Three years on and the 2019 National Folk Festival, the event’s last fully fledged iteration, feels like an eternity ago.

With the 2020 festival cancelled and 2021’s scaled-down Good Folk taking over the streets of Queanbeyan for the Easter long weekend, this year they’re back at EPIC and gearing up for a return to the glory days.

With a program that combines headline acts with cult favourites, quirky fringe acts, workshops and dances, there is a sense of excitement and anticipation amongst performers, administrators, volunteers, and festivalgoers alike.

One of this year’s headline acts, Kate Ceberano, told Canberra Daily she was eager to be a part of the fun after her friend, Festival Artistic Director Katie Noonan, outlined her vision.

“What she’s trying to do with the festival is return it to an earlier story, pay homage to the owners of our country, and give us an identity of folk music,” Ceberano said.

Initially unsure of how her contemporary pop music fitted within the broad church of folk music, Noonan reassured Ceberano of her rightful place.

“She told me you are essentially Australian, bringing the history and sound of your life into your work, and no one can judge whether it’s folk enough.”

“It’s what takes you back to that place and makes you emotionally responsive … it brings you back home.”

Playing on the Friday night, Ceberano comes to the Folky while touring her latest album, 2021’s Sweet Inspiration, which tips its hats to the traditions of folk music through honest storytelling.

The album comprises two originals written during lockdown, title track Sweet Inspiration, and Hold On, and a host of covers of some of her favourite songs.

Recorded in Melbourne over three days between lockdowns, Ceberano gathered her band members – who hadn’t seen each other in a year – into a studio to play all the songs live in real time.

Ceberano said Hold On was written for her daughter as she celebrated her second birthday in a row in lockdown.

“Hasn’t folk music always been for the purpose of telling a story?” she said. “This is the story of folk, and I guess I was writing Hold On like that for my daughter, and maybe every other person’s son or daughter in that space.”

Folky ‘spiritual home’ for local stalwarts

Local group and Festival stalwarts, the Shiny Bum Singers, have routinely played the Folky since they formed in 1999.

Shiny Bum Singers founder and member, Chris Clarke, told Canberra Daily they initially formed for the Festival for what was meant to be a one-off performance.

Realising Canberra’s “local industry” wasn’t represented in song, Clarke and some colleagues thought they’d right that by performing the “work songs of the public service in traditional working dress”.

“To our amazement, they put us on the program, so we had to create the group and the songs pretty much from scratch,” he said.

Their inaugural performance was scheduled for 10am on the Saturday morning, known amongst artists as a “graveyard shift”.

“It was an amazing first performance because we weren’t expecting any more than a few people turn up … but, in fact, the place was packed out to overflowing,” Clarke said. “Hundreds of people were turned away.”

Playing the Festival every few years, the Singers regard it as their “spiritual home”.

“We’re excited to be back at the National this year, we started there and it is where we came from,” Clarke said.

An accomplished singer, Clarke’s favourite part of the festival are the session bar singing sessions that can last well into the early hours of the morning, and the lesser-known hymns on Easter Sunday morning.

“It’s a bit of a hidden secret,” he said, “but it’s actually the best thing of the Festival.”

“Everybody comes to sing along, from Christians of all denominations of whatever degree of interest right through to atheists who want to come along … It’s the most unusual hymn book they sing from.”

Now many years since they first formed, just three of the original members remain, with nearly all 12 current singers no longer working as public servants.

“We’re all a bit older than we were 23 years ago, but we still find the energy from somewhere,” he said.

Writing all their own material, they have amassed a catalogue of roughly 350 songs.

“We were worried about running out of ideas early on, but far from it – and they’re still coming out now,” Clarke said. “The public service and politics it serves is a never-ending stream of inspiration.”

“And we don’t write so much now about actual public service as it is at the moment, but a lot of our audience are the same generation we are anyway, so the public service they know is still the public service we sing about.”

The National Folk Festival returns to Exhibition Park in Canberra over the Easter long weekend, 14-18 April; folkfestival.org.au