Organisers of Yours & Owls Festival have announced the cancellation of the event due to extreme weather events.
Flooding in and around the Wollongong festival site across the weekend has left the grounds a soggy mess, and with more rain forecast, organisers have made the heartbreaking decision to cancel.
“With total exhaustion and sadness, we announce the cancellation of Yours and Owls 2022 due to flooding,” organisers said in a statement regarding the two-day event this afternoon.
“With the amount of water that has landed on Stuart Park in the past few weeks, the flash flooding we experienced in The Gong over the weekend and the forecast for the rest of this week, we simply cannot safely execute this year’s event.”
Organisers have been frantically pumping water off the site – even using the SCG’s famous Super Sopper – and working on management and mitigation plans, “but nothing has been a match for the formidable force of La Niña”.
Ticket holders will receive a full refund.
The festival’s cancellation follows the cancellation of their New Year’s Eve event, which was impacted by COVID.
Love Live Music?
Get the latest Live Music news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
Scheduled for this Saturday April 2nd and Sunday April 3rd, Yours & Owls 2022 promised a massive, mainly local lineup, including Hilltop Hoods, BENEE, Bliss N Eso, Flight Facilities, Peking Duk and Violent Soho.
For the first time, don’t bore us was giving fans the opportunity to vote for one of the acts to perform at this year’s festival.
Altogether, over 100 acts have lost work not due to the global pandemic, but to Mother Nature.
“The past few years have been an unprecedented shit fight of biblical proportions for the live music industry,” festival organisers acknowledged.
“If you can spare any of the cash you had stashed to spend this weekend, please consider donating to those people along the East Coast who have been and continue to be severely impacted by these recent and current flood events.”
The BRAG‘s Luke Girgis and Poppy Reid recently sat down with the co-founder of Yours & Owls and Farmer & The Owl, Ben Tillman, on the Fear At The Top podcast. Listen to it below.
