The coalfields eisteddfod is on again, from Abermain to Vincent Street

It has been eisteddfod week in Abermain. The vocal and instrumental sections and the speech and drama sections of the 2026 Abermain Eisteddfod ran from Monday 28 September to Saturday 3 October at the Abermain Plaza Hall, according to the dates the eisteddfod has published.

The dance solos follow in Cessnock. They are listed for Tuesday 6 to Saturday 10 October at the council's performing arts theatre on Vincent Street. On the Saturday night, 10 October, the theatre lists a showcase evening there for the eisteddfod's Spirit of the Coalfields Cup.

The year's competition began in August, with the school sections and the dance troupes.

A competition from the pit villages

The eisteddfod says it was established around 1917 by the Methodist Church, with Robert Hanley as a founding member; he stayed on the committee until his death in 1955. By its own account it had grown by 1965 into the largest eisteddfod in New South Wales, "even rivalling the Sydney Eisteddfod", and it is now the only eisteddfod still running in the Cessnock local government area.

The earliest newspaper report of it we have found on Trove is from April 1919, and it is a complaint. A Kurri Kurri reader who signed the letter "Opposer" wrote to the Newcastle Morning Herald that the eisteddfod, due "a week after Easter", "ought to be stopped, owing to the influenza". Shows and race meetings had already been called off, the letter said, and competitors from the Newcastle and Sydney districts would spread the disease in "a crowded hall".

That September the Herald announced the programme for an Abermain eisteddfod at Scott's Hall on 7 and 8 November 1919, its items "selected so as to attract competitors of all ages", with entries to the secretary, E. Robertson.

Part of a longer habit

Abermain was one of several coalfields towns with an eisteddfod. Cessnock held its own through the 1920s: the Newcastle Sun announced the third annual Cessnock eisteddfod for the Lyceum Hall in October 1923, and the schedule for the 1928 Cessnock Town Eisteddfod ran to 95 items, from choirs and elocution to mouth-organ and dancing, with £300 in prize money.

When the second State eisteddfod finished at the Strand Theatre, Cessnock, in May 1939, the adjudicator of its choral, vocal and instrumental sections told the audience the choral work was equal to anything he had heard in Australia. He put the standard of the district's children down, the Maitland Daily Mercury reported, to the "holding of eisteddfods in northern districts over the past 25 years". A year earlier a combined male choir from Cessnock, Weston and Kurri Kurri had gone to Sydney and won the chief choral contest by half a mark.

Of all those competitions, Abermain's is the one still running. Session times, entry rules and results are published by the eisteddfod itself; our eisteddfod guide explains how to watch or enter.