If Woodford folk festival was in mourning this year, you wouldn’t have known it. The death in May of festival elder and decade-long patron Bob Hawke could have loomed large over the week-long festivities in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland. Instead, you could say, the festival’s 34th year was a celebration of his life.
It wasn’t just the neon caricature of his face decorating the newly renamed Bob’s Bar, or the speeches given by Anthony Albanese and Kevin Rudd during a session to honour Australia’s 23rd prime minister (Blanche d’Alpuget had to cancel her appearance due to illness); Hawke’s legacy lived on in Woodford’s inclusiveness, in its progressive politics, its environmental ethos and its unwavering commitment to hedonism. Certainly Bob would have wanted the party to go on – and on it did.
It was a week in which eastern Australia burned and less fortunate summer festivals were cancelled due to bushfire threat. Woodford’s ticket sales were down by 4.5% as some regulars stayed home to protect their properties. Remarkably, this verdant slice of rural Queensland dodged the brunt of the extreme weather over the new year, enjoying cool nights and blue-sky days and even the occasional gentle shower. For the first time, campers could cool off in the new, on-site Lake Gkula, a 1.5-acre purpose-built conservation area with a natural filtration system and some 400 native fish species.
For the uninitiated, Woodford is a real-life choose-your-own-adventure story. This year more than 1,600 shows were spread across 25 stages, complete with a parallel children’s festival and an “artisan alley” for arts and crafts classes.
Even before you’d eaten breakfast, you could take an “aerobics with joy” class, get rubbed with bush leaves by traditional Arnhem Land healers, join a ukulele workshop, be serenaded by a roving one-man blues band, or gawk at a flock of humans in bird costumes perched in a giant nest 30m up a gumtree.
By day you could hear Ian Lowe and Dr Karl Kruszelnicki talk about the renewable energy future or learn sultry new moves in an “exotic solo blues dance” class, take the kids to see Dirtgirl sings songs with Costa Georgiadis about pollination, or simply chug beer to an endless succession of bands. You could carve new shapes in a lino-cutting workshop or watch the sun set on a hilltop overlooking the Glass House Mountains while Tibetan musician Tenzin Choegyal and a group of monks led prayers for world peace.
By night, you could dance to the soulful, bass-heavy dub of Kingfisha; watch the R-rated circus variety show Club Briefs; cram in to see the explicit, backwards-facing performance of Betty Grumble (who gave new meaning to the term “lip-syncing”); or limbo beneath a broomstick at a “queer prom night”.
If Woodford unofficially anointed a new elder this year, it was Indigenous musician and storyteller Archie Roach. Brought on stage in a wheelchair, Roach struggled for breath at times as he sung old and new songs accompanied by Paul Grabowsky on grand piano. By the time Roach delivered the final line of his stolen generations anthem Took the Children Away – “Everybody, I came back” – there was barely a dry eye in the packed tent. The standing ovation seemed to lift the 63-year-old out of his chair because at the end of the show he walked off stage, even giving a small bow. The next day, discussing his memoir and life story in a conversation with Bundjalung arts executive Rhoda Roberts, Roach recounted the first time he was the stunned recipient of audience applause – how it sounded like “rain on a tin roof” that began as a gentle patter and crescendoed to a downpour.
The crowd also had plenty of love for Woodford stalwart Lior, who played songs off his 2005 debut album Autumn Flow, and for Canadian musician Harry Manx, who melded Delta blues with Indian ragas and droll banter. The euphoric Celtic melodies of Prince Edward Island trio the East Pointers brought multiple generations to the moshpit, and Emma “Wiggle” Watkins often appeared on stage during the band’s daily sets to show off her Irish dancing and Auslan-signing talents.
Fresh from her stratospheric appearance at the 2019 Eurovision competition, Woodford regular Kate Miller-Heidke was as down to earth as ever, taking the piss out of her glass-shattering vocals (“[My son] Ernie says mum’s voice makes his ears cry”) as well as her “singing toilet doll” Zero Gravity performance.
Saturday evening with country music royalty and first-time Woodford performer Kasey Chambers was as warming as sitting around an outback campfire. Also getting a little bit country were female songwriting trio Dyson Stringer Cloher, whose on-stage repartee was as seamless as their honeyed harmonies.
Luring the Triple J crowd this year was flamboyant pop singer Sahara Beck, who proved it’s never too early in the day to wear a silver sequinned jumpsuit; the Robyn-esque poptronica of burgeoning queer icon Handsome; and Jungle singer Emma Louise, whose mournful and ethereal voice filled the night sky even if she couldn’t quite fill up the amphitheatre.
The teenage fans went ballistic for laid-back indie rockers Lime Cordiale. The Sydney duo’s stream of jokes took a sudden hiatus when they dedicated Inappropriate Behaviour to Scott Morrison and blamed him for the bushfires and cancellation of summer music festivals.
Aussie hip-hop group the Herd, who played on Monday night alongside Okenyo, L-Fresh the Lion, Jimblah and Horrorshow as part of the Elefant Traks music label’s 21st birthday bash, also had strong feelings about the current political situation. After playing their 2008 track Emergency, Ozi Batla remarked: “It’s hard going back to these songs coz ain’t a damn thing changed.”
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd used his Bob Hawke tribute speech to both grind a few axes and tell us about the time an overzealous fan at Woodford threw her black lacy underwear at him.
On a secluded hill within the festival grounds, architects had constructed an open-air bamboo house filled with hammocks, with supersized playable electric harps erected between the surrounding towering eucalypts. It was in this spot at sunset on the last day of 2019 that US singer Amanda Palmer held an impromptu gig with just her ukulele – and her four-year-old son, Ash, endearingly interrupting every few minutes.
Palmer’s main-stage set a few hours later proved a reflective finale to the decade. It featured stories about miscarriage and a performance of her new song about the climate emergency, Drowning in the Sound, and concluded with a tongue-in-cheek but no less passionate rendition of the Frozen theme song, Let It Go.
Due to the bushfires, no candles were distributed for the traditional festival-wide three-minute silence at 11.30pm on New Year’s Eve. Likewise, the Burning Man-style fire ceremony that usually closes the festival was replaced by a moving spectacle featuring a choir, local volunteer firefighters, climate protesters and giant puppets interpreting the theme of a phoenix rising.
Woodford’s theme this year was “imagining a beautiful future”, which seemed incongruous given the burning country, drought-ridden farms and smoke-choked cities many of us were going back to. But in this parallel reality, Woodford festivalgoers seemed determined to live in the moment. Here, for a week in the Woodford bubble, the future was now and it was glorious.
