Tara Camel Races: More than 15,000 flood into Tara for record breaking festival | Gallery
From galloping camels to crawling yabbies there was something for everyone at this year’s Tara Festival of Culture & Camel Races. Find out more here.
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A crowd of more than 15,000 people have camped out in more than 2000 sites for this year’s record breaking Tara Festival of Culture & Camel Races.
Held at the weekend, the event has been hailed a success with attendees enjoying camel and yabby races as well as a live music and entertainment.
The event also recorded a record number of entrants in the camel races, with 28 camels competing across 14 races over the two days, with teams travelling from as far as Newcastle, Gympie, and Boulia to take part in the action.
In the camel races New Castle’s Oakfield Ranch team cleaned up, winning five of the seven major races.
“We had a camel called Barry who took out the 400m and 600m finals,” festival marketing co-ordinator Sally Bird said.
“The Oakfield Ranch team really cleaned up this weekend, owner and trainer Rod Sansom won Owner and Trainer of the Weekend, one of their jockeys, Tegan Beck took out Jockey of the weekend and their camel Thirsty took out the 400m and 600m consolation finals.”
Camels weren’t the only ones on the starting line over the weekend with each camel race followed by Tara’s best and freshest yabbies crawling over 1200mm fighting for gold.
Ultimately it was ‘Big Bad Brent’ that clawed to the finish line first with a Western Downs local family taking home more than $3600 in winnings.
Ms Bird said they were pleased to see so many people in attendance.
“We had really strong numbers, over 15,000 over the three days and that was really driven by camping groups coming out and booking out camping spots,” she said.
“We were also really happy with the behaviour of the crowd as well which was really great to see.”
Ms Bird said during a time in which many festivals were struggling amid the cost of living crisis their affordable festival had thrived.
“We are so proud to see so many people down coming especially with so many events struggling this year,” she said.
“It just comes down to the fact that the cost of the event is really affordable for most people, you get five days of camping for $100 and a $100 for a three-day festival ticket which you don't really see anymore.
“I think it is also year after year of hard work from the committee and the community just putting on an awesome event that people want to come back to.
“We’ve had such incredible feedback over the weekend, glowing reviews of how well it has been organised and how much fun everyone had.”
Ms Bird said the event had been great for the region and they would find out the economic benefit in the coming weeks.
“This year we saw people stay a lot longer in town so we assume it will have an even greater economic impact than it has in the past,” she said.
“Usually we found people would leave on the Sunday and head back to the South East corner or down to NSW, but a lot of people stayed overnight last night and considering most of them turned up on Tuesday or Wednesday it is nice to see such a big length of stay from our visitors.”
Catch up on the action from the event here.
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Originally published as Tara Camel Races: More than 15,000 flood into Tara for record breaking festival | Gallery
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