Through their evolution and development festivals, like Brisbane’s, are intriguing insights into the communities they serve and the passions and politics of their time. A festival can be a mirror, but what are they showing us?
The Brisbane Festival has come a long way since it’s very early days in the 60s when it was theWarana Festival. With its theme, ‘entertainment for the people, by the people’ it embraced the concept of arts and entertainment broadly. There were all those great traditions of the 70s and 80s, parades, picnics, theatre and eisteddfods right across to sporting events and the Miss Warana pageant thrown in. But the city has aspirations for something more sophisticated after the 1988 expo and by the mid 90s it needed a revamp.
