I’m walking down the side of a steel-fenced arena, swatting flies and red dust out of my face and pulling my hat lower on my head.

The girls I’m following, long-time friends Kelsi and Jorja, look over their shoulders periodically, making sure nobody from our little group has been lost in the crowd. Bright orange flags have been strung a metre back from the arena fence, and everyone shuffles along them, trying to get a better view of the arena. People’s heads turn back and forth like they’re watching a tennis match, eyes following the action over the fence: the cowboy in the dirt, and the rodeo clowns chasing the bull away from him.

We’re in Dongara, at the first rodeo of the summer season and crowds of spectators have driven North to watch cowboys land in the dirt and stockhorses chase calves across the arena.

One of the last bulls rushes out of the chute, and I watch through my camera’s viewfinder as the cowboy hangs on for dear life, and as the crowd cheers for him. He hits the dirt to excited yells and whistling.

Watching the crowd of thousands, all decked out in their Western finery, anyone could be forgiven for thinking these people have come from farms or towns nearby, but upon closer inspection, the vast majority of them are like Kelsi, Jorja and their friends: city people who have heard about the rodeo in one way or another and have made the three-hour journey from Perth for the weekend.

At first it seems strange for so many people to be here, hours away from home watching a sport that many of the spectators I chat to don’t follow outside of this individual event. But the more I talk to people, the more it becomes clear that these events are a reminder, in some senses, of the bush life that many Australians now have left behind or never knew. Everyone who comes to the rodeo wants to feel like they belong there, drinking in the red dust; something about this atmosphere, the sight of cattle dogs and horses geared in stock saddles, seems to bring to the surface a long-forgotten desire to belong to the Aussie outback and its culture that is so far away for people living in metro towns and cities, except for at these events which are steadily growing in popularity with a whole new crowd.

Worth the price of admission

Jorja Vacca is a 21-year-old mechanical apprentice at an iron ore mine. Kelsi Popplewell has also just turned 21 and is a studying teaching. Both girls are at home in Perth’s northern suburbs, and like most young people their age, are always keen for something fun to do on their weekends.

Sick of the Perth clubbing scene and not wanting to spend upwards of $200 on a one-day festival ticket, Jorja and Kelsi joined a new and growing demographic of rodeo-goers.

They both say they haven’t looked back.

“We love it. We didn’t really know anything about rodeos until we actually started going to some, and I never used to listen to much country music either, but now it’s basically all I play,” Jorja says.

Kelsi and Jorja say they pay an average $50 for a ticket to a rodeo event. This ticket gets you into the rodeo itself, the community football oval stacked with novelty games like whip cracking and mechanical bull riding and shopping stalls, the bar and live music after dark, into the campgrounds about half a kilometre down the hill, and onto the free shuttle between the campgrounds and the show.

Kelsi says there’s no pressure to dress a certain way or try to fit in with the crowd if you aren’t from a country background, either.

“I think we all thought we’d get laughed at if we rocked up without the proper uniform on, but nobody seems to care, or notice that much, really. I think that’s a bit of a testament to the crowd,” she says.

Working in mining, Jorja earns in the higher end of the wage spectrum for her age, where the average weekly income is between $500 and $1000 according to Forbes.

Even so, with compounding cost of living pressures in the last year, Jorja says the cost of going out had just become too much and was something she was finding less and less reason to factor into her monthly budget.

“I was just finding I wasn’t having a great time whenever I did go out, and because it’s so expensive then it feels like I’ve wasted my money, so I just wasn’t going anymore,” she says.

Cost of living pressures are still playing a major role in financial decisions for people in WA; according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, cost of living indexes are still increasing by an average of 6.4 per cent between 2023 and 2024 for employee households, which is an improvement from the pandemic period, but still historically high.

Metro music festivals have seen a mudslide of cancellations over the past two years due to lack of demand, including events like Groovin’ the Moo and Splendour in the Grass that previously sold out in minutes. Research by ticketing agencies Bolster and Tixel reported rising costs of living and the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic impacting ticket sales for concerts and festivals in metropolitan areas around Australia.

So, what’s causing the difference in demand between these big festivals and regional events where live music is a featured aspect?

According to Kelsi, it isn’t down to just one factor.

“The crowd is the main thing. Everyone’s a lot more mellow, and there’s more of a friendly feel,” she says.

A not-so-country crowd

While metro festivals and concerts have been struggling in recent years, regional events like bush races and rodeos have seen record numbers of ticket sales.

The Kulin bush races are one such event. Coordinator Simone Lockyer-Luscombe says what was once a small community event is now an annual tourism magnet.

“2024 will be our 30th event and from our little community idea back in 1994 we never saw it being what it is today. We started out with about 1200 attendees, mostly people from local and nearby communities, to now seeing people come from all over WA even some from interstate,” she says.

