Folk Magazine is an independent editorial publication about Australian folk and roots music. We write so a reader can plan: which festival shape to choose, where live rooms still exist between the big weekends, and how to read a program without being lied to by a screenshot.
We are not Parks, not a state tourism office, not a promoter, and not the media cell of any festival named on this site. Festival names, artist names and venue names are other people’s property. They appear here as identifiers. If you need a ticket, a refund, an access map or a media pass, you want the official organiser.
Why this domain exists again
The domain carried a 2016–2022 WordPress magazine — interviews, folk spotlights, live notes, a contributors page, an issue callout. Later it also collected off-topic spam. This rebuild keeps the clean editorial paths, rewrites every body, and 301s the junk. /about-us/ now points here.
We did not copy archive text. We did not reconstruct interviews. We did not invent line-ups so the pages would look “busy”. A quiet, honest page is better than a crowded fake.
What we publish
- Planning essays on festivals and the calendar.
- Method pieces on reviews and interviews.
- Rebuilt heritage features under their original paths.
- Contributor standards at Write for us.
- Direct answers on FAQ.
We do not publish prices, rankings, or awards we did not witness. We do not take a booking fee. We do not promise coverage in exchange for a guest-list.
Editorial standards
The short version lives on Editorial. The even shorter version is: citeable facts only; official sites for anything that can change; no quotes we did not collect; historical listings labelled as such.
If we get a fact wrong, contact the desk with the source. We would rather correct a page than defend a flourish.
Who the writing is for
People who will travel for a weekend if the weekend is true. People who play in kitchens and want to know how to sit in a public session. People who write about music and need a house style that will not embarrass them in a year. People who remember the old Folk Magazine and deserve a rebuild that does not impersonate it.
What we are not
We are not a shop — /cart/ and /my-account/ are gone. We are not a dentist, a skate shop, a mortgage broker, or any of the other squatters that landed on this domain. Those URLs redirect home.
Contact
Editorial notes go through the contact form, which uses FormSubmit to reach the magazine inbox. That inbox is not a box office.
Folk Magazine is a desk you can argue with. That is the point of a magazine. A poster cannot be argued with. A poster can only be replaced.
A short history without nostalgia
The first Folk Magazine on this domain was a small independent title that treated folk as a wider colour than a costume. It published features, spotlights, live notes, and a contributors page. It also sat on the open web long enough for later squatters to park off-topic posts on the same WordPress. When we rebuilt the site, we treated those two facts differently. Editorial paths were kept and rewritten. Spam paths were excluded.
That is why /about-us/ 301s here, why /cart/ dies, and why /article/ slugs still open. A reader who bookmarked a 2019 essay should not land on a skateboard post. They should land on a page that tells the truth about what we will not reconstruct.
Independence, in practice
Independence is not a mood. It is a set of refusals. We refuse to sell tickets. We refuse to call ourselves a media partner of a festival we have not dated as such. We refuse to invent a phone number for a lighthouse or a box office we do not run. We refuse to put a price in a sentence to make the page feel “practical”. Practical, on this desk, means: here is the official door.
If a future commercial relationship exists — a sponsored note, a paid newsletter — it will be labelled. Today, there is no such note.
Who writes
The rebuilt site is a house style first and a byline second. Contributors are welcome under Write for us. Historical contributor names from the old roll-call are not republished as if they still write here. If you are one of those people and want a public note, use Contact.
How to hold us to account
Every page carries the fleet disclaimer in the footer. If we drift from it — if we start sounding like a box office, or if we invent a quote — tell us. The correction will be on the page, not in a private apology.
The magazine is for people who will change a weekend because a sentence was true. We intend to keep writing those sentences, and to keep deleting the ones that are not.