The festival has been held every year since 2013, with the exception of a one-year break in 2020, due to the pandemic. The 2021 festival, attended by over 9,000 people, was the first major multi-day camping festival to be held in Australia during the COVID-19 era.
“The Birdsville Big Red Bash is the most remote music festival in the world and has consistently attracted large crowds who travel to Birdsville from all corners of Australia,” said Outback Music Festival Group managing director and the Big Red Bash’s founder and organiser, Greg Donovan.
“It’s a bucket list experience for so many people and has consistently sold out.
“The spectacular desert location means we have no infrastructure on site – not even the basics of running water or electricity – so every year we effectively build and remove a mini city from scratch and spend six days looking after thousands of people.
“It’s a huge task, and one of the most logistically demanding events in the world to stage.
“Planning for the event is year-round, and most of our crew set aside a month to be on the ground from start to finish,” said Donovan.
“After eleven successful years of staging the event and overcoming so many challenges and obstacles along the journey, our awesome team is overdue a break to reset and recharge.
“So, we are having a ‘BRB breather’ in 2025.
“To us it feels a bit like having a gap year after 12 years of school! This break is not dissimilar to what some major overseas festivals do, with the most prominent example being Glastonbury in the UK which has a ‘Fallow Year’ once every five or six years when they feel the time is right.
“It’s not a decision we have taken lightly, and we know that this will cause disappointment for those who have the Big Red Bash in their travel plans for 2025, and for businesses in Outback Queensland who benefit from the influx of travellers the event brings to the region. For this reason, we wanted to give people as much notice as possible about the pause.
“Hopefully many will plan ahead to join us in 2026, and if that’s the case they can lock in 7th to 9th July that year, when we will be back refreshed, recharged and ready and eager to rock the Simpson once again!”
The Big Red Bash’s sister festival, the Mundi Mundi Bash, held in outback New South Wales will go ahead in 2025. The NSW event was sold out this year and became the largest festival ever held in the Australian outback with 14,000 attendees.
The pause of the Big Red Bash comes in a difficult year for Australian festivals, with multiple events cancelled at short notice or permanently retired.
The most high-profile cancellation was Splendour in the Grass, which pulled the plug shortly after tickets went on sale. Byron Bay Bluesfest also recently announced that the 2025 event will be its last, while organisers of Tasmanian summer festival Mona Foma announced, post-festival, that the event had had its last run this year. Mona’s winter festival was also paused for 2024.
