National Folk Festival 2022 kicks off at EPIC: Katie Noonan creates festival line-up featuring Archie Roach and Yothu Yindi

And as the first festival under the guidance of artistic director and Australian singer-songwriter Katie Noonan, it has certainly brought with it some of the biggest names in Australian music.

First Nations royalty is a large part of the line-up with Archie Roach helping to open the festival on Friday evening - in what will be his last Canberra performance - and Yothu Yindi marking the 30th anniversary of Treaty in the closing performance.

The line-up also includes the likes of Kate Ceberano, Josh Pyke, Canberra's Omar Musa and Fred Smith, and All Our Exes Live in Texas.

"Part of my job really was broadening the church of folk. So I think there has been a fairly strong focus on Anglican folk, which when the festival started in 1967, was probably a fairly complete definition of folk. But since then, we've become a beautiful multicultural experiment," Noonan said.

"I really wanted to reflect the beautiful melting pot of sounds that we have here in Australia, and indeed, in Canberra, which is a very international city. And I wanted to really connect with the Ngunnawal elders and give us a sense of place as Ngunnawal country. And so we've implemented language through the festival."

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It's the 30th year the festival has been held on Ngunnawal land. From 1967 to the early 1990s, the festival was held in different sites around the country before landing in Canberra for the annual Easter event.

Part of this integration of the Ngunnawal language into the festival is the new main stage named Narragunnawali, which means coming together and wellbeing.

Ngunnawal artist Alinta Barlow will also close the opening night concert with My Island Home which she, along with the Winanggaay Ngunnawal Language Group, translated into Ngunnawal.

"Katie Noonan came to us and asked 'Would this be something you'd be able to do?' And we wanted to try it," Barlow said.

"So we looked at the words that we have because it's a very different structure, Ngunnawal language to English.

"We thought, 'OK, how can we make this match the tune?' - because Ngunnawal words are quite long and we needed to turn it into something that would be simple to sing and easy to sing.

"It was an interesting process, using what little we have in the way of words. But I think we were able to do it, because My Island Home is such a versatile song, with so many different describing words, and we were able to do that."

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