The annual six-day event staged between Christmas and New Year is Australian culture's version of extreme sports, demanding Zen-like stoicism and tolerance in the face of overcrowding and, this year at least, appalling tropical weather. Yet with more than 500 events going on regardless of the heatwave, the punters come in droves. And droves.

This year, the Queensland Folk Federation organisers wisely sought to cap attendance numbers and sell tickets online only, but when advance sales looked problematic, director Bill Hauritz's team had an eleventh-hour change of plan. Releasing tickets for sale at the gate must have worked, because by Boxing Day, the 5km drive from the town of Woodford to the festival itself took more than an hour.

Once inside the gates, there were obvious changes to the site. The creation of a new precinct featuring the Big Top and Troubadour stages, each with its own tree-covered hillside, is a masterstroke, providing more space and offering two delightful places to watch some of the festival's more than 3000 performers.

Musically, Woodford is all about pluralism, and a highlight of each festival is searching for the most mongrel description of a band's music, this year's finalists being "urban jungle groove where reggae meets blues and folk flirts with jazz", and "a bitchin' brew of gangsta jazz, gypsy punk and garage cabaret".

All things to all people these hybrid bands might be, and some - like the Cat Empire, Blue King Brown and Panjea - always get the punters dancing, but what is often lacking in the cross-genre mix are well-crafted songs. Thank God, therefore, for Pete Murray, who arrived as the Amphitheatre headliner with nothing but his pared-down rhythm section and a blazing, inspired performance of memorable tunes.

The revelation of the event, though, was Troy'n'Trevelyn and the Tribe, a bunch of energetic kids whose charismatic stage presence and fabulous playing of soul and funk originals made the Murri Stage the place to be every night.

It was the year of North American folk-punk acts, with New York's the Mammals, Winnipeg's the Duhks, and Genticorum from Montreal fiddling and banjoing up a storm. Their final hootenanny, with all three bands jamming together, was a classic Woodford moment, the rapturous reception suggesting that festival programmer Michael Peterson might look at similar acts such as Quebec's Les Cowboys Fringants in future years.

Old-timers Andy Irvine and the septuagenarian Peggy Seeger were suitably venerated, the latter breaking out her scrapbook and demonstrating the grand folk tradition of five-minute introductions to one-minute songs. Usual Woodford suspects such as Eugene "Hideaway" Bridges, Bomba, Penelope Swales, Dya Singh and Ember Swift all did their thing again, while the bluesy Eric Bibb cruised his way through the melted afternoon sessions, Pablo Discobar impressed, and young Lior continued to carve out his musical niche somewhere between Jeff Buckley and george.

It was a big year for circus acts, though the queues for them were intimidating. The closing fire event featured a floating world and the familiar message of honouring mother-earth. At quieter moments, nature walks such as those run by ornithologist Roy Sonnenburg, were a welcome diversion from the hot and dusty main event.

In his final director's report, Hauritz said that the dust problem was only a quarter as bad as it had been last year.

In the performance area, this may have been the case, but it certainly wasn't among the season-campers, where those with respiratory problems went in search of asthma-busting doses of clean air while others simply prayed for rain.

Ironically, the festival was nearly washed out three years running, but it now seems further dust-minimisation strategies will need to be adopted if Woodford is to become as easy to endure over six days as it is to love.