The extent and significance of rural and regional festivals in Australia

Details of the Impact

UOW research documenting the extent and significance of regional festivals – including economic contributions, job creation, socio-cultural benefits, and regional development implications – had significant influence on Austrailan policy and the regional festival sector. The first public report on this project (Reinventing Public Places) was presented to the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Cultural Infrastructure Provision and delivered personally by CI Gibson to the Federal Minister for the Arts, Environment & Heritage in 2009. This Inquiry subsequently travelled to UOW to interview Gibson regarding the project's findings and implications for cultural infrastructure provision. This report was then tabled in the NSW Parliament (2010), and formed the basis for three motions that recognised the constructive role of rural festivals, and the contributions agricultural shows and cultural festivals make to the economy and social fabric of rural communities.

Member of the Legislative Council Mick Veitch delivered a speech to the Australian Parliament in support of these motions – citing economic activity, job creation and education – as sourced from this project's findings and public report. Extensive quotes and statistics from the public report featured throughout the parliamentary record.

Reinventing Rural Places was also distributed in hard copy to over 1,000 festival directors, tourism authorities, arts organisations and relevant government agencies. The first and most significant benefit of this research was that the documentation of the previously undervalued extent and significance of rural festivals in Australia effectively raised their profile in regional development policy debate, and more broadly in national conversations about the future of rural and regional Australia.

There were a number of interest groups that benefitted from this research. These included tourism and special events coordinators who used the project's data to gauge the extent of the sector across rural Australia, and to facilitate more effective planning and programming. National, state and local arts organisations benefited as the research assisted in advocating for the value of cultural events, and captured for the first time the nation-wide value of the associated volunteer labour involved in the organization of agricultural shows. At the local scale, these events also benefitted from the legitimation of their economic and socio-cultural contributions to regional development in terms of advocacy and formal policy support.

Positive correspondence was received from festivals and local government authorities across rural Australia, from Deniliquin to Inverell, Coffs Harbour to Lismore, Dubbo, Taree and Tasmania. There was consistent appreciation of the fact that the project made visible the previously underestimated extent and significance of festivals, and the socio-cultural contributions these events made to host communities.

At the macro, policy-making scale, Elizabeth Rogers, CEO Regional Arts NSW, stated: "I want to acknowledge the value that this research project has had on NSW regional festivals. While, as practitioners, we understand the value of these events to regional communities, we have never had the research based evidence to back this up... The more detailed return on investment analysis and economic evaluation is beyond the abilities and resources of most regional festival organisers.... I have used your publications, particularly Reinventing Rural Places, in numerous meetings over the years with all levels of government, to advocate for the support of regional festivals". Based on this, CEO Rogers confirms that Regional Arts NSW have secured two years' funding from the NSW Government to support paid festival coordinators for community festivals throughout regional NSW.

Research findings were profiled in 50 media stories across print (Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Australian Financial Review, The Straits Times), and online news (BBC News, ABC, Huffington Post), television (WIN News, Channel 7 Sunrise), plus extensive radio interviews (BBC Radio 2, ABC Radio National, ABC Sydney, Canberra, WA and 20+ local ABC stations across Australia). The public report was profiled on Australian Policy Online, where it has been viewed 6,500 times, while a piece on The Conversation attracted 25,000 readers. From 2009-16 public lectures were delivered at the Australian Museum (Sydney), Policy Notes Music Industry Forum (Melbourne), Australian Regional Economies Conference (Parkes), Uni in the Brewery (Wollongong) and Artlands Festival (Dubbo).

Longitudinal research and annual tailored reports assisted in improving individual events, leading to growth in visitor numbers, incomes and job creation. Kelly Hendry, Destination Development Manager for Parkes Shire Council, wrote: "Parkes Shire Council wishes to extend its recognition and appreciation for many years of support and contribution to our hallmark event, the Parkes Elvis Festival. Whilst we just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the festival, the real success and growth of this event has been achieved over the last fourteen years or so, with your research and associated findings a contributing factor... the partnership has been extremely valuable … in building the event, and sustaining support. Working with you has brought a new way of thinking to aspects of the Festival, and has also generated additional exposure to the importance and spin-off benefits of regional events such as ours".

This research provided a template for assessing the extent and significance of festivals internationally. In 2010 methods were shared with the Canadian Federal Govt Department of Canadian Heritage, and in 2015 with Prof George Mackay, Salford University, who authored the UK's first ever nationwide audit of festivals, modelled on this Australian precedent.

