You know those experiences when at the time you suspect that what’s happening around you and to you is awesome, but it’s hard to 100% enjoy in the moment because it’s such a marathon? And then you have a hot shower for the first time in over a week and it hits you just how incredible a time you’ve just had? This is what the Woodford Folk Festival was like for me.

We (my three grown up kids and I) left our home in Sydney on Christmas Day at 6am… well, we tried to leave at 6am but there’s always stuff that happens to make leaving when intended an impossible ideal. Even so, we made great time and there was hardly any traffic. After a LOT of driving to a little area tucked away behind the Sunshine coast in Queensland, the final leg of our journey saw us pulling up at the gates of the Woodford Folk Festival at midday of Boxing Day. Complete with fairies, elves and other colourful characters, we waited with a mixture of excitement and amusement in the car-queue to get in. That was followed by a big afternoon of setting up camp. 

Then the real fun began…

First shift at the homeopathy tent the next morning involved helping with the final bits and pieces of setting it all up, which Mandy Heritage and her partner Ashley Brett tirelessly complete the vast majority of every year. Mandy is a powerhouse of energy and passion. She tells the story about how if it wasn’t for volunteering at the homeopathy tent at the Woodford Folk Festival when she was a student, she might never have felt guided enough to make that final leap into becoming a practicing homeopath.

I’ll describe the set up for a moment, because Woodford Folk Festival is really quite remarkable. Picture a surprisingly large tent city set up for only 10 or so days, where anywhere up to 10,000 people converge each day. There are around 5 big main stages (the Amphigrand is the biggest), then an impossible variety of smaller venues beyond what I could count. Add in various circus tents, outdoor performances showing more than what my imagination could ever conjure, and random weird and wonderful characters dressed as though straight from a fantasy novel, and you might be able to visualise the colourful chaos that is Woodford.

Then there’s a vast plethora of stalls offering a huge range of foods, clothing and trinkets. Some of the ones that stood out to me included the steampunk stall selling ornate and wonderfully lopsided top hats, adorned with old style flying goggles. Another was the woman who had created intricate and beautiful crowns decorated with seashells and gems. She broke her arm before the festival and was in a lot of pain, so when Mandy noticed, she sent up some remedies to help with healing and pain management so she could keep manning her stall for the duration of the festival. At the end of the festival Mandy was gifted one of the most amazing crowns from the stall owner in gratitude for her care.

The homeopathy tent, which is also remarkable in my opinion, was much larger this year than the last time I was there two years before, with 6 case taking stations separated by partitions. For a little while there was even an acupuncture table as we had a practitioner who did both, which was very popular.

Out the back was another two canvas pavilion type tents harbouring an impressive dispensary… well, dispensaries, actually. One was the dispensary dedicated to the festival, brought every year for the occasion. There’s another from RMDY college and also one from Fiona Lippey who brought over 700 remedies from her personal stash.

At first, all of us were a little nervous about whether the homeopathy tent would break even. Unfortunately, even in a place like Woodford which is way more open than many festivals, there’s still the old negative attitude towards homeopathy that pervades despite the ever-growing body of evidence to the contrary. We noticed that the naturopathy tent was fully funded by the festival, which was more than a little disappointing to see since they don’t fund anything for us. This meant that we were under the pump to collect donations enough to cover the expenses that weren’t covered by donations from RMDY college, Switch on Health college and some anonymous donors. The Aurum Project and AHA donated advertising.

You might think that the kind of people who come to seek homeopathy at Woodford Folk Festival would be looking for help with sunburn, tick bites and overindulging. You’d be right, to a point. Way more often what I found was that so many people who come to Woodford are searching from the depths of their souls. They’re yearning for peace, for deeper healing of their complex childhood traumas, and for connection.

I just can’t help myself when they’re so ready to go through the process of healing, I feel compelled to let the process unfold and be there with them while we go deeper and ever deeper. It’s the nature of homeopathy to strive to reach the inner-most place of turbulence that pushes us to behave in the dysfunctional and painful patterns that we do. Also, I couldn’t help but see that their skin conditions, their joint issues and physical pain were windows to that inner suffering hidden beneath their smiles. For some reason what I’ve found is that people are so much more open at Woodford and they are often happy to intimately share. Many of those who visit the homeopathy tent are so relieved to lay down their burdens and finally shake them free, with the help of a well-chosen remedy that the students and I then collaborate on out the back.

One of my favourite moments was seeing San Cisco with my three children, who these days tower over me and love music as much as their mother. It was one of those moments I will always treasure, dancing with abandon surrounded by my most loved people in the world and to see the smiles on everyone’s faces as we threw ourselves into San Cisco’s funky tunes. A big thanks to my daughter who helped us get the best out of what was on offer, as I was thoroughly overwhelmed by the huge list of performers.

When it came time to pack up and say goodbye, I couldn’t help but shed a few tears for the close friendships we built so quickly and the sense that something so fleeting, but so special, was suddenly coming to an end. I’m smiling as I write this, remembering the feeling of being surrounded by people who feel so strongly about building constructive, healing and joyful circumstances around themselves wherever they are.

I worry that the homeopathy tent at Woodford Folk Festival might not happen again in future, because each year it’s just a little more difficult for everyone to scrape together the funds needed for it to happen. Yes, this blog is a heartfelt sharing of my experience. But it’s also a plea for the Woodford organisers to recognise homeopathy and its value – alongside what naturopathy offers. It’s a request for anyone else out there who may be able to help keep the incredible experience alive for the students and practitioners for more years to come. It would be a tragedy if this special offering could not continue.

Now, I’m sitting at home and it’s quiet. I’ve had a deliciously hot shower (no queue) after a marathon drive to get back, during which I worried I pushed my body way too hard. I’ve set aside this time to rest and recover as my nervous system feels like an overstretched rubber band. But I’m restless. Surely there’s a band to see, a stall to check out, a gossip with the other homeos to be had, an esky to clean out. My fridge, full of cold fresh food rather than lukewarm, stinking esky-slurry, hums reliably in the kitchen. I’m sitting in a chair that’s actually comfortable, the sun isn’t blasting my face and I have peace, solitude and order.

But the walls are so close, the silence empty. I’m missing the little community we built together, the connection, the peals of laughter that seemed to always come from somewhere nearby. The constant background beat and hum of competing musics is now nothing but an echo in my memory. And damn it all if a little part of me doesn’t want to turn right around and do it all over again.