Grass Is Greener Festival Fallout Enters New Legal Round

The team behind the now-defunct Grass Is Greener festival are facing a legal stoush from an investor who’s attempting to claw-back a seven-figure loan.

Oliver Fines-Frost and Johnny Eddings, the operators of Grass Is Greener, along with five of their companies, are being pursued in a debt recovery claim, the Gold Coast Bulletin reports.

The paperwork was filed in the Brisbane Supreme Court in September 2024 by David Nicholas’ DN Holdings, the largest creditor of Hand Picked Events and Marketing, the company behind the Grass is Greener.

DN Holdings, whose sole director and shareholder is Nicholas, the Adelaide-raised entrepreneur, investor and social media influencer better known as The Captain Davo, is reportedly seeking an order from the court that payment of $1.25 million be made in full, with appropriate interest and costs, or the pair and their companies are to provide a list of related businesses in which they hold any beneficial interest.

In its claim, DN Holdings says the loan was provided in an arrangement that included repayments and equity, and changed shortly before the festival brand hit the wall.

The pair are said to be defending the claim, which their lawyer said was “wholly denied” by his clients.

The Grass Is Greener started out in Cairns, north Queensland, building from 4,000 to 8,000 punters at the Showground, and extending in its fourth year to the Gold Coast.

Then, the pandemic hit. The year 2022 was meant to be one of expansion, as the fest rolled out with southern dates, in Canberra and Geelong. Those plans came unglued when a string of headline acts pulled out, and the new Canberra and Geelong legs were scrapped, with organisers citing the health emergency, rising costs and unpredictable weather as contributing to the situation.

The Gold Coast and Cairns dates went ahead as planned.

It was curtains for Grass Is Greener when BCR Advisory was appointed as liquidators on December 9th 2022, and Hand Picked officially went into liquidation on July 17th, 2023.

Wild weather, changing ticket-buying behaviour, rising costs and other factors have created what many in festival-land are depicting as a crisis.

More than 50 music festivals across Australia were fully or partially cancelled due to extreme weather conditions in the past decade, according to “Rain, Heat, Repeat: How Music Fans Are Experiencing Extreme Weather”, a report from Green Music Australia, co-authored by Associate Professor Catherine Strong, Dr Ben Green, Dr Todd Denham of RMIT, and Dr Lauren Rickards of La Trobe University.

For a range of reasons, Souled Out cancelled its entire 2025 run just days out from the showtime, while major events such as Splendour in the Grass, Groovin the Moo, Esoteric Festival and Listen Out are missing from the calendar.