Images from the Wooden Boat Festival
The waterfront here in Hobart has been full of people enjoying the sunshine and the amazing collection of wooden boats in the harbour. Special thanks to the Media Room Team and photographers at the Festival for letting us share their wonderful images and providing us with some text about the event. We’ll see you there in 2017!
From the Media Room:
The biennial MyState Australian Wooden Boat Festival was held over four days from 6 to 9 February 2015 in Hobart. The MyState Australian Wooden Boat Festival now ranks as one of the biggest and best maritime celebrations in the world. In 2013 the festival displayed over 550 boats and attracted over 200,000 visitors.
“Early Tasmanian history is fundamentally linked to wooden boats and we thought it was time to take a look at their importance to our common heritage,” General Manager Paul Cullen said. “Boats have been built here from the earliest times. Indeed, the first Tasmanian Aboriginal people built several different types of boat for fishing, hunting and travelling to the offshore islands. The first European explorers discovered the superb ship-building qualities of Huon pine, celery-top pine and other special timbers and of course the size of the resource was enormous. Shipwrights supplied the fledgling settlement with wooden boats for trading, passenger traffic and exploration.”
Held across Hobart’s vibrant and bustling waterfront, the four-day festival brings together the largest and most beautiful collection of wooden boats in the southern hemisphere. From its humble beginnings in 1994, it has grown to become the most significant event of its kind in Australia.
Festival Web Page
