History

WOMADelaide: The World's Festival since 1992

Over the past three decades, WOMADelaide has evolved from a daring experiment to a unique and essential part of the Australian festival landscape. Held amongst the trees of Botanic Park/Tainmuntilla, WOMADelaide — the World of Music, Arts & Dance in Adelaide — is one of Australia’s most loved festivals. Growing from just three stages to eight, thousands of artists from every corner of the world have performed in the park since 1992.

WOMAD was co-founded in 1982 in England by Grammy-winning musician Peter Gabriel; with a dedicated fanbase, the festival became a worldwide name. “It's brilliant to have an audience that cares so much about what WOMAD is, could be, and stands for,” says Gabriel. “In a world in which many bad actors seem to be achieving power by fanning the flames of hatred, racism and division, a meeting place for all the world’s cultures and dreams, built on mutual respect, seems all the more precious.”

This is the basis of a festival that has stood the test of time through multiple iterations around the world — community, cultural celebration, and music.

Initially staged biennially from 1993, in alternate years to the then-biennial Adelaide Festival, WOMADelaide moved to an annual cycle in 2004, and expanded to become a four-day event from 2010. Held over the March long weekend, returning revellers reserve the sun-soaked four days in their calendars every year for a world of discovery, unforgettable moments, and connection. 

Over its 35-year history, WOMADelaide has been home to extraordinary performances, memorable moments beneath the trees, and rich cultural experiences. Masters of their craft have graced the stages, from Sinéad O’Connor to Peter Gabriel, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Crowded House, Florence + The Machine, Yothu Yindi, Grace Jones, PJ Harvey, Ravi Shankar and hundreds more. Beyond the stages and Around the Park, WOMADelaide has also welcomed dance, theatre, and large-scale performance installations – from Luke Jerram’s awe-inspiring inflatable world, Gaia and Gratte Ciel’s spectacular Place des Anges, to the 4-metre-tall wandering puppets of Company Archibald Caramantran, and the visually and musically stunning masterpiece The Manganiyar Seduction. 

A pioneer in sustainability, WOMADelaide has led the way in environmental initiatives, becoming the first South Australian festival to achieve all stages powered by 100% renewable energy, among many other milestones. As an independent charitable foundation, WOMADelaide has introduced countless initiatives to support industry, culture, and local communities.

WOMADelaide is more than just a festival. It’s a celebration of our shared humanity, a meeting place where generations of families, friends and artists return.

1992–2002

Botanic Park/Tainmuntilla was acquired by the adjacent Adelaide Botanic Garden in 1866 and developed as a lush arboretum into an extraordinary wonderland: the native plants. The springy couch grass. The oaks, elms and ghost gums, and majestic Moreton Bay Figs.

But in 1992 came further magic, hints of an event so visionary, so spectacular, that it would change the face of a city and open the ears and hearts of a nation.

There amid the 34-hectare expanse were three separate stages. Sound checks charged the air with curious tones: the slap and boom of a West African djembe; the heavenly octaves of Sufi Qawwali singing; the ethereal beauty of a Chinese dizi bamboo flute.

‘WOMADelaide Festival 1992’ read banners decorated with a lion logo and geometric slashes of red and green.

When the gates opened, a crowd of adults and kids poured in for what the Adelaide Festival billed as ‘a spectrum of world sounds in one weekend.’ People knew headliners Crowded House and Paul Kelly. But Youssou N’Dour from Senegal? Pakistan’s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan? A Chinese flautist named Guo Yue? This was a voyage of discovery, a leap into the unknown.

Organisers took a punt on that first WOMADelaide. Presented as part of the 1992 Adelaide Festival in a joint venture with the UK-based WOMAD organisation – and with sponsorship from the National AIDS campaign (“Play safe stay safe”) – WOMADelaide was guided by a faith in music’s ability to connect. To promote peace, love and cultural understanding.

From England to the World

WOMAD (World of Music Arts and Dance) had been co-founded in England a decade earlier by the Grammy-winning rock musician Peter Gabriel: “Music is a universal language,” said Gabriel early on. “It draws people together and proves, as well anything, the stupidity of racism.”

