If we asked you to name some Australian music festivals, we have no doubt you’d be able to throw names at us all day. But what you may not be as familiar with is just how your favourite festivals, even iconic Australian cultural events, actually come into being.
Sure, you’re probably aware that Big Day Out actually started life as a Nirvana concert, but it’s rare that you actually get to witness the birth of a game-changing new Australian music festival the way previous generations got to seemingly every couple of years.
Meet The Lost Lands, a new venture from Simon Daly (Falls Festival founder) and David Strong (The Peninsula Picnic Creative Director & former St Kilda Festival Director), which aims to bring a taste of the European festival market to the Australian scene.
Aimed at engaging the whole family (the parents and the kids), The Lost Lands sets itself apart from other festivals in the country. We recently caught up with Simon to find out how a music festival comes to life and how he hopes Lost Lands will foster a new generation of Aussie festival-goers.
See a ground-breaking new Australian music festival come to life this weekend when The Lost Lands launches its inaugural event at Werribee Mansion – check below for details or head to The Lost Lands website for more details and tickets!
Ch-ch-changes
“The market has changed significantly since I helped start Falls. Big Day Out I think was one year older than Falls and Meredith maybe the same, and that was probably the landscape at that time. And I guess Woodford.
“It just went into being a huge market, a really significant market through the 2000s and it’s been well documented how that shrunk. But interestingly, in Europe festivals haven’t gone through quite that shrinkage.
“There hasn’t been any significant events falling over, that I’m aware of anyway. I think in Europe there’s been a festival culture over many decades, whereas in Australia that was a lot younger.
“They’ve been part of the fabric in Europe for longer than in Australia. Hopefully with Lost Lands and things like that, younger generations, as in kids five to 12 and 14, will grow up in a really great festival culture and embrace it from a younger age and it’ll become a rite of passage.”
From Falls to The Lost Lands
“The key is that you’re curating for a demographic that’s from two to 62 and doing that opens up so many different worlds and so many different places you can take the event. Not just this year, but into the future.
“There just isn’t those constraints like with Falls, where you’re talking to an audience that’s an 18 – 30-year-old audience or a Meredith, maybe a 20 – 35-year-old audience, or something thereabouts. It’s a little but more constrained, I think.
With Lost Lands you really are wanting to program for parents and for kids, but you’re also wanting to program a music lineup that’s geared towards someone who may not necessarily be going with their kids or is just going with friends so they can have a great time.
The Spark
“Since departing Falls three years ago, I’ve spent a fair bit of time contemplating and I’ve also got two kids who are now three and we’ve got this space down on a river, about two hours south of Lorne, a really beautiful spot, and it’s just a place where we always go camping.
“We started inviting a whole bunch of families camping and it’s just amazing. We’d end up with probably around 100 families all up and you’d sit down at the end exhausted and over the Melbourne Cup weekend you’d count about 18 activities that we’d all engaged in.
“It was just for parents and kids, just a really engaging time, and each year that seemed to get stronger and stronger. And I thought this would be something great to share with a lot of families and I could add the music and arts element to it because of my festival time.”
Step One
“The first steps are very much just talking to a bunch of friends. Every family that has been on our little camping adventures are guests of the Lost Lands for life, especially since we’ve replaced that date with Lost Lands.
“It’s just incredible how many people all said it’s a no-brainer, just as an idea it’s something that hasn’t been done in that way, where kids and parents are treated in equal measure. There’s certainly some great festivals around where there’s some kids programming existing but not one where it’s at least 50-50 if not more.
“So it was very much workshopping with lots and lots people to make sure it’s the right one and then the next thing is securing the venue.”
Securing The Venue
“Harvest Festival was my first experience at the Werribee Mansion and I was just jaw-dropped at the beauty of the venue and there was some great music in that first Harvest Festival. It just left a really good impression on me and to me it was perfect for this.
“Families can easily access the mansion, they can camp, which has never been done before, and especially so close to Melbourne, where they can go out on a limb and camp. And if they feel it’s not working for them they’re never that far from home.
“And just the beauty of the grounds and the mansion and the Werribee Zoo surrounding, it really is just the perfect place. So that was probably the first thing, reaching out to Parks Victoria and working with them and all the stakeholders there, a lot was involved in that.
“So once we secured that element of it, it was about sourcing the artists and working with all the people you’ve worked with in the past, suppliers, to get it to the point where it’s an event that you can deliver for a price that it’s affordable for parents and kids to access, but also be a really strong event.”
The Lost Lands Festival
The Waifs
The Grates
Mariachi El Bronx
Missy Higgins
Ozomatli
Harts
Architecture in Helsinki
The Bamboos with Tim Rogers
Tash Sultana
Little Stevies
Alex Lahey
Ali Barter
Olympia
Saturday, 29th October – Sunday, 30th October 2016
Werribee Mansion, Werribee VIC
Tickets: The Lost Lands
