Greg Donovan says it seems almost a lifetime ago when he wore a suit and tie, worked in insurance and ws climbing the corporate ladder. Working for a large insurance firm he oversaw takeovers and acquisitions. Something that couldn’t be further away from the life he has now.
“It was a pretty average life. Working in the insurance industry, having three kids and a family and a mortgage. All the usual stuff,” Mr Donovan told the Barrier Truth.
“Working in the corporate world is a challenge. It has its ups and downs.”
But these days Mr Donovan is the man behind two of the country’s most popular music events, The Big Red Bash and our very own Mundi Mundi Bash. We wanted to know how he went from insurance man to Mundi Mundi man.
The pressure cooker corporate world was taking its take a toll on Mr Donovan. Alongside some family issues, his son being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes amongst them, Mr Donovan suffered from depression and anxiety.
“Issues and challenges at work. Things with family, things with my finances. I sort of got involved in some things that didn’t work out the way they were supposed to work, you know a whole range of stresses. It sort of took its toll and got on top of me and put me in a pretty bad space.”
To get through this tough period of his life, Mr Donovan turned to running. And we’re not talking your everyday jog around the block. He began taking part in the Four Deserts Ultra-Marathon Series.
That event sees ultra-marathons run through arid regions in Namibia, Mongolia, Chile, and Antarctica. Competitors cover more than 250km across unforgiving terrains. Along with helping with his own mental health problems at the time, he was also raising money for type 1 diabetes.
After the Four Deserts series, Mr Donovan began looking into hosting a similar event here in Australia. He named it the Big Red Run and little did he know that it was the beginning of something huge.
“After doing all these desert runs around the world and everything, we decided to set one up in Australia. There wasn’t anything like that over here, so we decided to set one up as a fundraiser for type 1 diabetes,” Mr Donovan said.
“We didn’t expect to be doing anything on the music side of things. Then we ended up doing a little music to kind of celebrate the run. And we got John Williamson to play some tunes on Big Red [in Birdsville] where we had the event and that was sort of the first little thing in terms of the music side of things.”
After parting ways with the corporate world and the insurance company he had worked at for 20 years, he decided to return to Big Red and this time focus on the music.
“After we got John Williamson to play out on the dunes, we got a lot of feedback saying how cool it was to have live music in the middle of the desert, and we thought maybe this can be our little niche,” he reflected on.
“Before I got the redundancy, in 2014 we decided to turn it [the Big Red Run] into a mini music festival. We did that and it didn’t go that well. I didn’t realise how much was involved, how much everything would cost. After we had done that, I was thinking ‘that was a good idea at the time, now it is time to move on’.”
But fate had a different plan in store and with the redundancy money in hand, Mr Donovan decided to re-visit the music festival idea to see if he could make a go of it.
And make a go of it he did. After returning to the original location of Birdsville in 2014, it all took off in a big way.
“Around 2016 as Big Red Bash was growing and becoming really successful model, we thought let’s look at maybe starting something up in another location.”
There were several boxes this new location had to tick. It had to be a ‘bucket list’ spot, something iconic, a little easier to access than Birdsville, and of course, it had to be an outback location.
“The logical place for me was somewhere around Broken Hill,” Mr Donovan said.
“It’s a great place with a lot of history, a lot of things for people to do and pretty easy to access from most capital cities.”
Once he had identified the Silver City as the ideal place, Mr Donovan began discussions with Broken Hill City Council, which went well, and so he went about scouting locations around the Hill.
The Mundi Mundi Plains was the only one to tick every box.
When the Big Red Bash was cancelled in 2020 due to COVID, Mr Donovan found himself with a bit of time on his hands, and the work began in earnest to make the Broken Hill leg of the Big Red Bash a reality.
“We worked really hard in 2020 to get the Broken Hill event up and running, it’s a lot of work to get something like that going, and in early 2021 we launched the Mundi Mundi Bash.”
The hurdles weren’t totally cleared. As we are all aware, coronavirus just would not go away. And that meant the inaugural event slated for August 2021 was postponed.
It would eventually take place in April this year, and included a who’s-who of Australian music.
Paul Kelly headlined, and John Williamson, who was a Big Red veteran by that point, also played at that first event.
August saw the second Mundi Bash. And the plan going forward is to have the event held in August each year. The second Bash was an even bigger success with legends of Aussie music Jimmy Barnes, Jon Stevens, Kasey
Chambers, Midnight Oil and Daryl Braithwaite performing.
With ticket sales strong, Mr Donovan is supremely confident there will be record numbers on the Mundi Plains next August.
Just two weeks into tickets being available for the Mundi Mundi Bash, two thirds of the tickets are sold.
“Its amazing. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Mundi Mundi will sell out. We are well ahead in terms of ticket sales for the 2022 event. We are confident we will get a really great crowd. In fact, I’ll put on the record that it will definitely be a record crowd.”
Truly a once in a lifetime experience, if you haven’t got your ticket to the Mundi Mundi Bash yet, follow the link below to be part of the record crowd in the desert next year.