Not that Rob Brookman, as incoming Artistic Director of the 1992 Adelaide Festival, had heard of WOMAD when he considered programming a mini-festival of music from elsewhere, to be staged outside the confines of the concert hall.

“The Internet didn’t exist back then,” he says. “There was no email. I was flicking through [British entertainment newspaper] The Stage when I saw a tiny article about a music festival called WOMAD happening in the UK. I thought, ‘That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about doing’. So I sent off a fax.

“I flew over and met Thomas Brooman, WOMAD’s Artistic Director, at a WOMAD event in Morecombe Bay in northwest England,” he continues. “I remember how fantastically exciting it was to see an audience embracing music that perhaps they weren’t aware of.”

Brookman was on a mission to take WOMAD to the world. As well as the main festival in Reading outside London (now in Wiltshire) and its now defunct Morecambe Bay event, there were WOMADs in Spain and Singapore and countries yet to come. A WOMAD in Adelaide – WOMADelaide, as subsequently named by festival Marketing Manager Colin Koch – made sense.

Besides, something was in the ether in Australia in 1992. Alongside the inaugural Big Day Out in Sydney, WOMADelaide heralded a new era of large-scale outdoor events with multiple stages and a multiplicity of voices. Festivals that would eventually dispense with the need for headliners, evolving to become brands guaranteeing quality, variety and life enhancing good vibes.

“WOMADelaide was a huge bonus for the Adelaide Festival and so far from the mainstream approach,” says Koch. “Even Neil and Tim Finn from Crowded House seemed in awe of all the unknown talent and at the last minute decided to do a stripped back acoustic set.”

Brooman and Brookman created a line-up of artists they sourced from the existing WOMAD circuit and Brookman’s contacts, folding in several acts – Paul Kelly, Indian violinist Dr L Subramaniam, the Mapapa Acrobats of Kenya – booked to play the Adelaide Festival. A site was found at Belair National Park, 13 kilometres south of the city. But with a few weeks to opening, and with the location printed in the program and on the tickets, organisers were told that if the weekend coincided with a Total Fire Ban, the park would stay closed.

Ian Scobie, Administrator of the Adelaide Festival, was tasked with finding a new venue, fast: “I got into my car with a Gregory’s Street Directory and drove around,” he says. “When I passed Botanic Park, which was run by the Botanic Gardens, who we’d already worked with, I thought, ‘Wow.’”

For Paula Henderson from WOMAD, Botanic Park was a revelation. “It was the most beautiful site I’d ever seen, and a vision after the longest flight I’d ever been on,” she says, having obtained visas for, and flown down from London with, artists including Tanzanian singer/composer Remy Ongala and Guo Yue (“A character; he was so bored on the plane that he washed his socks in the sink”).

WOMADelaide shared similarities with its mothership. There was the official lion logo. The Global Village of food, retail and community stalls. But unlike WOMAD in the UK there was no camping. Arts-based projects – dance, installations, orchestras, roaming performers and large-scale performance – morphed from the Adelaide Festival. Stage crews came with theatre resumes. Things happened on the ground, in the park, not just on the stage.

“It had the feel of WOMAD,” says Henderson. “But it also had its own identity.”

In uniqueness and scale WOMADelaide offered a perfect example of what festivals could achieve. It even wooed the neighbourhood: “One of my roles was to drive out to nearby residential areas like Hackney and St Peters and assess the noise spill,” says Colin Koch. “I’ll never forget the serene sound of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice floating across the rooftops. People were out in their gardens, rapt.”

Spontaneity Pays Off

WOMADelaide was only meant to be a one-off, an Adelaide Festival highlight. But with crowd enthusiasm palpable, organisers jumped onstage on closing night and pledged that it would return the next year as a stand-alone festival.

“Which was a bit rash,” says Brookman, who, following his (then customary) biennial stint as director of the Adelaide Festival, became Programming Director of the Adelaide Festival Centre. “A lot of fancy footwork had to be achieved.”

And so it was. “Colin, Rob and I went to see Mike Rann, who was Minister for Tourism at the time and a huge supporter of what we were doing,” remembers Scobie. “He personally wanted Peter Gabriel to come and provided a guarantee to help make it happen. It was a major moment in securing WOMADelaide’s future.”

