Goongerah Gathering
January 12th - 15th 2001

This festival is to be hosted by the Goongerah Community. Located at a beautiful site in the green valley of Goongerah, East Gippsland, between the Errinundra and the Snowy River National Parks. The event is a bringing together of people to celebrate community, culture, arts, organics, and our environment.

There will be a wide variety of music, workshops , performance, an art gallery, guided forest tours, an internet cafe, videos, kids entertainment and a food and craft market. A program of workshops is underway on this site soon.

The focus of this event is to CELEBRATE AND DEFEND OUR ANCIENT FORESTS. This is an opportunity for people to experience and learn about the forests of this region in a festive atmosphere. There will be forest tours with Ecologists and Botanists which will explore rainforest and rare ecosystems which are under threat. The forests of East Gippsland are being clearfelled at an alarming rate, mostly to be exported as woodchips, they are now also threatened by a new proposal to burn our forests for fuel. These Ancient Forests survived the last ice age but are rapidly dissappearing under the onslaught of the industrial logging regime. It is time for the community to reclaim the future and ensure that these forests are here for generations to come.

We will also be carrying out a land regeneration project as part of the festival and people who come can participate by planting a tree on the festival site.

Thanks to all our sponsers including:

Goongerah Environment Centre, Concerned Residents of East Gippsland, The Wilderness Society, Snap Printing Box Hill and the East Gippsland Shire Council.