Envirofiesta 2003 will be held on August 24th
from 10am to 11pm at The Tanks Arts Centre,
Collins Avenue, Cairns.

In Australia we live on the driest continent, yet we use the most water per capita. Clean water is becoming increasingly scarce. We are lucky in Australia to still have access to good quality freshwater; many parts of the world no longer have this luxury.

However, this apparent ready availability of potable water, particularly in the tropics, leaves us with a wasteful attitude to this valuable resource. Having just been through the driest year on record, it is time as a region, country and planet to become conscious of our finite water resources and change our perception of water and its uses.

Water is our life, without clean water we would not survive. Waterways have for centuries been sacred places, places of worship and food. Cultures around the world have developed rituals, initiations, ceremonies and ways of life in relation to major waterways, rivers, creeks, oceans, springs & wells. This has inspired us to include a Multicultural Water Festival component into the Envirofiesta program.

In North Queensland we live in a culturally diverse community. Every year at Envirofiesta we celebrate this diversity through art, dance, music and the presence of peoples from an wide array of cultural backgrounds at Envirofiesta. In 2003 we would like to further this involvement and invite the FNQ cultural community to take part in our water festival component. We would like each ethnic group to share their traditional rituals and relationships to water, through dance, storytelling, workshops, art exhibitions, and displays.

We will also look at our current approach to water and invite industry, business, scientists and ecologists to inform the community on the problems facing our waterways, locally and globally. We will also present some of the solutions that are being put in place to combat the wide scale degradation of our water sources.

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