The parade was cancelled,but hardy types braved the Melbourne’s heat to enjoy the last day of the Moomba festival.
Having fun and raising money for charity were the aims of entrants in a sweltering Moomba Birdman Rally.
The quirky Moomba event – in which amateur aviators fling themselves off a platform on the Yarra – boasts a venerable history of lunacy. But Melbourne wasn’t the first city to dive in.
The Moomba parade has been cancelled due to forecast severe heat,as drama engulfs a camping arts festival in regional Victoria that is proceeding despite an extreme fire warning.
As the curiously named Melbourne festival celebrates 70 years,we highlight its best and brightest events and performances in 2024.
Michelle Yeoh’s best actress Oscar win has shed a light on her long-standing link to Australia,where she won a beauty pageant at Melbourne’s Moomba festival and got her start on screen,shooting a commercial with Jackie Chan.
Multicultural Melbourne was on full display during the Moomba Festival parade,from the Vietnamese community,dancing in the traditional dress of ao dai and conical nón lá hats,to recently arrived Ukrainians.
Even Rachael Fleming,an actual pilot-in-training and whose family operates a flight school,plummeted nose-first into the river.
Moomba has been called an anachronism,and the meaning of its name doesn’t mean what organisers imagined. But it has outlasted many other events,despite its daggy reputation.
Is it a corny dag-fest,a diorama of another age? Of course it is,and this is exactly why we should love it,even if we are inclined to find it a bit embarrassing.
Melbourne hipsters and Sydney smarties have long enjoyed lampooning Moomba as a slightly daggy leftover from another age,yet it remains the most popular of free community festivals.