General News
27 March, 2026
Booktown’s underdog story
Clunes Booktown Festival is a two-decade success story for the small town, but that wasn't always a guarantee, as one of the founders will attest.
Clunes’ attachment to books, rather than gold, has stood the test of time given they celebrated two decades of the booktown festival over the weekend.
For the thousands of attendees and over 100 book traders, the event is a highlight in the country town’s calendar which helped them buck the story of rural decline.
But the event’s success took a “magic combination” of founders two decades ago through Tess Brady, Tim Hayes, Graeme Johnstone, and Linda Newitt Scull.
Ms Brady reflected on their scrappy 2007 launch for this year’s milestone Clunes Booktown Festival.
Faced with the town’s decline, the small group came together almost by accident, according to Ms Brady, to steer development they wanted to see.
“We thought long and hard about what could work here. I’d just come back from overseas where I’d been to the booktown in Wales. I thought that could work because you didn’t have to change the infrastructure,” she said.
Now with an idea, and soon a “ridiculously small” amount of money, they started organising a test event.
That meant contacting book traders, an experience that “terrified” Ms Brady.
“We wrote to every book trader, in those days, the yellow pages. Everybody. We rang them all first. We said we’re going to send you a letter ... it was a beautiful fold out of Clunes and how lovely it was,” she said.
Their hope was that maybe they’d hear back from four and could still go ahead.
“We posted them Friday night and by Monday morning we had something like 25. It just grew and grew and grew and grew,” she said.
If their idea was the seed, then what grew over the decades is held up by the community.
That’s true now, with the many volunteers that make the event possible, and it was true in the first year.
Local people came together and opened their doors to the event, and cleaned up the town, to give it a chance.
It’s that community spirit Ms Brady said is the reason she moved to the town after stumbling upon it while exploring.
“I knew straight away that I had to leave my office and leave my work and come and live in Clunes,” she said.
“It was this extraordinary feel for this place. It was dead. It was empty. There was nothing here. But it was just something about it, that very strong sense of community was there, and I was so drawn to this place. I never lived away from the city really before in my life.”
Ms Brady stepped back from the Clunes Booktown Festival a decade ago but remains involved as an advocate and is fondly called an elder.
She said she’s “enormously pleased” the event has been passed forward to the next generation.
Considering many community groups can’t manage the same leap Ms Brady offered some advice on longevity.
“If you have a cross-generational thing, you let them have ownership, and you have a mechanism for talking — I think you’re half way there,” she said.
Clunes Booktown Festival’s secret, however, goes one step further.
“There’s something good about it that is the personality now of this town,” she said.