“Bluesfest was hugely successful,” she says. “It had a target of over 100,000. But a lot of that came in the last few days in the lead-up to the event … People weren’t sure if they were going to get sick or if they would be able to go.”

Speaking with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on the first day of Melbourne’s new arts festival Rising, co-artistic director Hannah Fox says she’s seeing the same thing: events that were “sitting flatline for quite a while” are now suddenly starting to sell out.

“Buying on the day of the event is not unusual [anymore]. Even for the really big shows,” she says.

And, though it’s great that people are buying tickets, the change in behaviour has a “big knock-on effect”. “It’s hard to know how many staff you need, how much beer you have to buy and how much security to put on,” she says.

Notably, after attending opening night of the festival, The Age’s reviewer wrote there were too many bar staff at what felt like an “under-attended party”.

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Susan Provan, director of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF), says this is one part of the “rolling uncertainty” she faced during this year’s event that ran through April.

With transmission rates quite high in the community, MICF had to deal with cancellations and refunds, late-ticket buying and staff shortages.

“It was probably the most logistically challenging festival we’ve ever had,” Provan says.

And, while she found many audience members were “dead keen” to be back at live events, the number of tickets sold was “definitely not back to normal yet”.

“There’s still quite a percentage of the population who are very cautious, and that’s totally fair enough,” she says. “People who would normally buy four or five tickets, were buying just one or two.”

Provan is “really optimistic about the future” and thinks this will pick back up as community attitudes shift over time. But Webb, who runs a festival on a tighter budget that gets 40 per cent of its revenue from the box office, is more concerned.

“A loss in revenue impacts [how Sydney Writers’ Festival can] grow and innovate in the following years,” she says. “Commercial imperatives become a lot more important … and you become reliant on having events you know are going to sell out.

“We want to be able to take risks. We don’t want to go into a creative black hole.”

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Richardson says the next six-18 months will be crucial for companies like this, as a number of federal and state support programs finish up and “the full impact of COVID” is felt.

And while she praises efforts like state governments’ dining and entertainment rebates, she says those programs need to be ongoing – and other measures, like insurance schemes, should account for the current challenges being faced and be made consistent across the country.

Though Victoria now has an insurance product that covers events in the case of a snap lockdown or mandated capacity restrictions, for instance, it doesn’t cover anything if your cast and crew get COVID or a huge chunk of ticket holders have to cancel at the last minute.