The Big Red Bash will be staged for the last time in July 2027, its organisers announced on Wednesday, ending a festival that has drawn crowds of between 8,000 and 12,000 to a sand dune outside Birdsville in far south-west Queensland.
The final event runs from 6 to 8 July 2027 at Big Red, about 1,500 kilometres west of Brisbane, near the point where Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory meet. Tickets go on sale at 10am AEDT on 12 November.
Outback Music Festival Group, the company run by founder Greg Donovan and his family, gave four reasons. Early in 2026 a major rain event flooded the site and forced the cancellation of this year's festival when it was 90 per cent sold. Costs have climbed. Record July rain closed roads and cut access to the site in recent years. And the location means, in the organisers' words, that "a mini city is built from the ground up each year".
Donovan said the festival was "successful and financially viable", but that outside pressures had made the Birdsville site "difficult to sustain for the long term". "It's a lot to walk away from, but we'd rather go out on a high than risk the event being prevented from continuing by circumstances beyond our control," he said in a statement on the festival's website.
He told the ABC the decision had been hard after 13 years. "We built this festival over many years; we built it from our heart, but this decision is one we've had to make with our head," he said. He said costs had risen but were not the main problem.
The water is still there. Parts of the site sit under about six feet of floodwater, according to the organisers. Their model, based on Bureau of Meteorology average monthly pan evaporation figures for Birdsville Airport between 1970 and 2020, put the deepest sections at 2.4 metres on 30 June and estimates 540 millimetres had evaporated by September. It predicts the ground will be dry by late February 2027. Ticket holders will get full refunds if the event cannot go ahead.
Birdsville averages about 160 millimetres of rain a year against roughly 3,500 millimetres of open-water evaporation, the organisers say. That gap is the basis for their confidence that the dune will be dry in time.
The festival's own history records other setbacks. The 2014 event lost money, and in 2015 Donovan put his $300,000 redundancy payout into the festival, with Jimmy Barnes as headliner. The Covid cancellation of 2020 cost the organisers "more than $3 million not covered by insurance", by their account. Rain disrupted the 2023 and 2024 festivals, and 2025 was a planned break year with a scaled-back John Williamson concert on the dune.
The organisers say the festival brings more than $20 million a year in tourism spending to the region. That is their own figure, and no independent study of it has been published. The local reaction suggests the money is real enough. "It's a bit devastating for us out here; it's something we look forward to to boost our economy," Diamantina Shire Mayor Francis Murray told the ABC. "It's going to have an effect on our businesses that are already doing it tough."
Birdsville business owner Jenna Brook said the festival brought people who would not otherwise make the trip. "To lose that is a huge hit to businesses," she said.
Missy Higgins, Hoodoo Gurus, The Teskey Brothers, The Living End, Jessica Mauboy and The Whitlams are among 20 acts on the 2027 bill. After that, the company's Mundi Mundi Bash near Broken Hill becomes its only event. Tickets for the final Big Red Bash go on sale on 12 November.
