Events
15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals
1Australians pride themselves on their irreverent sense of humour, their down-to-earth attitude and community spirit. We’re shining a spotlight on the offbeat festivals, events and traditions that best showcase the real ‘Straya.
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
2Chinchilla, the “Melon Capital of Australia”, celebrates its prized fruit with a Melon Festival every other year. The wacky events include melon skiing, melon-eating and pip-spitting contests, as well as markets selling melon hats, onesies, and other paraphernalia. Located in rural Queensland, 300km west of Brisbane, aka the middle of nowhere, the best way to travel is by rail on the nostalgic Westlander. melonfest.com.au
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
2Darwin’s annual Beer Can Regatta turns litter lemons into entertaining lemonade. The cans littering the streets and beaches of the Top End are turned into more or less seaworthy crafts for a charity race that has become a highlight for visitors and locals alike. The vessels aren’t just judged on their ability to float, but also on their design. Drowned boats can have a second go in the dry-land Henley on Mindil race, inspired by… (see next slide). beercanregatta.org.au
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
4The Henley on Todd Regatta makes light of Australia’s colonial history, and prides itself on being the only boat race in the world that has to be cancelled due to water in the river. Participants compete on the (almost always) dry river bed of the river Todd in Alice Springs, carrying bottomless vessels that “must resemble a boat,” Flintstones-style. henleyontodd.com.au
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
5Offbeat races are something of a tradition Down Under – and in the Outback, it’s all about the dromedaries. Alice Springs has been hosting an annual Camel Race since 1970, and in recent years the Uluru Camel Cup has taken over the tiny, tiny town of Yulara. The choice of animal is no accident, as Australia’s arid inland regions are home to the largest feral camel population in the world, descendants of the pack animals introduced by settlers in the 19th century. camelcup.com.au, ulurucamelracingclub.com
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
6Part Bogan Burning Man, part car club meetup, served with a side of music and a healthy dose of Australiana, the Ute Muster in Deniliquin, NSW, is a crash course in (white) Outback culture. The titular ute is short for utility vehicle, and the festival attempts to set a new Guinness World Record each year for “Most Utes in One Place.” deniutemuster.com.au
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
7There are two wonderfully quirky things that set Parkes apart from any other sleepy rural New South Wales town: One is the Observatory, which famously helped relay the moon landing, as dramatised in Aussie comedy The Dish. The other is the annual Elvis Festival, which sees the town’s population double for a long weekend in January. parkeselvisfestival.com.au [Photo: Parkes Elvis Festival]
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
8Everyone knows that wife-carrying as a competitive sport was invented in Finland, but Australians know a good (read: crazy) idea when they see one, so it’s now become a fixture on the calendar at the Singleton Agricultural Show. The annual obstacle race pits men carrying their partners against each other. singletonshow.com [Photo: Starting Point Photography/Flickr]
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
9The Port Lincoln Tunarama Festival could be just another seafood festival, but in addition to classy oyster-sipping, a gala event and long table dinner, one slightly off-the-wall competition has become the focus of the entire festival: The “World Famous Tuna Toss” sees contestants hurling frozen tuna, a skill that once was perfected by the local fishermen. tunarama.net
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
10Amongst Outback mining town Broken Hill’s many claims to fame (no, seriously, there’s more than one), is the fact that it served as a filming location for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The quirky Palace Hotel has long attracted fans of the cult classic, so why not offer them something worth making the long journey for? Of course, the only appropriate way to make the journey to the Broken Heel Festival is on a dusty road trip, in a bus like the one that gave the film its name. bhfestival.com
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
11At first glance, Hobart’s Mona Festival Of Music and Art (Mofo) is just another hip music festival – and a highbrow one at that. However, the programming goes out of its way to be anything but normal, offering countless concerts, performances and events that skew strange. The mass nude winter solstice swim during the winter edition, Dark Mofo, is a case in point. darkmofo.net.au
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Events
15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
12A slightly twisted sense of humour would seem necessary to celebrate a pub with no beer. The Day Dawn Hotel in Ingham, Queensland, was indeed drank dry by US soldiers on a hot summer’s day in 1943. In 1957, a song inspired by this event became the first Australian single to go gold. To commemorate the 70th anniversary, the town celebrated a Pub with No Beer Festival, complete with historic re-enactment (save for the actual running out of beer). thepubwithnobeer.com.au
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
13The Indian Pacific Outback Christmas Train is not a festival as such, more of a travelling music show, bringing entertainment to some of the most remote communities in Australia. The train travels coast to coast, from Sydney to Perth, stopping in places like Nullarbor ghost town Cook and gold mining town Kalgoorlie, with big-name Australian artists and a Santa Claus on board. [Photo: Wikimedia Commons]
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
14January’s Australia Day celebrations really bring out the locals’ competitive side. However, they don’t celebrate their national holiday with athletic events in the traditional sense. Contests are carried out in more unusual disciplines like hermit-crab-, cockroach- and esky- (Australian for cooler box) racing, or prawn-peeling, jellyfish-eating and thong- (that’s flip flops to you and me) throwing competitions. australiaday.org.au
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
15If you think rodeos are a spectacle best enjoyed in America’s wild, wild west, the cowboys, cowgirls and drovers of the Australian rodeo scene may well prove you wrong. The big events, such as the Mount Isa Rodeo and Cloncurry Muster, showcase a very different side of the Outback, when the normally sleepy towns erupt in a frenzy of activities, parties, markets and competitions. abcra.com.au, currymerrymuster.com.au, isarodeo.com.au
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
16Sure, the Melbourne Cup is the more famous event, but nowhere do the races quite take over as at the Birdsville Races. The one-horse town (human population: 120) becomes a many, many-horse town (human population: 7,000). Perhaps the best location to witness the effects of this influx is the Birdsville Hotel, which looks fit to bust at the seams on race day, with crowds spilling out on to the street, where they make their own fun with impromptu toy horse races. birdsvilleraces.com [Photo: Geoffrey Rhodes/Flickr]
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15 Weird And Wonderful Australian Festivals.
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