NSW Deputy Premier, Minister for the Arts and Member for Dubbo Troy Grant will deliver them.

One of the gifts is the Cultural Tourism Toolkit that offers suggestions for promoting the work of regional artists and cultural organisations to boost cultural tourism.

The other is a new Screen NSW program that will give $4000 grants to 10 emerging regional filmmakers to create a short film or web series for online screening on ABC Open.

The gifts come on top of the $380,000 provided by the state government to Artlands that has returned to NSW for the first time in 14 years.

“Artlands is about bringing the best people from across Australia together to share ideas for the betterment of arts and culture in regional NSW,” Mr Grant said.

“In NSW we’re doing more and more to help artists based in regional NSW and over this conference we’re going to let that be known. We will also be listening to what others are doing and see if we can do even more to make arts in the bush the best in the country.”

Artlands, dubbed “Part Conference, Part Festival, All Arts”, will run from Thursday to Sunday. Its extensive program of free and ticketed events is available at artlands.com.au. 

The former Dubbo City Council put in a successful bid for 2016 Artlands being led by a Regional Arts NSW team. It promises to lift Dubbo’s cultural standing and inject an estimated $360,000 into its economy.

On Thursday a street parade led by Circus West will collect some of the 1000 conference delegates at Dubbo Regional Theatre and Convention Centre on its way to Victoria Park No 2 Oval for the Artlands opening ceremony from 7.30pm.

2016 Artlands artistic director Greg Pritchard is urging the community to turn out. “It will be a spectacle with floating helium balloons, projections on balloons, local schoolchildren drumming, contemporary Indigenous dancers and a big irrigator as the centrepiece,” he said.