Boorna Waanginy – A special lights festival in Perth
I landed in Perth on 7th February because it worked well with my schedule and it’s the last summer month in Western Australia. By complete chance, I got there at a perfect time with lots of stuff happening such as the Perth Fringe Festival and the Perth Festival, including the FREE (!) ‘Boorna Waanginy’ in Kings Park – the most special light show I have ever seen.
When my friends asked if I wanted to go to some sort of light festival in Kings Park, I was expecting trees wrapped into fairy lights. And that would have been perfectly fine – Kings Park is overlooking Perth’s central business district and the Swan River and going there by night and day is a treat on its own. We parked the car on the bottom of Mount Eliza and walked up the road up to the festival.
Joining the crowd at the tree-lined Fraser Avenue, it quickly became apparent that this light festival was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Huge projectors brought the trees to life with blossoming flowers, native animals, bush fires and rain. Underlined by soft music and the calm voice of a narrator, we walked through the moving images unfolding on the canvas of trees, part of a stunned audience that admired the unique display in a collective silence and wonder.
As much as I love my camera, the pictures don’t do proper justice to the beauty of it all. To get a real sense of the magic of this festival, watch the short video here:
The walk through the various parts of the story was supposed to take more than an hour, starting with the six seasons of Australia’s South West according to the culture of the native Noongar people.
- Mukuru – The season of fertility and the first rains
- Djilba – The second rain, wetlands and conception
- Kambagarang – Wildflower season, birth and new life
- Birak – The first summer, season of youth, warmth and play
- Bunuru – The second summer, season of heat, fire and coming of age
- Djeran – Adulthood, the season of ripeness, knowledge and maturity
The “Extinctions” part of the festival was at the same time beautiful and sad. Lit-up bottles hanging in trees that were illuminated in different colours contained fauna and flora that has already been lost to the world – an emotional warning about more losses to come.
The journey concluded with “Seeds of Change”, a spectacular light installation featuring thousands of seed pots as well as interviews with students, Noongar Elders and community members about environmental preservation.
Liam and I left the festival deeply impressed, but not without treating ourselves to an ice cream at one of the food stalls following the light installations. I’d highly recommend to align any visit to Perth with this, assuming that the spectacle will return in 2020. It’s been truly inspiring.
