- Lotterywest provides record funding to Perth Festival with $9.5 million grant
- Perth Festival to revive and reactivate East Perth Power Station
- New funding to assist Perth Festival in offering affordable events
Lotterywest's long-standing support for Perth Festival will continue in 2025, with record funding provided for events this summer.
Perth Festival will be provided with $9.5 million in funding to support the upcoming 2025 festival - the biggest Lotterywest grant received by Perth Festival to date. This continues Lotterywest's decades-long support to the organisation.
The record grant will support affordable events to ensure everyone has the opportunity to enjoy the upcoming festival.
It will also contribute to the creation of community experiences such as the Karla Mia Bidi trail and Festival of Neighbourhoods programs, and expand existing offerings including the introduction of a Children's Film program.
In 2025, Perth Festival is aiming to push the boundaries of traditional art forms using ground-breaking virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality art.
The 2025-2028 Festivals will feature a number of iconic events, including:
KARLA MIA BIDI: Karla Mia Bidi, meaning "the campfire track" in Noongar language, will be a large-scale light installation that illuminates sites of significance and community gathering along the Swan River from Guildford to Fremantle. The beacons will herald the arrival of Perth Festival from the opening night and remain lit every night of the festival to remind the community that the season is upon us.
EAST PERTH POWER STATION: Perth Festival will revive and re-activate the historic East Perth Power Station site as a creative hub that will be home to major programs featuring First Nations visual art as well as contemporary and world music. The venue will come to life with Casa Music a family-friendly and free alfresco music stage, an outdoor contemporary music venue, and home to Boorloo contemporary visual arts projections that will light up the building for the duration of the festival as a major installation.
Perth Festival's 2024 season welcomed more than 214,800 people across 129 events, showcasing 827 artists. Lotterywest's multimillion-dollar funding support now seeks to build on these audience numbers through ambitious, large-scale community programming.
Over more than 30 years, Lotterywest has provided almost $170 million in grants to Perth Festival.
As stated by Premier Roger Cook:
"Every year Perth Festival finds new ways to create incredible moments for Western Australians.
"Perth Festival's work to provide WA audiences with access to shows they wouldn't otherwise see is what makes this festival so special.
"My Government is proud to support the 2025 festival through Lotterywest, which plays a vital role in helping Perth Festival to transform our city into a vibrant community space ever year."
As stated by Tourism Minister Rita Saffioti:
"The East Perth Power Station is an amazing site with so much history and it will be open to the public as a key part of the Perth Festival 2025.
"It's going to be incredible and of course, in the future, a great tourism icon."
As stated by Culture and the Arts Minister David Templeman:
"Perth Festival is a wonderful annual celebration of culture and the arts and something that I always look forward to.
"I am particularly excited about the use of the East Perth Power Station this year in what will be a very special activation.
"Every year, the artists and all the people who work on the festival deliver memorable and thought-provoking works that enrich our lives. I am sure this year will be no exception."
As stated by Perth MLA John Carey:
"The Cook Labor Government has always considered the East Perth Power Station site for tourism opportunities, given its location close to the Perth CBD and proximity to existing amenities including Optus Stadium.
"It's brilliant to bring the iconic Perth Festival to the East Perth Power site, as our Government continues to drive revitalisation of our city and is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to create jobs, economic activity and attract more people to the Perth CBD."
