The spirit of Curdimurka

ALMOST 600KM NORTH of Adelaide, where the famed Oodnadatta and Birdsville tracks meet, John Simpson and Renee Ormesher are frantically working their phones.

Perched on stools in the front bar of the historic Marree Hotel, they’ve set up a temporary office to coordinate the logistics of bumping in the Curdimurka Outback Ball. This once-legendary annual outback event hasn’t been held for 18 years, but it’s about to be revived.

Moves for its resurrection began one day a few years back, when John and Renee were having lunch in the Marree Roadhouse and were asked by locals: “Why don’t you start it back up again?” As collaborators in Revive the Regions with Music, a touring company supporting regional South Australia and its musicians through remote festivals, they had the credentials. And in that laconic Aussie outback way, after a drink or two, John thought, I’ll give it a shot.

So began the epic task to resurrect and reclaim what had become a largely forgotten late-20th-century Aussie institution.

THE FIRST CURDIMURKA Outback Ball dates to 1981, when Simon Coxon, a survey technician with what was then the SA Department of Lands, drove past the Curdimurka railway siding while working in the Lake Eyre region.

He noticed an upturned trolley on the