This feature is part of festival month, a series dedicated to celebrating festivals, the people who make them happen and the people who cherish them.

Inner Varnika is a festival inextricably connected with its environment. The dramatic weather, the sparse Djargurd Wurrung plains littered with volcanic rocks and the red dust of the crater's soil are the roots of each year's event. Most of the time, the sloped sides—which form a natural amphitheatre around the festival's only stage—cradle the dance floor, protecting dancers from the elements.

But on the Saturday afternoon of Inner Varnika's final edition, the arpeggios of Higher Intelligence Agency's "Speedlearn (Empathy Mix)" cascaded from the speakers while gusts of wind sent the rain horizontally through a throng of umbrellas and raincoats. The mixture of music lovers, club kids and semi-retired ravers were undeterred, as the full dance floor bounced along to the sparkling synth lines and crystalline sound design. Feet squelched in the mud along with the pulsing 303 lines. Faces beamed with joy.

The set was a triumph for Higher Intelligence Agency, and a highlight of the festival. It sparkled with an optimism and imagination that felt at once forward-thinking and timeless, encapsulating the kind of leftfield music and cult favourite artist that, for a long time in Australia, you could only hear at a festival like Inner Varnika.

Inner Varnika has been raising Australia's dance music children for the past decade. Growing alongside its audience, the festival began as a 500-strong party in a field, inviting international acts like Luke Hess, XDB and Lerosa, before migrating two years later to its current location two and a half hours west of Melbourne (naarm) on Djargurd Wurrung Country, colonially known as Bookaar, Victoria.

As conversations in Melbourne's dance community examined gender and race representation on lineups, the festival's programming shifted in response. Inner Varnika's engagement with place has also deepened over the years: the festival held space for its first Welcome To Country (or "ngatanwarr merrang" in the local Djargurd Wurrung language) in 2019, a ceremony originating from pre-colonial times where the Traditional Custodians of a region formally welcome visitors to the land they care for. 2022 and 2023 marked a visible shift in the festival's prioritisation of booking First Nations DJs and live acts, a change that, while late to arrive, is one I hope other promoters and festivals will continue to build on.

While Inner Varnika's broader politics took time to ripen, the anti-commercial and community-driven ethos was present from day one. The festival consistently made decisions that made little business sense but were of tremendous cultural and creative merit. They formed enduring relationships with artists that would solidify over the years, and helped niche overseas acts break out. From the first edition, they platformed local DJs directly in conversation with international artists, flattening the headliner/local support hierarchy so normalised in the festival landscape.

Each slot at the festival, whether late night or late morning, was programmed with the flow of the day in mind. This graceful journey across musical domains, say from dub to disco to house to techno to bass to ambient, opened the audience up to new sounds and ideas. The organisers of the festival (Bryce Lawrence, Louis McCoy, Glyn Hill, Kim Pong, Jess Wood and former contributors Wael Najm and Scott Levy) had the breadth of knowledge between them to programme across scenes with sensitivity, booking artists who also had this commitment to flow and context in mind.

Yawung was a perfect example of this. In 2022, the Melbourne-based DJ played a stellar set, easing the Saturday morning crowd in with a palette of gentle sounds. In contrast, she responded to this year's Friday early evening by moving from bass to dub techno and mutant dancehall, tying tracks together with low-slung, loose-limbed grooves and foggy textures. It peaked with Burial's "Ghost Hardware," sending dancers' hands reaching up to the grey sky above.

As conversations in Melbourne's dance community examined gender and race representation on lineups, the festival's programming shifted in response and the organisers made a deliberate effort to engage with the local landscape.

The cost of living and wage stagnation crisis in Australia has had a direct effect on clubs and festivals. Attendees are buying their tickets later, in more unpredictable patterns. While event production costs have increased steadily since the pandemic, punters' capacity or appetite to spend more on ticket prices has remained level, making it harder than ever for promoters to take risks with adventurous bookings.

This situation made the festival's two-years-in-the-making scheme to showcase electronic music provocateur Terre Thaemlitz playing a live piano set at peak time on Friday night all the more surprising. As Thaemlitz sat in a greenhouse to the side of the stage—which had been built especially for the performance—moving through melancholic chords of an unreleased, original composition, I took in the contrasting experiences of those around me. While some people were spellbound in silent attention, others looked around confused, chatted loudly—one person even took a phone call. I wondered if I would ever get to partake in such a beautiful, bizarre mess again.

Each edition of the festival had a consistent narrative arc, with particular slots—Friday dusk, Saturday night, Sunday sunset—often soundtracked by recurring genres and moods. For the final slots on Friday and Saturday, the festival would book ambient and experimental acts to coax the dance floor back down to earth. This gentle finish and 4 or 5 AM curfew, combined with the fact that the festival has only one stage, meant that the arc of the weekend felt more cohesive than it might at other festivals.

