Numeralla and District Activities Inc.

26th to 28th January 2024

We’ve had a few challenges along the way making it happen again, with numerous last moment obstacles put in our way. Our small team of volunteers has nevertheless worked hard to overcome the challenges and its happening!

Highlights of the festival include the Friday Night Showcase, bush dances, and a blackboard concert where seasoned professionals and budding artists can chalk their name up to play a couple of songs, recite a poem, spin a yarn or entertain the crowd in any creative way.

Sunday morning’s Markets have a variety of products available where you can amble about to sample the fresh food delights, pick up a bargain, listen to some Numeralla bluegrass music or have a cuppa.

Dance and music workshops and kid’s activities are also programmed over the three days, and no prior skill is required!

Come along and enjoy the 47^th  Numeralla Folk Festival

PROGRAM

What was to be the 46^th Numeralla FF in 2020, was cancelled as the country was seriously affected by bushfires. Then in January 2021 the festival was cancelled again due to COVID 19 restrictions. The Numeralla Folk Festival committee are now looking at the plans for Numeralla FF 2022 – it would still be the 46^th Festival if it goes ahead. 

The Folk Festival Committee are aware that people are planning their “get out of lockdown” holidays and we want to keep you up to date to help you make those plans. To this end we have got the ball rolling with the initial paperwork in the hope we can make it happen.

Right now, the river is full. The blossoms are bright. It’s shaping up to be the perfect summer for a festival. Except for one thing…

As we are all well aware, COVID-19 is currently affecting all our lives and all our plans. 

The folk in Numeralla would love to have a festival this coming January. At the present time, we’re not sure we can make it happen but we are being cautiously optimistic. With the likely necessary COVID-19 controls needed, with associated hardware and additional volunteers required to manage them, we think it may not be a viable proposition. 

If it is feasible for our little community to meet all the requirements for staging the event we’ll be giving our best effort to hold the festival over the weekend of Friday 28^th – Sunday 30^th January.

We will keep you posted.

Please know that we miss you. We hope you are travelling well. We are looking forward to hearing all the songs, poems, tunes and dances you have written during this time of isolation. Perhaps you could send some to us and we could have some space on our webpage to share them?

Take care. Be safe. You are in our hearts.

Numeralla Folk Festival Committee

To all the friends of the Numeralla Folk Festival,

Primarily for safety reasons the 2020 Numeralla Folk Festival has been cancelled.

Numeralla locals and fireys have been dealing with prolonged bushfires for over two weeks. The fires are still active and it is predicted that they will remain so for some weeks. It is currently unsafe for anyone to be camped in or near the village and will likely continue to be so for some time.

Locals are exhausted and even when the fires are over, they will have a lot of tidying up to do.

The Folk Festival Committee have made the difficult, or not so difficult under the circumstances, decision to cancel this year’s Festival in the interests of safety and the wellbeing of the local and the folk communities.

Nevertheless, at a date to be determined, the Numeralla community hopes to organise a post-fires event to celebrate making it through the crisis and to acknowledge and thank all those who have supported the community through fire-fighting, organising, cooking, making donations, giving moral support and in any other way. We will try to keep you posted regarding this.

Further, the committee and Numeralla community at large are saddened to hear of the property and stock losses among the folk community. We extend our deepest condolences to families who have lost loved ones in this disaster.

We are particularly mourning the loss of our dear friend Col Burns, from the upper Belowra Valley who perished in the fire near his property on 31 December. Col was semi Numeralla local, and a regular at the Festival, always quietly lending a hand with deliveries of firewood, doing odd jobs and entertaining us with his many true tales of adventure. Not only one of nature’s gentlemen but a unique character. Vale Col (Rover).

We hope that you are all safe from the fires.

Numeralla now has a mobile phone service, just Numeralla and not the District as hoped and lobbied for, see posts below. The system is operated by Telstra and is colocated on the NBN tower off Peak View Road above the village.

Note that no service other than ‘000’ is available via Optus or Vodaphone or their resellers.

A collection of historic photos is on permanent display at the Numeralla Diggers Memorial Hall. Unfortunately they have been fading a little. The photos have been preserved in digital form by the Numeralla and District Community History Group, and are available for viewing online here; https://www.flickr.com/photos/154908099@N04/

We recently received the above image along with the following words:

I was moving some of my art lately and came across your web info and thought the image may have been of interest.

“The artist is Joseph Frost a well known artist and this painting is called “Early Morning at Numerella. It is a big painting, 1.5m tall, and I believe it was his last major work and was commissioned by QANTAS however they didn’t like the rusty drum in the creek and wanted Joseph to paint it out and as Joseph doesn’t retouch his works QANTAS decided to sell it and I was the fortunate buyer.”

We subsequently learnt the following:

“Joseph Frost lived in Numeralla years ago”

and then:

“Apparently Joseph Frost lived in our house. Dieter Schubert has at least one of his paintings as does Peter Brennan. The one Peter has used to be on display in the waiting room of his surgery. Peter said he used to swap paintings for vet work at times.”

So after lobbying our various politicians, the Dept and also keeping the media in the loop, where are we at?

It took some time to get a formal response. It seems the politicians decided to keep their hands off and defer to the ‘experts’ at the Department of Communications, which means its preferred that the District continues with status quo and services for those in the village area are effectively to be triplicated.

Here’s the response we received, with a few comments inserted:

20170728PhoneResponseNDAIC

The last post below left us anticipating a meeting with Telstra and their subcontractor Visionstream on 15 June. On the day, among a couple of others, we also had the Hangman landowner, an RFS representative and the Snowy Mountains Regional Council’s administrator in attendance.

Key points to come out of the meeting, not necessarily in order were:

• budget only allows for, and requires, a village service
• Hangman offers wide District coverage but may not cover all village ‘roofs’ as specified in contract
• no additional funding is available to facilitate a Hangman tower
• with more notice, Council and/or the community may have been able to raise funds, especially with the seed/grant monies for Council amalgamation
• $500k incremental budget for power may have been over the top, and is likely to be much closer to $200k
• emergency services need better coverage but have no $s to commit, though would likely leverage colocation ASAP if constructed on Hangman
• Aboriginal land claims on vacant Crown lands preclude those sites from current consideration due to likely lengthy paper chases to gain approvals
• only sites now under consideration are at the Numeralla exchange or colocation on the NBN tower with cost benefits to be completed

Following the meeting, with a weekend to stew on it, it was realised that NDAI needed to be liaising and lobbying with relevant politicians if any change to the contract was to occur. Seemed obvious once realised, but wasn’t so clear before as the contact had all been with Telstra and Visionstream, and part of contract apparently required Telstra to liaise with the community, which they have sort of been doing, sort of. We’d also been strung along for almost 9 months with the impression the Hangman site was being given full consideration and had a realistic chance of implementation.

Why the politicians? Because the terms of the contract that Telstra are delivering on was/is established by the Department of Communications and the contract needs to be renegotiated. They’re in control and we figured that they needed to be directed by the politicians to sort it.

After a community meeting convened to discuss a way forward on 22 June 2017 it was decided to lobby our politicians and the Department and hope for a good outcome.

To hopefully assist, a Change.org petition was established; https://www.change.org/p/senator-the-hon-mitch-fifield-ministers-for-the-department-of-communications-and-the-arts-provide-mobile-phone-coverage-to-the-numeralla-district-b3a441e0-4b9f-4a83-9a05-09f04f157a27