I dragged my 41 year old arse to the Big Day Out on Sunday, and it was awesome (the Big Day Out, that is, not my arse).

I saw the bands I wanted to see, I didn’t have a beer, I stayed hydrated, avoided sunburn, and I got within about a hundred metres of Tool. I marvelled at the dark comedy and completely over the top pyrotechnics of Rammstein, and I wished, despite the fact that he’s still brilliant, that I’d seen Iggy front The Stooges thirty years ago.

Over the course of seven hours, it struck me how good-natured and well-behaved the crowd of over fifty-two thousand was, particularly in that heat. The headline acts were Metal, but of course there are those who just want to doof-doof all day in the Boiler Room, or lie around feeling groovy while Angus and Julia Stone do their thing. All these sub-cultures were forced together in appalling heat, and yet I didn’t see a single fight, or even an arrest.

I had thought of blogging about how cool it all was, how you can get fifty-two thousand young people to spend a day together and it doesn’t need to end in a stampede or a race riot. For all my fast-developing curmudgeonliness, I was all set to write the BDO up as a great time had by all; affordable food, free water, safe, friendly and well-run. Most importantly I wanted to say “Good on you, youngsters”.

Then I read this in today’s Herald Sun.

Of course Neil Mitchell had to find something wrong with the BDO; his problem? Nobody was arrested for drug possession. Victoria Police made an operational decision not to deploy drug-sniffing dogs (because the dogs suffer far more than humans in 40 degree heat and cannot do their jobs, and are at risk of serious illness) and this, apparently, was a mistake. Mitchell drew on his decades of policing experience to tell us “This concert should have been targeted by visible policing, including dogs, backed by an undercover operation. Such events can be a drug supermarket -- which makes them precisely the place to hunt down lower-level dealers and to trace suppliers. Important information may have been collected.”

I’m finding it difficult to express how ignorant this statement is and how may wrong assumptions the man can make in three sentences. Of course, the target of his ire is Victoria Police, for not coming down hard enough on all the strange-haired youngsters in black T-shirts who are his usual betes-noir, but it doesn’t take much to imagine what he would’ve been saying if the Police had brought the dogs along and arrested a couple of dozen kids for a few pills.

Poor Neil just seems so disappointed; here were all these stinky youths listening to their loud music and no doubt thinking about fornicating, free to sniff and pop and Bolt-only-knows what else, and yet there were no fights and only two overdoses. To the best of my knowledge there were no shenanigans on trains and trams afterwards, nobody got hurt, and the Big Day Out showed yet again that loud music and young people do not a societal collapse make.

What Mitchell doesn’t realise is that a big reason for there being no trouble at the BDO is that his readers and their kids weren’t there. I didn’t see a single piece of Ed Hardy or HSV clothing, and the only Australian flag I saw draped over someone’s shoulders was being worn ironically. There was no anger, there was no fear, there was no stupidity. Fifty-two thousand of us gathered to enjoy music and get along with each other, and I think that’s what pisses Mitchell off the most.

In the absence of any bad behaviour to be outraged about, he’s trying to manufacture some about bad things that should have happened and by jingo if he were in charge there’d be a lot more of these youngsters getting a haircut and being shoved into the Army, you mark my words.

Neil Mitchell hasn't managed to ruin it for me, though. Tool were simply amazing, as they always have been and always will be; and Rammstein? They had flamethrowers. On their heads. ON THEIR HEADS!!!!

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