So, when the gates open at the Four Winds festival at Easter in the New South Wales coastal city of Bermagui, the three-day event will invoke the good old days when people and communities came together through music, food, conversations, and recreation.

Sound a little retro? Not quite.

Perched on Barragga Bay, the outdoor Four Winds Festival has brought music lovers to the region since 1991. Its founder Neilma Gantner - daughter of Melbourne retailer and philanthropist Sidney Myer - began the festival with the vision of bringing "performing arts of the highest quality to Bermagui for the benefit of locals and tourists".

The vision of the author and prolific letter-writer has been carried throughout its 21-year lineage. In 2021, Neilma's philosophy will be realised through the dreams of newly installed Creative Director Lindy Hume.

Festival direction is in Hume's veins. She has steered the Sydney and Perth Festivals, and is currently midway through her tenure as artistic director of Tasmania's Ten Days on the Island festival. But away from her heady travels, Hume is a local in heart, mind, and body. She moved to the south coast 15 years ago.

"I'm delighted to take on this role in my home community on Yuin Country. As a local resident I'm excited about devising a program for this extraordinary amphitheatre near the crystalline waters of Cuttagee Beach and Barragga," she says.

"My mantra is relationships - relationships between artists and audiences, between emerging and established artists, between local and visiting artists, between people and this place - these are the lifeblood and future of our festival."

Hume calls the artists in her program heroes, and draws our attention to performances by the Sydney Dance Company, who will perform Cinco, a work created by their Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela; William Zappa's adaptation of Homer's epic tale The Iliad, which earned standing ovations at the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals; the Aria Award-winning female county trio The New Graces, who will perform with Lou Bennett (ex-Tiddas and Black Arm Band), and the best south coast contemporary artists.

If diversity is the storyline of the Four Winds, then classical music, and the artistic expressions of the local Indigenous peoples, the Yuin local community, is its beating heart.

For the 2021 program, the tradition continues. More recently, Four Winds has created a partnership with the National Museum of Australia, which has allowed it to engage highly respected visual artist Cheryl Davison as their Indigenous creative producer. For the festival, Davison brings her project Bubwal Buradja-Strong Tomorrow, a local Koori community choir that was started by Davison as a way to preserve the language of her people. Dhurga is one of the Yuin nation languages spoken on the South Coast and the Southern Tablelands.

Davison, who spent most of her childhood sitting next to her grandfather on his old wooden boat on the Wallaga Lake, says singing in language is the best way preserve a language that is over 60,000 years old. The choral experience brings multiple generations of her people together.

When audiences encounter their performance with guest artist Lou Tiddas on the opening night, they will hear the sentiments of the Yuin peoples expressed in Dhurga from singers from eight years old to septuagenarians.

In the land of the Four Winds, inclusivity and exclusivity are equal partners and no festival is truly complete without world premieres. The occasion brings a rush of excitement to the performers and a palpable experience for the audience.

One of Australia's foremost string quartets, The Goldner String Quartet, will give the world premiere of Haunted Spring, by Australian composer Ross Edwards.

Edwards' music is renowned for its inspirations from ritual and dance, and his deep commitment to ecology. He says the work "has poignant moments... it is overall an optimistic work". Hume says it "expresses a sense of hoped-for emergence after the complexities and lockdowns of 2020".

The dreaming for optimism embodied in Ross Edwards' work will be played out in real time during the festival with the mission of eat, drink and be merry as the obligatory daily ritual. Bermagui, and its surrounding places of Tilba, Bega, and Montague Island will sing their own songs. If previous years are a harbinger, festival patrons will be detouring to the Oyster Farmer's Daughter in Narooma, snorkelling with seals at Montague Island, enjoying the Tilba Festival or winding down on Wagonga Princess Sunset Cruise.

It is incontrovertible that birds of a feather flock together, and it is also an urban fact in these parts that you will find that the person who you sat next to in a concert will be the person you are supping oysters with the next day or haggling with at the Tilba markets.