Approach to Impact

Our approach to facilitating thematic, high-impact, multidisciplinary research in Language, Communication and Culture aligns strongly with the UOW mission to leverage multidisciplinary research strengths for impact, which is reflected in the UOW flagship Global Challenges program. This program has fascilitated projects located in a number of different faculties and schools. With the provision of additional internal faculty and university grants to support impact, an internal culture recognising the value of potential impact, the incorporation of students with end-user driven research, and the establishment of a network of interdisciplinary faculty-funded research centres we work to foster, mentor and support the career trajectories of these researchers.

Our UOW Global Challenges Program, a university-wide challenge-led interdisciplinary research program with the theme “Transforming Lives and Regions”, was both influenced by the lessons learned from this project (regarding achieving impact) and also supported the project in its latter years. This support provided funding and logistical support for a book launch and media coverage, while our Australian Centre for Cultural Environment Research (AUSCCER) provided travel support for two keynote presentations. The first of these was at the Australian Regional Economies conference (which brings together local government managers and regional development policy-makers), and the second at the Artlands Festival in 2016, a national regional arts event that brings together performances, exhibitions, talks and interactions between practitioners and policy experts on the future of arts and culture in regional Australia.

Global Challenges has also supported the multidisciplinary research project “The Long View: investigating the long term efficacy of social and cultural responses to natural disaster”, which focused on the long-term impact and efficacy of social and cultural responses to natural disasters and suggested alternative modes of response.

Similarly, our Centre for Texts, Cultures and Creative Industries (CTC) has played a strategic role in supporting a number of projects that have demonstrated significant social and cultural impact, as has the Forum for Indigenous Research Excellence (FIRE). CTC has supported industry-facing research concerned with the evolution of the creative industries in Australia, Asia and across the global media landscape, and FIRE has supported community-oriented research that addresses issues of representation and identity, and the use of social media by indigenous people in their help-seeking behaviours.

Our culture of support for research impact in this field is clearly illustrated in the evolution of the case study Reinventing Rural Places. The project received early support from the Dean of the relevant Faculty at the time (Prof Will Price) and the university continued to provide support for the project through on-going funding and resources made available from 2007 to the present. In this instance, Faculty funds were provided for a part-time research assistant (RA) to assist with research analysis and administration, as well as the production of the public report. The RA subsequently organised the distribution of the public report to over 1,000 festivals, tourism agencies and relevant government departments and arts agencies and managed the voluminous subsequent correspondence.

University and faculty funding enabled our researchers to visit and form partnerships with festivals in Parkes, Inverell, Bermagui, Daylesford and Bundanoon, and to conduct longitudinal field work, analyse data and write further customised reports for these individual festivals. The Faculties of Science and Social Science's Student Internship Schemes enabled teams of undergraduate students to accompany CIs on these trips. Student interns assisted in gathering and analyzing data, and writing a sequence of customised annual reports for these individual festivals from 2007-15.

Following the 2013 university-wide restructure, the project was relocated within the newly created School of Geography and Sustainable Communities in the Faculty of Social Sciences. This new institutional setting provided greater visibility and critical mass for the project. Further funding support extended from this Faculty and School, as well as from Global Challenges.

Students also played a role in strengthening community links between secondary and tertiary education institutions. For example, a UOW Community Engagement Grant funded the project “Bringing languages back to the community” and sent university students to partners Keira High School, Kiama High School, Smiths Hill High School and The Illawarra Grammar School to mentor high school students and act as language ambassadors.

Communicating our research broadly is a key strategy for reaching stakeholders in government and the general public. To further enhance public engagement with this research, the dedicated media and publicity manager of the university's Research Services Office coordinated a "Uni in the Brewery" public lecture on the project in Wollongong. The University Central Media Unit also profiled the project in its long-form news outlet, The Stand, and secured an opportunity to write an opinion piece for The Conversation. This unit also coordinated press releases and invitations with New South Publishing relating to the publication of Outback Elvis (NewSouth), a major nonfiction book written for a popular audience on the history and impact of the Parkes Elvis Festival.

Recognising that impact flows well beyond the completion of a research project's empirical phase, the university has continued to provide support as further outputs ensue, and as relationships with individual festivals have deepened.