Wiradjuri artist Michael Lyons used to receive visitors by the hour at his rural New South Wales workshop.

“Ten caravans a day – for out here, that’s a lot,” says Lyons, who lives and works in Narrandera, population 3,746.

But with sustained drought and nearby bushfires having affected tourism in the western Riverina region of New South Wales, business has slowed to a trickle.

Lyons estimates he sold approximately $150,000 worth of paintings and painted artefacts last year. “This year, I probably would have sold $20,000 or $15,000, if that. Because I’m not selling to shops, I’m not selling to tourists.”

Lyons is one of many regional and rural artists grappling with a double whammy dealt by 2020.

Bushfires and Covid-19 restrictions devastated domestic tourism in the first three months of this year, Tourism Research Australia (TRA) figures show – and arts and heritage-focused tourism has also taken a hit, starving regional artists of buyers and audiences in some areas. North coast NSW alone welcomed 52,932 fewer overnight arts tourists in the first three months of 2020 compared with the same period in 2019, while Hobart and the south of Tasmania lost 17,114 overnight arts visitors, TRA research indicates.

Regional tourism data for the period since the onset of the pandemic is scant, but tourism operators at even popular holiday destinations such as Byron Bay and the NSW Central Coast say they have been struggling to attract their usual visitor numbers.

“We are two-thirds down in the amount of foot traffic that we normally get,” says Mick Webb, general manager of the Byron Bay visitor centre. “The big events which keep this local economy kicking in a big way – BluesFest, Splendour in the Grass and Falls [festival] – they’re off the radar for the moment, which is devastating.”

In regional Victoria, stage 3 Covid-19 restrictions closely followed the horrific bushfire season.

The Man from Snowy River Bush festival has felt that disastrous combination particularly keenly.

The annual event typically draws 7,500 revellers to the small Victorian town of Corryong with its live music, street performers, craft stalls, art exhibition and horsemanship. The festival was due to take place in April, but bushfires swept through the region in January, destroying the festival’s cross-country paddock and tearing through more than $300,000 worth of equipment and property.

“Once the fire had been through, we said, ‘Well the community needs us more than ever as a festival, to get some more support back into the place’,” says Cameron Jackson, secretary of the festival’s board.

Volunteers worked seven-day weeks from January to March to repair the damage.

“Then just as we were all good to go, we learned that this Covid-19 was going to be a larger issue than we first thought,” he says.

“Personally, there was a lot of time spent in paddocks screaming up at the sky.”

The festival was postponed, then cancelled.

Artists and poets in the region, who rely on the festival to find buyers, are “shattered”, Jackson says.

“There’s a lot of people there that have written some magnificent poems about the bushfires that had been emailed to me, and people saying, ‘I can’t wait to read this out, really feeling for you guys,’ and then of course we were cancelled,” he says.

“The emotional strain on those folks has been hard to watch.”

But the financial strains on all involved are also pressing.

Alyce Fisher, executive director of Murray Arts, says: “They’re never going to make the money back from the loss of all their equipment; they’ll never make the money back from losing a whole year’s worth of income. And then they’ve got to galvanise whatever’s left to pull together for next year’s festival.”

Ros Abercrombie, executive director of Regional Arts Australia, adds: “There’s droughts, bushfires and now Covid. This multiplier effect is massive.”

In June, the federal government announced a lifeline for the arts sector in the form of a $250m support package; some of the details from that long-awaited package were unveiled last week.

Abercrombie welcomes its eligibility guidelines as “inclusive” and says she believes some regional arts organisations will be able to access that support. She adds that the $10m government package the Regional Arts Fund received back in April has been “significant and welcome”.

But funding alone is not enough, she says.

“When you put a relief package together, it’s really important that it comes with resourcing workers on the ground to support that package,” she says.

Joe Toohey, executive director of Regional Arts Victoria, agrees: “That could be someone to help people dealing with trauma to navigate another funding application form, or it might be someone whose job is to ‘connect the dots’ in a local community by running events or information sessions.”

For Lyons, this kind of help could be life-changing. He is now on jobkeeper, but says he wouldn’t know where to start when it comes to accessing government grants.

“Regional artists just need some centre point where they can go and say, ‘Can you help me with this? What’s going on here?’” he says. “Whether there are people that do it and just don’t come out to the country, I don’t know.”

Abercrombie also wants to see more funding for on-the-ground workers who can help with risk management and mitigation planning – for example, to protect First Nations arts and culture sites from future natural disasters.

“As we talk about Covid recovery and relief, we need to do that with the lens of [the] approaching potential summer bushfire season ahead of us,” she says. “And it’s not something that anyone’s in a position to do at the moment.”

Many freelance contract workers who rely on festivals are now scrambling to find alternative forms of income because they don’t qualify for jobkeeper, says Abercrombie.

Jackson is hoping the Man From Snowy River Bush festival will run in 2021 – but with regional Victoria clamped down under stage 3 restrictions, they’re holding off ticket sales until the situation is clearer.

“We’re at the mercy of government at the moment,” says Jackson. “There is nobody around here who thinks 2020 has been a great year … It’s been shocking, shattering. But high-country folk are resilient, so we’ll continue to do what we do best and that is deal with the challenges as they come.”