April 17 - 19 2009
(Modified from an article inTrad&Now Magazine, Autumn 2003)
Fairbridge
Festival has just happened for the 14th time, and all the signs are that
the momentum and enthusiasm continues to grow. The scene is set for another
great weekend of joyous music making.
The festival site is unique on the Australian circuit. Fairbridge Village was originally Fairbridge Farm School, a combination of orphanage, school and Imperial social engineering project set up as part of a grand colonial vision by Kingsley Fairbridge in 1912. Founded with the mission of taking deprived children from the orphanages and streets of Britain and giving them a healthy life in the Colonies, (while ensuring that the Colonies continued to be populated with sound Anglo-Saxon stock, as was the prevailing ethos of the time), the Farm School functioned until the early 60s.
Well over a thousand children, many of them from the Dr. Barnardo’s Homes, were shipped to Australia as part of the Child Migration Scheme. Not all of those children’s stories were happy of course, as anybody who saw the ABC TV documentary “The Leaving of Liverpool” a few years ago would have seen, but by and large the inmates of Fairbridge seem to have escaped the worst excesses of some of the destinations of the Child Migration Scheme, and many Old Fairbridgeans hold their former home in great reverence and affection.
The child migrants took up residence in a complex of wooden dormitory cottages, equipped with dining and school facilities and an architecturally significant red-brick church, all completed between 1921 and 1938 and still preserved largely intact. These unique buildings are in the throes of a major renovation program, and provide the artists’ accommodation and several of the performance venues for the Festival.
The
Village makes a wonderful festival site, with graceful, mature bush and
sweeping views over the Darling Escarpment about 100 km south of Perth’s
outlying south-eastern suburbs. Over the weekend the site comes alive
with music in numerous marquees and permanent buildings, and in the church
which is the home for a now-legendary Sunday morning Gospel session and
a plethora of a cappella singing in its natural habitat.
The whole area of the festival is slightly smaller than that of the National at Exhibition Park in Canberra, making for a relaxed, spacious environment that never seems overcrowded even with peak crowds of around 5000 people.
Credit for starting the festival belongs to Max Klubal and Sally Grice back in 1992. At the time they were committee members for the WA Folk Federation, which was running a long-standing festival in the attractive country town of Toodyay, about 100km north east of Perth. Max and Sally recognised the potential of the site, and with the benefit of persistence and persuasiveness convinced the WAFF to give it a go. A partnership with the organisation Parents for Music was formed to run the festival, with the intention of making it a more family-orientated event than Toodyay. The first festival happened on Mothers Day, May 1993. (I remember it vividly, Ros and I were pushing three-month-old twins around the gravel roads in a very large pram).
The two festivals continued in parallel for two years but eventually Toodyay ran out of steam and closed down, and in 1996 Fairbridge Festival broke away from the WAFF to its present status as an incorporated not-for-profit association. Since incorporation it has stayed true to the original vision of catering to a family audience, and presents probably the largest children’s program, in proportion to the festival as a whole, of any such event in the country.
Growth
of the festival audience has been steady at around about 10% per year,
and in 2005 we attained over 15,000 day attendances. Barring a major hiccup
in 1996, the festival has always made a small profit, which has been used
to build up a strategic reserve, literally for a rainy day.
Scott Wise of the Wise Family band and the Ten Cent Shooters has generously donated one of his beautiful hand made guitars as a raffle prize each year since 1995. [Guitar raffle info]
The festival is now established as a major event on the WA cultural calendar with a devoted audience base, a strong pool of volunteers, and a remarkably stable organising committee led by president Wendy Corrick. Its reputation has spread to the point where each year we receive well over 300 applications from acts wanting to play, many of them from interstate.
The tyranny of distance and the hideous cost of airfares to Perth put stringent limits on the number of interstate acts we can book, and every year we have to send a depressing number of rejection letters to acts we’d love to book but simply can’t afford, but we’ve got to the point where we’re putting on a show up there with the best Australian festivals.
Most artists and visitors agree that what we might lack in depth compared with a National or Port Fairy we make up for in atmosphere. With the strength of the WA talent pool there’s certainly no shortage of quality acts anyway.
In 2006, with financial help form ArtsWA, ALCOA and the Australia Coucil, we presented a showcase of Australian family bands. Over 20 acts participated in what we think is the largest gathering of family music-makers to be held at an Australian festival. [Review].
The success of the festival is an inspiring example of what can be done from the grass roots, at the far-off, sparsely populated end of the country, by a small group of people dedicated to the love of folk music and community events. We’re deeply proud of our festival, and strongly encourage any of you from "Over East" who haven’t yet been to make the big trip West one April and be part of it.
Further information on the history of Fairbridge Village can be found at http://www.fairbridge.asn.au/, and in the autobiography “Fairbridge Kid” by John Lane, available from the Village.
Steve Barnes Feb 2003, modified May 06.
