Wollongong's HONK! Oz street musical festival turns 10 in January, and it's time to celebrate a decade of honking good fun. The festival is a veritable cavalcade of creative performing arts, mixing alternative community bands with related arts such as circus acts, lantern- and drum-making, belly-dancing and more. The colour, sound and general spectacle of HONK! Oz transforms the centre of Wollongong. And it's all completely free!
But behind the scenes there's a whole ecosystem of creative people and connections that nurture and sustain the HONK! Oz festival vibe. The spirit of honk is community, and the festival is entirely volunteer-created and run. This article features some of the people of HONK! Oz who help make the event what it is.
Long-term performer
At 86, Thirroul resident John Spira is one of the most senior participants in HONK! Oz, and he's been part of the festival since it began in 2015. John said: "I got involved 10 years ago when Honk Oz started. It was an initiative of the Con Artists band leader, David Rooney, and others in this band, of which I am a member. The Honk festival originated in the US, in Boston, and we saw reproducing it here as an excellent way to offer street band music to the people of Wollongong."
Asked how HONK! Oz has changed over the years, John replied: "The festival has grown and become well known Australia-wide and internationally. It attracts bands from within NSW and interstate, and some great musicians from abroad, principally the USA, so we locals have the pleasure and privilege of getting to know them and playing with them."
John's advice to anyone thinking of coming along to play at HONK! Oz for the first time: "Go for it! Join the pick-up band led by Ken Field from Boston."
New bands formed out of HONK! Oz
At the other end of the age range, many young musicians participate in the festival. Programs and activities such as the Kids Honk workshops and performances, supported by staff from the Wollongong Conservatorium of Music, give young people opportunities to perform and improvise together, and have even helped forge new bands of young musicians.
Youth band 1140, which started in 2019 as fortnightly backyard rehearsals of children who'd come up through Kids Honk, has played at venues around the Illawarra. The band performs unique brass-based arrangements of well-known pop songs such as A-ha's Take On Me and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, as well as second-line standards.
Eighteen-year-old Saskia McIntyre, who has been with 1140 since the start, said she values the social side of the band as much as the musical, as it offers connections that students don't get through school or other avenues. 1140 was also her entry into the Wollongong Conservatorium of Music. "Through 1140 I met young people who were in the Con and I decided it would be all right to join."
She added: "I feel we have grown a lot in confidence since 2019, and have much more of an idea of what's going on musically."
Informal band leader Jenn Cook, who teaches at the Conservatorium and took the band under her wing, sees this growth as well. She said 1140 has progressed from the novelty of being a "band of young people" that everyone wants to support, to a genuinely cool act that everyone wants to watch and enjoy in its own right.
Jenn hosted rehearsals in her backyard during the initial band formation period in 2019, and has seen the group grow in confidence and ability over the years. Saskia describes Jenn as her "mum in music" and as a "mentor who's always there". Both Saskia and Jenn value the range of members, with a mix of dedicated music students and community band members for whom playing music is a third- or fourth-string activity, but important nevertheless.
As Saskia said: "The great thing about the Honk bands is they show that the constraints of formal music-making aren't necessary, and that having fun and playing music for the sake of it is completely worthwhile. If you want to do excellence, that's great, but it really isn't necessary."
Long-term volunteer
At the very heart of Honk is community and the volunteering spirit. All the bands and other performers play for free, event logistics and production are provided for free, and the entire festival is organised by a group of dedicated volunteers.
This approach inspires many people to come along and volunteer their time for an hour or two (or 10) during the festival. One such person is long-term HONK! Oz volunteer Anne Steyer of Barrack Heights.
Anne, previously a community health and welfare worker, is a volunteer extraordinaire, who works with many organisations including the Australian Red Cross where she serves in emergency services and provides buddy support, among other things. She started volunteering at community music festivals with the very first HONK! Oz festival in 2015, and says she absolutely adores being part of it.
"I love that it is free for families and brings the community together at all levels and ages, with little kids dancing with their parents and playing anything they can bang on and make into a drum. The atmosphere is so vibrant and wonderful, even in bad weather."