Over the three decades, the bush races have raised more than $1.8 million, and the majority of the proceeds go straight back into the Kulin community.

Simone says the proportion of city people venturing out to the country for the races has grown significantly over the past five years.

“It has probably been since we had Eskimo Joe headline our live music back in 2017 that we have seen our profile really lift and had a significant increase in people venturing out of the metro area,” she says.

The bush races in Kulin are not the only regional event in WA seeing a staggering climb in ticket sales.

Bodean Buckingham, co-founder of Outback Rodeos, says the annual Coolgardie outback festival has had a similar response from the metro crowd.

“The metro people have been massive supporters for us and our rodeo circuit; with over 1400 people registering for camping this year, a large percentage of them are from elsewhere in WA.”

Jo and Mark Kestel are the two faces behind Double Barrel Entertainment, WA’s biggest rodeo promoter. The pair and their team run dozens of rodeos across WA and are focussed on bringing their beloved sport to a broader audience.

Mark says the rodeo scene in WA is changing for the bigger and better.

“We’ve been part of the rodeo world for a long time, and we’ve seen it change over the years. We’ve noticed a huge increase in the interest, and the crowds show it. The events closer to Perth can be up to 80 or 90 per cent city folks buying tickets,” he says.

“A lot of these small country towns, rodeo has put them on the map. Take Boyup Brook for example: without Harvey Dickson, nobody would have even heard of Boyup Brook. Now there’s thousands of people heading out there for rodeos and the country festival multiple times a year.”

The Harvey Dickson rodeo and country music festival is held biannually in Boyup Brook and received more than $20,000 in funding over 2023 and 2024 from the state government’s ‘regional events scheme’ to run their events. The scheme allocates more than $1.2 million to regional events across WA that reliably bring tourists and tourism dollars to their region.

Mark says supporting the local community is a big focus of Double Barrel’s business model.

“We want each event to become an annual thing and an integral part of the rodeo calendar. As well as your normal attendees: the rodeo veterans and country people who have always been going to these events, we are opening up to a new crowd. That’s what we’ve always been about, is taking the sport to people who haven’t seen it before.

Cool to be a cowboy

Dubbed the “Yellowstone effect” after Paramount’s hit Western show that premiered in 2018, country culture, including fashion and music, is steadily becoming more popular around the world, and Australia is no exception to this trend.

Long-time rodeo competitor and member of the Australian Bushman’s Campdraft and Rodeo Association (the ABCRA) Amanda Oversby says the exposure of American rodeo and Western culture to Australians through social media and the internet has awoken city people to the same sport and lifestyle existing in their own backyard.

“Being able to see it in America, and how massive it is over there, it’s made this whole new audience who have found the Western culture and rodeos and want to be part of it, and it’s great that we can do that in WA. We’ve been doing it for a long time, but it’s better now more people actually are aware we’re here and it’s not just an American thing or an Eastern states thing,” she says.

“It’s growing so fast, even in the last year. At the more established ones they’re getting up to seven, eight thousand people. I think they had 8500 at Boddington last year, just for the weekend. And most of those people are from Perth.

“It allows, for so many little community groups to make a lot of money in a weekend. In Wagin, they have had the Woolarama for years, and the first rodeo they added brought in an extra $100,000, so it keeps the Woolarama going and keeps people out in the region for longer.”

Another crowd favourite part of many regional events is the after party: live bands and a cans-only bar that keeps the crowd around well after dark.

According to entertainment data platform Luminate, country music has hit the main stage, both in Australia and the USA. With renowned pop artists including Beyonce and Post Malone making the switch to the country genre, and radio-favourite American artists like Zach Bryan, Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen crossing the popularity boundary into non-country fans, country music is no longer a shameful secret to have on your Spotify playlist, and Gen Z in particular is carrying the trend.

Country music is gaining popularity, and young people in WA want to see live music without the heavy price tags.

The combination of these two factors makes live music at regional events the perfect solution, and Amanda says more young people are taking advantage of it.

“People are looking for cheaper ways to go out and have fun on the weekend, and more people are listening to country music and getting involved in the country scene, so having the bands at night after the rodeo’s over is a big part of the event. People love it, it’s live music that feels accessible and not so overwhelming as big concerts or festivals in the city,” she says.

For young city people like Kelsi and Jorja, the fun atmosphere of the live bands is one of the best parts of going to a rodeo.

Jorja says everyone should give regional events a try, especially as WA is headed into warmer weather and longer school and university holidays. “There’s something for everyone, and if you never give it a go, you’re shutting yourself off from a whole lot of fun that’s right there on your doorstep,” she says.