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ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Thousands of meatballs and dolmades on menu at Greek GleNTi festival in Darwin
Preparing for Darwin's largest annual multicultural festival is no easy feat, with a small army of volunteers having been hard at work for weeks to put on a feast for this year's GleNTi. Throughout the past week, thousands of meatballs and dolmades have been rolled and tonnes of seafood has been prepared for the major Greek festival. It has all been to ensure that the tens of thousands of attendees at the beloved annual event leave full and satisfied. Since its launch in 1988, GleNTi has grown in size every year to become one of the biggest weekends on Darwin's social calendar. These days GleNTi is a two-day extravaganza, with food, dancing, music and plate-smashing filling the busy schedule at Bicentennial Park on the Darwin Esplanade. Michael Koulianos, president of the Greek Orthodox Community of Northern Australia, which organises GleNTi, said the festival was an annual highlight of Darwin's event calendar. "It's a celebration of our Greek heritage, but also of our families, our community and our standing in the NT," he said. "It brings us all together. It brings friends, families but also the wider community together as well". On Wednesday, members of the Greek community held a working bee to wrap dolmades for the festival. The parcels, which are often called "fylla" by Darwin's predominantly Kalymnian Greek population, are made of grapevine leaves stuffed with rice, meat, herbs and spices. Katina Vrodos, who has been making dolmades her whole life, said they were one of the festival's highlights. "I started [making dolmades] in Greek school … and have continued all these years," she said. She keeps a keen eye on the volunteers, ensuring quality standards are upheld. "This recipe is mine from more than 40 years ago," she said. The preparation is a tradition that has been passed down from generation to generation. High school student Anna Koulianos — Mr Koulianos's daughter — was among the young people who pitched in. "I have memories sitting at my Yiya's table at her house, her teaching me how to do it from a really young age," she said. She joked that she felt the pressure of carrying on a tradition so deeply protected by her grandmothers, but also said the practice made her feel "at home". There were several other workshops held throughout the week, including rolling meatballs, or "keftedes", and preparing honey puffs, also called "loukoumades". Organisers say all up, there will be about 3 tonnes of souvla, 600 kilograms of dolmades, 2 tonnes of octopus and 800kg of calamari — though the true numbers are hard to quantify. Many hands made light work of the preparations, with the working bees drawing volunteers from beyond the Greek community. "We've got Darwin High School, we've got St John [Ambulance] volunteer corps and a lot of other non-profit organisations taking part as well, including the Filipino community," Mr Koulianos said. Politicians also rolled up their sleeves and got to work, with federal MP Luke Gosling and NT Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro among the volunteers. "We start our preparations in January every year, but the last three months are quite intense," Mr Koulianos said. "That's when we really gear up, and obviously the last month is sleepless nights to really get everything done." However, not all the preparations for this year's GleNTi have been smooth sailing. On Friday, the day before the festival kicked off, an NT Health investigator found one of the GleNTi stallholders, the Kalymnian Brotherhood, had breached food safety standards when preparing their tonnes of octopus. In a statement, an NT Health spokesperson said it had deemed the octopus "unsuitable for consumption". "As a result, Environmental Health Officers have requested the provider dispose of the affected octopus," the spokesperson said. NT Health said the decision would have a "very minor impact" on the festival. In a Facebook post, the Kalymnian Brotherhood denied any wrongdoing and said the investigators made "false accusations". "We want to make it clear our octopus prep was conducted properly and in the correct manner," they said. The Kalymnian Brotherhood said in the same post the group would not take part in this year's festival as a result. Mr Koulianos said organisers had found a solution and octopus would still be available. "We did stay up all night, rang some suppliers [and] local distributors, and found octopus, so we are definitely going to have octopus this GleNTi," he said. "I think it's going to be enough, probably about a tonne. "Normally we sell about two tonnes over the GleNTi weekend, but it's going to be enough for people to taste it, let's put it that way". GleNTi is being held on Saturday and Sunday at the Bicentenial Park on Darwin's Esplanade.
