One of Australia’s leading opera and festival directors, Hume moved to Tasmania seeking a new work adventure six years ago, but got more than she bargained for.

She has been the artistic director of the much-loved Ten Days on the Island biennial arts festival for the past six years, and says she feels privileged to have worked with so many fantastic local, interstate and international artists during that time.

She also met her Tasmanian husband, academic Dr Dain Bolwell, soon after arriving in the state in 2017, and they married in Hobart at the end of 2019.

And despite next month’s Ten Days on the Island festival being Hume’s last – as she is stepping away from organising large-scale festivals to focus on other artistic pursuits – she remains committed to Tasmania, with plans to split her time between her home at Port Sorell, in the state’s North-West, and her second home in Tathra, on the south coast of NSW, as she runs her “creative adventures” business Crimson Rosella.

Despite having worked in various parts of Australia and overseas throughout her extensive career, which has involved working with opera companies across the globe and leading 12 major festivals between 2004–2023 – including Perth Festival, Sydney Festival and Four Winds Festival in NSW – Hume admits Tasmania has captured a special place in her heart.

“This unique and powerful place has seeped under my skin and into my dreams,’’ she says.

“For the last six years I have been inspired by the limitless beauty of lutruwita/Tasmania, by Tasmanian artists and the fabulous Ten Days on the Island team, sharing experiences with communities across this magnificent state.

“After 20 years of international festivals, it’s time to pass the baton, to revisit my other life as a practising artist, to explore new creative opportunities and some exciting new directions.’’

But for now, Hume is focused on ensuring her final festival – Ten Days on the Island, which runs in Tasmania’s South, North and North West from March 10-19 – is a great one. And adventure is once again at the forefront of her mind with the “exuberant” program of free and ticketed events celebrating “radical optimism, epic journeys and the voices of women and girls’’ as well as “water journeys and myths”.

Highlights of this year’s festival include Te Wheke-a-Muturangi – a giant, colourful, floating octopus created by Maori artist Lisa Reihana which will dominate the foreshore at Kangaroo Bay – as well as a performance by Grammy Award-winning Kronos Quartet from America, and Women Of Troy – a show at Hobart’s Theatre Royal, by Tasmania’s Archipelago Productions, with a stellar cast including Sarah Peirse, Jane Johnson, Marta Dusseldorp, Angela Mahlatjie and Guy Hooper. Directed by Ben Winspear, Women of Troy also features a score by Katie Noonan, libretto by Behrouz Boochani, and a community chorus of women and children.

Meanwhile Tasmanian group Van Diemen’s Band, one of Australia’s top chamber orchestras, will present an “extraordinary gathering of female artists from the past, present and future of music performance” with the group’s artistic director and violinist Julia Fredersdorff assembling an ensemble of artists from across the globe for Heroines, a cross-genre celebration of female composers from the baroque and contemporary eras.

Filmmaker Lynette Wallworth’s immersive video work, Coral: Rekindling Venus, will plunge audiences into the ocean’s abyss to reveal an exquisite and fragile world of fluorescent coral reefs, bioluminescent sea creatures and shimmering marine life – a world fatally threatened by climate change, which weaves together science, imagery and music from global artists including the late Indigenous Australian musician Gurrumul, American singer-songwriter

Anohni and German British composer Max Richter.

Ten Days on the Island will also feature the world premiere of Hide the Dog, a trans-Tasman, First Nations theatre production for children. Adorable and fun, the family-friendly show has been co-written by Tasmanian playwright Nathan Maynard (pakana) and Aotearoa writer Jamie McCaskill (Maori).

Festivalgoers will also be able to play with UV torches in a family-friendly sea adventure of light and sound in Sea of Light, which features artworks by contemporary Aboriginal visual artist, Elizabeth Close. They can also step inside Mirror Mirror, an intimate dome where every surface is a gleaming mirror, with Patch Theatre taking you “deep inside the heart of the disco ball”, or enjoy Be Here, a 25-minute outdoor dance work in Hobart’s St David’s Park featuring meditative, sculptural movement created in response to the performance site.

Another inclusion is Berlin-based Australian artist Joanne Dudley’s dynamic artwork We Will Slam You With Our Wings, an operatic video and sound installation comprising seven portrait-sized screens, each a 19th century colonial imperialistic portrait with one noticeable difference. Instead of powerful men, six young girls between the ages of 8 to 16 stand in their regalia and hold their own stances of power. These young girls are the leaders, the army, the chorus, the pack, the collective and the future voice.

Meanwhile the North-West community will gather by the Mersey River at Devonport at the end of the final day of the festival for mapali – a sunset gathering – which is a celebration of fire, music and stories created and narrated by artist and cultural leader Dave mangenner Gough. The story of mulaka makalina (hunting stingray) is inspired by the waters of the river that literally run throughout this stirring event.

“This 2023 festival program reflects a more expansive, adventurous mindset, and we’re thrilled that our Ten Days program will again include global artists alongside Tasmanian innovators,’’ Hume says.

“We’re inviting people across lutruwita/Tasmania to throw themselves into this packed ten-day program, starting at dawn in Hobart before travelling north, and finishing in a sunset celebration in Devonport.

“Festivals are special times for people to come together and be inspired and moved by music, stories, images and ideas.’’

Ten Days has been running since 2001, and this will be the 12th festival since its inception, with Hume at the helm of three of those festivals.

The 2021 festival was scaled back due to Covid restrictions, but the 2023 festival returns to full capacity. Hume says a silver lining of the pandemic was that it provided fresh inspiration for the long-running festival to change and grow.

