Obituary / Philip John Wilson OBE, October 3, 1948-November 7, 2024

Members of Australia’s folk music community have been saddened and shocked to hear that Phil Wilson, the man who cemented the National Folk Festival’s permanent place in Canberra, has died in Denpasar, Bali, aged 76, after complications from dengue fever.

Wilson, who directed the event from 1993 to 1998, turned it from a loss-making event attracting around 8000 people to a financially and artistically successful event attended by 42,000 in 1999 and supported by a team of 700 volunteers.

Born in Burnley, Lancashire, UK, to John and Elsie Wilson, he was educated in engineering studies at Oxford Polytechnic and in management services at Teesside University, while in his spare time playing with the Dalesmen folk group and Darlington Mummers.

Wilson was always naturally adventurous and early professional assignments saw him performing underwater repairs to concrete storage tanks in the North Sea and sealing toxic leaks on the Tanio oil taker that had broken up in the English Channel, before he emigrated to Australia and worked for the Queensland Housing Commission.

CityNews music writer and former director of the Australian Folk Trust, Graham McDonald, says that when the National Folk Festival Ltd was created to run the festival as a separate entity, Wilson, with his practical, problem-solving approach and background as a folk musician and dancer, was the stand-out candidate for the job of director.

Once here, he firmly embedded himself in the Canberra arts community and I recall Wilson once taking up his ukelele to accompany a group of arts organisers (including me) to sing Click Go the Shears at the Chinese Cultural offices in O’Malley.

Under his watch, the Folk Festival grew at around 15 per cent a year until 1999, when he surprised everyone by resigning and moving back to England to care for his ageing parents.

In an interview at the time, I suggested he was a bit of a gypsy, a view he gleefully confirmed when, a few months later, the English Folk Dance and Song Society hired him as its new chief executive in London, and he emailed to say that because of the cost of accommodation there, he had, gypsy-like, parked his caravan in their office compound.

Wilson returned briefly to Australia before moving to Bali in 2002 when his brother, Mark, then honorary British Honorary Consul, called on Phil’s organisational skills to help him set up a team of 57 volunteer relief workers in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombing, when 28 British nationals lost their lives. Both Wilson brothers were bestowed with OBEs in recognition of their leading roles in the British government’s emergency response.

In Bali, he converted to Islam in 2003 and married Awie Ambarawati, also setting up his own MrFixit property renovation and maintenance business and from 2007 to 2016, writing a regular column in the Bali Advertiser.

I last saw him when we had ice-cream in Ubud, Bali, after attending an evening of poetry at the Readers’ and Writers’ Festival.

In Indonesia, he worked as a consultant building earthquake-resistant maternity units on behalf of AusAID, also designing and supervising the installation of water supply systems. He played music in a traditional folk group, and enjoyed scuba diving, caving, potholing, and running with the Bali Hash House Harriers.

Wilson was a Rotarian and also since 2007 had served as chairman of the Peduli Munti Guning Foundation, which provides disaster and humanitarian relief for people who live on the eastern slopes of Bali’s Mount Agung.

Wilson was buried following Muslim practice shortly after he died in Denpasar.

He is survived by his wife, Awie Ambarawati, whom he married in 2003 and by two adult daughters, Emily and Susie, and an infant grandson, living in Australia.