Case Study:
Orange Region Fire Festival
Location: Orange, Blayney, and Cabonne Shire
Offers: Art and culture festival with exhibitions, shows, and workshops
We spoke to: Orange360 General Manager Ned Sweetapple
Between Orange Food Week and Orange Wine Festival in the region’s event calendar, Fire Festival is taking shape as the third major multi-day event drawing in visitors. The ten-day program takes place across various venues in Orange, Blayney and Cabonne Shire, combining a range of arts and cultural attractions with the region’s established food and beverage offerings. This curated festival, celebrating all things warm and fiery during the region’s coldest, quietest month, represents an effort to attract visitors during the winter slump, as well as get locals out and about.
This year’s festival, from Friday 1 – Sunday 10 August 2025, will feature art exhibitions and live music at a number of hotels, restaurants, and wineries, as well silversmithing and ceramics workshops. All events are paid, ticketed entry, hosted independently by various businesses but overseen by the event organisers at Orange360, a structure which better ensures the growing festival’s profitability. Tickets for the full program are available to buy through the festival’s main website, listed below.
The arts and culture aspect of this festival differentiates it from those other big festivals in Orange, and winter festivals within the region. Hence, Ned Sweetapple and the Orange360 events team have chosen to drop the ‘Winter’ previously in the festival’s title. Since Ned came on board in 2023, this focus on the arts has become more concerted, and her goal is to make Fire Festival a central attraction for arts and culture to the region. Already it is a platform for creatives local to the area, who have had previous years’ events to showcase the products or experiences that their business offers. Last year, approximately three-thousand people attended the festival, of whom about half were overnight or weeklong visitors. Ned has seen that the festival is attractive to the Sydney market, and to grow it in future years plans to target this market with increased advertising.
Currently, Orange360 has only a small marketing budget for the festival, funded by Orange Regional Council, as they await confirmation of funding from Destination NSW. While not essential to the festival’s viability, additional funding would be useful in promoting the festival more extensively online and in traditional media, both regionally and in Sydney and Canberra. Nonetheless, Orange360’s established and highly polished Instagram has been a promotional centre point for past festivals and will continue to be so this year. The team now has plenty of high-quality photo and video assets from previous years’ events to use for content, and so should drive a strong campaign.
For Ned and the team, becoming clear on the festival’s theme and intention has given it more shape and strategy as a growing cultural event. More than boosting winter tourism to the region, Ned wants this festival to function as a network for local creatives. Through the festival’s organisation, she stresses the importance of artists and cultural tourism provider’s collaborating with businesses in other sectors, such as accommodation, food and wine, throughout other major events and the whole year. All participating businesses and organisers in the program must have their festival events listed with ATDW, a powerful free tool for exposure that Ned advocates strongly for.
As both festival organiser and tourism network manager, she says, ‘Destination and cultural tourism need to work together to create what we call package offerings, building experiences with multiple dimensions so that people have more than one reason to visit a place or buy a ticket.’
There’s certainly a growing market for domestic destination tourism that intersects with the arts and the wellness industry, as more and more overworked city dwellers look for high-value, relatively affordable escapes closer to home. Fire Festival comfortably ticks these three boxes, and Ned and her team’s long-term goal for the festival is to build it into a major drawcard both for funding and visitation to the area. Twenty thousand is the dream number for attendance.
Four tips we got from Ned:
- Collaboration as a creative is key, so reach out to established businesses within the tourism sector around you and find ways to work together.
- Get to know your audience and tailor your offering to that audience.
- Don’t start any commercial creative endeavour that wholly relies on external funding; to be sustainable your business must be independently profitable.
- Make yourself familiar with ATDW (Australian Tourism Data Warehouse) and how to make the most of it for your business
More info:
Orange Regional Fire Festival homepage
Researched and written for Arts OutWest by Callum Robinson
