Sydney Warehouse Party Experience

31/08/08

Unbelievable.

A couple of days ago I received a text message which was passed onto me by a friend up here in Sydney. Basically, the message spoke about an Inner-City, multi-level warehouse party featuring sound systems from about 5 underground crews. Basically, you had to call a number on the night to get the location...

Well, it got to about 10pm on Saturday night and so I rang my friend to see if she was going. Her and some other peeps were planning on attending (and had already called the number) and found out that the address was 125 Paramatta Road. Sik, I thought, old skool rave party. High chance of being good. It was free and close to home so I thought I'd check it out.

We got there and the place was jammed with (no kidding) approximately 1500 people. It was a large, three-story abandoned warehouse which still had the electricity connected. The place was completely going off. There was a huge DnB stage downstairs and a variety of other stages over the other levels, such as a hip hop stage, a psy stage, a funk stage, etc. We had a boogie both downstairs to the DnB and then went upstairs to the psy and it was unbelievably hot up there but totally awesome.

Things looked to be going well but for the event but something of that size really had little chance of not being noticed by police, especially as it was on a major arterial into town. So it wasn't that surprising that around 1:30am the police arrived.

What was surprising was the extent of the police presence. There must have been about 50 cops. They obviously had a planned strategy because they started evacuating the building from the top down. The music was suddenly turned off and about 20 cops started yelling at people to go downstairs. We did, but managed to get back into the DnB room for some more action, because it was clear that we had at least another 20 minutes to party. Eventually however, the DnB stage was shut down as well. As 1000 people poured onto Paramatta road, which was completely blocked off for about 500m in each direction, it became clear that this was a massive operation. A police helicopter circled overhead to hundreds of cheering raver hands being waved in the air, and police on the ground tried to get the crowd moving away from the area. I definitely think this will be front page news tomorrow!

My friends and I walked back to mine for a cup of tea and a chat, before my friends went back to central to catch the train home. Here are some photos from the night - I tried to capture some of the action.

03/09/08 - Yes indeed, the event made the ABC news. Here is the link:

http://abc.com.au/news/stories/2008/08/31/2351032.htm