Original Lorne Falls Festival site listed for sale

“The Falls Festival was a rite of passage for young music fans – ringing in the new year with friends, following their favourite bands and discovering their next favourite band,” said music journalist, critic and commentator Jeff Jenkins, the author of several music books, including 50 Years of Rock in Australia.

“The festival really took off in the late ’90s when they started bringing in big international headliners, and people like Iggy Pop and Blondie were knocked out by the beauty of the location. But importantly, the bills were always packed with home-grown talent and the festival-goers got to see that the Aussie acts were just as good as anything from overseas.”

Today, that historic 58-hectare site on Erskine Falls Road in the Great Otway National Park, close to the Great Ocean Road, is for sale, with the annual festival moved, after 25 years, permanently to Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl.

Agents expect interest in buying the large cleared area alongside a dense tangle of forest to come from entrepreneurs locally, nationally and globally, with an expressions-of-interest campaign and a guide of about $4 million.

“While it’s a place steeped in memories for so many people, it could be used in the future for so many different things,” said Harcourts North Geelong listing agent Joe Grgic, who’s making the sale with Charles Stewart Real Estate Colac’s Andrew Rice. “It’s limited only by someone’s imagination.

“It could be turned into a private luxury getaway or a hobby farm, or possibly it’s the perfect site for a wellness centre, a school camp or even another festival, all subject to council approval. It’s such a beautiful spot and so serene and tranquil.”

As well as its spacious land area, the property also comes with an existing three-bedroom farmhouse with multiple living areas, a huge open barn stage, a warehouse and shed and office buildings, and power.

The Falls Festival started in Lorne in December 1993 with a crowd of 11,000 and spawned another Falls festival in Marion Bay, Tasmania, in 2003, with a third event introduced in 2013 in Bryon Bay.

In 2019, the Lorne festival was cancelled because of the bushfire risk, and then none of the festivals ran in 2020 and 2021 because of the COVID pandemic. In March 2023 the 273-hectare Marion Bay site was put up for sale and now, with the Victorian festival moved to Melbourne in 2022, it’s the turn of the original Falls site to go.

Many thousands of festival-goers will greet the news with real sadness. “Falls really changed the festival scene across Australia,” said Jenkins. “There were highlights every year, but two in particular come to mind.

“One was Daryl Braithwaite singing The Horses at Falls in 2017, when Daryl realised that the song had become an anthem for all ages. And then the great John Farnham got to play at Lorne in 2019, before the event was cancelled because of the bushfire threat.

“Farnham was one of the final performances at the Lorne site and the crowd loved him. And you could tell how much Farnham enjoyed it, even as he called the crowd [an expletive] for not singing along loudly enough to his cover of It’s A Long Way To The Top.”

Grgic agrees that many will miss the annual events. “It was a coming of age for many people, and so many had such a good time in that place,” he said. “They had some phenomenal Aussie icon acts down there, as well as some big international names.