name of Jacinda Ardern. They were a flop. John Key also spoke that year and was greeted like a hero.
Key was known to be gutted when Parachute folded. It came as a shock to many. The festival had established itself as a regular fixture, and attracted a record 27,000 people in 2007. But numbers began to fall, just as sales of the once wildly popular genre of Christian contemporary rock began to dwindle. Parachute registered a $250,000 loss in its final year. Even so, the 2014 crowd (17,000) is over three times the number expected at Festival One.
Graham Burt had attended every Parachute with his wife and kids. He was determined to keep something like it going. Baptist pastors Mark Pierson and Kevin Schultz staged the very Christian music festival in New Zealand, in 1987, in Otaki; Burt described Pierson as “a curator of sacred spaces”. Burt and Gardiner too, see Festival One as a place of enlightenment. “If people can get closer to creation,” Gardiner said of Hartford’s Eden-like appearance, “they can get closer to the creator.”
The offer of Hartford came when Gardiner ran into Burt at Festival One a few years ago at Mystery Creek. He asked Burt what his plans were for the future. Gardiner: “Graham said, ‘I’m looking at a more natural setting. Somewhere more in touch with creation.’ I said, ‘That’s interesting. I’ve just bought a property that’s got a God factor to it.’ It was too good a property to be a sheep farm.”
Burt was keen to get away from Mystery Creek. He described it as “an industrial wasteland” when he made a submission to the Waipā District Council to gain permission to stage Festival One at Hartford. I said, “You got in trouble for that, didn’t you?”
“No,” he said.
“The CEO of Mystery Creek asked for an apology.”
“Mmm.”
“You got a scolding.”
“Yeah.”
Waipā District Council declined Burt’s application at a hearing in November 2020. There were 10 objections to Festival One, from neighbouring property owners who were concerned “about the potential adverse effects on their families, pets and farm animals, their personal health and their businesses as a direct result of the proposed festival”. There was also fears for the survival of long‐tailed bats, a threatened species thought to be present in eucalyptus trees on the farm.
Project planner Hayley Thomas told the council, “Land use application should be refused…The identified potential adverse effects cannot be avoided, remedied or mitigated to a level which are deemed acceptable.”
But they were deemed acceptable in September 2021. Satisfied with the remedies and mitigations put in place by Festival One, the council gave Burt the go-ahead. Two families who objected to the festival have since sold up. Gardiner said he has told a third family, concerned the festival might devalue their property, that he will buy them out if they want to move, too.
The council made a telling remark in its 2021 ruling: “The nature of the event was also a defining factor, in that it is drug and alcohol-free and will provide a family festival atmosphere, with music being one component of the weekend Christian festival.” Festival One is not exactly Coachella, or Soundsplash, or Laneways, or anywhere people can expect to get smashed out of their minds and sleep with strangers. Festival One is hymns. Festival One is prayers. Festival One is wild mint, which Burt picked to use on his potatoes at dinner this past busy week setting up a sacred place.
When Gardiner bought the farm, it was over-run with thistle, blackberry, and ragwort. One day he counted 300 feral deer camped out on a field. But the weeds have been cut back, with fencing, and bridges laid across Karapiro Stream. I took a walk through the farm with Burt. He pointed out a grassy knoll where a small stage will be built for acoustic music played at sunrise. We walked past three firepits for the Saturday night two-ton barbecue. A truck arrived, bearing a load advertised as FAR-OUT SHOWERS. It was nice to imagine about 5000 Christians pegging tents, eating sirloin, hanging out, having fun, probably gossiping about Destiny and Arise, sharing their faith.
Burt pointed to the main stage. It would be called the King’s Arms stage, he said. Nothing to do with the famous Auckland pub that functioned as one of the city’s great music venues; it was based on a verse from Deuteronomy. Burt’s grandfather loved to quote from it: “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”
'His journey was just beginning as it is for so many of us.'