Mackay's artistic persuasion

From the 11th to the 25th July, Mackay celebrated its own Arts Festival. I have been so impressed with the quality and diversity of artistic offerings that this festival has brought to the region and have participated in as many things as I could. The fortnight that the festival was on was chock-full of exciting, interesting and inspiring events and I barely had a day or evening where I wasn't been busy, which is partly why I haven’t been very diligent in updating this blog!

The festival opened with much fanfare, as the city also celebrated the opening of the new Mackay Entertainment & Convention Centre, the MECC. The new centre played host to one of Australia’s most popular rock stars, Jimmy Barnes. I had never heard of this guy beforehand, but he is a legend in Oz, and the whole city was thrilled that he was going to be appearing. The main concert was inside the new MECC but the council had also decided to let the party spill out into the grounds and had erected a huge screen outside so that anyone could go along and watch the concert for free outside. It was a really buzzing, friendly atmosphere outside, as families and friends had brought along picnics and drinks to enjoy the show on the grass. Susan and I met up with Kathleen, Barwon, Tiah, Naten and Kathleen’s Mum and had a great time rocking along to Barnesy’s songs. I only recognised two songs, one of his called ‘Cheap wine’, which seemed appropriate, and he also did a fantastic duet with his daughter of one of my favourite songs, ‘Proud Mary’. After the show we went back to Kathleen and Barwon’s and I finally got my chance to play a didgeridoo – Woo hoo! I was crap at it, needless to say, but that is hardly the point.

The following day Susan and I were picked up by Cody and Vanessa for a trip to Grasstree Beach near Sarina for the ‘Songs for Sarina’ world music festival. It was a beautiful sunny winters day, with a light breeze, and the setting for the festival was perfect – the stage had been set up right on the edge of the beach, which is a beautiful sheltered cove with crystal clear turquoise water and yellow sand. We were joined later on by Andrew and Lee, and their dog, Girl. It was a relaxing and chilled-out vibe with music from the Fijian choir, an Aboriginal group of dancers with didgeridoos, Mexican guitarists, and a weird duet who were singing medieval madrigals. The highlight of the day unfortunately came right at the end, as the sun was going down, and it got quite chilly; she was called Kavisha Mazzella, an ARIA award-winning Italian-Australian singer who sang lilting melodies in the style of Norah Jones, followed by some wonderful 17th century Italian stuff. Very eclectic but beautiful to listen to in the cool of the evening.

On Tuesday the 14th, I joined Susan Poosan and Michele One L at the new MECC for a burlesque night. The new centre is very impressive; classy and sophisticated and a real asset to the city. The show we went to see was by a group called Tarnished and they performed a highly amusing show filled with a mixture of acrobatics, dance, contortionists, comedy and sauciness! All of this was done with the aid of some frightfully ridiculous costumes with feathers and sequins everywhere. They even provided each member of the audience with their own feather boa so we could get into the spirit of the evening. At the end of the night the three of us scoured the emptying room to see how many discarded boas we could snaffle to take to the next Book Group meeting (we managed nine in the end)! Unfortunately I forgot to take my camera so don't have any pics of this evening, but you can rest assured that the boas will feature strongly in future events.