Festival fire has been lit
ANOTHER Festival 2018 style event could be back in Townsville in the future.
Townsville City Council Mayor Jenny Hill said there was the potential for the festival to become a regular event.
“We are talking about it, we just need to see how we can do that,” she said.
“We have a number of events on our calendar, so next year we have Strand Ephemera, all the boardwalk is full of public art.
“Currently, we incorporate that with the Australian Festival of Chamber Music. We might see how we could do that. Conversely we’ve got Groovin The Moo at the start of the year – maybe we could do something at that end for our audience.”
It comes after almost 100,000 people flocked through Uncontained on The Strand and Queens Gardens. There were 22 sellout shows, too.
The council says the crowds in Townsville were almost double that of Cairns.
Cr Hill said Festival 2018 had been a “huge success”.
“This festival began from the ground up, the development of it included many of our arts and cultural groups and I think that’s why it was a success,” she said.
“We didn’t bring someone in to build our festival, we asked our community to help us.”
Cr Hill said she expected the shipping containers to stay at The Strand until about June, until the council worked out what to do with them.
“We’ve had a lot of interest from companies that want to purchase them and we need to work through a process where we can allow that to happen,” she said.
However, the Mayor said the footings would stay.
Cr Hill said because of the drought and other factors, Townsville had forgotten how to party.
“It’s been a while since we’ve had something to celebrate, things have been pretty tough and difficult,” she said.
“Sometimes it’s nice to have a party, forget that and realise there is something to look forward to, this is a great community and we do some fun things.”
“We know that this festival really worked because it appealed to everyone, from every age group,.”