Presented by the Adelaide Festival Centre, WOMADelaide 1993 was buoyed by commitment from government at State, Federal and local levels, sponsors including the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People initiative, and by media who appreciated that great music came from everywhere. Artists that year ranged from British Asian diva Sheila Chandra to Malian crooner Salif Keita and indeed, former Genesis frontman and A-lister Peter Gabriel.

“We were so lucky to get Peter,” says Brookman. “He had a rare free date in his diary the weekend before he was attending the Grammys, our weekend, so we shared the travel costs.

“If 1993 hadn’t worked,” he adds, “then WOMADelaide would have been over.”

A village fair atmosphere was part of WOMADelaide’s early charm; ‘Come and meet your neighbours’ was a tagline coined by Koch. Still, its existence depended on meeting box office targets. The small revenue made in 1993 became risk capital bolstering the next WOMADelaide in 1995 – an alternate year to Adelaide Festival (and the year Stage 4 was created).

Those gap years were peppered with often unprofitable, albeit creatively brilliant, events. Most notably, the 1996 WOMAD Indian-Pacific train trip from Perth to Adelaide, an all-aboard adventure with a stop-off concert at the remote settlement of Pimba. Passenger/performers included the Bauls of Bengal, Tuvan throat-singing ensemble Shu-De, Scottish band the Well Oiled Sisters and – collaborating with all en route – Paul Kelly.

“I sat down with Australian National Railways and talked them into giving us a train,” says Colin Koch, whose idea it was. “The journey with those musicians was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a real hoot. The best 50K we ever lost.”

There were one-off projects at, variously, the Sydney Opera House, Melbourne’s Myer Music Bowl, Perth’s Belvoir Amphitheatre and the vineyards of McLaren Vale outside Adelaide. WOMADelaide’s influence continued to spread; in 1997 the first WOMAD New Zealand ‘sister event’ was staged in Auckland on the weekend after WOMADelaide, with the event relocating to New Plymouth in 2005.

By this time events company Arts Projects Australia (APA) had been formed by former Adelaide Festival colleagues Brookman, Brown, Koch and Scobie. For a few years APA presented WOMADelaide in partnership with the Adelaide Festival Centre (then with the Government of South Australia and later, with South Australian Tourism). By 1999, WOMADelaide was part of the fabric of its host city. A glorious cornucopia of sound, sight and taste. A microcosm of a world we all wanted to live in.

A world with a KidZone children’s area, a WoZone nightclub (presented off-site until 2004), giant silk flags by British visual artist Angus Watt, a fifth stage and a good-natured ambience that was carefully nurtured: “Part of building the ethos of the festival was establishing a sense of relationship,” says Brookman. “We tried to keep as many musicians as possible onsite across the weekend, even if they had no further performances.” 

One of my favourite moments was the football match that erupted backstage when Irish band Kila got out a soccer ball. Members of Baaba Maal’s Senegalese band joined in dressed in their flowing robes and before long there were about 35 people playing. No sides, no goals, just lots of passing the ball around.”

A sense of intimacy continued to prevail. Workshops brought artists up close and encouraged people to engage with each other. Shared environmental concerns were seen, heard, and validated by WOMADelaide 2001 – Australia’s first major ‘green festival’. That same year, the United Nations Year of Volunteers, 18 volunteers operated the Information Booth. Angus Watt worked with Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara women artists to create new flags that stood, rows and rows of them, fluttering in the golden Adelaide light – as if acknowledging victories won, and heralding spectacular things to come.

2002–2012

By its second decade, WOMADelaide was a brand. A byword for quality. A guarantee of good times. An acronym – World of Music, Arts and Dance – that did what it said on the tin. No matter if you didn’t know, or couldn’t pronounce, many of the names on the bill. Each artist was a gift and very often, a discovery. Each opened a window onto a living culture, to stories from near and far, to traditions both ancient and modern.

Having come on board via the Adelaide Festival, critics and journalists had their horizons broadened. Their affection for WOMADelaide, and their understanding of sounds from around the world, developed and grew.

