If you listen carefully at 4am on New Year’s Day – you may hear the echoes of chants from thousands of Woodford Folk Festival goers seeing in the New Year with world-renowned musician Tenzin Choegyal and the Monks of Tibet leading the throng.

Yes, you read that right – 4am. But in spite of the early hour, this sunrise ritual has proven so popular that it has been going for almost a quarter of a century – building a larger crowd each year.

In all the years I’ve trudged through the mud in my gumboots to enjoy the festival I have yet to experience the Hilltop Sunrise Ceremony,  although many fellow festival goers have urged me to make my way up the mountain to set my intentions for the year to come.

I’ve been given the tip that the best way to do it is to keep partying through the wee hours to the plethora of live music on offer, ensuring you don’t crash to the temptation of going to sleep instead of greeting the first sunrise of the new year.

Tenzin Choegyal smiles as he recalls how the ceremony began 24 years ago, soon after he emigrated to Australia from Tibet.

“We thought it would be amazing to do at four in the morning while people are still in their dream state,” Choegyal explains. “You can see the Glasshouse Mountains, all these beautiful mountains in the distance, while the mist of the clouds are still drifting around on the waist of the mountains.

“And you take a pledge or anything that you want, to positively think about the world and yourself as well. It starts always from … if you want something positive for the world, I guess you have to start from yourself in the first place.

“And so it’s that intention of positivity, creating positive `thoughts’, and that will lead to actions in the year to come.”

And so it comes to be every year that while most people are tucked up in bed recovering from New Year’s Eve activities, the Hilltop Sunrise Ceremony continues anew as an integral part of the festival that now attracts more than 130,000 people annually to Woodfordia, on the foothills of the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

The festival is on the site of a former dairy farm, now covered in more than 120,000 subtropical rainforest trees lovingly planted by the lifeblood of the festival – its volunteers.

Tenzin says the festival is unique on the world scene.

“That’s where I started my music career in the West. I was freshly arrived in Australia, and the community of Woodford embraced me very inclusively. I found it to be a world in itself,” he says.

“It was like you are in Australia, but you are not in Australia at the same time. You are in a very different universe. It felt like there were elements of all around the globe.

“For me, music is like a drifting cloud where it’s not bothered by the geographical boundaries that we humans put on this planet that we call home.

“When somebody asks me, ‘oh, can you describe your music?’, I describe it like that because I don’t know how to describe it in a sound. It’s very hard to describe your sound. But in a pictorial form, I think of my music as like drifting clouds.”

Woodford Folk Festival managing director Amanda Jackes cannot imagine the festival without Tenzin’s sunrise ceremony and the three minutes of silence the night before to mark the new year.

It is part of the tapestry of more than 500 acts over six days from December 26 to January 1, performed by more than 2000 local, national and international creatives – making it the largest gathering of artists and musicians in Australia.

More than 1000 volunteers are building the festival infrastructure now, and have been all through December, continuing right up until Christmas Day, the day before the festival officially opens. Many of those volunteers will spend another week after the festival ends to pull it all down.

“Since the dawn of time, humans have been celebrating the changes of seasons, the changes of the calendars, the changes of years, and this is part of that process,” Jackes says.

“And it’s very much a time of renewal. It is a time when our ceremony will actually be expressing the voices of all of the dreams of everyone who has been part of the Village of Woodfordia for those six days. So it’s going to be a very exciting and moving ceremony on the 1st of January this year. It will be very special.”

This is the 36th iteration of the Woodford Folk Festival – and the 28th held at Woodfordia. Last year was the festival’s much heralded return after a two-year break because of the pandemic.

Jackes has worked with the festival’s founder and former executive director Bill Hauritz for the past 25 years and it’s her first year at the helm after Hauritz’s retirement.

Hauritz’s name became synonymous with the Woodford Folk Festival over the years, but Jackes says his passing on the baton won’t hinder the festival’s development.

“It’s the 67th largest town in Australia when the festival’s on,” Jackes says. “I’ve been involved for many years and working with Bill for many years and I’ve been general manager for 20-plus years, so the job’s very much morphed.”

Jackes is conscious of lifting the bar after the somewhat tumultuous return of the festival post-pandemic – improving the comfort level of all the venues by increasing their size, ensuring better pathways through Woodfordia, adding more food stalls and better amenities throughout the site.

“It was a very challenging time during those Covid years … we spent so long reinventing ourselves,” she says.

This year the festival is triumphantly back in full swing, with acts such as the Vanuatu Water Drummers, award-winning Irish artist Lisa O’Neill and local musical legends Kate Miller-Heidke and Kasey Chambers.

If you’re looking for a moment of peace in the throng, Tenzin Choegyal urges you to come to Mandala House, where a Tibetan sand mandala will be created symbolising harmony and impermanence. It’s a cherished spot for him, a step away from a busy performing schedule that also reminds him of how far he has travelled in life.

“Mandala House is a little tent, a little marquee that we put up every year. And people love seeing the sand mandala. It’s a sacred artwork, but we have been able to bring it into public view. Normally it only happens in the monasteries and nunneries,” Choegyal says.

“Everybody can just come in and view the mandala. Normally in Tibet, it only happens in the monastic situation. So in Tibet we only get a viewing for one second, as 150,000 people are queued to view the mandala. But at Woodford, people will be able to view it from the beginning ’til the end. So it’s a nice place to share traditional art meeting the contemporary world.

“At the end of the festival, we dissolve the mandala and take it to the pond and offer the coloured sand that has been used for the creation of the mandala. Through the cycle of the water, the Tibetans believe the cycle will bring blessings.”

So will I make it to the Hilltop Sunrise Ceremony this Woodford Folk Festival? I certainly hope to. I have found comfy shoes for dancing in the all-important lead-up, ready to walk up the mountain for the event. Listen for my chants.

woodfordfolkfestival.com

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