Picture this: you aren’t sitting at home bored out of your mind because your country fended off COVID-19 and now you can go to music festivals again. While it seems like a pipe dream for many of us around the world, Australians are living it due to their country’s reported success in keeping infection rates low.
Kicking off earlier in the month, Factory Summer is a new traveling festival that will take place over the course of three weeks in Brisbane and Perth simultaneously with a Melbourne outing later in the spring. Unlike America, where most states only allow drive-in shows or socially-distanced gatherings, Factory Summer is the exact live music experience that’s grown to become a distant memory to many of us.
Featured on the lineup were performances from What So Not, Hermitude, Anna Lunoe, Vera Blue, Lucille Croft, and more. Some of those artists shared posts on Instagram letting the rest of the world know what they’re missing out on and showing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
A report from the BBC shows that, compared to other countries around the world, Australia has done quite well with its response to the pandemic. Restrictions put in place by the government were very strict, including mandatory masking, enforced curfews, and 14-day quarantines for the limited number of people allowed to enter the country. While restrictive, the results speak for themselves as the Worldometers Coronavirus tracker shows that in the past month, new case counts are mostly in the single-digit range each day while the US—with fewer restrictions—has averaged well over 200,000 new cases daily as of late.
The Perth and Brisbane iterations of Factory Summer Festival take place over the course of December 11th to 31st while the Melbourne event will be held March 19th to April 5th, 2021. For more information on the three-week festivals, you can check out their website.