“Lying on the grass in Adelaide’s beautiful Botanic Park, surrounded by huge and ancient fig trees and listening to great music is as close to heaven we can hope for in this lifetime,” wrote Bruce Elder in The Age in 2003 – the year that WOMADelaide went annual.

Like the crowds, back the media came each year. Waxing ecstatic about the music of the planet. About the classical orchestras and dance companies; the roving performers and visual art installations; the workshops and children’s parade and huge al fresco spectacles.

“WOMADelaide’s roots in the Adelaide Festival made the idea of crossovers between western art music, western classical music and music from around the world very attractive,” says WOMADelaide co-founder Brookman. “Bringing the likes of Bangarra Dance Theatre or Meryl Tankard’s ADT onstage meant you got to experience acts that you wouldn’t ordinarily find at a music festival.

“It helped us make the demographic as broad as possible, which we wanted,” he continues. “You could basically track two independent pathways through the festival. Older people who came for the classical music and dance companies then began exploring world cultures. And another completely different group were there for the drums and bass, the beats and the DJs.”

Annette Tripodi was programming the festival’s Australia-based content, and working with WOMAD in the UK to manage the international artists, when she established the late night WoZone club that ran from 1999 to 2003 inside the Student Union of nearby Adelaide University.

“I didn’t want to go home at 11pm, which was the curfew at the time,” she says. “We had the club run from midnight until 5am on Fridays and Saturdays: three rooms with DJs, live bands and a chill out space with projections.

“In 2004 we teamed up with the Adelaide Festival, running two WoZone nights as part of their Universal Playground club,” she continues. “In 2006 we did a late night DJ set (Talvin Singh on Stage 3) to test the waters. It was hugely well received and since 2007 we’ve programmed DJs in Speakers’ Corner – the first new area of the park we expanded into.”

There were those who’d doubted the wisdom of positioning a sixth stage in ‘Speakers' Corner’ amid the tall pine trees on the opposite side of Botanic Park. Said the locale was too remote. Doubted that anyone would want to walk that far.

“We crossed our fingers,” says Scobie. “Partly because the park is so beautiful, people were just really happy to explore different areas. One of the delights of producing the event has been finding new nooks and crannies where people can happen upon a performance. “To walk through the park when the festival is in full swing is to see a whole range of ages and emotions. There are so many animated faces, lots of talk of ‘Wasn’t that amazing?’ It’s this constant live exchange.”

There was just so much to take in: the Artist in Conversation sessions at Speakers' Corner. The food, fashion, art and trinkets in the Global Village area. The Taste the World stage, where artists chatted and cooked up a storm between intimate musical shows – a concept dreamed up for the 2004 festival by then Marketing Manager Sandy Verschoor (who went on to be Lord Mayor of Adelaide) that is now a fixture of WOMADs across the world.

Making History

In 2004, the WOMADelaide Foundation – the non-profit body that now presents the festival – was established, buoyed by a remit to foster cultural understanding within and outside the festival. That same year the festival began an annual cycle of presentation – a move that was subsequently followed in 2007 by the Adelaide Fringe and in 2013, the Adelaide Festival.

In 2005, the first week-long visual arts workshop (featuring Cuban papier-mâché Artists, the Mora Brothers) was presented with Adelaide’s Community Arts Network. The Foundation’s outreach programmes became intrinsic to the festival’s identity: in 2007 a local artist visited the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) lands of the tri-state central desert region to work with the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, returning for large-scale workshops with Community Arts Network, creating pieces on-site. In 2010 artists from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands of remote northwest South Australia based themselves at Better World Arts in Port Adelaide, creating a set of sixty hand-painted flags in workshops facilitated by UK ’flag artist’ Angus Watt, their creations flying alongside Watt’s iconic flags – as they have done ever since.

WOMADelaide went carbon-neutral in 2005 through an active program of tree planting and reforestation. It was a move that underscored the festival’s commitment to sustainability, nurturing the sort of environmental awareness that saw people picking up what might have been left behind, and leaving the site as pristine as it was at the outset.

