1994-5
The Maleny Folk Festival has been an annual cultural event for the past nine years. It has increased in size, production, and popularity to the extent that it has out-grown its original home at Maleny in the sunshine coast hinterland and is now held at its own permanent site on two hundred and forty acres in the foothills of the State Forest outside Woodford. The most recent Festival, held over the last Christmas-New Year period, contained an interesting and expansive program (primarily of music, but also including arts workshops, community forums, theatre, and children 's activities). For the first time visual artists were invited to participate and they produced site-specific installation works in and around the Festival site.
I want here to consider the socio-political significance of a cultural phenomenon such as the Maleny-Woodford Folk Festival and the meanings it generates in the broader cultural sphere. There are both potentials and pitfalls involved in an undertaking like this and the on-site artworks manifested a type of cultural consciousness for audience and participants alike, reflecting collective aspirations and anxieties.
There is a very real movement and politics of resistance which manifests itself at this Festival and propels its existence. This deliberately avoids slogans, bandwagons, and grandstanding, acting as a locus for what has been termed "anti-systemic" movements: the democracy movements on all sides of the socialist divide, the ecology movements, indigenous peoples' movements, and the women's movements.1 Indeed, the Festival is a singular example of the "intersection" of these movements and their promising ability to think laterally across the essentialising boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and nation-state.2
The purchasing of a dedicated site is the practical realization of environmental concerns