The 2025 line-up for the Meredith Music Festival has been revealed and every act named has never performed at the festival before.
The Meredith Music Festival lineup of first timers is:
• TV On The Radio
• Atarashii Gakko!
• Perfume Genius
• Folk Bitch Trio
• Pa Salieu
• Colin Hay
• HAAi
• Thee Sacred Souls
• Bar Italia
• Omar Souleyman
• Dames Brown
• Mildlife
• Saya Gray
• RONA.
• Sam Austins
• Radio Free Alice
• RP Boo
• Jack J
• Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice
• Drifting Clouds
• Florist
• Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir
• Brown Spirits
• Mouseatouille
• Lazy Susan
• Wax’o Paradiso
Meredith Music Festival
• Where: Supernatural Amphitheatre, Meredith, Victoria
• When: 5-7 December 2025
• Tickets: Second ballot round open until 19 August
Watch the 2025 Noise11.com interview with Colin Hay:
Meredith Music Festival wasn’t born out of a business plan so much as a backyard idea that refused to stay small.
In December 1991, about 200 friends, locals and curious travellers rolled into a farm outside the rural Victorian town of Meredith, pitched tents, and watched bands play off the back of a truck. It was cheekily dubbed the “Meredith Music Festival” because—well—there were bands, and there was Meredith. It was BYO, people slept in cars or under the stars, and a handful of locals ran a barbecue that did breakfast, lunch and dinner. The next year 500 people turned up; four years later it was 5,000. The essentials, though, barely changed: music first, community always, and near zero fuss.
The setting became as famous as the festival itself. The “Meredith Supernatural Amphitheatre” is a natural bowl discovered in 1989 by local farmer Jack Nolan while traversing an overgrown corner of his family’s land. The story—half practicality, half myth—has him stumbling into a perfect plateau encircled by gentle slopes, where a stage could sit and sound could carry. That’s exactly what happened: a permanent, purpose-built site slowly took shape, allowing Meredith to be self-sustaining and to evolve without losing its feel. The site remains on the Nolan family property, with infrastructure (showers, composting toilets, recycled water) built thoughtfully over time, and an atmosphere that reflects the creativity and diversity of greater Melbourne’s music community.
From the outset, Meredith defined itself by what it doesn’t do. There’s only one stage. There are no brand billboards or corporate activations. Tickets are one type—your pass includes camping and parking—and the festival is proudly BYO (no glass), preserving the humble freedoms of a countryside weekender. The language of the official program hasn’t changed much in decades: “One stage, BYO, free range camping under the stars… a complete absence of commercial sponsorship.” It’s a manifesto in a sentence, and it’s remained remarkably intact.
Another key pillar is how you get in. In the early years, demand quickly outstripped supply, so Meredith pioneered a subscriber ballot. A large portion of tickets is allocated by random draw to people on the festival’s email list, with further allocations released through local record stores and online. The ballot system rewards loyalty, keeps scalping down, and turns ticket day into a community ritual as much as a transaction. The formula works: the event typically sells out well before gates open each December.
Culture at Meredith has always been shaped as much by its people as by its programmers. A cheeky, self-regulating “No Dickhead Policy”—first articulated in the 2000s and now part of the festival’s lore—sets the tone. It’s simple: inconsiderate behaviour isn’t welcome, and regulars are empowered to (politely) call it out. The result is a remarkably low-agro, high-care environment for a weekend of camping, dancing and shared space.
Then there are the traditions, some planned, some invented on the fly. The most famous is the Meredith Gift, “the world’s greatest” nude footrace, run on the Sunday afternoon before the final acts. What started as an impromptu diversion when a band ran late in the early 1990s became a recurring highlight: a lap of the amphitheatre, a packed hillside cheering, and the winner hoisting the Golden Jocks. It’s silly, inclusive and oddly moving—just like the festival.
Programming is deliberately eclectic. Meredith is a place where a brass band might open a sunny Saturday, a fierce punk set could melt into deep-night techno, and a folk singer might hush 12,000 people at dusk. Line-ups over the years have pivoted between international heavyweights and Australian cult favourites: Liam Gallagher alongside Róisín Murphy, DJ Koze next to Dead Prez, Julia Jacklin, Amyl and the Sniffers, and many more, all on the same piece of grass. But because there’s only one stage, there’s no FOMO, just a shared sequence of moments that everyone there experiences together.
Meredith’s influence radiates beyond December. In 2007, the site and crew launched Golden Plains, a sister festival held each March on the Labour Day long weekend. It shares the single-stage, no-sponsors ethos and has built its own lore, effectively giving the Supernatural Amphitheatre two seasons a year—one a pre-summer exhale, one a late-summer celebration. Reviews routinely describe the pair as the best of Australian festival culture: communal, eccentric, and stubbornly independent.
The festival’s durability has been tested. Like virtually every major event, Meredith paused during the pandemic; after running annually from 1991 through 2019, it returned in 2022. The comeback years underlined how much the festival’s small-c conservative design—single site, one stage, limited capacity, strong local ties—functions as a resilience strategy. While many Australian festivals have struggled or folded in recent seasons, Meredith has continued to sell out and stage joyous weekends in challenging weather, from downpours to scorchers.
Recent editions have doubled down on community texture. In 2024, reviewers highlighted the way the program braided emerging artists with legacy names (Jamie xx to Leo Sayer!), the steady presence of the City of Ballarat Municipal Brass Band, and statements of solidarity from artists on social issues—reminders that Meredith is as much a social space as a sonic one. The Sunday nude run went ahead in the mud, of course.
Behind the scenes, the festival’s volunteer culture and local partnerships keep it grounded. Dozens of community groups staff stalls, manage recycling and welfare tents, and help the site hum. The organisers—often addressed, affectionately, as “Aunty Meredith”—maintain an idiosyncratic, handwritten voice across programs and websites, which makes official info read like a zine passed from friend to friend rather than a press release. Even the ticketing notices carry that tone: “same shape, same size, and all on the one stage.”
If the 1991 party was the spark, the through-line since has been a stubborn commitment to scale and spirit. Meredith long ago had the demand to become a sprawling multi-stage behemoth; instead, it stayed personal. It could have auctioned naming rights to every bar and pathway; it chose a Pink Flamingo bar and a brass band. It could have turned the amphitheatre into a brand activation zone; it kept it a communal hillside. Those choices made Meredith more than a festival—they made it a living ritual with its own vocabulary and values.
Today, entering the ballot in August and rolling into the site on the second weekend of December feels like re-joining a story that’s still being written: of a natural amphitheatre found by chance; of a farm party that became a cultural institution; of a crowd that believes in good music and good manners; of a festival that is proudly “like no other.” And at sunset, when the stage lights pick out the gum trees and a new act takes their place in the long single-file of Meredith line-ups, it’s easy to see why the simplest ideas are the ones that last.
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