Missy Higgins, Kate Miller-Heidke, Kasey Chambers and Sarah Blasko star on first big all-female Wildflower festival
Missy Higgins and Kate Miller-Heidke are about to make history with a new all-female festival, after previously being told they wouldn’t be able to sell tickets.
Music
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It took the pandemic to finally give Australia its first all-female outdoor festival line-up with Wildflower to launch next March starring Missy Higgins, Kasey Chambers, Kate Miller-Heidke and Sarah Blasko.
The line-up also appropriately features Deborah Conway, who curated the all-female Broad concert tours which ran from 2005 to 2008, as well as ThornBird (the solo project of The Waifs’ Vikki Thorn) and rising Indigenous star Alice Skye.
Wildflower is one of dozens of new events ignited by the Federal Government’s RISE grant program to reinvigorate the Australian live music industry in 2022.
Higgins said she had been waiting for an all-female festival like Wildflower to bloom since performing at the world-famous Lilith festival alongside Miller-Heidke in America in 2010.
“Ever since playing Lilith, alongside artists like Sarah McLachlan and the Indigo Girls who were such massive inspirations for me, I have always wondered why we couldn’t do something like that in Australia,” she said.
“There’s been this stupid thing in Australia where there was this belief that female artists can’t sell tickets which is bullshit. Look at the amazing talent that we have here.”
The launch of Wildflower coincides with Higgins launching her new single Edge Of Something on October 15, which will feature on the ABC political drama Total Control starring Deborah Mailman.
“Everyone’s gonna know my name, I will be the one with the heart on fire, screaming from the highest stage,” Higgins sings.
The chart-topping singer songwriter said the harrowing experiences and subsequent activism of Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame coupled with “Deborah’s gritty and fierce character” had inspired her to pen the soaring, powerful song.
“I love being able to get into the head of a character who was allowed to be unapologetically angry because there’s so many rules about how angry we were allowed to get,” she said.
“At every step of the way, we have to acknowledge any caveats, any privileges we might have and any woman who’s been through these tough experiences really should just be able to say their piece and shout it from the rooftops.
“And probably every woman can relate to that fantasy of wanting to get up on stage and just scream.”
Edge Of Something also relates to Higgins’ own experiences starting out as a touring artist where she was often patronised whenever she would attempt to engage in the technical aspects of staging a live show.
“Every woman in the industry has felt that this is such a male-dominated industry,” she said.
“I’ve been playing live ever since I was a young teenager and I just thought being patronised was just a normal way of life as a young woman in a man’s world.
“After a while, you start to you start to wonder whether they’re right, whether you really don’t know what you’re doing.
“But as I became more successful, I had the privilege of being able to be pick and choose who I worked with, and I was lucky enough to just pick people who respected me and treated me like a human being.
“I just I feel for a lot of young women coming up in the pub scene because it can be pretty rough.”
Edge of Something may just be the perfect song for her to realise her Wildflower fantasy of all the performers joining on stage at the end to sing together.
Wildflower opens at Rochford Wines, Yarra Valley on March 12 and then travels to Riverstage, Brisbane on March 19 and Roche Estate, Hunter Valley on April 2 with tickets on sale from October 15.
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