“WOMADelaide was the first festival in the country to pay proper attention to simple stuff like separating waste streams,” says Brookman. “We always tried to be inventive in our approach to carbon neutrality – the crazy idea of compostable plates and cutlery, say – and in our efforts to inspire change. It’s something that has gone into the DNA of the organisation.”

In 2010, ostensibly to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Adelaide Festival, WOMADelaide extended to four days. The festival’s enormous popularity, along with the public holiday on the Monday, has ensured its four-day length ever since.

“The pace of WOMADelaide changed with that extra day,” says Tripodi. “We could schedule two shows by the same artist, who the audience might see on the Friday and again on the Monday; in between they’d do their activities or watch the other artists. There was more chilling, mingling and opportunities for collaboration. One artist likened it to a summer camp.”

By 2011, around 50% of attendees were travelling from interstate or overseas. Buoyed by a reputation for distinguished environmental sensitivity, the one-off three-day WOMAD Earth Station sister event took place later that year at Belair National Park – the site originally planned for the inaugural WOMADelaide before it was abandoned due to the risk of bushfire related fire bans closing the Park.

Earth Station’s focus on sharing concern and ideas for sustainable life on our earth was a catalyst for WOMADelaide’s wildly successful Planet Talks program, which debuted in 2013.

2012 was WOMADelaide’s twentieth anniversary. By which time the festival was entrenched in the national arts calendar as a must-see event, a celebration of our global community in one of the most beautiful locales in the country and possibly the world. Among the historic memories absorbed by Botanic Park that decade were private celebrations: weddings, three of them, complete with marquee, celebrant and flowers, and catering by Global Village stallholders.

There was the generational shift that saw kids who came with their parents in 1992 return over the years as tweens, teenagers and young adults, with or without children of their own. The personal highlights: the excitement of discovery; the glimpses into lesser-known musical traditions; the bursts of on-the-fly creative brilliance.

The sense of belonging. Of being at the centre of a world we would all like to live in.

“People would walk into Botanic Park and immediately their minds and hearts seemed to open,” says Tripodi. “You could almost feel the joy.”

2012–2022

The joy has continued and even intensified, what with the combination of memories and experiences accrued over the decades and the steady influx of new audiences.

WOMADelaide’s stellar reputation (“Uplifting, political and expansive festival offers hope amidst the doom,” wrote The Guardian in 2020) owes much to the blue-sky thinking of its organisers. A long-time crew for whom WOMADelaideans – the festival-goers themselves – are key.

“Never underestimate the audience,” says Director Scobie. “That’s something that often gets forgotten in the arts. While we are mindful that ideally people have to like what we present, the first questions we ask are, ‘Is the work good?’ ‘Is it enriching and sustaining?’

“Art and music must have meaning,” he continues, “whether it is traditional rhythms (Master Drummers of Burundi, 2012), protest dance music (Palestinian Jordanian outfit 47Soul, 2016) or leftfield French pop (Christine and the Queens, 2019). We want people to feel moved, to connect and feel better for the experience of being there.”

WOMADelaide has worked to maintain its optimum vibe: in 2012 ‘Sounds of the Planet’ was replaced with the new WOMAD-wide tagline, ‘The World’s Festival’, and in 2017 the festival extended into neighbouring Frome Park. This increased the possibilities for large-scale performance and presenting Exodus of the Forgotten Peoples – a sprawling immersive fire installation about the plight of refugees by French fire artists Cie Carabosse.

In Frome Park in 2018 a multi-storey ‘jewel box’ stage was created for The Manganiyar Seduction, an audio-visual feast created by Indian theatre director Royston Abel. In 2019, Stage 6 moved from its position down by the creek near Speakers' Corner to become the bigger, better Frome Park Pavilion.

Elsewhere, the WOMADelaide Community Access Program continued opening doors to those who wouldn’t ordinarily attend the festival. In 2022 over 300 tickets were distributed to a range of community groups including young refugees, Indigenous communities and survivors of torture and trauma.

“Coming to WOMADelaide is a luxury for many, particularly for those on a low income,” says Scobie. “We proactively try and make it as accessible as possible.”

