Lamb and Potato Festival

Dot, her friend Jane and I decided at short notice to go up to Guyra for the Lamb and Potato Festival. This extravaganza celebrates the two main local agricultural products and is mostly visited by locals, except for curious drivers on the main N-S New England Highway. Guyra is one of Australia's highest and coldest towns at about 1350 m asl, and it only has a population of about 2,000.



Extravaganza might be an inappropriate word if you judge by what was on offer: lamb dinners of various kinds, an exhibition of line dancing, a sheep shearing demonstration with kids wielding the shears much to the terror of the quadrupeds, and numerous stallholders vending bits and pieces of use to country people. Mainly, it was an excuse for isolated rural people to get together for a chat. The participants were, to put it kindly, of an older demographic and, from the way they dressed, talked and presented themselves, deeply conservative. Most had something to do with land.

We met up with Dot's friends, Diana and Ian, who own a lifestyle block at Black Mountain. This little village of less than 50 people lies at the top of the range about 8 km south of Guyra in the direction of Armidale, and we spent a pleasant couple of hours there around a table before heading home.

AS