Not Only A Music Festival

After the festival was renamed Woodford and the space Woodfordia, the past 20 years have seen the area transformed into an environmental parkland complete with 35 performance venues and an infrastructure that includes camping grounds, restaurants, cafes, stalls, bars, an underground sewage reticulation system, sullage and potable water reticulation, drainage and venue earthworks, as well as butterfly walks, ponds and native wildlife. Since 1997 more than 100,000 trees have been planted on the site, and that is actually as much the point for the army of people who put the festival together every year as the festival itself.

"You can have totally different experiences at the festival depending on what path you follow.”

Programme Director Chloe Goodyear sees it as more than a music festival: “I think most people think of Woodford as being a music programme, ‘cause that’s what’s easiest to talk about, but there will be some people who’ll come and stay in the Greenhouse for pretty much the entire time just listening to speakers on environmental issues and social justice, and the same again with our health programme. There are something like 57 different yoga and tai chi sessions that you can go to this year. You can have totally different experiences at the festival depending on what path you follow.”

Of course, for the bulk of the 13,000-odd attendees it’s the music that’s the drawcard, and this year the programming team saw 1700 formal applications from bands and artists wanting to participate, along with what the organisers call the long list presented by booking agents, and again, as Goodyear points out, “We don’t seek so much big names. More we’re looking for certain experiences to have at the festival.”

That said, the more than 2000 performers who will be presenting the more than 1500 concerts over the six days include, from the US, Violent Femmes; from Canada, Paper Lions and The East Pointers; from Scotland, Shooglenifty and Kaela Rowan, and, from all over Australia, The Cat Empire, Lior, Bertie Blackman, Sticky Fingers, L-FRESH The LION and way too many to mention here. 

“We try to have 65 per cent new content every year,” Goodyear adds, “and then try to bring in new music in a mix of international, local and very local – we like to have folks from southeast Queensland – and in the end it’s about the chemistry of the way those artists work together.”