A quick scan around Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland sees an early start to Spring celebrations early with community gatherings and sustainable living themed art and product showcases and interactive dining experiences this weekend! Beginning this weekend audiences and visitors can view art that has been produced on reclaimed street posters, learn about organic gardening and learn more on how to live a chemical free lift, see motorbike stunts in a thrilling show, bull riding, sheep dog displays, sheep shearing demonstrations, woodchopping, a Ute Muster, FREE Circus Workshops and more!!!
Terracotta Warriors Asian Infused High Tea
Two high profile companies are coming together to celebrate Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality the new Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Sofitel Melbourne On Collins and Dulux®, Australia’s most trusted paint brand have collaborated on an Asian infused High Tea buffet where guests are invited to paint chocolate Terracotta Warriors back to their original colours.
Over 2,200 years has passed since anyone has seen the original colours of the Terracotta Warriors. Due to their fragility and transparent lacquer coating colours have since faded or peeled off. High Tea goers will need to use their imagination to choose from four flowing fountains of edible Dulux Mint Twist, Dulux Symphony Red, Dulux Midas Touch and Dulux China White colours.
Sofitel’s General Manager, Clive Scott mentions, ‘This new high tea concept is quite unique, bridging the Chinese culture of the past with the artistic flair of our very talented international pastry chef, David Hann’.
David has led the creative process of the Asian infused high tea, highlighted by his crispy Wonton with chocolate, ginger and pineapple. All the desserts will be accompanied by a hot buffet selection of Chinese favourites, such as steamed pork buns and crispy fried wontons.
WHERE: 25 Collins Street, Melbourne VIC 3000
WHEN: High tea gastronomes can embrace their inner artist at Sofi’s Lounge from 2.30pm every Saturday and Sunday until 13th October 2019 for $99 per adult.
Cunnamulla Fella Festival:
24 August to 1 September
The township of Cunnamulla was created by Cobb & Co. on the third of September 1879, when the first coach drove through from Bourke. Today it is the only surviving south-west town along the original route. This says a lot about the people of Cunnamulla. Tough, resilient, creative…. they are down to earth folk who love their country. While wool growing and beef production are still the main industries, the new kids on the block are irrigated table grape farming, organic wheat and organic lamb production. The mighty Warrego River is on the edge of town. Kayaking, fishing, swimming ….it’s the perfect place for a bush picnic. Keen ‘twitchers’ will love discovering the region’s native birds in their natural environment too. Cunnamulla has some of the best natural sand hills in Australia. Just seeing them is an eye-catching feast.
For one famous week at the end of August, cowboys and bull riders, shearers and stockmen, foodies, travellers, music lovers and visitors from all over Australia head to Outback Queensland to celebrate the Cunnamulla Fella Festival! It’s the outback Queensland spirit, up close, personal and covered in genuine country dust and the people of Cunnamulla have officially invited Australia, to get amongst it!
Australian country music star, ADAM BRAND will headline with an exclusive performance on Saturday 31st August. He’s joined by three-piece country sensation Redneck Gentlemen, young Sydney-based country singer-songwriter Dani Young, the well-known performer Cathy Drummond, as well as Australian whip-cracking sensation Walter Whip, Trick Riding thrillsters, the breathtaking Globe of Death motorbike spectacle and the internationally acclaimed magic-maker Cosentino!
There’s the Cunnamulla Rodeo, sheep dog displays, sheep shearing demonstrations, woodchopping, a Ute Muster, FREE Circus Workshops, performance classes and fireworks and for the first time, Barrel Racing.
On the Saturday evening (August 31), the “toughest sport of dirt” will be held – the PBR Bull Ride. Today more than 1,200 bull riders hold PBR memberships and compete in more than 300 PBR sanctioned competitions around the globe millions in prizemoney; some of these will be riding at the Cunnamulla Fella Festival!
So, who is the Cunnamulla Fella? He is the essence of the outback immortalised in a song by Stan Coster, and sung by the legendary Slim Dusty, who spent considerable time in the outback town. Paying tribute to the ‘fellas of the region who forged the way – the shearers, ringers, bushman, riders and more – the Cunnamulla Fella statute stands tall in the main street, a fitting epicentre for this iconic Queensland town and festival.
WHERE: Cunnamulla is located 972 km west of Brisbane and 120 km north of the NSW border on the Warrego River.
Fly REX (Regional Express Airlines) flies twice weekly between Brisbane and Cunnamulla. Enjoy the spectacular view of Outback Queensland from the air on your way to Cunnamulla. 13 17 13, or visit
Rail: Travel from Brisbane across the Great Dividing Range to Charleville and connect with a rail coach service to Cunnamulla. To book travel on Queensland Rail Travel’s services, phone 1800 TRAINS (872 467)
Bus: Getting to Cunnamulla with Bus Queensland is as easy as booking an online ticket or calling 1300 287 537
The Patch (Sustainable Living Festival) – Erina Fair
24 August to 8 September
“The Central Coast is surrounded by stunning, pristine beaches and bushland, and our community is very conscious of protecting these natural resources. That’s why The Patch was so popular last year, and why we’re bringing it back again, and bigger than before.” says Erina Fair Centre Manager, Stephen Ross. “We’re also listening to our customers’ desire for local businesses to be more sustainable and at Erina Fair, we’ve introduced a number of initiatives that will reduce our carbon footprint. We recently installed the Closed Loop takeaway coffee cup recycling program, as a complement to the plastic bags, paper, cardboard and organic waste we already recycle. We also harvest rainwater for landscape irrigation and centre amenities.”
