Sowing the seeds: Michael Tucak’s vision for NewFarm, New Country music festival

Former politician and long-time supporter of WA’s creative sector, Michael Tucak, is one of the driving forces behind NewFarm, New Country—a brand-new alt-country and folk festival set at the New Farm Campground in The Great Southern from Friday, October 17, to Sunday, October 19—with tickets on sale now. With a vision to platform local talent alongside national and international acts, the festival aims to strengthen Denmark’s vibrant creative community while placing WA firmly on the national touring map. LILLIAN WILSON spoke with Michael Tucak about the festival and the legacy he hopes it will create for WA’s cultural landscape.

You’ve been a long-time advocate for WA’s creative sector—from running P.U.L.P. to sitting on boards like RTRFM and Fringe World. How does New Farm, New Country fit into your broader mission to support and celebrate the arts?

NewFarm, New Country’s vision is to establish a landmark annual alt-country and folk music festival in Western Australia’s Great Southern, providing a platform for world-class and emerging artists from both here and abroad, while also celebrating the region’s own culture, creativity and community.

We want to both provide new opportunities for WA alt-country/folk artists to reach audiences, including artists from the Great Southern, Denmark and the South West, and provide an anchor for touring alt-country and folk artists to make it here to WA, which still gets left off the national touring circuit too often.

We also hope those two goals combine with WA artists being able to connect to touring international or East Coast artists, and vice versa, for future touring opportunities and other collaborations. The timing of NewFarm, New Country is deliberate, to follow on from Dashville Skyline festival in NSW’s Hunter Valley and similar genre festivals like Groundwater Country Music Festival in Queensland and Out On The Weekend, an Americana day festival near Melbourne, and to hopefully in the future see more of the acts from those festivals coming to play Denmark and WA. And hopefully, more WA acts will be able to join those East Coast festivals!

It is all about creating new opportunities for musicians and performers to celebrate and enjoy some of the truly incredible alt-country/folk music being made both right here in the west and around the world.

Were you involved in navigating the trickier logistics behind launching a brand-new regional festival? Was it difficult?

We’re a very tiny team—a micro-team—but the shared enthusiasm for NewFarm, New Country’s vision has been our power source, and the team comes with a range of experience and knowledge, from active musicians regularly putting on shows, lineups or events, to folks who’ve worked on setting up festival sites like Meredith Music Festival in Victoria or creating other successful festival events in a range of art forms. There’s been a lot of superb support from people in and around Denmark and the Great Southern, including all the relevant bodies we work with. Plus, plenty of great advice from people running other music festivals elsewhere or at other times. So yes, it’s been a lot of work from the ground up, but we’re driven by the vision and goals to hopefully make something that lasts.

How important was it for you and the team to platform local and regional talent in a meaningful way?

That is one of our core goals—to provide a sustainable festival that thrives on the support and strong appeal to our local regional communities, where we can prioritise local acts from the Great Southern, South West and WA alongside national and international acts. For us, the local acts aren’t just going to fill the early spots on the bill, they’ll be some of the real highlights.

In this first year, we are way excited to have Lemon Myrtle playing right upon the release of their debut album. The Wilds emerge from wherever they hibernate for a rare show, Tammy London plays the great tunes she’s releasing throughout this year, and we’ve enticed Racoo to head back home from the east.

From Perth, there are acts like Anna Schneider, who is a stunning performer that everyone needs to see! Plus hyper-local artists like Sienna Raii, who more and more people are hearing about, and some ‘old dogs’—I hope they don’t mind me calling them that—of Simon London and Dave Mann teaming up to do something quite special with Mark Gretton on drums.

We also hope the NewFarm, New Country lineup becomes a fantastic ‘all in one place’ opportunity to see some of Perth and WA’s best alt-country and folk artists—Polly Medlen from the wheatbelt, Andrew Mostyn Powell stretching out in new musical directions from his days with Jaycos and Bucket, Nici Ward from Lonesome Dove with a new bedroom-indie project and the irrepressible lads from Stack of Bibles. We also have our own ‘world-class from right here in WA’ star, Emily Barker, playing the sunset with Luke Dux, from The Kill Devil Hills, and The Wilds.

We’re hoping that those acts all leave with a stack of new fans from the festival weekend, wrapped up in some great memories of the magical NewFarm Campground site and stunning wider Great Southern.

In a previous interview, from your time running as an independent candidate, you talked a bit about the importance of creativity, particularly in the arts. Do you see festivals like this as part of that importance?

Our hope for NewFarm, New Country is that as a music festival, it will contribute to the wider creativity and community of the Great Southern. A town like Denmark already has a very strong, beating creative heart, and we hope we can add to that with our offering.

Creativity is an incredibly important thing for a healthy and vibrant community, whether that’s in cities or country towns. It can lead to a range of tangible benefits, from well-being and connection to even bigger items like imagining futures, tackling difficult and complex problems and forging identity and history in real time. It’s the sort of thing you might only notice when it’s gone, when it’s too late—so it is a vital thing to keep alive and keep stoking the fire of—we never know what the future holds, but creativity will help us tackle it!

Regional arts events often struggle with funding and sustainability, which you have also spoken about with us. What’s your take on how grassroots initiatives like NewFarm, New Country can thrive long term?

We’re really hopeful that NewFarm, New Country will earn the support and love of the Denmark and Great Southern communities, from Walpole and Albany and out to Pemberton, Manji and Bridgetown and even Kojonup and Cranbrook. That will be fundamental to the festival being sustainable over time, having that local buy-in and ownership. We’re also going to launch a fresh idea for how the festival can be run in the future, something different from the usual models of a promoter bearing all the risk and reward or committee-run associations, which can sometimes get flipped off the rails. We’ll be announcing this at the festival itself—so you’ll have to come!

The idea is to provide a year-round approach to the festival, which benefits festival-goers as well as artists, and allows the festival itself to become enduring. So this year’s festival is also the start of that really exciting step—a fresh way to run a sustainable arts event.

What kind of legacy or future do you hope this festival creates for the Great Southern’s creative landscape?

We hope that with the use of a new sustainable approach to running the festival in the future, we can create a future that is sustainable for the Great Southern and could be replicated or even improved on elsewhere, in other local or arts contexts. It would be fantastic if NewFarm, New Country, became a staple event on the annual alt-country/folk music calendar, able to attract global-level acts to come and enjoy all the Great Southern—and WA—offers, and shine bright lights on our WA acts. We’d love it to still be going in decades to come and to give audiences memories and good times that keep on returning like an investment!

You’ve long been vocal about the need to invest in the arts as a pillar of innovation and community wellbeing. Do you see New Farm, New Country as an example of that vision in action?

NewFarm, New Country is being driven by the investment of time and resources by our nano team, and we hope it will pay off for much wider benefit. There is a lot of discussion at the moment about where the profits of musical endeavours are being channelled by aggregated platforms—which is causing lots of artists and audiences to stop using them—and it’s not too big a stretch to imagine a future with sustainable incomes for artists and profits invested back into human creativity, which history shows is totally unceasing and can lead to some of the most exciting things we can experience. We aren’t trying to change the world, but we are intentional about paying our artists well and hoping to create a sustainable event that will deliver many benefits to the community it’s a part of.

Michael Tucak is one of the driving forces behind the new alt-country music festival, New Farm, New Country. Tickets are on sale now from humanitix.com

Photo by Paris Hawken