So, a couple of weekends back Hobart and I went to vote. We made our choice, and we put it forwards to decide who our new Prime Minister would be! Yeah, that’s worked out well.
We also went to the Cultural Fest that weekend. It worked out just about as well.
Cultural Fest is an annual event in Townsville, and something we kinda look forwards to. Good food, a celebration of cultural diversity, and a chance to buy whacky hats! Here, check out this website:
http://www.culturalfest.org/home.htm
So we went, paid our five bucks and headed on in. And boy did it suck.
The start wasn’t too bad. There was a face painting stall right near the entrance so Hobart stopped to get his face painted. I suggested a robot, but like the shitburger he is, he decided he wanted to be a zombie. While I was waiting for him to get his face painted, I decided to stop at the stall next door, which was basically a suggestion box.
You might notice that my hand is a little bit green in these shots. I stole the face painter’s brush and was trying to paint on my hand. But she didn’t like that at all. So she wouldn’t let me paint on my hand. Which was actually one of the reasons that, y’know, I’d left Hobart to get his face painted.
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Having placed my suggestion I rejoined Hobart and we stopped at a really really cultural store that had all kinds of traditional things that are made in China. Like this:
Yeah. This is basically what it was all like. Rather than the promised cultural celebration what we had was a shitty weekend market and some okay, slightly diverse food. It was thoroughly disappointing. There just wasn’t much there that was actually celebrating cultural diversity.
There was some local radio representation. There was some stalls selling shitty Twilight knock-off merchandise, and beads, and some stalls with plastic guns. Hobart was having a lot of fun with his annoying gun (which got broken pretty fucking fast… I broked it, on accident… sorry Hobart) and was very fond of saying the same joke again and again and again to everyone we met. People were all, “OH MY GOD! ZOMBIE-MAN!” and he was all, “YES! IT IS CULTURAL!”
Shut up Hobart.
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The food is another attraction, but it just isn’t that special, really. Spanish food out of a cart really isn’t that much less greasy and disgusting than Chinese, or Greek, or I dunno… Indonesian food.
The real hi-light was the two stages, with different cultural displays. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough else there to keep us around long enough to see more than one or two displays. Unless you want to just find a chair and sit down for the whole day hoping the next display is really interesting… well, it just ain’t gunna keep you there.
Honestly, there just didn’t seem to be much going on. The ‘cultural’ stalls were mostly crappy market stalls selling second-rate shit you wouldn’t even buy in Crazy Clarks. There wasn’t really anyone in traditional cultural clothing outside of the demos… and one of the demos we watched was ballroom dancing. Yay, ballroom dancing!
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Townsville celebrating multi-culturalism!
The Cultural Fest has been a lot better in past years, but I really think they need to shape up if they want the event to keep going. The Christian festival I visited last year, at Christmas, was fucking fantastic compared to this, with a tonne of interesting stuff going on to keep you around. Nothing like that here.
Where were my roaming karate displays? Or… I dunno… a story tent? Or people walking around in the native costumes of their countries of origin? If the idea was to celebrate multi-culturalism by not singling out any specific cultures, then I guess they did a fairly good job.
Otherwise, it was pretty much just shit.
–Andrew S.
