Tickets are now available for Australia's first ever traditional stone craftsmanship festival, tipped to bring people from all over the world to Wellington for dry stone walling and carving events.
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The Great Australian Stone Festival will feature world class dry stone wallers, carvers and masons, for a week and a half schedule of events set to put Wellington on the world stage.
There will be demonstrations, workshops, tools, music, dry stone training and accreditation events, the 'Stone Olympics', and community events and excursions - including to Brewarrina to view the 40,000-year-old, Aboriginal-built, Ngunnhu fish traps - the oldest dry stone constructions on the planet.
Organiser Emma Knowles of local dry stone wall business Stone of Arc has lodged a development application with Dubbo Regional Council for the event, which is scheduled to run from March 15 to 26, 2024.
The DA is for an event to run every two years at Brennans Way, Mount Arthur, with approximately 1000 people to visit over the 11 days.
There will be camping for up to 20 people on site and over the Friday and Saturday nights there is set to be acoustic singers, an alfresco dinner and a dance party in the shed. Food vans and stalls will be on site.
When the Daily Liberal interviewed festival organiser, Ms Knowles, back in September 2023, she and fellow organisers from Wellington Arts said they hoped to change the Wellington town sign to 'Wallington' for the duration of the festival.
Ms Knowles said the idea for the Great Australian Stone Festival came off the back of her study to become a master dry stone waller, and needing to get top-level master examiners to her premises in Wellington to do the accreditation.
"So off the back of that I decided that we could broaden this out and make it a massive opportunity for many people," she told the Daily Liberal in September.
Ms Knowles said the festival would be "pretty world class", with "quite an international flavour", and she hoped to attract wallers from Korea and Japan.
She hoped to make a dry stone trail around Wellington for the duration of the event which would be "unique in the world".
"There's nowhere on earth that's got a dry stone trail and we're going to use that to highlight the town, to get people off the Mitchell Highway, to learn the history of the town and see its highlights trough an app-supported dry stone trail," she said in September.
Find out more about the festival and book events at https://stoneofarc.com/events/international-stone-festival
Sarah Falson
Daily Liberal journalist. I love telling people's stories. Get in touch at sarah.falson@austcommunitymedia.com.au
Daily Liberal journalist. I love telling people's stories. Get in touch at sarah.falson@austcommunitymedia.com.au
