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| YHA Peace Festival 2006
 Light Square is the place to be this Sunday as the YHA Peace Festival 2006 takes over for the day. Boasting an impressive music line-up that will feature Melbourne's Labjacd and Sime Nugent, alongside Heather Frahn, Mia Dyson and locals The Audreys and etypejazz, the free festival is the premier event of its kind in the country. Running from 11 am to 9 pm, it's not only a free day out; it's for a great cause, too.
The fact that YHA - the Youth Hostels Association - is involved in the event makes perfect sense, as it's effectively an extension of what they do.
Peace Festival organiser Tanya Schroeder explains how the organisation came to be involved. "YHA has an agreement with UNESCO and it just so happens that YHA's philosophy and mission statement is in line with that, so they struck an agreement to further peace, tolerance and understanding.
"And if you think about it; YHA's involved in accommodation, which therefore promotes travel and backpacking in other countries. And when you travel and meet other people and have new experiences and you're learning new things about other cultures, of course, that's going to encourage inter-cultural understanding, so that results in peace."
 And then Schroeder sums it up rather brilliantly, "In other words, you're less likely to go about killing people if you have a better understanding of them.
"With hostelling, what you are doing is you are meeting people," she continues, "just by staying in a hotel, you're able to experience and get to know other people. Also, with backpacking you stay a lot longer and that's what YHA wants to encourage: for people to have an experience in the place that they stay and stay for a long time, not to just go there, have a quick look and leave again."
The YHA Peace Festival celebrates the United Nations International Day Of Peace on September 21. Amazingly, the International Day Of Peace - a day of global ceasefire and non-violence - is the result of the efforts of just one man: British filmmaker and actor Jeremy Gilley. Gilley produced a feature-length documentary following his efforts to inspire and co-ordinate one day a year on which there was no fighting.
The movie itself - also called 'Peace One Day' - will be screened at the event. "It's really powerful. You watch it and you just think 'oh my God, I've got to get on this cause'," says Schroeder. "It's inspiring because he's just a normal guy and he decided that he wanted to make a movie that meant something. He was actually more interested in the movie to start with, but then he really got on the cause and spent six years of his life trying to make the International Day Of Peace happen."
 With this year's line-up, over 6000 people are expected to be at the event and Schroeder doesn't mind that it takes an event like this to get people acting for peace. "To get people's attention you have to create another reason. If we were to have a gathering on the day just to mark the Day Of Peace, I don't think anyone would come, to be totally honest. And that is the catch-22, so you may as well make a party out of it, we believe!"
Schroeder adds, "I was actually thinking about this the other night while looking at some of the catchy media release titles to write and I was thinking, 'I really have to sex it up' because peace itself doesn't seem to be too sexy for some reason. But whether that is because of the media or whether that's the general public, I'm not entirely sure," she observes.
We begin to talk about the huge crowd that marched against the invading of Iraq in 2003, to which Schroeder adds, "To find out it didn't make any difference in the end was just devastating for everyone. So I think probably in another way people think it's a bit futile if you're supporting these things because sometimes nothing really happens in the end. But you have to keep trying and you have to keep having a presence there, you can't just give up that easily."
Wade Howland
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YHA Peace Festival 2006 takes place on Light Square on Sun 17 Sept featuring Labjacd, Heather Frahn, Sime Nugent (all pictured above), Mia Dyson, The Audreys, Liz Stringer, Dada Nii, La Bomba and more. For more information visit www.peacefestival.org and wwwmyspace.com/peacefestival |
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