In 2021 came the WOMADelaide x NSS Academy, a training and development programme for emerging SA First Nations and multicultural artists run in partnership with youth-focused Adelaide music hub Northern Sound System, based in Elizabeth in Adelaide’s northern suburbs.

“Over the years we’ve nursed an ambition to help build the future careers of young musicians,” says Scobie of a scheme that has so far welcomed the likes of Kenyan rapper-singer Elsy Wameyo and Sonz of Serpent Aboriginal hip-hop outfit.

“Professional mentors are paired with the training initiatives NSS have developed, further building WOMADelaide’s connection with local emerging talent and audiences across the community.”

Community projects have remained paramount. In 2013 WOMADelaide was the winner of the Partnerships Project (part of the SA Premier’s Natural Resources Management Award) for its relationship with Greening Australia, with whom it works to offset the festival’s carbon footprint. Two dollars from every ticket sold have to date seen over 149 hectares of native shrubs and trees (she-oak groves, mallee trees) planted in regional South Australia, a WOMADelaide forest like no other.

In 2018, Botanic Park was transformed each night of the festival by the ambitious live art project Place des Anges by French aerial company Gratte Ciel. The spectacular overhead ballet involved swirling feathers, brilliant white angels and a giant inflatable cherub. The following year French experimentalists Le Phun presented The Leafies: sculptures made from tonnes of disintegrating leaves collected from Botanic Park over the previous autumn and stored in a warehouse in purpose-built containers.

“Le Phun arrived from France two weeks before the festival began to do workshops in the warehouse then on-site with students from the Adelaide Central School of Art,” says Tripodi. “They created 150 Leafies that progressively populated Botanic Park in different guises then ‘migrated’ across the city for the next few weeks.”

Joy Perseveres

This most recent decade was also the period in which the precedents set early by WOMADelaide – that is, its role as an influencer – were now clearly reflected in the aesthetics of other Australia-based festivals.

Still, no other festival could ever bottle the essence – and resilience – of WOMADelaide. The festival has navigated everything from world politics (caught up in the conflict in Mali, desert blues band Tinariwen cancelled 2012 then played in 2018) to unusual artist riders (cigars, cognac and crème brulee for the late Cape Verdean diva Cesaria Evora) and the challenges of flying artists in from such far-flung locales as Yakutia in Siberia (Ayarkhaan, 2013) and Nouakchott in Mauritania (Noura Mint Seymali, 2018).

Not to mention getting equipment and accoutrements past customs officials with almost permanently raised eyebrows. Among the items that have been brought down in flight cases or sourced locally (as requested in 2020 by Belgian metal-rock-electro-Balkan outfit KermesZ L’Est) are maracas, megaphones and bouquets of synthetic roses; a goat’s skull, two boar’s teeth and three stuffed martens; human dreadlocks, half a mirror ball, a fishing rod and a bicycle pump.

In 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic and unable to secure permission from SA Health for a full-scale event in Botanic Park, WOMADelaide defied all odds to present a series of reserved seating sunset concerts at King Rodney (Ityamai-itpina) Park over four nights. They featured the same high production values WOMADelaideans have come to expect, with a line-up of domestic icons including Midnight Oil, Sarah Blasko and Archie Roach – whose poignant farewell concert, coupled with his performance at the first Festival in 1992, seemed like a spiritual bookend.

In 2022 WOMADelaide returned to Botanic Park/Tainmuntilla, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the inaugural event in 1992 with the homegrown likes of Courtney Barnett, The Cat Empire and Joseph Tawadros performing a special concerto for oud with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

2023–2027

Life continues, and WOMADelaide remains a steadfast celebration despite the global uncertainty throughout the pandemic. Following two years of necessarily condensed and modified programs steering through the web of COVID-19 restrictions — the intent for 2023 was to "throw everything at the program,” and as Director Ian Scobie says, “We did.” 

