Saturday is the big day of Triple J’s One Night Stand and on behalf of the North West Star I welcome visitors to our region and hope you enjoy your stay.
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My congratulations again to ABC for their decision to bring One Night Stand to Mount Isa, really showing the national charter of what remains a cherished organisation.
As Triple J content director Ollie Wards said in his interview with our journalist Chris Burns, the challenges involved with the distances were big but ones they were happy to face.
“This is a good challenge; actually telling quite a full story about the town. We don’t want to just fly in, put the music on, and fly out,” Mr Wards said.
“We generally want to put it on the map. What we (Triple J) get out of it is we have the opportunity to raise a regional town to the top of the platform and make it the star of the show, even if for a short time.”
Mount Isa is a place most people in Australia would have heard of, but equally a place most people would know very little about.
There are some unique challenges here of living in a reasonably large-sized town so far from the coast.
Many people in Brisbane and beyond who may have been checking out plane tickets to Mount Isa for One Night Stand would have been shocked by the typical fares on the route.
“Welcome to our world,” was the general response of locals.
It’s no harm for city people to put themselves in the shoes of their regional, rural and remote cousins and as a youth-focussed station Triple J is ideally placed to bring that experience to a younger demographic.
Mr Wards has predicted a crowd of 10,000 people to turn up at Tony White Oval and I hope he is right though I’m hearing anecdotal evidence the local motels have not yet put out the “no vacancies” signs.
I know a lot of people planning road trips will arrive on or near the day and be happy to camp or swag near the venue.
But either way the vibe in town leading up to the event has been good and it is a psychological boost for Mount Isa, even if the predicted economic gain does not totally eventuate. DB