Our First Busking Experience!

It was an effort to costume ourselves in the 30+ heat, but we arrived at Mindil Beach Sunset Markets all togged up and carted all our instruments in to our pitch. After the Alice experience, we were half expecting some ranger to come and tell us to bugger off, but the people were very organised and we got our busking licence for $7 on the spot.

Tuning took a while, but all the unusual instruments attracted attention, and we started playing to a crowd. Our first warm-up song was OK and a lady came and asked if we could do "Brown Eyed Girl". Dave could and the rest of us "sha-la-la-la-laed" and pretended we could. She wasn't too discerning and put our first $10 in!

We had been reminding the kids to smile, and Marcus leaned over to tell me "I can't help but smile" in the middle of a song. One guy came over at the end of a song and gave Ella (who had been drumming) $5, saying "This little girl deserves every cent of this!". Thommo gave her another $5 for smiling all the way through one song, complete with her first ukulele solo - which consisted of a C chord!

The first set of 10 songs went quickly and we had a break. The kids were very excited to buy a can of cold drink each out of the proceeds!

The second set was cut short by the fire juggling man who wanted to start next door as it was getting dark. We didn't mind stopping as the mandolin case was jingling and we had already made $235.80. My days of chasing $1 coins for the washing machines are over!! (Thanks to Ian, Alana and Thommo for helping to rev the audience up!) While we were putting the notes away (so the kids could shout us dinner!) we found the business card of the Operations Manager of the ABC Radio. There were some very excited Hermits who had a hard time getting to sleep last night.

Our first task this morning was to ring the ABC. Dave spoke to one of the announcers who was very keen to put us on the afternoon show on Monday. He explained that it would involve an interview and that we would perform 2 songs live. We were supposed to leave this morning, but after about a tenth of a second's hesitation we agreed to stay on in Darwin to be available at the ABC studios.

We then started rehearsing.

After a good couple of hours, we drove off to the air conditioned shopping centre for haircuts (all round) and had a swim to top off a very interesting start to our busking career! We are booked in to the Mindil markets again on Sunday so we will discover if our first day was indeed just a fluke!

Stay tuned ...