But we weren’t going to South Australia for art, landscapes and wine, we were going to experience the 17th biennial South Australian Wooden Boat Festival held in Goolwa near the mouth of the Murray. I was looking forward to understanding a little bit about the particular craft of the area and how they relate the idiosyncratic geography of the region.

Just in case you are still dreaming of that weekend three weeks ago, the AWBF has put together a three minute video montage covering all the action from in an around the Hobart Waterside.

While we came away with enough content to keep these pages filled for a month or two, this week we choose instead to simply share some images from an unforgettable four days.

The chosen social media platform at SWS is instagram… so here are nine feeds that should be covering the AWBF event if you can’t make it in person. There’s plenty of existing content from their journeys to the festival and hopefully plenty of imagery to come from Hobart

Any musical genre will be considered. Jim’s especially looking to find a jazz/blues piano player to take on melodica duties but he’s also hoping to see bagpipes, bush ballads, bosa nova, bebop and blues - perhaps not all at the same time!

Most Unique Boat was awarded to Roger Patterson’s PEGGY OF TWEED. An open canoe  stern launch, that was built by her owner Roger in 2022 in Pottsville, NSW.

Given the difficulties in travel and transport over the last few years, the festival organisers made a cleaver decision for 2023, to highlight Australian designers and builders and with the release of the full program on line, we can now see how they are intending to do this.

For those of us lucky enough to be attending next years festival, the live symposium provides a level of scholarship and intellect rarely applied to the world of wooden boats. The program is now out!

Former Chair of the AWBF, Peter Higgs once described the Festival as an elephant on roller skates, zooming down a hill. In the words of the current General Manager Paul Stephanus… “Well, we are are now almost seven months out from the big day, and the beast is well and truly picking up momentum.“

The portraits will become an evolving display at the Festival with each participant invited to find their image amongst the sea of faces and handwrite on their print what wooden boat custodianship means to them.

Got a wooden boat? Why not bring your pride and joy? It will be four years since the last Festival, and the AWBF crew are excited to open the flood gates for registrations.

Wooden boats were and still are a common feature in Tasmania, an island surrounded by water. Sharing the knowledge surrounding the wooden boat craft is a big feature for the Australian Wooden Boat Festival.