These tranquil final hours provided an opportunity for artists to dive into leftfield territory without the need to maintain the energy levels in the crowd. This year, the collaboration closing Friday night–E Fishpool, Sam Miers and Kalyani–layered the emotive and delicately moving ambient of E Fishpool's solo works with DJing, live vocals, samples and keys from Miers and Kalyani.

The performance was paced like an opera, with notable scene changes marked by distinct shifts in energy and mood. At one point, Miers left the decks and Kalyani stepped up, moving through a brief ambient passage before crescendoing in an ecstatic baile funk tune while Fishpool improvised slicing synth lines on top. They closed with a cover of Seal's "Crazy," Kalyani's voice floating out to the campsite like a lullaby for tender hearts. The few hundred people left at the stage were mesmerised. Groups of friends huddled close, embracing and listening in stunned silence.

Local DJs and punters were the primary creators of Inner Varnika's mythos, the people who infused the party with a sense of play and irreverence. Over the years this has been expressed through traditions like Suit Sunday, where partygoers cosplay as office workers, or Shit Horses of Inner Varnika, where the suited punters are requested to attempt to draw a horse at the peak of their intoxication (a perversion of an Objekt and Call Super ritual). These traditions often continued beyond the festival's end, particularly before the decline of Facebook as a hub for dance music events, with each year's edition resulting in an extensive thread of track IDs and a community-built playlist.

Inner Varnika has been raising Australia's dance music children for the past decade, beginning as a 500-strong party in a field before migrating two years later to its current location outside of Melbourne (naarm).

You would be hard-pressed to find artists who have had greater sonic influence on Inner Varnika than Sleep D and Moopie. Listening to Sleep D's seminal "Red Rock (IV Mix)" transports me right back to its Martian plains: the vast landscape, the ochre underfoot, the heat of the sun. Through their work as producers, DJs and label heads of Butter Sessions, the duo—who played at Inner Varnika six times in total—shaped a generation of Australian dance music through their affinity for texture and analogue instrumentation.

If Sleep D were the reliable stalwarts of the festival, Moopie was the renegade. Across five appearances, Moopie regularly delivered warm-up sets more thrilling, adventurous and visionary than the headline acts that followed, once to the point of spurring a petition for an extended set. He spiralled across twisted techno, freaky electro, crisp tech house and dubstep classics, and he regularly dominated the track ID threads on Facebook. His sets often foretold or even shaped the sound of the year to come in Melbourne club music. He would introduce much of the local scene to tracks before they became hometown anthems, like Klon Dump's "Out Of Touch!," bridging different eras of music with his precise, authoritative mixing.

The closing set of Inner Varnika always had an ambiguous finishing time. This charged the last hour of the final edition with an uncertainty that things might end, for good, at any given moment. Festival cofounder Louis McCoy gave his yearly speech, this time imbued with gratitude, which sparked a signature call-and-response of "ten more songs!" from the crowd.

Sex Tags, AKA DJ Sotofett and Fett Burger, played into that collective desire to cherish the final dance in the crater. There was little cynicism left in the crowd: big-feelings moments like "The Time Is Now" by Moloko and Underground Resistance & Yolanda's "Living For The Night (Brainstorm Live Mix)" ripped our hearts wide open. People held their friends close, celebrating the last tender moments of an institution, as Sex Tags shifted into a gear described by one disgruntled partygoer as "playing from the aux cord." I wouldn't have had it any other way. We sang along to Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight," looked at each other laughing as Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" rang out, before swaying, wrapped in each others' arms to Bruce Springsteen's "Streets Of Philadelphia," the final song ever to play at Inner Varnika.

Through traditions like Suit Sunday—where partygoers cosplay as office workers—local DJs and punters became the primary creators of Inner Varnika's enduring mythos.

The one-stage festival format creates an opportunity for deep, emotionally resonant moments to music far away from peak-time bangers. In a landscape where the pace and intensity of dance music is increasing, Inner Varnika acted as a consistent, trusted anchor to the past. For a decade, the festival marched to the beat of its own drum while syncing to the rhythms around it, creating a space that collapsed all these different worlds together.

While the final year played out like a celebration of life, with the respect and appreciation it deserved, I was left wondering–can we give our institutions their flowers while they can smell them? Can we find ways for promoters to pass on the reins to the next generation, so wisdom and knowledge isn't lost? Can we gather together in ways that genuinely nourish each other and ourselves? As I scrubbed the mud off my shoes from the weekend, my spirit full of gratitude and peace, I knew, just for a moment, that all the answers were contained in the land and the music.

The author, who DJs as Anuraag, performed at the 2022 edition of Inner Varnika