Orange Region Tourism general manager Caddie Marshall launched the festival at De Salis Wines on Monday, together with Western NSW parliamentary secretary Rick Colless and representatives from Orange and Cabonne councils.

She said the $20,000 in incubator funding from the state government would cover a website for the festival, as well as bringing outside media to the region to promote it.

“We’re going to have an interactive Google map that will actually highlight where all the bonfires and events are because this is about dispersing people right throughout the region,” she said. 

A fringe night market at Millthorpe will start the festival.

“And then on the Saturday night, that’s when we’ll really start to see a series of bonfires,” Ms Marshall said. 

“We’ll be encouraging our local pubs to list their events and [that] will be of no charge.”

She said there was also an opportunity for sporting clubs to hold fundraisers, but encouraged all hosts to register their bonfires with the Rural Fire Service. 

Orange mayor Reg Kidd said he would host a bonfire at his farm, but others who wanted to mark the weekend at home did not need a lot of space, with fire buckets a smaller-scale option.

Mr Colless said the festival was “a fabulous idea”.

“As kids, a lot of us grew up with a traditional bonfire and we had fire crackers and so on and it was a real community get-together,” he said.

“Of course, when fire crackers were banned, we were then in the situation where we lost all that community function – this is a re-establishment of that.”

Ms Marshall hoped the festival could follow in the successful footsteps of the Bathurst Winter Festival, although the date had been selected to avoid a clash. 

“They’ve been having sensational growth,” she said.