How a Geelong barista and a retired accountant built the city's hottest festival calendar

Marcus Webb was pulling espresso shots at a laneway café on Moorabool Street when he realised Geelong had a timing problem. Summer festivals packed the Waterfront precinct. Winter emptied it. By April, the city's event calendar looked like a shell.

That observation, made over coffee in 2023, became the seed for Geelong's unexpected autumn festival boom. Webb, now 34, partnered with Patricia Chen, a former chief accountant at the Port of Geelong, to launch what would become the Autumn Arts Collective-a loose network of pop-up cultural events that now runs from late March through June across seven Geelong venues.

The story matters now because Geelong's council is preparing its 2026-27 events budget, and the councillors are watching what Webb and Chen have built with genuine interest. The pair didn't wait for a grant. They didn't commission a consultant. They just started.

From coffee chats to cultural infrastructure

Chen, 58, spent 19 years managing budgets at the port. She'd watched businesses struggle with unpredictable foot traffic. "Winter is when people stay indoors," she told me last week at Bellerine Street's Collective Café, which has become the collective's de facto headquarters. "But it's also when artists have finished their summer commitments. They need stages. We saw both sides of that equation."

Their first event was modest: a Thursday-night poetry series in the upstairs room at Geelong Library's annexe on Gheringhap Street in April 2024. Twelve people showed up. By the third week, they'd hit 40. By October 2024, they'd expanded to include a three-week visual arts trail across Newtown studios, a monthly jazz night at the old Geelong Pivot Club on Myers Street, and a weekend market in the unused laneway behind Westfield on Malop Street.

Neither Webb nor Chen had formal events management backgrounds. Webb learned programming from YouTube tutorials and a mentorship with someone at Federation University's arts administration program. Chen built spreadsheets to track attendance, venue costs, and artist fees. Their operating budget last year: $47,000, cobbled together from venue hire agreements and artist contributions of 15 percent of ticket sales.

By comparison, Geelong's council-funded summer festivals-including the Geelong Festival in February and the Waterfront Comedy Series-collectively receive roughly $180,000 annually. The Autumn Arts Collective operates on a quarter of that.

Why autumn worked when no one expected it

The data surprised even them. Webb's team logged attendance across all venues from March to June 2025. Average attendance per event: 67 people. Weekend events at the Myers Street jazz nights pulled 120 people on average. The visual arts trail attracted 2,300 foot traffic across three weeks. Visitor surveys showed 64 percent travelled from outside the Geelong CBD specifically for events.

"People said autumn events wouldn't work because everyone goes to the beach in summer," Chen said. "But Geelong isn't a beach destination in the way Torquay is. We have a different audience-people who work here, who want cultural stuff, who aren't chasing tourism dollars."

That audience includes visual artists priced out of Melbourne's inner-north scene. Three of the Newtown studio participants told Webb they'd considered relocating to Ballarat before the collective offered affordable exhibition space. Musician Sarah Davie, who performs at the Myers Street series, moved from Footscray specifically because the collective offered consistent weekend gigs.

For anyone wanting to experience this firsthand, the autumn calendar opens again March 15, 2026. The visual arts trail kicks off March 20. Tickets for individual events typically run $15-$25. Webb and Chen are now training a volunteer coordinator to manage bookings through a website launched in February.

The council's culture and events officer, contacted for comment, declined to be quoted on future funding decisions. But the pattern is clear: Geelong needed people willing to build festivals without waiting for permission. Webb and Chen did that. Now the city is watching what comes next.