Extreme weather is wreaking havoc on Australian music festivals. Can they survive?

Last weekend’s Pitch Music and Arts Festival was supposed to be a four-day revelry of electronic music in the Grampians, three hours west of Melbourne.

But soaring temperatures, extreme fire warnings, and the tragic death of an attendee cut the event short and restarted a conversation about the longevity of Australia’s once-beloved music festival industry.

Pitch is far from the first event in Australia to be affected by extreme weather. Over the same weekend, the Yarraville Festival in Melbourne’s inner west, originally scheduled for Sunday, was postponed, and the Moomba Parade, scheduled for Monday, was cancelled, both due to extreme heat.

Festival-goers sit in the shade at last weekend’s Golden Plains.Credit: Vicki Bell

The Golden Plains Festival at Meredith, west of Melbourne, went ahead last weekend despite the heat. Police briefed patrons from the stage about the site’s fire plan, and volunteers doused people in the sweltering crowd with sprinklers.

Throughout the past four years, more than 22 Australian festivals have been relocated, postponed or cancelled due to dangerous weather fuelled by climate change. In comparison, only 10 festivals were affected by extreme weather between 2013 and 2019.

While Pitch’s communications with patrons and its emergency response plans are being reviewed, there are many in the music industry considering the bigger picture. If extreme weather is now the norm, not the exception, when it comes to outdoor music festivals, what lessons are there to learn?

Communication is key

Pitch went ahead on Friday and Saturday despite the Country Fire Authority advising people to “stay away” from the area due to extreme fire danger. While organisers told everyone already at the festival that there was no immediate danger, they advised those yet to arrive to follow the CFA’s directions and delay their travel.

Jessica Revell, 27, of Beveridge, said organisers should have provided this information before the festival began.

“We were already on the bus there at 8.30am on Friday. We got all unpacked, and it wasn’t until we went down to the stage that we saw the sign that said the CFA advises you leave tonight or early tomorrow morning,” she said.

Crowds at the 2023 Pitch Music & Arts festival near the Grampians.Credit: Pitch Music Arts/YouTube

“We just thought, ‘we have no way of getting home, we have no internet, we have nothing.’ If all of that had been communicated earlier, it would have changed a lot.”

Dr Milad Haghani, a senior lecturer of urban mobility, public safety and disaster risk at UNSW, said a key takeaway from Pitch was the importance of involving attendees more directly in risk assessments before the event began.

“We need to acknowledge weather-related risks are going to become increasingly common. This way, we allow individuals to make informed decisions based on comprehensive, more nuanced, risk information, considering their personal health and other factors,” he said.

Any information provided must also be streamlined, eliminating mixed messaging.

“By integrating all messaging into a single nuanced set of information, attendees can receive straightforward information about potential risks, including temperature forecasts, fire risks, and specific health conditions or demographics at higher risk,” Haghani said, adding that detailed information about the heightened risk of using drugs in adverse conditions like extreme heat could help punters make safer choices.

A Pitch spokesperson said organisers “diligently followed the guidance of relevant authorities leading up to and during the festival to prioritise the safety of [its] community”.

“We had a full team of emergency services including medical, police and on-site fire response who were on call throughout the event, as well as Crowd Care, an initiative to support emergency teams and patrons on site, and over 30 staffers from DanceWize.”

Wi-Fi and reception

Pitch organisers were regularly sharing updates via social media; however, Revell said many of the attendees had been unable to access these due to poor mobile phone service and a lack of Wi-Fi. “We were in limbo … The only way you could know what was going on was if you walked all the way down the hill in the sun to read the [information] board.”

Catherine Strong, an associate professor at RMIT specialising in popular music studies, said festival organisers should consider basing their events in areas with existing phone and Wi-Fi coverage.

“You could be sending out the best communications in the world but if people can’t get that communication, you may as well not be saying anything,” she said.

Rethink location, time and scale

Music festivals are traditionally held in regional areas where large, open spaces are available. However, these are the areas increasingly hit by bushfires and floods.

As a result, Mitch Wilson, managing director of the Australian Festival Association, says the insurance industry has unilaterally stopped covering major events held in areas that are more likely to be hit with extreme weather.

Some organisers may need to consider relocating festivals to less remote spaces, ensuring attendees could more easily evacuate in emergencies.

“It might start to become impossible to get insurance for a festival held at the height of summer because of the risks around fire and heat are too high,” Strong said. “Maybe we’re going to start to see more autumn and spring festivals.”

Another possibility is bringing music festivals indoors. Strong references small country towns that have set up a number of small venues, most of which were sheltered from the elements. Though this would require a general reshaping of people’s perception of festivals, it could help mitigate the impact of extreme weather. It’s also not a new concept: Byron Bay’s iconic Bluesfest launched in Melbourne and was held indoors. Similarly, Sydney’s Laneway Festival moved from Callan Park to the covered Sydney Showgrounds.

Prevention over mitigation

Regardless of how prepared a festival is, weather remains unpredictable. Though music festivals like Pitch factor in the possibility of extreme weather when implementing safety measures, it remains difficult to predict what will happen at a specific time of year so far ahead of time.

However, the industry contributes to the very thing that has intensified these extreme weather events: climate change.

Specific data on festivals’ carbon footprint is lacking due to the absence of a comprehensive greenhouse gas audit within the industry, Haghani says, but the UK could act as a reference point.

“The UK’s live music sector emitted approximately 400,000 tonnes of CO2 each year,” he said. “Audience travel and venue operations account for nearly 70 per cent of the total carbon footprint of live events.”

Green initiatives like Coldplay’s “One Tree Planted” campaign are a step in the right direction, but Haghani said festival organisers needed to prioritise a number of environmental measures, such as localising festivals to reduce the amount of travel required, or minimising the amount of plastic waste left behind.

It must go beyond the festival organisers, Strong added, noting the importance of government intervention.

“People may need to start getting more political around this … We’re getting to a point where everybody who has a stake in anything needs to be thinking about how they could be doing more to put pressure on the people who are making decisions, who can get real change to happen.”

As far as Pitch is concerned, Wilson said the industry “is committed to working with the Victorian government to understand more about the events over the long weekend, and how the industry and agencies can work together to deliver safe and fun events for all festival-goers into the future”.

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