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Canberra Today 15°/17° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Friendly Corinbank calls the festival faithful

WHY is a small music festival in the Brindabella Mountains proving immune from the phenomenon of “festival fatigue” and succeeding where many other such festivals have failed?

Very simple, according to Amy Moon, the general manager of Corinbank Festival: “It’s a truly immersive experience… we do it for love… it’s very family-friendly” and it’s sustainable.

Founded in 2008 by three musician friends who wanted to grow opportunities for local bands to find bigger audiences, this is the fourth year of Corinbank, staged just a 20-minute drive from Tuggeranong.

Readers who can count will see that they took a year off. Moon reports that the site was sodden last year after heavy rain, but it also gave the masterminds time to reconsider the direction of the event.

Now Corinbank is back with a vengeance and expects to see 2000 people a day through the gates – not huge, you may say, but much more feasible than events that disappeared or were cancelled last year, such as Rewind Australia, the Great Southern Blues Festival and Funk ‘N’ Grooves.

While the organising is done on a voluntary basis, the artists are paid as professionals, except for a few local artists who participate in exchange for free tickets. Fifty-four per cent of artists come from the Canberra region, including Beth ‘n’ Ben, the Burley Griffins and Rafe Morris. The out-of-town headliner is singer-songwriter Josh Pyke.

Corinbank’s aim, through a 10-year planned partnership with Canberra solar electricity firm Armada, is to be carbon neutral. It’s already gone a long way towards achieving this by offering offsets to visitors’ carbon input. Additionally, none of the power used will come from fossil-fuel-based sources, thanks to a bio-diesel PremiAir generator and waste recycled through Natural Event Compost Loos.

“It’s exciting – it’s bold,” Moon says.

Apart from the music, to Moon, the most exciting things are on the quirky side – performers playing on the roof of a van near the main stage, adjunct creative camps for writing and yarn spinning and the unique “back-up camp”, where a group of young men give out objects visitors might have forgotten – toothbrushes, soap and shavers.

There will also be poets, jugglers, stilt-walkers, carvers, visual artists and circus performers.

“You could not see a band the whole weekend and still be busy,” Moon says.

Corinbank, in the Brindabella Mountains, March 2-4. Camping is free with a three-day ticket (hot showers, toilets and drinking water available on site). Bookings to corinbank.com

 


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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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