Tonight is the longest night of the year, with a 4:43 pm sunset (according to Geoscience Australia) and in Hobart that means a party. It’s time for the Antarctic Midwinter Festival 2008. This stretches out over several days, but tonight was the Midwinter Solstice Party.
The evening started with the March of the Snow Petrels, a parade of people carrying large homemade lanterns in the shape of birds. There were standing, sitting, and flying birds as well as eggs, ranging in size from a foot long and six inches high to a foot long and three feet high. (The largest looked like penguins and not at all what came up when I typed “snow petrel” into Google image search. Snow petrels are pure white, pigeon-sized birds.) All of these were lit by candles placed inside, and the parade was led by a troop of musicians. Coming down the dark street, the line of softly glowing birds was enchanting.
Then the crowd, following the large bird-shaped lanterns, moved into Salamanca Square, where a Latin American music band began to play. I had a very Australian dinner from a bakery while there: chicken curry pie. Australians are very fond of their pies as meals. They come in all sorts of varieties, although the standard beef and vegetable pie is always popular. I have read, and been told, that the international influence in Australian cuisine has only been going on for about twenty years or so, but I think that the curried chicken pie is a good example of that. Today’s Australians do like their Asian dishes, or at least Asian-influenced dishes, but they still like a good pie, so someone decided to combine the two into curried chicken pie. I thought it was tasty.
After dinner I went back out and listened to the music for another twenty minutes or so, until it was time for the fire dancing. This was performed by two young women from Melbourne who were very good. Now, I don’t like too many lit candles all at once unless they’re safely tucked in bowls, and at one point these two were using large rings lit in five places as hula hoops! The crowd loved it, and it looked like the performers enjoyed themselves as well. I had a hard time seeing this, because there were a lot of people clustered around and, as usual, most of them were taller than I am. However, I thoroughly enjoyed what I did see.
From fire we went to ice, as the other event was an ice sculpture. It was a long process, but I watched it with interest because I’ve seen finished ice sculptures but I’ve never seen one being made. The artist wouldn’t tell us what it was until someone guessed, and it was over an hour before anyone did. He started with two large rectangles of ice fused together, then moved to a cylindrical shape with extra ice removed from the middle, which was then cut in half. It wasn’t until he started chipping certain sections of the halves away that someone said, “It’s an hourglass!” Indeed it was, as we saw when the two halves were fused back together, with some snow inside. (The snow was saved from when he shaved the ice, because there certainly wasn’t any on the ground!) It was interesting to watch the progress, and the finished product was admirable.
While watching the ice sculpture progress I amused myself by listening to everyone around me talk about how cold it was. “It’s freezing!” some of them would say. It was certainly not freezing; it was noticeable that the ice was getting softer as the sculptor chipped away at it. It couldn’t have been below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I asked someone what they thought it was, they said the equivalent to 45 degrees Fahrenheit! I had tucked my gloves and fleece earband into my purse because the advertisements said to “bundle up.” I didn’t need them. Being a Mainer born and raised, I thought it was pretty warm for winter. There are still some roses blooming, even!
Nevertheless, while I didn’t feel very Antarctic, I enjoyed the Midwinter Solstice Party. It was a fun way to spend a Saturday evening, and it was all free as well.
Plus, we start getting more daylight after this!
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