Icy festival draws to a close

THE dust — or is it snow? — is only just settling on this year’s Australian Antarctic Festival, but director Paul Cullen already has his sights set on making the next edition even bigger and better.

Mr Cullen estimated 20,000 to 25,000 people engaged with the festival, which wrapped up yesterday, over the four days.

It was the second time the biennial festival has been held, and Mr Cullen said this year’s event was bigger than the first.

“This time we had buy-in from everybody — the University of Tasmania, IMAS, the CSIRO, the Antarctic Division, all of them came to the party, and it was a fantastic party,” Mr Cullen said.

The Huskies Picnic at Mawson’s Hut Replica Museum was one of the big drawcards on the final day.

“We had a couple of hundred people turn up, it was fun and games — loads of kids, loads of dogs, everybody had a big grin on their face all day,” Mr Cullen said. He hoped the next edition of the festival would be bigger again.

“The idea of the festival is to bring Antarctica back to Hobart. This time we did it much better than we did in 2016, and in 2020 we’re looking forward to welcoming the new Antarctic ship Nuyina, and I’m hoping that it will be part of the program, too,” he said.

“We’re expecting to see that delivered in 2020, and … also a couple of major Antarctic conferences here in Hobart in 2020. So, that’s kind of a perfect storm of Antarctic interest and we would love to see the festival be much bigger by that time.”