MAJOR BANGALOW EVENTS

 The Bangalow community has a well deserved reputation for staging high standard sporting, cultural and creative events.  These are some of the highlights:

THE BANGALOW MARKET

On the 4th Sunday of every Month at the picturesque showgrounds

There are many other events, concerts, workshops, dinners, exhibitions and happenings in Bangalow throughout the year. These are usually widely advertised in local newspapers. Bangalow Market Website

THE BANGALOW BILLY CART DERBY

A Sunday in May

The Bangalow Billy Cart Derby was originally organised by Bangalow Chamber of Commerce to celebrate reclaiming the Byron Street CBD by the reduction of traffic with the opening of The Pacific Highway by-pass in 1994. The Chamber established the event to promote Bangalow in order to counter popular belief that the by-pass would destroy the financial viability of the village.

During the 1997 Derby, Wilson Draper careered into the prize table shattering many of the trophies, luckily he escaped serious injury. The event resulted in a perpetual trophy for the best stack of the day in future years.

The event now has a crowd estimated at 7000, as well as the billycart races, expert skateboard riders, parades, kids rides and displays food and fun. It’s a major event talked about far and wide. The Sydney Morning Herald reporter Daniel Lewis says this about the day in May. “In the hills above Byron Bay the art of billycarting rolls on in a passionate and sometimes spectacular fashion. The village of Bangalow boasts a sublimely sloped main street that yesterday came alive with the annual billycart derby. This year it was back with its usual thrills, spills and masterpieces of backyard engineering. Bits of old prams, wheelchairs shopping trolleys lawnmowers, chairs, rope, washing line, metal pipe, fruit boxes and four ‘b’ two are cobbled together that would not look out of place on the apocalyptic set of a Mad max movie. Others spend thousands of dollars making very sleek, high tech carts and come from interstate to complete.”

The Billycart Derby makes a powerful statement about what makes Bangalow tick.

THE A & I HALL

The home of many of the events in Bangalow.

In the early days much of Bangalow’s community life centred around agricultural developments and in 1911 a new show pavilion was constructed, The Agricultural & Industrial (A&I) Hall.

As well as being used as the show pavilion each year the hall was used for picture shows, dances, roller skating, weddings, bazaars, flower shows and a host of other activities. Today the A&I Hall can be used for events as diverse as the imagination can conjure.

The hall has had a chequered and precarious past it fell into complete disuse and became such a liability that serious though was given to its demolition. It has been occupied by an artist with a studio and gallery and by the Church of England opportunity shop who occupied the main hall.

In 1991 the Bangalow Park Management committee led by Mrs Jan Hulbert started the process of revitalization for the A & I Hall which culminated in its restoration in 1993/94.

While the hall to this day is still very much a work in progress as far as ongoing maintenance is concerned, it has become the focus of Bangalow’s cultural life and now one of the most heavily used community facilities in Byron Shire.

As well as the annual Bangalow Show the hall is home to The Bangalow Music Festival, the birth place of the BASC Film Festival, the zany Cabaret Da Desh, The Starlight & Flickerfest Festivals, and The Yoga and The Healing Arts Festivals. There is also a variety of concerts, fundraisers, arts shows, and regularly used as a celebration and conference centre. Truly a much loved facility in our community and an iconic feature of the village.

Paul Dean, the artistic director of the Bangalow Music Festival said about the A&I “The amazing acoustics we discovered in the A & I Hall was the supreme icing on the cake when we decided to proceed with the festival in 2002. As a performer who has played concerts from coast to coast in Australia, I consider the A & I Hall to be unique in its setting and acoustic quality.”