2023 saw an embrace of dance and joy with a packed lineup of artists including the ethereal dance queen Florence + The Machine, alongside two-time Grammy-winner Bon Iver, Norway’s most streamed female artist of all time AURORA, Youssou N’Dour, and a return-to-form performance from Sampa The Great. The sound emanating from the stages was a draw for a new audience of first-timers, “Between Florence and Bon Iver there were people who it was unlikely had been to WOMADelaide, and that was also part of the intent: to try and bring a new crowd,” Scobie says. The festival has always embraced well-loved artists alongside lesser known. “If you go back to Men at Work in 1999, there were people saying, ‘they are not world music artists; Florence is not a world music artist; Bon Iver is not a world music artist’. But what is a world music artist? Ultimately, it's about a diversity of programming which brings together different tastes and sounds which can cross-fertilise in a way. You hope that the people who come as passionate fans of one particular artist will listen to another and discover and go away with a few more artists than is possible from attending a single concert of the artist they love.”

And it seemed to work in 2023, with the festival creating an innate sense of community celebration, one that carried over in the following years. When the world becomes increasingly isolating, there is always a place in the park, and Gratte Ciel’s Place des Anges was a beautiful representation of that. After debuting at WOMADelaide in 2018, the spectacular overhead ballet involving swirling feathers, brilliant white angels and a giant inflatable cherub returned to close each night of the festival in 2023 and left audiences with joyful memories for years to come.

After record-breaking crowds in 2023, the festival site underwent a redesign to create a more comfortable experience and more green space for all. In 2024, the shaded WoMarkets was established along Plane Tree Drive as part of the relocation of infrastructure to free up the park’s green space and to provide more space for patrons. Access pathways were established to make for clearer and easier navigation day and night around the site and support crowd flow and management. The Studio in the Adelaide Botanic High gym also debuted, created specifically for more intimate physical theatre and dance works, including Compagnie On Off – Le Chant de L'eau, Hewa Rwanda – Letter to the Absent, Restless Dance Theatre – Seeing Through Darkness, and Lewis Major Projects – Triptych Redux. 

Musical acts included reggae royalty Ziggy Marley, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae, Ukrainian ‘ethno chaos’ quartet DakhaBrakha and many more. And in 2024, the Malinauskas Labour Government announced it was extending its longstanding partnership to lock in the beloved festival through to 2029. Despite being the hottest year ever, enthusiastic festival-goers still turned up with more four-day passes purchased than ever before. 

The heat stuck around in 2025, but it didn’t stop artists like the formidable two-time Mercury Music Prize winner PJ Harvey, avant-pop powerhouse Roisin Murphy and Grammy-nominees Khruangbin. Crowd favourites Compagnie Paris Bénarès presented Chamôh — a giant camel searching for the way home that delighted audiences across the park. 

Breaking the heatwave, WOMADelaide 2026 was forecast for clear blue skies and perfect temperatures, but there’s always a hurdle in events! The week before the 2026 festival was set to begin, conflict in the Middle East escalated, resulting in the closure of multiple international flight paths, disrupting travel plans for 45 groups scheduled to play in a short five days time. Working 24 hours a day, the WOMADelaide team succeeded in re-routing hundreds of artists and ensuring the festival went ahead, and ultimately only three groups were forced to cancel their plans.

Director Scobie describes there being a “great sense of achievement” at the 2026 festival, highlighting the irony being ‘The World’s Festival’, which celebrates the coming together of people, happening at the same time “the world (was) going mad”. The energy was high, and this showed with performances from Italian mega-star Jovanotti, feminist idol Oumou Sangaré, the return of Yothu Yindi after more than 30 years, and the “one and only” Saturday night headliner, Grace Jones. 

Sustainability has always been at the forefront of every WOMADelaide festival — leading the way when it came to innovative ways to better manage waste, beginning with the implementation of multiple coloured rubbish bins, removing single use plastics and introducing a reusable cup system — 2026 was the first time a South Australian festival powered all stages with 100% renewable energy.

“It’s proof of concept for the industry,” Scobie says. “Which is the ambition…if you prove the model, it can be done.”

So felicidades again to a festival that has developed alongside its audience: embracing change, enabling discovery and reinforcing connection. Offering food for thought, reasons to dance, incentive to grow and becoming even more beloved along the way. 

Here’s to the next 35 years. See you in the park!

Want to dive deeper into WOMADelaide history? Explore year by year on our archive pages. Or, discover how you can help support the festival for years to come.

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