TasWeekend: Ruth Langford’s Nayri Niara festival at Bruny Island is full of ancient wisdom and good spirit

A festival held every two years on Bruny Island celebrates traditional indigenous culture, knowledge and wisdom with good music, good sharing, good food and good spirit.

Craig Everett leads dancers at the opening ceremony of the Nayri Niara Good Spirit Festival held at Cloudy Bay on the March long weekend. Picture: AMANDA DUCKER

“I FEEL changed by the weekend,” Mum says after we return from the Nayri Niara Good Spirit Festival held at Cloudy Bay. She’s not quite sure how she has changed, but I can see she is moved by our days of ceremony, knowledge-sharing, music and arts. “Humbled, somehow,” she says.

My friend Sally, who camped with her kids in her tee pee, felt uplifted. We had both passed on our usual March family jaunt to A Festival Called Panama near Lilydale in favour of Nayri Niara on South Bruny Island.

“Like Panama, Nayri Niara was extremely relaxed, family friendly and set in a stunning bush location – full of good people, too,” Sally says. “What made it such a nourishing experience, though, was the intention of the gathering to honour indigenous culture and the land and all of its gifts and wisdom. I felt spiritually connected to the land and the community in a way I haven’t experienced at other festivals.”

I am inspired to head to Lunawunna-alonnah (Bruny Island), traditional home of the Neunone people, after meeting festival director Ruth Langford weeks before her fifth Nayri Niara fest. “I grew up in a house where there was always a bed and a feed to anyone who needed it,” she says in our first sitdown.

“There was never, ‘oh you are black, you are white, you get to come in’ [or not]. It was ‘are you in need, then of course’.”

Kangaroo-hunting dance at the opening ceremony, just before the audience joins in for an emu dance. Picture: AMANDA DUCKER

This is Ruth’s spirit and the spirit of Nayri Niara. And here we are on Manganna (black cockatoo) country. A spiritual hunger is clear; a desire for deeper connection and understanding shows itself in gentle gestures and quiet listening rather than a surfeit of hugging. A mood of kindness prevails.

Connection to country, to culture and to the sacred are the guiding principles of the festival, which taps into ancient wisdom of first peoples from around the world.

Special guest presenters this year include elder Tayta Ullpu and knowledge keeper Sacha Sawila, both from the Andean Quechua indigenous community.

A women’s forest gathering in the forest foothills at Nayri Niara. Picture: NIKKI MICHAEL

The opening ceremony includes three dances — a cleansing dance to rid us all of negative energy, a welcome dance and a kangaroo hunting dance.

We are invited into the sand circle to learn an emu dance. It’s fast and fun; our hands are bobbing beaks on long necks.

Lead dancer Craig Everett is our guide. Afterwards, he thanks the flushed and joyous emus. “Unless there’s someone actually listening, we can’t share anything,” he says.

The author cannot be separated from her reed-basket craft to go dancing. Found bone comes in handy later as a lino-cut tool at another workshop. Picture: AMANDA DUCKER

“You have no idea how much stronger you make our culture.”

Mum’s right, the generosity here is humbling.

The weekend schedule is loose and doesn’t always line up with official programming. Ruth giggles on the microphone as she warns we’re on blackfella time.

The music is intermittent, but that’s intentional — ah, the relief of peace and spontaneity. When I look over to Mum on her director’s chair at one point, she is being serenaded by a young woman playing “a melody from my head” on her ukulele.

My girls and I love basket-making at The Missing Tree, a forest-edge women’s space where we sit on stumps by a small fire.

After making traditional kelp water-carrying baskets with Auntie Wendal Pitchford we move on to twisted reed baskets.

Lots of fathers and young sons attend carving workshops side by side with tomahawks outside the Tin Camp, where another fire burms and people gather to yarn. An outdoor movement studio lures Sally to dance, but I’m hooked on my basket craft.

A healing area over the hill offers esoteric treatments including craniosacral therapy. Somewhere, films are showing, drumming is happening, printmaking and bush-dyeing workshops over billy tea are getting under way and kids are learning to build a humpy. Others gather to think about how we might reimagine apology and forgiveness. There is no alcohol.

Installation art in the healing centre over the rise from the main site. Picture: AMANDA DUCKER

The stage sessions with traditional elders fill the main marquee, there’s a storytelling dome, Dewayne Everett-Smith sings and on it goes, a smorgasbord of delights for sensitive souls. There are lots of laughs.

With the lightest touch, Ruth Langford leads us back in time to find a way forward. She says she came away from the festival feeling she had “a heart as big as Pharlap’s”.

It’s raining when Archie Roach sings late on Sunday. In his last song, with its hypnotic refrain of “We won’t cry, lift our spirits up to the sky,” the rain stops and a double rainbow appears, the main arch astonishingly bright.

Everyone seems to agree with the old man when he speaks from the stage in farewell.

“When you come to a place like this, there’s no place you’d rather be.”

Archie Roach reaches out to the audience. Picture: AMANDA JAMES

The author was a guest of Nayri Niara festival

Nayri Niara Good Spirit welcomes readers to a Tin Camp storytelling studio on Sunday, June 2 from 2-5pm, at its new creative hub, the Long House at Macquarie Point as part of National Reconciliation Week.

To find out more, go to Facebook Nayri Niara Good Spirit Festival. More events will follow year-round. The next Bruny Island festival will be held in 2021.