Every ticket to the last Big Red Bash is gone in under an hour, eight months after floodwater sank this year’s

The last Big Red Bash took less than an hour to sell out.

Tickets for the final edition of the outback music festival, billed as The Last Hurrah, went on sale at 10am AEDT (7am AWST) on Thursday 12 November and were gone in under an hour. The festival’s website now says every ticket has been sold.

The farewell runs from 6 to 8 July 2027 at Big Red, the sand dune about 35 kilometres west of Birdsville in far south-west Queensland. Crowds are capped at under 11,000.

Who is playing?

The farewell line-up is a roll call of Australian music: Missy Higgins, Hoodoo Gurus, The Living End, Birds of Tokyo, Jessica Mauboy, The Whitlams, Kate Ceberano, Leo Sayer, Tim Finn, Troy Cassar-Daley, Shannon Noll, Ross Wilson, Chocolate Starfish, Shane Howard, Wes Carr and Jem Cassar-Daley, with Furnace and the Fundamentals, 50 Years of Fleetwood Mac, Tom Busby and Gypsy Lee.

Why is it ending?

Founder Greg Donovan announced in October that 2027 would be the last Birdsville event. He cited rising costs, recent weather and the demands of staging a festival in one of the most remote places in the country, saying continuing there was “becoming difficult to sustain for the long term”.

He said the family would rather farewell the event on its own terms, and end on a high, than risk it being stopped by circumstances beyond its control. “It breaks my heart to have to walk away,” he said at the time.

The weather has already had its say. In March, once-in-a-generation rain flooded the site and the 2026 festival was cancelled with about 90 per cent of tickets sold. Parts of the site were still under water in October, and the organisers expected it to have evaporated by February 2027.

What happens if it cannot go ahead?

Buyers paid a deposit, with further instalments due from March 2027. The organisers say there will be full refunds if the event cannot proceed.

What has the Bash meant to the outback?

The festival began in 2013 with John Williamson playing an acoustic set on the side of the dune. It has sold out every year since, drawing more than 78,000 people to Birdsville in total, and almost 60 per cent of its crowd comes from interstate.

For a town in the Channel Country, that is a once-a-year flood of a different kind. Businesses along the long road west, from Morven to Windorah, have said the festival fortnight is one of their busiest of the year, and people plan their holidays around it. The festival has also raised up to $400,000 a year for the Royal Flying Doctor Service and juvenile diabetes research.

Will there be another outback Bash?

Yes, but not at Birdsville. The Donovan family’s Mundi Mundi Bash, held near Broken Hill in New South Wales, continues and becomes its main focus.