Arnhem Land’s Garma Festival canned for a second year

Australia’s best-known Indigenous culture event, the Garma Festival, has been cancelled for the second year running because of concerns over coronavirus.

Indigenous dancers at the Garma Festival in 2019. Picture: Melanie Faith Dove

Australia’s best-known Indigenous culture event, the Garma Festival in northeast Arnhem Land, has been cancelled for the second year running because of concerns over coronavirus.

The Yothu Yindi Foundation planned a smaller version of Garma in 2021 with about 1300 guests instead of the 2600 who attended in 2019. However, Northern Territory’s acting chief health officer Charles Pain told the foundation on Friday the risks were too challenging. This included the difficulty of evacuating people in the event of a Covid-19 outbreak.

The festival has helped fund education programs in Arnhem Land. Organisers said the event was a source of enormous pride and satisfaction to Yolngu ­people, and each year Garma injected up to $13 million into the Northern Territory economy, about $5 million of which landed in Nhulunbuy and surrounding communities. “The economic loss to local Territory businesses and Yolngu people will be significant again this year,” organisers said in a media release.

“For the past six months, the Yothu Yindi Foundation has worked extremely hard in partnership with the relevant authorities to plan a Covid-safe event for our guests and our communities.

“We have thrown all our ­energy into establishing an ­environment that would meet with the approval of the ­Territory’s chief health officer. This has included making ­arrangements for all interstate ­attendees to be tested upon ­arrival in Arnhem Land, and providing a 24-hour Covid clinic on site, staffed by the Nat­ional Critical Care & Trauma Response ­Centre.

“Organisers were confident these and other safety measures were rigorous enough to all but eliminate the public health risk associated with staging the event.

“Unfortunately, the NT’s chief health officer has determined that Gulkula’s remote location poses too many logistical and safety challenges in the unlikely event of a Covid incident, such as the difficulty of evacuating people from the site, and the unsuit­ability of quarantine facilities in northeast Arnhem Land.”

Festival organisers learned they could not proceed with the event, planned for July 30-­August 2, a week after 14,000 people attended the Bassinthegrass music festival in Darwin.