Is Australia's festival scene the best it's ever been?

The giants of Australia’s festival scene have fallen since March last year.

Stereosonic and Future, leaders of the country’s once dominant touring festival model (where events hit major cities Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth each summer) are not on the 2016 festival calendar.

But Australia’s electronic music festival landscape is more exciting than ever. The reputations of smaller events and multi-day festivals away from the main cities are growing and they’re freshening things up.

“When we started Strawberry Fields seven years ago we were barely 21, passionate as hell, and probably quite naïve too,” says Strawberry Fields director and Let Them Eat Cake partner Tara Benney.

“It’s really evolved alongside the three of us [including co-directors Elliot Rothfield and Billy Staughton] as we have been exposed to different music, art, experiences and ideas and it’s still evolving today. We’re not afraid to do things differently to what people might expect.”

Strawberry Fields relocated to a new, larger site at The Wildlands, beside the picturesque Murray River roughly between Melbourne and Sydney, in 2015.

Soul Clap, Apparat, Bicep and Booka Shade were among the headliners, and, this year, it will add another day, taking place from November 17 to 20.

“Initially, the motivation was just to have a wild party in the bush for our friends,” Benney says. “Today, the vision is more about creating an experience that inspires people for years to come.”

Embracing the natural bush landscape, with the welcome additions of Funktion One sound and quality house and techno, has increasingly made the untamed areas outside small Australian towns the hubs of dance music across summer.

Long-running “bush doofs”, the term given to alternative festivals in Australia held off the beaten track, including Strawberry Fields, Rainbow Serpent and Earthcore, are a few hours drive from Melbourne and have boomed in recent years.

Further north, the lush green surroundings outside Sydney and Byron Bay are home to Subsonic, Rabbits Eat Lettuce and newcomer Lost Paradise, which was started by long-time industry players Wade Cawood and Simon Beckingham in 2014.

“Over the last few years we have seen the word ‘boutique’ popping up on every small festival. We aim to be ‘boutique’ in the truest of forms and, most importantly, ‘experience, experience, experience’,” Cawood says.

“I’ve always been passionate about the curation of the line-up, but now that line-up has extended to yoga, live, food, performances, kids etc. We want people to be entertained and engaged."

Big names including Jamie xx, Four Tet, Motor City Drum Ensemble and Âme were among the DJs that played the three-day New Year’s camping festival's most recent incarnation, and the line-up for its 2016/17 edition will be announced soon.

The use of “boutique” as a descriptor for festivals, as Cawood refers to, was born from the dominance of large scale touring events, such as Stereosonic, at the time comparatively smaller events started to work their way onto the scene.

Let Them Eat Cake, a New Year’s Day festival held at Werribee Mansion near Melbourne, was among those labeled with the tag when it started in 2013.

Also run by the guys behind Strawberry Fields, in partnership with a few other Melbourne crews, LTEC has an identity defined by its iconic location in the mansion’s lavish gardens and an aim to deliver a solid one-day experience, according to Benney.

Another smaller one-day location-oriented Melbourne festival is Sugar Mountain, which started at The Forum theatre in 2011 before being relocated to the precinct around the Victorian College of The Arts in 2015.

“Sugar Mountain is a place for creativity to be absorbed and celebrated,” the festival’s managing director Tig Huggins says. “The festival creates an environment that is convivial and interactive, with performances and spaces that remain with the audience long after the festival finale.”

He also said that smaller, lower risk festivals now made up the bulk of the festival market in Australia, as opposed to the large scale touring brands of the past 10 years.

One of the best-placed people to speak about the demise of Australia’s large touring festivals is Stereosonic founder Richie McNeill.

He reckons they are simply too big and, with an increase in costs associated with running the events, there's just not enough money in them anymore. “I always said as soon as [past Australian touring festivals] Stereo, Big Day Out, Soundwave, Summadayze, Future Music, Good Vibrations and V Festival all went above a $150 ticket price, it was the beginning of the end,” McNeill says. He doubts Stereosonic will be back after its announced “hiatus”.

“It was my baby, so of course [I’m] a little sad [about the festival’s situation]", says McNeill, who sold the event to SFX in 2013. “Yet I am always a believer that from the end of one thing another rises in its place. And, well, I am working on something now with a few peeps and it will be announced soon.”

So, having just finished Carl Cox’s new festival PURE in Melbourne and Sydney (and already begun planning 2017), what’s next for the man who started Stereo?

“I am launching a new festival in December and have a camping festival launching next year,” McNeill says. “Heaps of tours. Heaps of new events. You’ll just have to wait and see. Can’t let too much out of the bag.”

Boutique partying down under looks to be in safe hands.

Scott Carbines is Mixmag's Australian Digital Content Editor, follow him on Twitter