The first festival was in 2007 at Wingham Central Park.

every year since then we have been strongly committed to growing, not only our audience, but the sustainability and capacity of the event and the volunteer organisation that Makes it happen.

The festival is best described as vibrant, yet relaxed. You can throw a rug under the bright flag sails and absorb every second of the music from Friday evening, all day Saturday to sunset on Sunday.

We always aim to promote our local artists, giving them the experience to play alongside the bigger names that are larger than life on stage at night… and some of our local artists have gone a long way from Wingham to Nashville!

If you love following an artist rise from being your favourite, to everyone’s favourite, this is the spot for you. We were all so excited when festival favourite Colin Lillee, originally from Scotland via the Northern Territory, played at Akoostik and then appeared on the Voice. In 2009 ‘Smokin’ Joe Robinson played to an inspired local crowd on Central Park before taking on the world, to now be regarded as a guitar virtuoso!

Numerous Australian icons have played the WMF stages, including Russell Morris, Kasey Chambers, Ross Wilson, Diesel, Grace Knight, Doc Neeson, Joe Camilleri, James Reyne, Richard Clapton, Wendy Matthews, Jenny Morris and many more.

We have had years of glorious warm sunshine, which has been by far the majority, we also had one year of a forceful unpredicted storm that had major Impact and cut the festival one day short. Our Akoo crowd were all the more supportive when this happened as they knew they are just as much a part of it all as we are – they know we can’t do it without them! It is this that keeps us inspired year after year refreshing the Festival by adding new art forms and elements to the program. This in turn exposes the Festival audience and the wider community to creative endeavors that might otherwise not be available to a regional audience.

In 2020 of course COVID impacted our plans and after thinking we had a solution in moving to smaller venues in the streets of the town we took the safer option to present the festival In a live stream format across two days. This provided the one off novelty of music home delivered to peoples lounge rooms for free!

So live like a local, save the third weekend in October for the Wingham Music Festival and immerse yourself in music, it’s good for the soul!