Big Red Bash presses pause on 2025 festival, confirms 2026 return
It’s a mammoth effort to stage the annual Queensland desert event known as the Big Red Bash, and organisers have made an early call to take next year off while confirming a 2026 return.
It’s a mammoth effort to stage the desert gathering known as the Big Red Bash each year, and after hosting 11 editions of the world’s most remote music festival, organisers have made an early call to press pause on their plans for 2025.
But rather than falling foul of poor ticket sales that saw established festivals such as Splendour in the Grass and Groovin’ The Moo cancelled earlier this year, their reason for postponing is tied to the inherent challenge of staging events in remote locales.
“We’ve been thinking about it on and off for the last few years,” festival director Greg Donovan told The Australian. “It’s a good time to give the event a bit of time to breathe and rest, and to work on our business rather than working on the event.”
Having operated continuously since 2013 but for a Covid-enforced break in 2020, the Bash – held near the small town of Birdsville, in far western Queensland – has become one of the great Australian festivals and a major tourist attraction in its own right.
“We’ll try and have an easier year, and come back strong in 2026,” he said. “That’s what we’re aiming to do; it’s nothing more than that. People might read into it ‘Oh, here’s another festival that’s fallen by the wayside’ but it’s certainly not that. We’re not playing silly buggers; we’re not packing up for good.”
Although next year’s event won’t happen, the next Big Red Bash is planned for July 7 to July 9, 2026, with an artistic line-up to be advised.
For Donovan and his team, the strain of staging the festival is significant, with staff on site for four weeks from first preparations to final pack-down.
Each year, they’re tasked with building a bare site from scratch, with no permanent infrastructure in place in the shadow of the Big Red sand dune, including no running water or electricity.
It’s no small job to convert a bare red dirt plain into a pop-up city dubbed “Bashville”, which becomes home for a thousands of campers and caravan tourists of all ages.
Each event costs about $5m for Donovan’s Outback Music Festival Group to run. That it happens at all is a striking testament to human dedication and ingenuity.
About 76,000 people have attended the 11 Big Red Bash events held since 2013, with the most recent edition attracting about 7500 to a line-up that featured Tina Arena, Jon Stevens and Colin Hay across three days in July.
That crowd figure was down from a peak of about 9000 in 2021. This year, rainfall complicated the post-event pack-down – a costly delay that pushed back the team’s site exit by a week.
Afterwards, faced with the need to clean mud off 1000sq m of hired plastic marquee flooring, Donovan’s can-do leadership was on show when he opted to jump on the pressure washer for two days, from dawn to dusk.
“I looked like the monster from the Black Swamp,” he said with a laugh. “It’s such a dirty, disgraceful job – but if you’re not prepared to do the dirty work, you can’t expect everybody else to do it for you.”
In August, Donovan and co attracted a record 14,000 people to the fourth edition of their newer event, the Broken Hill Mundi Mundi Bash in western NSW, which will continue next year from August 21 to 23 while the Queensland Bash gets a breather.
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