Within The Patch’s purpose-built green garden oasis in Centre Court, customers can take part in a series of free interactive and hands-on workshops focusing on living a more sustainable life. From organic gardening, living chemical free and keeping backyard chickens’ workshops, preloved clothing sale, and special guest appearances by dirtgirl and her Grubby Bucket Show, and Gardening Guru, Melissa King.
Customers can also chat to resident gardening experts from Kincumber Mitre 10, who will be available to answer any gardening questions from 9am – 5:30pm weekdays and 10am – 5pm on weekends.
To entertain and inspire our young customers to make a positive difference to the planet, much loved dirtgirl and scrapboy of ABCKids Dirtgirlworld spin-off program Get Grubby TV will host their singalong Grubby Bucket Show on Saturday 24 August. Kids will learn, watch and grow as the girl with a dirt name, in a dirt game continues to explore the wonders around us with quizzes, challenges and songs. Plus stick around for a meet and greet and a special take home gift.
Erina Fair is partnering with Fairhaven Services to host The Patch Preloved Pop Up Shop on Saturday 12 September, where you can shop preloved, on trend, clothing in excellent condition. With nothing over $10, customers who spend more than $20 will receive a sustainable string bag.
Anyone visiting The Patch
has a chance to win great prizes including an
Eglu Go Up Chicken Coop
and five $500 Erina Fair Gift Cards.
WHERE: Terrigal Drive, Erina
Shane Forrest Exhibition:
24 August to 8 September
A glimpse into 25 years of studio practice is encapsulated in Shane Forrest’s new show at Rogue Pop Up Gallery in Newtown. In this review show, past supports present and present echoes past and works become uncoupled from the actual time of production, existing in a relationship of the artists making. This is most evident if Forrest’s themes are identified and then compared. Forrest has been working with ‘the street’ since the early 1980’s. The ephemeral, the discarded, the unremarkable and the evidence of entropy in our daily lives are reoccurring themes in his work. He makes 2D and 3D works informed by his local environment, both the inhabitants, as well as the landscape. He is attracted to representing, in small sculptural maquettes, the sometimes unusual and surprising shapes made by people with their accessories as they move through the environment. An interest in the Sydney obsession with real estate is a theme for both painting and small sculptural explosions.
Forrest produces his work with mainly reclaimed materials. Old palettes, worn out brushes, reclaimed paper and cardboard, failed or discarded canvases thrown out into the street. His practices are historically connected to the Nouveaux Realists (1960 -1963) and Raymond Hains’ particular “affichist” conceptual concern for engaging with the unspectacular.
From a series called “Consumer Robusta”, the material choice to work on large slabs of reclaimed street posters speak of an abiding interest and concern for urban voices as heard on flyers, posters, brochures and other ephemeral notices. These poster slabs provide messages that Forrest mines like an archaeologist, uncovering forgotten snippets in the cacophony of voices. A de-gloving of the handy work of the popular and the mundane as he carves new images into the poster surfaces using a scalpel.
In the series ‘Porous Suburb’, Forrest uses the voluminous, ubiquitous, letterbox clogging advertising generated to promote the Sydney obsession with real estate, as stimulus. This property transfer industry has created an intense image-making machine with its own codified, visual and verbal systems, turning bricks and mortar into inadequacy and desire. The result is that a young, vibrant, creative population, essential in their presence, are largely disassociated from ownership of hyped-up dream homes. The paintings are a metaphor for the now unattainable dream of home ownership by the very residents who make a suburb a desirable.
To make each work he first completes three to four meticulously painted scenes on paper. The imagery is taken from the real estate promotions that stuff his letterbox. These scenes are then ripped and reassembled into collages that become a view of all three layers at once. The resulting layered compositions simultaneously hide and reveal, allowing a view through closed doors. Private residences peeled back, the eye and imagination travelling through ruptured facades. The property, so tantalizingly depicted in the original photographs, is now doubly unattainable. Disrupted representation of dwellings, no longer ‘perfect’, offered for sale, their layers torn, hint at all not being well as Forrest subjects these utopian visions to entropic forces.
In recent sculptural works, Forrest asks questions about failures. Failure of surface, failure to protect, failure to be contained. Some masses are moth eaten, some are collapsing, seams burst, edges fray. A veneer of control soon succumbs; protective layers are ruptured. They are proposals that playfully engage with folly, time and entropy. No one is a shiny winner; no one loses either. Nervously balanced between apexes, the longer lasting mid ground is explored, after shiny and new and before derelict and useless, hovering nervously in realms of deterioration. A mid-range of battered, tatty, worn and revealed.
Frozen on the threshold of explosion, are a series of sculptural paper works Forrest has titled ‘Gifts’. These ‘explosions’ are the latest direction for Forrest. They are a collision of plenty and entropy. Are the ‘Gifts’ erupting in delight or something more sinister? Torn in frustration or a voyeur’s peek into interior layers? As Forrest states about his small unassuming sculpture titled Caution, “Is this work about an intimate interest in entropic forces and the struggle to maintain order, or do I just like thinks that go bang?”
WHERE: Shop 6. 480 King Street, Newtown
WHEN: Wednesday to Saturday 11am to 6pm, Sunday 10am to 5pm