“As an artistic director, who has worked on a number of festivals over many years, you do spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a great festival,’’ she explains.

“And one of the things that makes a good festival, is that it evolves – it doesn’t stay still, it responds to the challenges and the opportunities that the world provides. And that includes a pandemic.’’

While the 2021 festival was based around a series of local acts and smaller and socially-distanced events and had more of a comforting and consoling air, the 2023 festival features a bigger, bolder program with more large-scale events, as well as some smaller offerings.

“I really wanted this festival to capture this sense of radical optimism,’’ Hume explains.

“More of an expansive, arms-wide-open kind of feeling that everyone wants to feel.’’

And with borders open again, she says it was also an exciting opportunity to not only celebrate local talent and nurture innovation and creativity and explore Tasmania’s relationship with the world, but to also welcome international acts back to the festival to perform alongside local and interstate artists.

“It’s big excitement for us to have Kronos Quartet from America, Qwerin from Wales, and other artists from outside Tasmania, to stimulate and inspire us,’’ Hume says.

She has always considered Tasmanian audiences to be adventurous and keen to embrace something new, with interest in creative arts growing steadily since Ten Days first began.

“There can be a conservative streak but on the whole I think people (in Tasmania) are really up for an adventure, and increasingly there’s this real appetite for new experiences,’’ Hume says.

“Mona, Mona Foma and Dark Mofo have played into that and done it brilliantly. They are an expression of what people are really hungry for, which is experiences – people want experiences. Audiences don’t want to just go and sit down in a theatre and that’s enough … that’s an old-fashioned subscriber model and now people are much more adventurous – they want talks, they want to be able to understand things better, they want much more online activity, they want a lot more context around that experience.’’

Hume loves that Ten Days is a truly statewide festival, with festival headquarters relocated from Hobart to Burnie around the same time she started as artistic director.

“When I got this job one of the things that really appealed to me was that it’s not a festival that just deals with one place,’’ Hume says.

“I loved the fact that Ten Days is a pan-Tasmanian experience which incorporates regional communities as well as Hobart and Launceston. And that was really appealing to me, that idea (of having headquarters in the state’s North-West) was very aligned with my own values.’’

She says gone are the days when festival directors stepped in to run arts festivals and imposed their own personal taste on everyone around them. And a good arts festival is not just for lovers of art. Hume says the great thing about Ten Days is that it, “embraces the experience of many, many kinds of communities, not just the arts-loving community’’.

She says the exploration of the Tasmanian identity increasingly encompasses so many things, whether that be based around our geographical position as an island state, or our position as leaders, innovators and creators in a global context, or our cultural identity.

Hume says having people follow the festival – from its start in Hobart, before winding its way North and then to the North West for the finale – and take in all Tasmania has to offer along the way, was also part of the experience.

“One of the strengths of Tasmania is its extraordinary landscapes, so the journey part of the festival is really, really important,’’ Hume says.

Hume was born in Sydney and grew up with three brothers and parents who “were always interested in art”.

Her mum – a psychologist – and her dad – a schoolteacher – were “both big music lovers” with her dad into jazz and her mum a lover of classical and baroque music, which is where Hume believes she developed her own eclectic musical tastes.

“We’ve always been a family where art was really valued,’’ she says.

Hume left school at 16 and became a dancer, working in an opera company.

She later shifted to working in various roles behind the scenes, which eventually led her to become an artistic director, and she’s never looked back.

In addition to working on numerous festivals in Australia and overseas, Hume has worked as artistic director for various opera companies in Australia, including West Australian Opera (1992-96), Victoria State Opera, OzOpera (1996-2001) and Opera Queensland (2012-2017).

She has also directed opera productions in Europe, the UK, the US, and New Zealand.

Recently invited by Opera Australia to act as interim creative director, Hume will curate and oversee Opera Australia’s Sydney Summer Season 2024.

The recipient of an Australia Council Theatre Board Fellowship, Hume holds a Graduate Diploma in Arts Administration from the University of South Australia and in 2021 she was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the performing arts, particularly to opera.

Hume says she simply loves the art of storytelling.

“I just love to bring artists and audiences together,’’ she explains.

“For me, that’s the greatest reward, that alchemy that happens between art and audiences, that shimmering moment.’’

As Hume wraps up her festival career there has been high praise coming from all parts of the arts community, as she’s recognised internationally for fresh interpretations of a wide variety of repertoire, and for progressive artistic leadership of a number of arts organisations.

Hume has been described by heavyweights in the industry as a “trailblazing” mentor and friend with “intelligent and passionate leadership” which has “empowered the stories of so many diverse artists and transformed how we identify with place and each other”, which has “left a lasting impact across Australia’’.

Hume says it has been an honour to be at the helm of so many festivals and help share the stories of so many artists and communities.

“Curating a festival on behalf of a community is an enormous privilege and always a great adventure,’’ Hume says.

“It’s the best job in the world, gathering people together in celebration of our shared humanity, creating programs that tell a unique story about our community, about our time and place. Festivals are all-consuming, grand obsessions. Big highs, big lows. I treasure the incredible experiences I’ve had over my 12 festivals and the many incredible people that I’ve met along the way. There have been so many artistic, cultural and personal highlights since my first Perth Festival, and for my last one to be here on Ten Days on the Island in lutruwita/Tasmania is special indeed.’’•

Ten Days on the Island will run from March 10-19 across multiple locations in Tasmania. Free and ticketed events. For the full program visit tendays.org.au

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