There is plenty to look forward to at the second instalment of the free Illawarra Nature Festival on Friday 12 and Saturday 13 September.
After the success of the inaugural 2024 Illawarra Nature Festival, The Servo in Port Kembla will be brought to life again with a jam-packed program designed to inspire and light up your senses, including The Grassening Living Installation, nature talks, an assortment of workshops, kids activities, a film screening and more.
Landcare Illawarra is getting behind this community-led event supported by the Illawarra Ecosystem and Threatened Species Team (DCCEEW) with an interactive stall and seed-bomb making, a talk about our Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm with Ailee Calderbank, and expertise from Emma Rooksby in the creation of The Grassening installation.
Highlights
- With feedback from last year’s event calling for more talks, this year there is a rolling program of 15 minute nature talks on Saturday from 1.15pm – 5pm. Drop in to hear about everything from native bees nesting underground to threatened fungi, snake venom and frog fertility.
- If you’re passionate about ridding the Illawarra of weeds, there are 15-minute drop-in ‘Weed Wacker’ workshops with Wollongong City Council’s Natural Areas team at 2pm, 3pm and 4pm.
- For those wanting to green their thumbs, Narelle Happ from A Garden for Life will be running a drop-in workshop on growing natives in pots starting at 1.15pm and building a native garden from plants in pots at 2.45pm.
- Take a moment to allow yourself to be immersed into the living, breathing presence of the Illawarra Lowlands Grassy Woodland in The Grassening. A collaboration by multiple local artists and native plant enthusiasts, this work layers living sound, image and drawing into a multi-artform installation inside the gallery at The Servo.
“The gallery at The Servo, Port Kembla will become a living grassland, a place where plants hum, leaves cast shadows like moving water and stories take root in the air..”
Kathryn Morgan, Understorey Landscape Architecture Studio
Watch our highlights video from 2024
Program details
Friday evening program, 5pm to 10pm
- Friday night’s program will kick off from 5pm with food from Balinese Spice Magic.
- Dive into the science of investigating the cryptic lives of wildlife in the Illawarra with a ‘Wildlife Detectives’ panel discussion from 5:30pm.
- Hear from local experts including Beth Mott from the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water and Trudy Costa from Wollongong City Council, about how scientists are using environmental DNA sampling, ecoacoustics and drone monitoring to learn the whereabouts of platypus, koalas and tiny microbats in the Illawarra.
Relax with a film screening of The Message of the Lyrebird, a multi award-winning Australian documentary about a bird who holds the stories of our landscapes, - Finish with live music by Russel W in The Grassening from 9pm.
Saturday afternoon program, 1pm to 6pm
- Saturday’s family-friendly all ages program will feature a variety of hands on activities to spark curiosity and creativity from making seed-bombs and clay sculptures to drop-in poetic activities with Red Room Poetry, nature journalling with Penny Sadubin and Tentacular Inter-species Story Mapping with Katrin from Understorey.
- Stalls will be spread across the Servo grounds creating a lively marketplace vibe. Organisations involved in stalls and drop-in activities include:
- Illawarra Ecosystems and Threatened Species team
- Landcare Illawarra
- Wollongong City Council’s Environmental Volunteer Programs
- Wollongong Botanic Garden
- Shellharbour City Council’s Natural Areas and Environment teams
- Illawarra Shoalhaven branch of the Australian Native Bee Association
- Ecological Interactions Research team from Western Sydney University,
- One Million Turtles
- WIRES
- ORRCA
Images from 2024
