Garma

Wow, what an experience Garma was.
Garma is one of Australia’s biggest and most publicised Indigenous event. Over 2000 people come to the site in East Arnhem Land for 4 days of workshops, music, dance, presentations and learning about Yolgnu culture and traditions.
We arrived onsite at the beautiful festival site near Nhulunbuy with 100 fellow vollies 5 days before the festival started. We were then split up into different squads and put on a variety of jobs like erecting tents, helping putting up lighting, landscaping, cleaning over 1000 chairs and the like. Within our squads we got to know our teams really well and formed some incredible friendships, there is certain type of bonding and comradery that’s comes from sharing full days of work in the hot sun doing repetitive and, at times, menial work. As well as sharing all our mealtimes together, there was so much laughter and quality conversation - it very much filled our cups to the brim!

Then the festival started and we swapped into our festival roles, I was on the info desk and Pete was on Rapid Response team (I.e. fixing all the stuff that gets broken or needs attending to). Outside our working hours, we saw lots of incredible traditional dancing, as well great music by William Barton, Kee’ahn, King Stingray and more and amazing cultural discussions and talks. It was so beautiful to see that despite the many challenges that the community faces, Yolgnu culture is very strong and they love to share it with the outside world.
It was then all over in a whirlwind and everyone was heading home after 12 days of learning, companionship, cultural immersion and good, wholesome labour 😁 it was such an awesome awesome experience, we couldn’t recommend the volunteering at Garma highly enough!
(I was enjoying myself so much that I often forgot to take photos, so some of these are from fellow vollies)Read more