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Moomba Festival

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Crowds down as heat prevents monarchs’ reign on Moomba parade

The parade was cancelled, but hardy types braved the Melbourne’s heat to enjoy the last day of the Moomba festival.

  • Carolyn Webb

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Here I go: JJ Taika, dressed as Nacho Libre, competes in the 2024 Moomba Birdman Rally.

Birdman from the underground takes to the skies at Moomba

Having fun and raising money for charity were the aims of entrants in a sweltering Moomba Birdman Rally.

  • Carolyn Webb
Jimmy Giggle (aka James Rees) became the first King of Moomba to take part in the Birdman Rally in 2018.

How the Birdman Rally became a cult Melbourne event

The quirky Moomba event – in which amateur aviators fling themselves off a platform on the Yarra – boasts a venerable history of lunacy. But Melbourne wasn’t the first city to dive in.

  • Tony Wright
2024 Moomba monarchs Emma Memma and Pete Helliar.

Festival chaos across Victoria amid extreme heat and bushfire warning

The Moomba parade has been cancelled due to forecast severe heat, as drama engulfs a camping arts festival in regional Victoria that is proceeding despite an extreme fire warning.

  • Rachael Dexter and Max Walden
Performers practice ahead of Moomba on Thursday.

How to Moomba: Your guide to this year’s festival

As the curiously named Melbourne festival celebrates 70 years, we highlight its best and brightest events and performances in 2024.

  • Kerrie O'Brien
Michelle Yeoh was involved in Moomba in 1984 and won the best actress Oscar on Sunday in the US, 39 years later.

Everything, Everywhere ... even Moomba: Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh’s Aussie connection

Michelle Yeoh’s best actress Oscar win has shed a light on her long-standing link to Australia, where she won a beauty pageant at Melbourne’s Moomba festival and got her start on screen, shooting a commercial with Jackie Chan.

  • Karl Quinn
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Dancers from Toepaz Dance Studio perform in the Moomba parade.

Melbourne’s Moomba draws crowds and cheers despite ‘daggy’ reputation

Multicultural Melbourne was on full display during the Moomba Festival parade, from the Vietnamese community, dancing in the traditional dress of ao dai and conical nón lá hats, to recently arrived Ukrainians.

  • Cara Waters
Rachael Fleming nose dives during the Birdman Rally at Moomba 2023.  

Birdman Rally contestants taunt gravity and come off second best

Even Rachael Fleming, an actual pilot-in-training and whose family operates a flight school, plummeted nose-first into the river.

  • Jackson Graham
The Moomba Birdman Rally in full flight.

At 68, Moomba has a lewd message for detractors

Moomba has been called an anachronism, and the meaning of its name doesn’t mean what organisers imagined. But it has outlasted many other events, despite its daggy reputation.

  • Tony Wright
The Moomba parade in 2010.

Congratulations, Moomba, you’re still going strong

We love Moomba not because it embraces the modern world but because it resolutely does not.

  • The Age's View

Original URL: https://www.theage.com.au/topic/moomba-festival-6fiu