Australia’s Biggest Folk Festival Takes Place in an Autumnal Garden City

If autumn is too short for you and you’d like to chase after it into the Southern Hemisphere to enjoy it a very compatible place, it would be hard to go wrong with the National Folk Festival in Canberra, Australia, March 28 through April 1.

The festival will be one of the crowning events of a nationwide celebration called “Year of the Outback,” a 12-month string of performances, car rallies, rodeos, balls and fairs honoring Australia’s vast red interior wilderness, the Outback.

Some of the events scheduled for Year of the Outback, such as an opera under the stars in one of Western Australia’s farthest-flung settlements, will be rather small in scale, drawing perhaps 100 people.

Not so with the National Folk Festival. It will feature more than 1,200 folk music performers from Australia, the UK, the United States, Canada, India, Indonesia at Exhibition Park, just north of Canberra, for 16 hours a day. In total, there will be 100 concerts, 80 workshops and uncounted jam sessions. Throw in dancing, comedy, workshops and food ranging from “bush tucker” (grub you eat in the wilderness) to sophisticated sit-down fare. 

The musical categories will include traditional Australian, traditional folk, bluegrass, cajun, zydeco, contemporary and “world music” (from non-Western nations).

Then throw in autumn in Australia, a season blessed by relatively moderate temperatures, beautiful slanting light and the change of colors among the European and Asian trees brought by the country’s immigrant settlers over the past 200 years.

Sweeping view of Canberra shows its wide boulevards and low-key skyline. The plume at the right is the Captain Cook Memorial Jet, a man-made geyser that spouts 200 feet into the air.

Canberra itself, designed by the American architect Walter Burley Griffin, is the low-key, garden-like capital city of Australia. Like Washington, DC, it sits in a special federal territory of its own, in this case on land ceded by the state of New South Wales. The city is the often ignored offspring of a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne, bitter rivals who vied to become the London of Australia by establishing themselves as the hub of both the country’s political and financial might.

While Canberra, like Washington, seized the levers of national power from big East Coast cities, unlike Washington it never blossomed into a capital with worldwide prestige and influence. After all, it presides over a very distant, very large, very under-populated country (only 18 million people in 3 million square miles) that exerts little influence on the world – other than to excite distant admiration – and that has worked out a stable, egalitarian political system. Australia does not wrestle as mightily with great social and political problems as do much as larger and more important nations.

In short, there’s not much for Canberra to do.

What it does do is prettily occupy a green, well-watered, wooded, hill-ringed lowland halfway between Melbourne and Sydney. Griffin’s plan called for broad boulevards and sweeping lawns, parkways and esplanades. There was to be other magic, too, including some that still holds sway: To this day, despite Canberra’s population having hit the 300,000 mark, visitors often remark that it is hard to see where all the people are. Years of careful planning and plantings have made the place seem as uncrowded and unhurried as an elysian field.

With its access to both Melbourne and Sydney, and Canberra becomes a wonderful layover for a tour of Australia’s two most populated states, New South Wales and Victoria.— Patrick Totty