Derby Day 1

Today we headed off to Derby for part of the Boab Festival, or more importantly the Mowanjum Festival. It’s an aboriginal community about 30kms out of Derby on the Gibb River Road. They’ve recently got some funding for a magnificent Art Centre to be built. They have an amazing art collective running and teaching many people the finer points of their local painting style as well as Boab Nut Carving, rope making and paperbark container making, and wood carving. Its all quite stunning and very professionally put together. It is also a dry community, and the whole festival was also a smoke free event! Great going as Ange worked with them for their funding grant from Health Ways (which requires events be smoke free), and we helped deliver the signage for the event in our van.

if you look closely at this picture you can see an old boat propeller that was placed next to a newly planted tree sometime after it was sunk in 1910. The space between the sapling and the propeller wasnt sufficient to take into its growth of the next few decades, so the tree has moulded itself around the metal work of this newly formed artwork, creating a lovely metal stain in the wood.

The event started at 4pm and went into the night. There were local bands, and also cultural exchanges with Canadian Indians and NZ Maori’s also invited to present and attend. There were also acrobats and a fabulous kids corroboree presented to the attendees. It was a really well run event with food and drink also available to purchase, as well as a boab nut carving competion and art exhibition in the new gallery. The event was in its 11th year of operation, and you can see by the way it was run. We all really enjoyed it. Especially the kids. They were fantastic!