Another Winter Festival

Dark Mofo finished last weekend – but that's not the only festival that brightens up a Tasmanian winter.

LANTERNS FOR PEACE

It was a chilly evening, but a large group of people turned out at Cornelian Bay for the Multicultural Council of Tasmania's celebration of Refugee Week. 

Earlier this month I spent two Sundays at the Red Cross office in Melville Street with a horde of enthusiastic lantern-making volunteers. 

Naomi, designer, instructor, and terrifyingly efficient person, managed to organise a motley crowd of all ages and levels of ability wielding strips of gaffer tape, five-metre lengths of cane, and various sharp implements in a confined space.

The following weekend we came back and worked with buckets and brushes of glue, grease-proof paper and lots of people milling around in the same confined space. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, somehow nobody ended up seriously injured or wallpapered to the ceiling, nobody put their foot in a bucket of water, and we succeeded in transforming cane and paper into five big lanterns – a leafy sea dragon, lighthouse, sea turtle, dove and pelican.

I've been looking forward to seeing them in action – and tonight it happened. Here are the pictures:

the choir

ready for the onslaught

onlookers

the drummers

the dancers

so here's the lantern I worked on - with many other people, I hasten to add

and here are the rest of them

lit up - it's almost dark enough to see the pretty lights

Lucie Cutting, who did all the organising, opens proceedings

My camera doesn't have a lot of fancy settings, being the cheapest one I could buy (within reason) so I had to take an awful lot of photos to get these two. They're still not very good, but you get a bit of an idea.

oh look - the pelican again!

And last of all, this: