Forget the Opera House, this outback festival is the real deal

Queensland’s outback serenades me. It’s late autumn, when opera singers converge on the towns of Winton and Longreach for the annual Festival of Outback Opera – but it’s not a soprano or a countertenor squawking out those notes that has roused me from bed.

A cacophony of galahs has settled on power lines along Winton’s main drag of Elderslie Street, right outside my room at the North Gregory Hotel where Australia’s unofficial anthem, Banjo Paterson’s Waltzing Matilda, was first performed in 1895. As day dawns, the pink and grey birds raise a racket. The bush soundtrack reminds me that music is part of Winton’s DNA.

Still,it’s a surprise to see Grammy Award-winning South Korean soprano Sumi Jo ambling along the main street of this remote town of fewer than 2000 residents. No one swivels their head because, really, who would think a global superstar had checked into one of Winton’s unpretentious motels and was now popping into shops and patting dogs?

Sumi Jo is an animal lover, so I ask her what she thinks of the galahs’ performance. “They’re my competitors,” she says, with a laugh. “As a coloratura [soprano], I always have to imitate the bird sounds, so I hear very carefully their sounds and I always wonder what they’re saying. They must have some good things to say to us.”

The birds are probably saying that, out here, you roll with the punches. That’s what everyone did the previous evening, when a looming storm relocated the 2025 launch event from the Crack Up Sisters’ outdoor Dustarena to a school hall. The next day, the “sisters” – a larrikin clowning troupe that travels regional Australia performing at events such as the Mundi Mundi Bash – conducted an interactive tour of their zany Elderslie Street headquarters and arts precinct, Crackup Corner.

Visitors played yard games (made from cleverly recycled materials), giggled and creaked their hips while spinning hula hoops and browsed a museum showcasing outback entertainers. Founder and “big sister” Amanda-Lyn Pearson said: “Our aim is to have year-round programming where different artists come in.” Weather permitting, of course.

Another fun-filled fantasia fashioned from recycled materials sits on Winton’s outskirts. The Musical Fence, created by percussionist and composer Graeme Leak, debuted in 2003. It’s surrounded by a junkyard orchestra that includes a drum kit (complete with pedal) and other instruments incorporating hub caps, tyre rims, oil drums and a bed frame. The unlikely installation has even featured in a Gotye music video. Pick up a stick and go your hardest.

Winton is also known for opals and dinosaur fossils – claims to fame that unite at the festival’s Dark Sky Serenade, an event staged at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum perched on The Jump-Up, a mesa popping from the Channel Country’s flat plains 25 kilometres out of town. Before the stars (literal and operatic) start to shine, there’s time to explore the sculpture-studded Dinosaur Canyon trail and admire the stretch-on-forever landscape before settling into our seats.

Where does opal come into the evening, though? Both Sumi Jo and Nina Korbe – a First Nations soprano who can trace her ancestry to this area – wore opal pendants so large they could be spied from rows back. Nature also played along with the concert, which was timed to coincide with a technicolour sunset as flashy as those opals. Eventually, the sky-fire wanes to star-pierced black, allowing everyone to see exactly why The Jump-Up became Australia’s first International Dark Sky Sanctuary.

How to wrap an extraordinary night like this? There’s only one way – and that’s with a Waltzing Matilda singalong. No matter the outfit – jeans, sneakers, RM Williams boots, haute couture gowns or diamante designer heels – we raise our voices as one. Banjo would be gobsmacked.

THE DETAILS

BOOK
Opera Queensland’s 2026 Festival of Outback Opera, which includes ticketed and free events, runs May 19-25. This year’s headline artist is New Zealand-Tongan tenor Filipe Manu. The festival starts in Winton and continues in Longreach, 180 kilometres away.

GETTING THERE
Self-drive, experience the festival via a multi-day bus or rail package, or day-trip via a charter flight from Brisbane for the gala concerts – Winton’s Dark Sky Serenade (May 21) and Longreach’s Singing in the Night (May 23).

MORE
See oq.com.au

The writer was a guest of Opera Queensland.