By European standards, the Rainbow Serpent Festival is small. By Australian standards, it’s huge – 18,000 people. 3 main music stages, and a central stalls area filled with the usual cheap cotton, studded leather and this year’s essential for the laydees – twerking pants.

Happy Rainbow! is the refrain and it is, in spite of 36 degree sunshine and dust which makes it difficult to breathe and dyes the inside of your nose black.

I’ve spent the morning at the solar cinema, run by Pippa and Rich from Future Art Research who have the shadiest spot on site. They showed my Lammas documentary on Friday and have entertained me since with Indigenous stories from Uncle Larry, sourdough breadmaking workshops using their solar oven and now, an interesting history of the activist scene in Australia.

In the early noughties, Undercurrents Beyond Tv Festival was showing films from Jabiluka uranium mine protests and Woomera detention centre. That footage of the fence coming down and refugees spilling out into the desert is unforgettable. Now, the scene has shifted to the brilliant Lock the Gate campaign against coal seam gas and instead of just the usual suspects, farmers have united with locals to create a united resistence.

We’re led into the discussion by a query about the lack of environmental awareness at this festival. My friend Cara has been flown in from the UK to do a talk on Free Economy and to show a film called Connected. She estimates her audience at 0.025 of the people here. She is camped in the artists quarter and is amazed by the DJs detailing their litany of flights to travel around the world for gigs.

“What’s it all for” she laments. “Just to have a good time?”.

David Holmgren‘s talk, however, is well attended, but then he’s a local. Known as the father of permaculture, he has established a self-sufficient homestead down the road in Hepburn Springs. He and his colleagues set up festivals in Tasmania, back in the day, which they wanted to be living examples of sustainability. They would plant veggies on site 6 months beforehand, so that festival-goers could harvest free food during their stay.

Here at Rainbow, they could take a few lessons from the Green Gathering, who run all of their site on renewable energy. If it’s possible in the UK, with all its rain and mud, it must be possible here, with its 36 degrees of sunshine.