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I've been to two Woodford Folk Festivals. It's a seven-day event held around New Year about two hours from where I live. I get season tickets and go camp there with my sister, Erica. Below are some observations for the two years, and for 2000/2001, a more detailed diary-type thing. This is because I kept a careful record of what I did in 2000/2001, but I didn't in 1999/2000. However, I have pictures from 1999/2000, but I didn't have a camera in 2000/2001.
Regarding my footnotes, I've put them at the end of each section. They were all at the end of the document, but it got annoying scrolling for them, so I put them closer by.
It's wall-to-wall wankers out there!
- anonymous folkie-type guy at Woodford Folk Festival, on New Years' Eve, 2000
Here are my pictures from Woodford.
That overheard quote just summed up the crowd surrounding me on the last night of the millennium. I was sitting in a film tent watching short films at the time, trying to avoid all of the drunken daytrippers [1] and all the the bloody bagpipe groups (the tent was full of like-minded people, all of whom were wearing the red season camper armband [2]). Anyway, except for New Years' Eve, Woodford is a wonderful place. It's a week long folk festival held just out of the town of Woodford (about 2 hours from where I live). I've only been once, but I'm going again this year. I have a season ticket, which lets you in on all of the days of the festival. Last year, my sister and I put our tent on a hill to avoid all of the mud [3], and ended up sleeping on a 45-degree slope [4]. There are many bands and story-tellers, and lots of visual arts workshops and things like that. You can make a paper lantern and march in the fire event parade and fireworks spectacular (held on New Years' Day, once it's dark). I did this, but I kind of regretted it. See, the people in the lantern parade waited at the top of a hill until the event started. We had to walk down in a long line to the area where they were going to light the bonfire and the really big paper lanterns (they were a few metres tall). Then we had to surround it in a really big circle, put our lanterns out, sit down and enjoy the show. We ended up with what some would call the best seat in the house. We were really close to all of the people dancing and stuff. The thing is, I'm absolutely terrified of fire, especially big ones burning ten metres away. I spent most of the time cringing and covering my head when the sparks flew at us.
[1] You could pick the ones there for NYE out from the crowd because they were properly clean. Unlike the season campers (like myself) who had been trying to shower for the past week in icy-cold-water-only showers for the past week. A shower in which one is trying to avoid the actual water like the plague leads to the sort of condition where one is probably nine-tenths of the way to getting the filth necessary to catch the plague.
[2] Perhaps explanation is necessary. Armbands were worn so that you could enter and leave the festival grounds as you wished. The season campers had different coloured ones to the people only there for the day.
[3] Of course it rained the first three days. The mud is apparently part of the Woodford tradition. I didn't mind it. It made the weather a lot cooler, for one thing.
[4] It was not really quite that steep. But it was quite certainly a slope. You started the night sleeping at the top of the tent and would wake up at the bottom of it. If the tent walls hadn't been there I would have woken up at the bottom of the hill.
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Our parents own a motorhome. It looks a lot like an overgrown combi-van. It's pretty cool, actually. We (me, Erica my twin sister, Jordan my little brother and my Mum and Dad) spent Christmas in the bus, in a caravan park at Maroochydore, a few hours north from my home. It was really really hot.
On Boxing Day, we left Maroochydore. By the way, it's the day after Christmas, the 26th of December, for all Americans, Atlanteans, Tibetans and other aliens [1]. We drove the hour and a half to Woodford. On the way there we saw about a signs for a place called the Australia Zoo. There were about a million of them ("More or less - maybe a little less, Anne. Exaggeration is merely a flight of poetic fancy." [2]). They had Steve Irwin the Crocodile Man painted all over them. We laughed at every picture of Steve we saw, and since there was a new billboard every few kilometers ("10 km to Australia Zoo... 5 km... 1 km... 500 m... you have reached Australia Zoo... you have passed Australia Zoo... Australia Zoo is 1km back... and so on).
