The Program.
Program Highlights!
General
Really amazing people who have done some incredible stuff
Arts Festival
Workshops & Plenaries
- We have the great honour of being invited to camp at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, which is a unique part of the history of struggles for Aboriginal sovereignty in Australia.
- The last night there’ll be a Mobile Dance Party, with hundreds of people dancing around a band of drums and horns leading everyone back home from the university.
- Learn how to be a better indigenous ally - spend a week learning from and getting to know an amazing bunch of Aboriginal elders who are coming together from nations all across this land.
- Learn about and get involved in the latest amazing campaigns around Australia for more socially and environmentally just world, from recent successes like the Bentley Blockade and James Price Point to current struggles like the Muckaty Anti-Nuclear Campaign, the Leard Blockade and the growing fight against to stop the Galilee Basin, the coal development which could singlehandedly push our climate over the edge.
- Incredible Food + Lunchtime Groove Sessions: a whole week of delicious breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus amazing musicians who will serenade you while you eat.
- Blackboard Sessions Space: One room, one blackboard. Put up your discussion topic, DIY workshop or campaign idea and bring people together to talk about it, anytime, day or night.
- Building Bridges Day, Saturday 5th: Come together with members of the wider Canberra and regional community, including farmers, union members, people of faith, social services and healthcare workers, to work on building broad-based coalitions and strong communities who can act decisively in favour of a liveable planet and society.
Really amazing people who have done some incredible stuff
- Meet Michael Anderson (Nyoongar Ghurradjong Murri Ghillar), leading figure in struggles for Aboriginal sovereignty since the 1960s and co-founder of the Tent Embassy.
- Climb a tree with Miranda Gibson, who helped save the Styx Valley forest in southern Tasmania by living for 451 days at the top of a 60 metre old-growth eucalyptus.
- Have a chat with Jack Mundey. Jack was the Secretary of the Builders Labourers Federation, a union who in the 1970s actually saved huge parts of Sydney from being cleared for development, including the Sydney Botanic Gardens, which were due to be turned into a carpark, and the historical Rocks area, which would have become a whole lot of high rises. By striking, or putting ‘Green Bans’ on certain projects, they were able to stop developers doing everything from woodchipping in Tasmania to kicking low-income people out of inner-city areas. Jack is now very venerable and this is definitely the last time he’ll appear in public - you could meet him. He’s a historical figure.
- Get to know Nicky Ison and Holly Creenaune, former convenors of the Australian Student Environment Network (ASEN) who have gone on to do amazing things out in the world. Nicky is now directing The Community Power agency, helping communities get started on renewable energy projects, and Holly is a Campaign Coordinator at LandWaterFuture. They’re both rad.
- Storytime with Drew Hutton, who has been a part of almost the entire history of the environment movement, co-founded the Queensland and Australian Greens and recently started the Lock the Gate Alliance, which has sparked game-changing alliances between farmers and environmentalists fighting coal and gas on the front lines.
Arts Festival
- Learn how to make your own giant portable stereo for street parties: then use it, all week!
- Join us on a Noise Music Bliss Voyage: Facepaint, Blacklight + Projections + incredible bands.
- A NoLightsNoLycra style dance party with DJs, instrumental jams, or your own music. Or maybe two. Or, if we top 400 attendees, every night.
- Open Mic Night! Featuring amazing musical artists, perhaps including you
- Learn to make and create with artistic skillshares on Screenprinting, Graffiti, Stencils, Patches, Poetry and Prose writing and Life Drawing.
- Live poetry and readings from contributors to a zine, Word of the Future, which will be launched at the festival featuring poetry and prose from writers around australia.
- Develop a Theatre of the Oppressed performance over the week with daily workshops before performing it on the final night.
- A bunch of incredible documentary films on the legacy of the Tent Embassy, the Green Ban and so much more, many introduced by the very people who made them or that they’re about.
- Write a Letter to the present from the future.
Meet and join the Riff Raff Radical Marching Band with your own instrument.
Workshops & Plenaries
- Hear from a bunch of amazing community organisers and activists about the Theories of Change behind what they do, then come on a transformative journey exploring your own theory of change and what it might mean for your future.
- A workshop and ceremony sharing Aboriginal Women’s Business, with Tjanara Goreng Goreng.
- Hear more about Just Transitions, or why the interests of working-class people and ecological systems might be much more aligned than you’d think.
- Learning how to deal better with gender, sexism, racism and other forms of oppression as they arise in our own lives with workshops on Critical Race, Masculinity, Queer Theory and Smashing Girl Hate.
- Meet The Bulga Milbrodale Progress Association: they might sound innocuous, but they’re singlehandedly taking on Rio Tinto and the NSW State Government to save their town from being devoured by a coal mine.
- Join workshops like Colonisation and Exploitation: Two Historical Versions of the Same Project and Where’s my Hoverboard? to ask big questions about where this world system came from, and where it’s going.
- Learn about Food Liberation and Urban Foraging, two ways to eat as much as you want without hurting anybody or paying anything! Seriously.
- Improve your skills in how-tos on public speaking, campaign strategy, digital media, community engagement and self-care.