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Grafton Jacaranda Festival
Title:
Grafton Jacaranda Festival
NFSA ID
118452
Year
1949
Japan has cherry-blossom season. Australia has Grafton’s Jacaranda Festival, held each Spring, when avenues of purple-flowered trees transform the town. This film was made in 1949 by the Department of Information and records the festival’s ‘parades, displays, exhibitions and contests’ on gorgeously hyper-saturated film.
In this clip, Grafton (a town in New South Wales’ Clarence Valley) is portrayed as an idyllic, close-knit community that honours its ‘pioneers’, where everyone comes together to decorate maypoles and weave garlands. The Australian composer Arthur Benjamin’s Overture to an Italian Comedy is a suitably bucolic accompaniment.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.