After Steve spotting, we finally got to Woodford. It was really bloody hot. Erica and I put on our backpacks, which were quite heavy. Mine was 75 litres, and Erica's 65, but we were camping for a week, so we had the tent and all sorts of other camping junk. We tied our loaf of bread to the outside on the grounds that it perhaps wouldn't get as squashed. Then we trekked across the carpark, got our armbands and went to look for a campsite. Mum and Dad came with us, to make sure we didn't have any trouble with the tent. We didn't think we would have, but they came anyway. Woodford has a big flat area for camping with a hill at one side. We like camping on the hill, because you get more space between tents and also the rain is less likely to end up inside your tent. So we wandered around the hill, almost passed out from the heat, discovered that Erica and I had both thought the other had brought water. Oops. Dad went back to the bus after helping us put the tent up to get the water we'd left behind. He also brought back one of the bus mattresses with him, for which we are eternally indebted to him. We had crappy air mattresses, but weren't looking forward to sleeping on them. A foam mattress was a good thing.
So Dad got back with the water and the mattress and was about to leave when a fireman walked up the hill, and told us that we were camped too high on the hill, and had to go down the the mown area. Lots of the other people up there told him to piss off and they stayed where they were, but we moved our tent anyway. Another woman was pitching a tent for her daughter and pitched it practically on top of ours. She shouldn't have, because we were there first and there was still the whole hill left to put up their tent. But she didn't and we had to move one of our tarpaulin poles out of the way of one of their three small tents. This stuffed up the tarp. To rectify this problem, we had to tie one of the tarp ropes to a tree. That gave us no end of trouble, because it was on the wrong angle and water kept collecting on the tarp, then splashing off all at once with a noise that sounded like it was falling down. That was really annoying. However, our new site was incredibly close to the festival, and also quite close to the bathrooms. So that was okay then.
We spent the first day bored out of our minds, because the festival doesn't actually open until the 27th. The market stalls are mostly all open, but there's no performances. We stayed in the tent, cooked pasta for dinner with Erica's little spirit stove, and went to bed around 8:30.
[1] I'm not trying to insult anyone. To understand this, read Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
[2] I'm quoting Phil Gordon, in Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery. I'm not sure if she's quoting someone, though. She probably was. Those people couldn't open their mouths without throwing a witty and relevant quote into the conversation.
Since this was the first day of the festival, we'd decided not to book any workshops. So we roved out to the stalls and venues. We ended up at the Sitting Duck venue at around 10-ish, where we saw someone called Paula Hedemann and a band called Chironsway. Neither really were that good, so we left and rambled around some more. We ended up back at the Sitting Duck again just before twelve, and we watched Tuffnel. After that, around one, it was off to the concert stage to see Miles From Nowhere, always entertaining. I believe we then went back to the tent for lunch, and we caught the end of a band called Tulca Mor back at the concert stage when we returned. Following that at about 2:30ish, we went to the Bamboo Palace see a band called the Rogues, solely because I liked their name [1]. They turned out to be really bloody good. They covered two songs by Great Big Sea, a band I'd heard a lot about but never anything by. I determined we'd have to see the Rogues at all their performances. Then we went to see anything to fill in time, which ended up being Nancy Kerr and James Fagan, which was okay. The story teller's hour was the next thing, at 5 in the Greenhouse. After this, I meant to go to a Woody Guthrie story thing but I didn't. We went and made dinner instead, then we went out to the opening ceremony. We left before the end because it was raining, and then we went to the Woodford short film competition at the Exchange. This started at 8 on the program, but of course there was a delay, probably because I was sitting half in the rain and was soaking, freezing and it felt longer than it was. The films were interesting. There was one really cool animation, which almost won the people's choice (the Screen D'or). This ended at 10-ish and then we went to bed.
Drizzly weather today. First up we had our felt making workshop, which started at nine and went till 12. It was fun, I made a piece with nice colours. My back ached when we'd done. Then we had lunch, back at the tent, and spent a while rigging up a clothesline at the back of the tent to hang the wet-sheep-scented felt on. Then we trekked out to the Ampitheatre to make lanterns. The theme for the year was the Ark, so we had to make animals. We started on a butterfly, finished the frame that day and had to do the paper the next day, except we were busy so it turned out to be the day after that.
After lanterns, which took us to about 4, we went and saw the Barleyshakes. Then Storyteller's hour was on at the Greenhouse, and the Rogues were on after that at the Club (played the GBS songs again!) We went back to the tent after that and made dinner, then went to the concert stage to see the Electric Women concert. Katie Noonan and someone else did an Ani DiFranco song, but I didn't recognise it. The Bluehouse, who I don't really like, did a cover of Suzi Quattro's Devilgate Drive, which was fun. We left before the end because I was falling asleep.
Today we'd booked our leadlight workshop. It was a full day one, starting at 9. I made two small stars, one