Dark Mofo's giant Maugean skate Ogoh-Ogoh lights up night as hundreds of festival-goers watch on

Australia Broadcast Center

15-06-2025

Hobart's midwinter arts festival, Dark Mofo, wrapped up on Sunday night with a community parade and the traditional burning of the Ogoh-Ogoh, an effigy this year in the shape of a giant Maugean skate.
The 10-day-long, boundary-pushing arts program that bathes the city in red and spills onto the streets with music and food offered some paid events but plenty free to the public.
Each year, the festival takes over the city during the darkest time of the year — the winter solstice — with pockets of events held across Hobart's laneways, industrial spaces, little-known boltholes and waterfront.
After a hiatus in 2024, as new artistic director Chris Twite settled in, the festival has returned with a program with enough shock value to keep up the intrigue.
This year — the festival's 11th — offered up coffin rides, an actual car crash, preserved sheep heads in jars, and staples Night Mass, and fire-pit filled Winter Feast and Dark Park.
The popular winter solstice nude swim is still to come, and will take place on Saturday, June 21.
Thousands joined the procession of the Maugean skate effigy from parliament lawns to Macquarie Point for the Ogoh-Ogoh burning, marking the festival's finale.
The Maugean skate is an endangered species found only in world-heritage-listed Macquarie Harbour, on Tasmania's west coast. It is at risk of extinction.
Spectators packed into Dark Park to watch a timber pyre, with the skate craned atop, burst into flames.
Fireworks erupted from behind and within, as the timber structure slowly burned then eventually toppled to the ground.
The Ogoh-Ogoh is based on a Balinese tradition of creating a paper-mache statue embodying chaos and disorder that is then burnt to exorcise negative energy.
Throughout the festival, tens of thousands of peoples had committed their fears on pieces of paper and fed them into Maugean skate egg casings that were later burned with the skate.
Mr Twite said each year at the festival a Tasmanian animal under threat or endangered is chosen as the effigy.
He said the festival creatives work with a team of Balinese artists to create the sculpture and manage "the receipt and holding of those fears".
Leonardo Guida, a conservation leader at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said there were as few as 4,100 Maugean skates left in Macquarie Harbour, which is also a site for controversial salmon farming.
Dr Guida said the skate had become representative of Australia's biodiversity crisis.
Earlier this year, federal Labor rushed legislation through the lower house with the aim of guaranteeing salmon farming could continue in the harbour.
"I really hope that the burning of the Ogoh-Ogoh really does ignite action to save the animal," Dr Guida said.
The federal government has committed tens of millions of dollars towards improving the oxygenation of water in the harbour to "help offset the affects of human activities".
While Dark Mofo festivities has wrapped up, the event officially comes to a close next week after the Nude Solstice Swim at Long Beach on June 21.