Desert sounds

The Donovans were just an average suburban family until 15-year-old Steve was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and in their quest to raise funds for a cure, they fell in love with the desert. Now, their outback music festivals give joy to thousands of Aussie revellers every year.

- SUSAN CHENERY

On the road out of Broken Hill you can almost see the curvature of the earth as the desert meets the horizon. Humans are very small in this powerful landscape of red earth against a faded blue sky. It is a landscape that seems endless, unforgiving and empty. But out on the Mundi Mundi plain, under the Border Ranges, there is loud music on the dry desert wind. And a city built from nothing that will be gone with the tumbleweeds in a few days. Ten thousand people have come to camp under the stars, sit around fires and stomp to rock music as the sun lingers going down. They have driven across the outback for days and weeks to come to the Mundi Mundi Bash. It is an adventure just to get here, camping along the way.

"It's much more than just the music," says festival organiser and owner Greg Donovan. "It's the atmosphere out here, the people that you meet."

Greg's own journey to putting on the most remote music festivals in the world has been long, dangerous and has traversed the earth from the Sahara to Antarctica.

When Greg married Raylene 38 years ago, he was an accountant. She thought that he would always be an accountant. He worked in insurance, in the corporate world. You would think he would be risk-averse. But when he lost his job of 20 years in 2015, and got a "nice" redundancy payout, instead of putting it into "boring" superannuation, Greg "spent it all on Jimmy Barnes".

The Donovans added Mundi Mundi in Broken Hill to the Big Red Bash festival in 2017.

Here's how it all started. At the age of 15, Greg and Raylene's son, Steve, became increasingly unwell. A skinny teenager and always thirsty, he then became very lethargic. When he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, it came as a shock to the whole family.