Gulliver's post reminded me of an occasion when I took a friend to the Numeralla folk festival; at the time this festival was like an extended week-end-long session. She was an artist (not music) who'd never been involved with the folk scene, let alone been to a folk festival. For almost the whole of the weekend I didn't see her. At the very end of the Sunday she ran into me, excited at what she'd been drawing.

"Such wonderful faces! They all look so      lived in!"

I've relished the description ever since, even though I could be a dinosaur.

McGrath took my "Canberra, at the time dominated by extreme middle classes" to task.
I had meant to imply that Canberra at the time was extremely middle class but haste got in the way. When I first arrived in Canberra (1964) there was no public nightlife to speak of. The 'city' was socially organised into "the diplomatic corps", "the university" and "the public service"; if you weren't integrated into one of these you could have a lonely time of it. There was no working class; all the cleaners lived in Queanbeyan, a town across the border in NSW, and travelled to and from work in special buses. The "industrial area" of the ACT was restricted to Fyshwick and there were no old aged pensioners visible.

The place had improved markedly by the mid70s, and the folk scene (mostly the Monaro Folk Soc) was a major part of that improvement. And I regard it as a fact rather than a criticism that most of us in the scene at the time were middle class. Even (especially?) me, a regular blow-in from south of the border, where I was in my element among some of the more assertive representatives of the workers that the middle class loved to patronise.

Cheers, Rowan