Yours and Owls founder and organiser Ben Tillman has been working through a raft of plans for the festival to run at Flagstaff Hill. Photos: Keeli Royle.
Yours and Owls has hosted its annual bush regeneration initiative to encourage locals to clean up the environment for a chance to win tickets to the popular music festival. However, it could take more than just a one-off to protect our coast from rubbish when 15,000 people descend on Flagstaff Hill for the March event.
Bushcare and community volunteers lined the coastline of Wollongong City Beach on Friday (24 January) to clear out weeds and rubbish and restore native flora to the foreshore.
The clean-up day has been running for the past five years in the lead-up to the Yours and Owls Festival, with the event partnering with Wollongong City Council’s Rise and Shine Bush Care Group.
“We’re local. We grew up here. We live here. Obviously, we love the area,” Yours and Owls founder and organiser Ben Tillman said. “So it’s nice to be able to use what we’ve built with the festival and audience to turn that into something good for the area and the environment.”
The festival has a history of trying to reduce its environmental footprint, from having a zero single-use plastic policy and ditching plastic wristbands for material alternatives to trialling composting toilets. This year, however, there will be the additional challenge of stopping waste from entering the ocean at the waterside site of Flagstaff Hill.
“There’s pretty extensive waste management plans that happen – there are a lot of volunteers on site and there is a fence line that runs all the way along, which should catch anything,” Ben said.
“It’s being cleaned all throughout the day and our intention is to return everything to the way we found it.
“There’s people on site cleaning throughout the day, and at the end of the day when everyone’s out there’s a big sweep that gets done. I think there will be a beach clean-up on Sunday after the festival.”
Bushcare volunteers partnered with Yours and Owls to clean up the coastline.
The waste management is just one of many issues that organisers had to prove they could manage in order to use the site, with the event application still not having received final approval.
“That site has a blanket existing DA in place so we are using that and then on top of that you need to do an event application and to be approved for that kind of stuff, you need to have all of your risk plans,” Ben said.
“There’s an opportunity for the council still to impose stuff on us, so there’s security, risk, waste and traffic, and we have to do a heritage plan, so all that gets assessed and if it’s not up to scratch it won’t get approved.”
The impact of the festival noise has also been assessed and formed part of the application.
“There’s noise management plans in place; all that has been thought of,” Ben said.
“But I don’t think noise is really going to be an issue where the site is, and we’re shooting all the stages out to sea but that’s all part of the plan.”
Festival organisers announced that the event would be held at the iconic location of Flagstaff Hill in early December, just days after lodging an event application, with no certainty of approval.
But Ben said the move was fairly standard for the industry.
“I can guarantee that’s what pretty much every festival does,” he said. “If we were waiting for final approval, we wouldn’t be able to announce the event until the week before the actual event.
“People are just aware of it. I don’t actually know why, I guess because it’s an important site there’s more eyeballs on it.”
The festival is expected to be held waterside at Wollongong’s Flagstaff Hill, but formal approval still hasn’t been received.
Wollongong City Council has now given ”in-principle” support for the event to take place, but the final tick of approval is yet to come.
“You have a pretty good indication early on about whether it’s going to work, but it takes time to get all those things signed off,” Ben said.
The event was last held at the University of Wollongong after a three-year deal with the institution was struck, but moved this year due to a clash with Orientation Week activities.
And Ben said holding the event on the first weekend of March was a necessity.
“There’s a festival in New Zealand the week before us that we share talent with, there’s a festival the week after us and on the same weekend as us, but we can alternate days,” he said.
“It was important just to align with those things.”
The first and second releases of tickets have already sold out, with the third and final allocation expected to follow suit, with 15,000 people expected to attend.
The success of ticket sales comes as one of the state’s other major festivals, Splendour in the Grass, announced its cancellation for the second year in a row.
“It’s been very tough for the past five years, to be honest, with COVID and we had a flood here as well, then just the cost-of-living crisis, but I feel really good about 2025. I think it’s going to be a good year,” Ben said.
If the site gains approval, the Yours and Owls Festival will boast an impressive lineup of international, national and local artists at one of the region’s best locations.
“I can’t think of a better festival site in the world, really. It’s incredible. Pretty much 360 degrees of the water, you have the escarpment, you have the harbour,” Ben said.
“I feel our brand is pretty synonymous with Wollongong, and you can’t really get more Wollongong than that site.”
Confirmation of approval by Wollongong City Council is expected shortly and a council spokesperson said: “Flagstaff Hill is the only location currently being assessed as part of this event application.”
Tickets are still available through the Yours and Owls website.
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