# Fairbridge Festival

The Fairbridge Festival was a music festival held annually from 1993 at Fairbridge village near Pinjarra in Western Australia until 2022. The festival was held over a weekend in April and was FolkWorld Inc.'s flagship annual event.
Visitors staying for the whole weekend could camp in the surrounding fields in tents or vans. The festival offered options for those who didn't have their own camping equipment in the form of "Cosy Camping" and "Glamping". Day tickets were also available.
The event took place over three days and three nights (Friday to Sunday), across 12 stages, which included marquees, a chapel, dance stage and workshop rooms. The program featured a variety of musical genres such as blues, roots, Celtic, folk, dance, a cappella and world music as well as acts and activities specifically catering for children and young people.
Fairbridge Festival experienced steady audience growth with a 2016 tally of about 15,000 day attendees. The most common patrons were families, but Fairbridge Festival was enjoyed by all ages including teenagers, young adults and the young at heart.
The 2017 Fairbridge Festival celebrated the festival's 25th anniversary, and part of these celebrations included an extended four-day event between 21–m and 24 April 2017.
The last festival was held on 9–11 April 2021. In November 2022, the difficult decision was made to cancel the 2023 event due to concerns the Fairbridge Village may no longer be a suitable venue.

## History

The Festival was established by Max Klubal and Sally Grice, who at the time were committee members of the Western Australian Folk Federation (WAFF). WAFF already ran a folk festival at Toodyay and formed a partnership with the organisation Parents for Music to run the festival at Fairbridge Village, in Pinjarra, with the intention of making it a more family-orientated event than Toodyay. The two festivals continued concurrently for two years but eventually the Toodyay festival ceased.
In 1996, Fairbridge Festival disassociated itself from WAFF to its present status as an incorporated not-for-profit association.
In 2006, a board of management was incorporated into Fairbridge Festival headed up by a president. During this time, a general manager was also appointed to lead the growing Festival Operations Group who were mainly volunteers. Up until this point the president, Wendy Corrick, had managed the event.
Fairbridge Festival and the organisation, Fairbridge WA, were often confused, particularly in relation to invoicing and accounting matters. Fairbridge WA Inc. manages Fairbridge Village, the site of the Fairbridge Festival. To help distinguish the organisations, in November 2011, the incorporation changed its name from Fairbridge Festival Inc. to FolkWorld Inc. This change also better reflected the role of FolkWorld Inc. as the premier peak organisation supporting and promoting folk, roots and world music in Western Australia.
From 2022, Jon Cope was in the role of artistic director. Prior to that, Rod Vervest was artistic director from 2015 when he took over the role from Steve Barnes. Fairbridge Festival's program was guided by the FolkWorld Inc. constitution:
   FolkWorld Inc. is dedicated to promoting traditional, contemporary and multicultural folk music, dance and related performing arts, with particular emphasis on the involvement of families [...].
Overall festival programming was contributed to by several festival programmers, including a Children's Program Director, Youth Program Director and a Dance Program Director.
In 2012, the Fairbridge Festival Quest songwriting competition for high school-aged young people was launched and regularly unearthed new talent from across Western Australia since then.
The 2017 Ben Elton film Three Summers is set at a fictional folk festival in Fairbridge which is called 'Westival', but is inspired by and based on the Fairbridge Festival. Ben Elton was a Patron of FolkWorld Inc.
Donations were invited to help support and contribute to the future of Fairbridge Festival and other FolkWorld Inc. initiatives. Donations of $2 or over were tax deductible.
The last Fairbridge Festival was held as scheduled on 9–11 April 2021. In 2020 the festival was postponed for six months, then cancelled, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

## Site

The festival site was originally Fairbridge School, a combination of orphanage, farm school and Imperial social engineering project set up as part of a colonial vision by Kingsley Fairbridge in 1912. The school was founded with the mission of taking deprived children from the orphanages (such as Barnardo's) and streets of Britain with the promise of a healthy life in the Colonies with better prospects, as was the prevailing ethos of the time. The school functioned until the early 1960s. Past pupils of the school are represented by the Old Fairbridgians Association WA.