Melbourne Diwali 2026 crew call

Melbourne event crew roles & live event work experience

Apply for one of 10 event-day crew positions at Marvel Stadium. Five experienced operators and five supported learning places will help move 45 performing groups through a live festival programme.

Event day: Saturday 31 October 2026

Applications close Saturday 17 October 2026

Event crew role at a glance

Volunteer event crew in Melbourne: key details

Role type: Unpaid festival volunteer roles. Approved travel, meals and other out-of-pocket costs are reimbursed.
Experience: Five station-operator roles for people who have run live events before, plus five supported learning places with no experience required. Event management students and people not attached to a course are both welcome.
Commitment: About thirteen hours, almost all of it on Saturday 31 October. One briefing beforehand, and a site walkthrough on Friday 30 October.
Location: Marvel Stadium Square, Docklands, Melbourne.
Requirement: A Victorian Working with Children Clearance. Free. See below, and start it now.
Positions: Ten places across four event crew assignments.

What the event day involves

These Melbourne festival volunteer roles put you inside a live eight-hour programme at Marvel Stadium Square. On Saturday 31 October, around 45 school and community groups, up to 380 performers, most of them school students, move through a single stage. Sets run four to six minutes. The order will change on the day, because groups arrive late and groups swap.

At any moment three acts are in play: one performing, one waiting in the stage left wing, one being introduced. Five stations hold that together. We are recruiting the person who runs each station and the person standing beside them.

These are operations roles. They are not performing roles and they are not media roles. There is no backstage access beyond the performer areas. If what you want is a pass and a good view, this is the wrong page. If you want to run a changeover and be measured on it, keep reading.

Station operators

Experienced event crew: run a station

Five stations, five operators. You hold the radio, you carry the call for your station, and you teach the person standing next to you by letting them take on as much of it as they are ready for across the day.

We are looking for people who have worked live events, in any capacity, at any scale. Stage management, festivals, theatre, conferences, school productions run properly. What matters is that you have stood in a position while a schedule was slipping and known what to do about it.

These positions are unpaid and out-of-pocket costs are reimbursed, the same as everything else on this page. Plenty of experienced people give a day to this festival, and this is the day where that experience is worth the most.

Fill the Stage Right Runner first. It has no fallback, and it is the hardest one to cover if it goes wrong.

Learning places

Event management work experience: learn beside an operator

Melbourne Diwali is run by a charity, and one of the things the festival is for is teaching people to run live events. You cannot get near a 45-act programme at a venue like this early in a career. Here you can.

Every one of these five stations is run by an experienced operator, someone who has done this work before. They hold the radio and they carry the call. Your place is next to them: you learn the station by standing in it while it is live, and you take on as much of the work as you are ready for across the day. Some people finish the day having run a changeover themselves. Some finish it having watched forty of them properly. Both are a good day.

That arrangement is deliberate. It means the show does not depend on you getting it right first time, which is exactly what makes it somewhere you can actually learn rather than somewhere you have to perform.

What you get, and we hold ourselves to all of it:

The station operator beside you all day, not a name on a chart. Running the station and teaching you it is their job for the day, not something squeezed in around it.
A written brief covering what you will learn and exactly what to do when something goes wrong.
Induction and a site walkthrough before the event, so the first time you see the stage is not on the day.
Your hours recorded, a debrief afterwards, and a written reference you can use.

The positions are unpaid, and out-of-pocket costs are reimbursed. If you are on a course that requires an industry placement, this counts and we will work with your institution. If you are not studying, that is fine, and you can still apply.

If money is what is stopping you, tell us

Nobody should be out of pocket for being here, so travel and meals on the day are covered.

And if what you actually need is paid work, say so in your first message. There are paid roles across the production, and we would rather point you at the right one than have you talk yourself out of applying. It will not count against you.

The stations

Available festival crew positions

Each role below carries the real call offsets the station works to. T−15 means fifteen minutes before that act goes on. You will not be doing all of this alone on the first act, or necessarily by the last one. The chain is what you are learning.

Performer Check-In Coordinator

Industry equivalent: artist registration and accreditation

1 position

T−60Arrival check. Confirm the group has physically arrived and log it.
EndReceive each group back after their set and sign them out.

You are the desk that knows who is actually on site. You work a printed grid, not a screen, and you feed the Stage Manager the one fact the running order depends on: which of the 45 groups has turned up. Without you the Stage Manager reshuffles blind.

What you take away: you have run accreditation for a 380-performer event and can explain why a paper fallback beats a device on a concourse.

What makes it hard

Groups arrive in clusters, out of order, with more people than the form said, and with a parent who wants to know where the toilets are. You will be asked to make exceptions all day, and the answer is usually no, said pleasantly, forty times.

Suits

Event Management, Entertainment Management, Applied Business

Artist Marshal, Performer Holding Area

Industry equivalent: artist liaison, talent marshal

1 position

T−45Large child groups into holding, early.
T−30All other groups into holding. Head count, and hold it.

You own the room the performers wait in. You take the head count at the door and you keep it true, which means knowing when four dancers have wandered off to find their mum and getting them back before the runner arrives.

