Media Release: Supporting arts and cultural projects at regional festivals

The Morrison Government has today announced almost $540,000 to fund 14 arts and cultural projects across regional and remote Australia through the latest Festivals Australia program funding round.

Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts, the Hon Paul Fletcher MP, said the Festivals Australia program celebrates cultural projects and helps make them available to regional audiences across the country.

“The Government is supporting the creative and cultural sector to takes steps in recovering and safely returning to communities. The latest round of funding will support 14 diverse projects spanning film, live performances and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditional crafts, which will help attract tourists and bring communities together,” Minister Fletcher said.

Funding through the Festivals Australia program will support a wide geographic spread of projects across many art forms including music, circus, theatre, and visual arts. These projects include:

• $27,156 for Best Employment to develop and perform Unstop-Ability: Journey, a disability and Aboriginal-led dance, music and drama production at the Inverell Sapphire City Festival.
• $95,000 for Ten Days on the Island to create mapali, a dawn celebration with fire, dance and other performing arts as the opening event for the 2021 Ten Days on the Island Festival.
• $35,000 for Big hART to deliver the Songs for Peace Prison Program, a series of music workshops for inmates at the Roebourne Regional Prison.
• $26,460 for The Village Festival of New Performance to deliver The Game, a large-scale, interactive community competition that reinvents theatre sports as part of the Benalla Festival.

The Office for the Arts will work with organisations receiving funding on the timing and delivery of these activities in line with any current COVID-19 requirements. 

The Festivals Australia program supports arts projects that invite community participation and audience engagement at festivals in regional and remote Australia. Around $1.2 million is provided each financial year through two competitive funding rounds to support arts projects at festivals in regional Australia.

The Government is investing $776 million in the arts and cultural sector in 2020-21 through its funding programs.

For the full list of recipients and more information visit: www.arts.gov.au/festivals-australia