Yaamma Festival

Festival Location: Bourke, NSW, Australia

Festival Type(s): Indigenous Fest, Cultural Festivals, Traditional Music Festivals

Yaamma means 'Welcome' in the local Ngiyampa language.

This year sees the launch of a new cultural festival designed to promote and enrich Indigenous communities in remote areas of far-western New South Wales - The Murdi-Paaki Region.

The Yaamma Festival is the first project to come out of the Bourke Aboriginal Community Working Party (a non-political community organisation). They developed a Community Plan entitled: Building Bridges - Having Fun and Living Well. It reads:

"A unified Bourke community, with Aboriginal people as leaders of the whole Bourke community, bringing spirit and respect for land and people to the whole community."

The themes of the Yaamma Festival, taken from the Community Plan, are spirit, soul, heart, mind and body. The festival program and events have all been designed around these themes.

The Yaamma Festival features a musical concert. Performers this year will include the Warumpi Band, who are delighted to perform at this event, reuniting for one concert. The concert line-up also features Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter and Neil Murray.

The week-long program features dancing, sports, bush foods, a symposium on water, bush poetry, and an attempt to create the world's largest painting.

Everyone is invited to participate in the longest painting attempt. Works can be submitted by anyone who wishes to take part including individuals, organisations and community groups.

All works that are submitted in the longest painting project must be based around the Yaamma Festival themes of spirit, soul, heart, mind and body.

The painting will be a collective of diverse stories and artwork from around Australia. Participants' work will be unified, sewn together into a single body of work by the Bourke Aboriginal Women's Group and in the process producing the single largest painting on record - over 350 metres long.

Many groups from around the country - including schools, correctional facilities and individual artists - have registered their interest and involvement in the project.

Some schools have invited Indigenous artists from their region to share local history, stories and art and convey this onto canvas. Students are involved personally in developing the story through painting, artistic expression and interpretation.