Serious fun: Festivals and the revitalisation of 
rural Australia

A/Prof Chris Gibson
School of Environmental Sciences, UOW

Wednesday 26th August | 5:30-6:30pm
At the Five Islands Brewery - All Welcome - Free Entry

Economic decline in non-metropolitan Australia has become an issue of national importance – and has been magnified by the recent financial crisis. Against a backdrop of uneven growth and decline, numerous places have sought to reinvent themselves through staging festivals. Struggling towns in non-metropolitan Australia have promoted festivals of all sorts, both as a community-building exercise, and because they can bring visitors and income. I will discuss results from Australia’s largest ever research project on the social and economic importance of festivals for non-metropolitan Australia. 

Rural festivals have proliferated and diversified in recent years from the traditional country show to evermore whacky niches: the Guyra Lamb and Potato Festival, the Wooli Goanna Pulling Festival, the Thoona Latin American and Wheely Bin Festival and Parkes’ Elvis impersonators festival. 

Are such festivals significant for rural communities in contrast to their apparent short-lived nature? The festivals project at the University of Wollongong sought to answer this question. We compiled a database of 2,800 participating festivals; talked in depth to the organisers of 480 festivals in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, and worked in partnership with individual festivals to assess their impacts and significance for non-metropolitan communities. Our findings show that festivals are ubiquitous, impressively diverse, and strongly connected to local 
communities through employment, volunteerism and participation. 

Despite festivals being mostly small-scale, economically modest affairs, geared around community goals, the regional proliferation of festivals produces enormous direct and indirect economic benefits. At a time when Australians are reassessing what makes our economy more or less resilient to global economic forces, important lessons can be learned from festivals and their stories of grass-roots community-building.