What you take away: you have marshalled hundreds of performers, most of them children, through a holding area on a live schedule.

What makes it hard

A holding area with sixty excited nine-year-olds in it is loud, and your job is to keep it calm without being the person who shouts. When the running order changes, you are the one who has to tell a group that has been ready for twenty minutes that they are now on later.

Suits

Event Management, Stage Management, Entertainment Management, creative production

Stage Left Runner

Industry equivalent: stage runner, stage assistant

2 positions

T−15Runner 3a: MC introduction handover, and the pronunciation check with the group leader.
T−5Runner 3b: walk the group to the wing, confirm the track is cued.
T+0On.

Stage left is where acts go on, and it carries two people rather than one. With four to six minute sets, the introduction handover for one act overlaps the walk-up for the act before it. One person cannot do both without one of them slipping.

The pronunciation check is not a formality. You are the last person who can stop an MC mispronouncing the name of a group in front of a crowd, and the group's families are in it.

What you take away: you have run the on-stage side of a changeover, repeatedly, for an audience the venue contract caps at 5,000 people at any one time.

What makes it hard

You are working to two offsets at once, on radio, in a wing you cannot see the other side of. If you are thirty seconds late the act walks on unattended or walks on to a track that is not cued, and both are visible from the front.

Suits

Stage Management, Event Management, creative production

Stage Right Runner

Industry equivalent: stage runner, talent egress

1 position

EndReceive the act off. Clear the wing.
+90sDirect the group back past check-in to sign out, before the next act finishes.

Acts come on from stage left and leave from stage right, and both happen in the same few seconds. This is the position that catches every act at its highest emotional point. Some are elated. Some are devastated. Some are eight years old and crying. Several will want to go back on for photographs.

You have about ninety seconds to move forty of them out of a wing while the next act is mid-set. The changeover is the single most-measured thing in running a live show, which is the reason to want this job.

What you take away: you have owned talent egress on a 45-act programme, which is the half of a changeover nobody watching ever notices and everybody notices when it fails.

What makes it hard

You cannot see stage left from where you stand, so everything runs on radio. If you fall behind, the programme starts losing a minute an act and it compounds. When that happens you escalate to the Stage Manager, never across to the other wing.

This is the station we staff first, because nobody else on the team can cover it. It is also the one where standing beside the operator teaches you the most, because you see the whole egress problem at close range.

Suits

Stage Management, Event Management, Entertainment Management

Every position

What every position has in common

Every position has a written brief, a named reporting line, defined escalation levels and a debrief afterwards. That is deliberate, so the role maps onto a placement unit rather than being a day of helping out.

What these roles are not

Not media. You are not filming, photographing or posting.
Not general backstage. Your access covers the performer areas and nothing else.
Not performing.
Not crowd control. Crowd management is licensed work in Victoria and the venue does it. If you end up near a crowd flow point, your job is to point and to radio.

Escalation

Everything goes up to the Stage Manager, never sideways to the other wing. Lost property, lost children and first aid all belong to Marvel Stadium customer service and St John Ambulance, and your briefing sheet will carry both locations.

Before you can start

Victorian Working with Children Check requirements

Every position works alongside performers under 18, so a current Victorian Working with Children Clearance is required for all of them. There is no way around this and no exception for a one-day event.

Apply as a volunteer, and do it now

It is free. Reimbursing your out-of-pocket costs does not change that. A Clearance is valid for five years, so it is worth having regardless of this event. You apply for a Check and you receive a Clearance.

Apply online through Service Victoria: service.vic.gov.au/services/working-with-children. Background on what the Check covers is at vic.gov.au/check-explained.

Start it in August, not October. Victoria does not publish a processing time, so we cannot tell you how long yours will take. Applying now is the only thing that removes the risk of missing the event because of it.

If you already hold a current Victorian Clearance, tell us in your application. Clearances are not transferable between states, so an interstate one does not count.

One form, ten minutes

How to apply for Melbourne Diwali crew

One form, about ten minutes, in two short pages. It asks which station you want and why that one, what live event experience you have, and where you are up to with your Working with Children Clearance. Naming a specific station and saying something accurate about its hard part counts for more than a general expression of interest.

If you need paid work rather than an unpaid position, there is a question for that. Answering yes will not count against you.

The form asks for your contact details. Melbourne Diwali is run by SarasCare, and the form itself sets out what we do with what you send us, where it is stored and how to ask us to change or remove it.

Apply now

Applications close Saturday 17 October 2026.

Context

About Melbourne Diwali

Melbourne Diwali is a community festival held on the Stadium Square concourse at Marvel Stadium. Up to 20,000 people attended across the day in 2025.

The 2026 festival is planned around up to 380 performers, around 900 people working the day, and more than 50 Marvel Stadium operations staff. The venue agreement caps guests on site at 5,000 at any one time.

The festival is 100% privately funded and receives no government funding.

Melbourne Diwali 2026 · Saturday 31 October 2026 · Marvel Stadium, Stadium Square and External Concourse, Gates 2 to 9.

Figures on this page are the approved festival numbers as at 25 August 2026. Clearance details were checked against Victorian government sources on 25 August 2026 and may change.