“We’re pretty passionate about connecting to the core of culture in Australia and sustaining the Celtic culture here,” says festival director and curator Una McAlinden. “Some of the first settlers in Australia were… well, most of them were Celtic. We bring our festival to the region and everybody seems to reconnect to some little part [of their history].”
Running since the early 2000s, the event is the largest Celtic festival in the Southern Hemisphere. Attracting musicians, singers, dancers and storytellers, there is no shortage of things to see and do. “We go across lots of the arts strands. There’s a strong theatre program, a dance program, storytelling, singing, language, trad talk,” McAlinden says. “There’s loads and loads of different elements to what we’re doing across the arts and different cultures as well. You can break it into Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornwall and the diaspora countries. It’s quite a diverse program.
“There’s over 15 venues. It [includes] concerts, dances, workshops, master classes and trad talk – which is a festival conference session. There’s social sessions where everyone just jams, so people get together and often haven’t seen each other all year and just play music together.”
The festival not only celebrates Celtic culture as a whole, but the practices unique to each region. “Ireland have so many different dance styles, it has so many different styles of music,” McAlinden says. “Like within fiddle playing, there is a different style of fiddle in each county and people will know by their fiddle playing where they’ve come from. We could be going for days and days trying to cover absolutely everything about all these cultures, but we just try to bring the best of it each year and try to introduce new things and keep people’s favourite things happening. Really the idea is to connect people to the culture, and get them participating.
Indeed, you could spend the whole weekend just doing workshops. “You could learn just about anything. We try to offer a really big range, and even the theatre program is really strong. A theatre company is coming from Dublin. They’re doing some play readings and working with Melbourne actors to put on a kids Celtic trail tales, which is somebody who is dressed up and tells the stories of legends and myths. They take the kids around Portarlington and there’s musicians and props at different sites. They’re really bringing back the old legends.”
There’s a room upstairs in the Grand Hotel called The Rambling House, which allows you to grab a pint and listen to a master storyteller weaving tales around roaring open fire. If poetry is more your thing, check out Felix Nobis’ Once Upon A Barstool. “It’s about him coming to move here then talking to someone back in Ireland. So it’s all about that sort of to and fro between here and Ireland.”
It’s not only actors and poets getting into the storytelling, either. Irish-born musician Damien Leith is presenting The Passing Glass, a show combining music and stories. Port Ferry’s 2016 Artist of the Year Marcia Howard is doing a concert titled Holy Wells to Waterholes – her story of belonging in Australia.
“It seems to have brought out all these interesting, thought-provoking shows. [It’s] an opportunity for people to perform that sort of stuff, and to share why it’s important to them, and their ancestry – what it means to them to be Celt. We give the performers an opportunity to share lots of different things.”
BY CASSIE HEDGER
