At the height of their popularity, The Seekers released a song that still manages to evoke feelings of love and loss almost six decades later.
After its release in November 1965, The Carnival is Over sold more than 1.4 million records in the UK alone.
Part of his initial appeal perhaps lay in the way his lyrics tapped into a pool of latent collective memory:
How it breaks my heart to leave you
Now the carnival is gone
The end of the show, the party, and the fun is an idea that has been quietly echoing in modern culture for decades.
Both metaphor and meme, it has served to symbolize the ways in which sorrow follows joy and elation is tempered by melancholy.
Such sentiments could be stirred in Adelaide where, after a disruption caused by COVID, the curtain will come down today on the first Royal Adelaide Show in three years.
“There is a romantic ideal about the idea of being at the fair,” said social psychologist Helen Street.
“It is certainly an image that is used in many films and in books, in poetry and in songs to represent the passing of good times.”
In one such story titled After the Fair, Welsh author Dylan Thomas brought out not only the emptiness that permeates an exhibition corner once the crowds have retreated, but also the emotions that accompany such an environment:
The lights in the coconut stalls went out and the wooden horses stood quietly in the dark, waiting for the music and the noise of the machinery that would lead them forward.
The Irish novelist James Joyce described a similar scene and explored similar feelings of evanescence and impermanence in his story Araby.
“I turned slowly and walked in the middle of the market”, reflects Joyce’s protagonist as he remembers the moment before the lights went out.
“Peering into the darkness, I saw myself as a creature driven and mocked by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
One of our stock phrases to describe the vagaries and vicissitudes of life, “swings and roundabouts,” carries carnival overtones and gained popularity thanks to another Irish writer, Patrick R. Chalmers.
In Chalmers’s poem Roundabouts and Swings, a veteran carny considers the fluctuating fortunes of those who make a living from traveling fairs:
Up an’ down an’ a round,” said ‘e, “all certain things go,
A loss in the roundabout means profits in the swing!
More recently and perhaps most pointedly, English band White Lies developed the theme in their pop single Farewell to the Fairground.
“We’re leaving this whole fair behind,” sings frontman Harry McVeigh, before expanding on the idea:
The circus never dies
The act forever haunts these skies
I know we can’t stay
If this all sounds strange, that’s because it is – and it’s important to note that the shows aren’t all swings and roundabouts, nor beer and kettles.
They certainly have their most trying and frustrating aspects.
As many parents can attest, showtime often involves struggling to find a park, fighting over exhibit bags, dragging tired kids through agricultural displays, and spending money on trinkets that break within hours.
But these elements do not undermine the more serious point about the prevalence of what can be described as “blue after the show”.
“All good things come to an end, if for no other reason than … we all do,” said Dr Street.
“If there is one absolute truth in life, it is that everything ends.”
The end of the current Royal Adelaide show will be particularly marked by this feeling, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, who first visited the exhibition in 1954.
The pageant authorities have paid tribute to the late monarch by flying flags at half-mast.
But the end of a show need not always bring sadness, said Dr Street, because we are all enriched by nostalgia.
“If we can rephrase that [sadness]and rather accept that something can be good and lose at the same time, then that would stand us in good stead for many areas of our lives,” she said.