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Women gather from around the world to bring cultural knowledge to firefighting.
Women from across the globe gathered in Far North Queensland to improve their firefighting skills and share cultural knowledge.
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
First Nations firefighters changing culture on the Queensland fire line
When Arlene Clubb and her relatives joined their local volunteer fire brigade in rural Queensland a decade ago, they were not entirely welcomed with open arms. "People didn't want us there because we were Indigenous people," the Kuku-Thaypan, Kuku Yalanji and Kuku-Possum woman said. "[Some members] in a photo, they turned their backs on us, they didn't want to be in the same photo as us and it just sort of made us feel no good. "But we didn't let that faze us. If you let people like that affect you, you're not going to go anywhere." The reception some gave the Clubb family at the Tinaroo Rural Fire Brigade in the state's far north belied the efforts of first officer and founding member Les Green, who went out of his way to encourage the Wadjanbarra Yidinji traditional owners to join in the first place. It started with a conversation about the need to manage a piece of the Atherton Tablelands of great importance to traditional owners. Arlene's sister-in-law Kylee Clubb, who also signed up, is now the Tinaroo brigade's second officer, working to drive cultural change in fire management more broadly. "[We] thought about what we wanted to do as a family and what we wanted to do as First Nations people, especially on the lands we've been on up there on the Tablelands," she said. Kylee said the growing number of First Nations firefighters was leading to a greater appreciation within agencies of the importance of cultural burning. The practice involves using small fires to benefit the ecology and encourage plant growth, rather than a simple focus on reducing fuel loads. But the best time for a cultural burn on the Atherton Tablelands — an ancient landscape shaped by volcanic activity millions of years ago — might clash with statewide fire bans or burning schedules decided elsewhere in the state. Kylee said the "conversation is being started" about moving away from strict burn schedules, to better include Indigenous knowledge of landscapes. "At the moment, we've seen heaps of lantana, heaps of different weeds, sicklepods just overtake the forest," she said. "[It's about] paying attention to what's flowering and what's seasonal. "The seeds we have out here need activation from fire." Fire management agencies have shown an interest in investing in the leadership skills and expertise of their First Nations personnel too. When the Queensland Fire Department was looking for female firefighters to attend an Indigenous-focused intensive training exchange program in the United States three years ago, Kylee was one of those asked to go. She and fellow Far North Queenslanders Chloe Sweeney and Alex Lacy found the experience so rewarding, they decided to organise their own version of Women-in-Fire Training Exchange, or WTREX, on home soil. It ran over 12 days near Cairns last month, bringing together 40 fire practitioners from across Australia and overseas, most of whom were Indigenous women. One of those was Arlene, who said the growing presence of Indigenous women among the ranks of volunteer firefighters was about showing "we're not just mothers, not just caregivers, not just stay-at-home wives anymore". "[Dispossession] did stop a lot of our cultural burning but it never got lost — the mentality has always been there and all the knowledge we had from our elders is still there," she said. Lenya Quinn-Davidson, an expert on human connection to fire at the University of California, was one of the founders of WTREX in 2016. She took part in the recent Queensland program, and said it was important to offer Indigenous women a safe place to develop their skills and share knowledge so they could thrive in a traditionally "male-dominated, very militaristic" field. "The fire issues we have globally are so wicked, they're wicked problems, and we need diverse perspectives to solve them," she said. Megan Currell, an Australian-born member of the British Columbia Wildfire Service said a decade ago, "it felt like Canada was way ahead of Australia" when it came to relationships with Indigenous peoples. "When I come back and visit home, honestly, I see a massive improvement in the relationship and that cultural aspect, starting to get into cultural burns and being a support system for that and forming real partnerships," she said. "I'd say now they're starting to become neck-and-neck a bit or maybe even Australia is starting to take over."
