Festival of Small Halls

Coming to a small town near you. In an Australian First, Woodford Folk Festival presents the inaugural Festival of Small Halls.

Festival of Small Halls is a unique, beautiful and romantic concept that it sure to capture the imagination of the Australian public.

It’s a series of tours that will take the best folk and contemporary acoustic artists (one local, one international) from two of Australia’s largest Festivals, and send them on the road together, to bring exceptional shows to treasured tiny community halls around the country.

The first tour kicks off at the Mullum Music Festival on November 23 and finishes at the Woodford Folk Festival on December 28.

This tour will visit 18 unique communities across Queensland with the two festivals providing the perfect bookends for an incredible adventure that takes in some of our most beautiful and remote areas, in the old wooden halls that have long played host to social gatherings for their communities. Each night of the tour will be hosted by volunteers from the local area, and is a chance for each town to show off their warmest welcome and most enthusiastic audiences. The halls themselves also have wonderful stories – for example, the Boonarga Cactoblastic Hall, 10 miles East of Chinchilla, is a memorial hall built to honour the Cactoblastis moth, brought in to save Queensland farmlands from the Opuntia cacti. Still the most successful example of bio control ever, apparently. Great hall too!

The artist line-up for Festival of Small Halls will always be an Australian artist and an International artist who play music of exceptional quality and heart. For this first festival, acclaimed Melbourne folk singer Jordie Lane (AUS) and International award winner Rose Cousins (CAN) on her first tour down under, have been selected to take this journey off the beaten track; chosen for their beautiful songs, their storytelling and their wonderful warmth. Future tour planning for all remote and rural regions of Australia is currently underway.