I’ve loaded into just about every room that matters in this country. The Forum in Melbourne, the Enmore in Sydney, the Tivoli in Brisbane, Festival Hall before they pulled it down. I’ve pushed road cases up stairs, through fire escapes, down corridors that were clearly designed by someone who’d never seen a Marshall stack in their life.

The load-in is the part of live music nobody romanticises. No one writes songs about it. No one posts about it on social media. But it’s the thing that determines whether your show starts on time, whether your gear arrives intact, and whether your crew is physically capable of doing their job by the time doors open.

And in Australia, it’s getting harder.

The Physical Reality

Most Australian venues were not built with modern production in mind. A lot of them are heritage-listed buildings, converted cinemas, old theatres, or pubs that added a band room as an afterthought. The loading docks—if they exist—were designed for kegs, not 2-tonne lighting rigs.

At one Sydney venue I won’t name, the load-in path involves reversing a truck down a one-lane alley, unloading onto a footpath, wheeling cases through a side door, and navigating a 90-degree turn into a goods lift that fits exactly one road case at a time. For a full production show, that process takes three hours before a single cable is plugged in.

Melbourne’s a bit better in some spots. The Forum has a reasonable dock, and the Corner Hotel’s back access is workable if you’ve got a smaller rig. But try loading a festival-sized PA into some of those Northcote and Collingwood rooms, and you’ll understand why crew members have bad backs by forty.

Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley venues are a mixed bag. The Tivoli’s got a decent backstage area, but the surrounding streets are chaos during business hours. Timing your truck arrival is half the battle.

The Time Crunch

Here’s what most punters—and plenty of promoters—don’t realise: load-in windows are shrinking. Venues are under pressure to run more events, which means tighter turnarounds. A room that used to give you an 8am load-in for an evening show might now push you back to noon because there was a corporate function the night before and the cleanup crew didn’t finish until 10.

A standard headline show in a 1,000-cap room needs a minimum of four hours for load-in, set-up, and sound check. That’s assuming everything goes to plan. Add a support act with their own backline, a lighting designer who needs programming time, and a house PA that needs supplementing, and you’re looking at six hours minimum.

When the window gets squeezed, corners get cut. And corners in live production mean safety risks. I’ve seen crew rush-rigging truss because they lost two hours to a late truck, and that’s the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night.

Crew Shortages Making It Worse

Australia’s live music crew shortage is real and it’s not going away. ILEA has been flagging this for years, and the pandemic hollowed out the experienced workforce. A lot of senior crew moved into corporate AV, construction, or just left the industry entirely.

What that means practically is that load-ins are being done with fewer people, less experience, and more pressure. Where you used to have eight hands on deck, you might get five. Where you used to have a head rigger with twenty years under their belt, you might get someone who’s been in the game for eighteen months.

I’m not blaming the newer crew—most of them are keen and work hard. But experience matters when you’re rigging a 500kg lighting rig above a crowd. The institutional knowledge that walks out the door when a veteran crew member retires doesn’t get replaced by a certificate.

What Actually Helps

Some venues have figured it out. Sydney’s Roundhouse was purpose-built with production access in mind—wide dock, level floor, enough power to run a decent rig without supplementary generators. It’s the kind of venue that should be the template for any new build.

For touring acts, my advice is simple: advance your load-in as carefully as you advance your rider. Get the dock dimensions. Find out whether there’s a lift, what its weight limit is, and whether it actually works. Ask about power—not just how many amps, but where the distro is and how far your cable runs will be.

And ask about parking. I’ve lost more load-in time to parking disputes with local councils than to any technical issue. One Melbourne show last year, the truck got a $400 fine because it was parked six minutes past the permit window.

It’s Not Glamorous, But It’s Everything

The load-in sets the tone for the entire show. When it goes well—crew’s rested, access is smooth, there’s enough time—everything downstream benefits. The sound check’s productive, the lighting gets properly programmed, the band walks into a room that feels ready.

When it goes badly, you spend the rest of the day catching up, and the audience gets a show that’s 80% of what it could’ve been.

Every new venue getting built in this country should have a mandatory consultation with a touring production manager before a single brick gets laid. Because if you can’t get the gear in, nothing else matters.