Ironfest was an annual festival held in the central western New South Wales town of Lithgow, a couple of hours drive west from Sydney. In the words of the organisation that ran it, it was originally "a glorified art exhibition... (which)... celebrated the birth of steel in Australia in Lithgow". (The first commercially viable blast furnace in Australia was built there in 1906-1907.)

From there the festival spread its wings. Iron working and blacksmithing were always at the core of it, but there were also cosplay themes (like the Wild West in 2018), military and medieval re-enactments and displays, classic cars, early steam tractors, hand-crafted goods stalls, falconry, steampunk, you name it.

Unfortunately this would be the second last Ironfest as we knew it. The one in 2019 went ahead, but Ironfest was hit badly by the Covid cancellation of the 2020 festival a mere 4 weeks out from the due date since a lot of the costs had already been paid for. With gatherings still banned in 2021, Ironfest never financially recovered.

(The festival was resurrected in a fashion by a new group in April 2024 in the nearby town of Portland (population 2,424) which is about 25km NW of Lithgow.)

I know that with some Ironfests, we stayed up in the Blue Mountains overnight to reduce the amount of driving to be done in a day. However we had to get back to the wolf and the cat since there was no one to mind them, so for 2018, the Google Maps Timeline shows that we went up and back on the same day. That's about 2.5 hours each way, which would explain why we didn't return for the 2019 one. The 2018 one was either our second or third one.

(Aside: It's unfortunate that Google will be destroying the usefulness of the timeline in late 2024.)