WOMADelaide festival to return to Adelaide’s Botanic Park in March 2022
Few Australian music festivals are as defined by their location as this one, and organisers are thrilled to be planning their 30th anniversary event for the place where it was first held in 1992.
The last major music festival to be run in Australia pre-pandemic will also be one of the first to be held in the new year, when WOMADelaide returns to Botanic Park in the SA capital in March for its 30th anniversary event.
In March 2020, when WOMADelaide was last held in its traditional, sprawling seven-stage format, a record-breaking 97,000 visitors attended the festival across four days just before our national lockdown began.
Few festivals are as defined by their location as this one, and organisers are thrilled to be planning their event for the place where it was first held in 1992.
“It’s that classic Adelaide secret: effectively in the middle of the CBD, you’ve got this 35 hectare park of extraordinary trees,” festival director Ian Scobie told The Australian.
“Sydney’s Hyde Park is gorgeous, but much more bisected by roads – whereas in Botanic Park, you have this absolute sense of oasis, but the city is a stone’s throw away, which makes it quite special.”
A smaller-scale WOMADelaide program was held at King Rodney Park in March, comprising seated live music events featuring artists such as Midnight Oil and Tash Sultana. About 19,000 people attended across four nights.
“We had great support for our Covid-modified event in March this year, but a lot of people are just dying to return to the multistage format, where they can wander between the stages and discover new music,” said associate director and program manager Annette Tripodi.
The last full-scale festival in 2020 featured 600 artists from 32 countries performing across its four-day program.
At the time, Review deputy editor Bridget Cormack described the event in these pages as a “multicultural miracle”, given the number of borders that were fast slamming shut around the world as the novel coronavirus began spreading.
At present, booking a similarly diverse artistic line-up remains an impossibility.
“It may well be international borders are open in a practical way by March, but we can’t wait until March for those kind of commitments, as no-one in the industry can,” said Scobie.
Instead, the 2022 event will predominantly feature Australian acts.
“We really hope that we’ll have some artists from New Zealand, and fingers crossed there might be a couple of internationals, but we’re not making that promise to anybody,” said Tripodi.
Organisers will reduce their maximum capacity from 25,000 visitors per day to 18,000, and everyone over the age of 16 who attends – including ticket holders, stallholders and artists – will be required to be fully vaccinated against Covid.
“Vaccination is absolutely a precondition for anyone to participate, and I think that will give people a level of comfort, rather than distress,” said Scobie.
WOMADelaide will be held at Botanic Park from March 11 to 14 2022, with its first line-up announcement due in mid November.
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