Anne admits to being a frustrated drummer, having played on and off since she was 13, and said she was particularly taken with the Junk Drums workshop, where people learned to make drums out of old bins and other found objects: "I was so inspired that people made drums out of bins!"
Anne's enthusiasm and professional experience in managing volunteers mean that in 2025 she has taken on the role of overall volunteer coordinator. If you've caught a bit of volunteering fever from hearing her story, you can sign up as a HONK! Oz festival volunteer here. And the Junk Drums workshop is running again in 2025.
Interstate bands
Ken Allen of WA band The Junkadelic Brass Band is the mastermind behind the Junk Drums workshop being run at this year's festival.
Drumming workshops have been a feature of HONK! Oz over the years, and The Junkadelic Brass Band brings a special recycling twist, helping participants to build drums from cast-off items such as old tubs and buckets. The band has also performed at every festival bar one, entertaining audiences with their big brass section complemented by hard-hitting recycled percussion.
When he heard about the inaugural HONK! Oz festival in 2014, Ken was instantly excited: "It looked like our kind of people: people who play music for the love of it – and we were right! We were there from the start and it has become an annual pilgrimage for us."
That is saying something for a large ensemble with a whole lot of musical instruments to transport from Perth to Wollongong.
Asked about how the Wollongong festival has changed over the years, Ken said: "I feel like it has consolidated, and is well supported now by multiple generations."
His favourite thing about the festival? "The community and the joy of performing with like-minded folks."
Junkadelic has also organised three WAHonk festivals over the years, and hopes to run another WAHonk soon. Watch this space!
Long-running international act
Someone else who travels a long way to participate in HONK! Oz is US-based musician Ken Field, who has been closely involved in the Honk concept since the first ever Honk festival emerged in Boston in 2005. Since then, he's seen the Honk concept expand to over 22 countries around the world, with each event having its own unique character.
Each year in Wollongong, Ken runs the Hoot Pickup Band for Unattached (and Attached) Musicians, an absolute finale event that brings dozens of performers together to play classic honk tunes such as Down by the Riverside, You Move Ya Lose and his own compositions, Xonk and Skunk.
The concept of the pickup band is that it's open to anyone to join, and the tunes that are played are easy to pick up at a rehearsal or two. It's the perfect opportunity for people to try out the Honk experience, dusting off that old clarinet, sax, flute or recorder that's been sitting neglected in a cupboard, and playing in a convivial low-pressure high-fun environment.
Growing out of the Wollongong Conservatorium Community Ensembles program, workshops and learning were an integral part of HONK! Oz from the beginning. The 2015 program featured: ‘Honk jam with Ken Field – a free workshop for musicians of all ages’ / Linsey Pollak’s Macedonian Gypsy Brass Workshop – for experienced players’ / Kids HONK! – for primary school band students, and lantern making. Later festivals added drumming workshops. All the workshops featured rehearsal and a performance elements.
Ken Field recounts how Illawarra musicians and HONK! Oz founders David Rooney and Lotte Latukefu reached out to him in 2014 with the idea of running a honk event in Wollongong.
With the help of a US Embassy grant, Ken attended the first HONK! Oz in 2015 and led a workshop pickup band, open to anyone to attend, focusing on New Orleans-style street, with an approach informed by the Boston Honk Festival. After it went pretty well that first year, Ken has returned every year since (COVID permitting).
He said: "I was really impressed with what David and Lotte and everyone had done that first year. It was such a joyous event, such a community-based event, and I learned so much about the music community that made up the HONK Oz festival. It was such a beautiful community, people were bonded in so many dimensions: socially, musically, politically.
"From there it just built year on year, and I brought in arrangements that I thought people would enjoy, such as my second line brass band arrangement of [Midnight Oil's] Beds are Burning."
Today the pickup band is one of the festival finale events, although it's always hard to choose among the many different performances.
The full program for the 10th HONK! Oz festival is available now. Ken Field's Hoot Pickup Band will be performing at 7.30pm on Saturday, 11 January in the Wollongong Arts Precinct. (Rehearsals are held on 9, 10 and 11 January, check the program for details of this and all other events.)
