The tragic thing about golden ages is that you seldom realise you are in one until it’s over.
In the Adelaide of the early nineties, it was easy to think that the incredible cultural moment we enjoyed – the venues, the bands, the incredible music – was normal, even inevitable.
But it was not. It was only possible because there was a coincidence of the right conditions at the right moment and, most important of all, with the right people.
Those people are rare, and they are weird. They are people that care far too much. They are people that always turn up. They are the people that create the conditions where things can happen.
Robert Dunstan was one of those people.
Legendarily he had dumped a dependable day job to dedicate his life to the far less stable (and significantly less lucrative) world of journalism, and independent music journalism at that, on the editorial team at Rip It Up.
That magazine was to be pivotal in the flourishing of Adelaide’s cultural moment, and much of that was down to the personal qualities of Robert: a music obsessive who was known, respected and loved for being at gigs every night of the week, living and breathing the local scene with the same passion as the musicians and the punters. There is a reason that the Governor Hindmarsh named the bar in their live room after him.
That commitment comes at a considerable cost. And yet for those of us, like Rob, that found community and purpose in the sweaty live rooms of Adelaide, it was a bargain.
And he drew other music obsessives to him, both in terms of writers and staff at Rip It Up, and in terms of the wider culture of artists and industry and media. That was where we crossed paths; I was a local musician who went on to write for RIU’s rival, dB Magazine, but professional competition never turned personal. Obsessives recognise other obsessives.
When that golden age passed, and when the ecosystem that supported street press died off and took Adelaide’s street press with it, Rob kept the faith. He poured that vast and encyclopaedic knowledge into BSide Magazine, a defiant refusal to let the recording and promoting of Adelaide’s creative culture evaporate into social media ephemera.
He was proud of this city and its artists, and he never stopped believing that something incredible was going to happen at the next gig and that he’d be damned if he was going to miss that moment. And more often than not, he was right.
That was Rob. He cared far too much. He always turned up. He helped things happen.
And our city, and our culture, remains the richer for it.
