Okines Community House Term 3, 2021

The past term has been been packed full of activities and events not least of which the Okines Lantern Parade 2021. After a one year hiatus from the Lantern Parade last year due to Covid 19, we came back together this year with a wonderful parade and event that showed how strong and resilient we are as a community. We believe we had well over 400 people come to enjoy the choir sing, lantern parade and hot soup around the fire. We could not have done this event without all of the amazing volunteers who worked so hard to make it happen. We had soup makers, soup servers, lantern makers, lantern decorators, lights crew, set up and pack down helpers. We wish to thank everyone involved in helping to make this event happen.

The last few Food For Thought evenings have been a great success with May’s topic: To Bee or Not to Be – Guest speaker Ronnie who will be running the upcoming Bee Workshop series starting in August. The topic for June was during Men’s Health week with a chat from Jonathan Bedloe on ‘Who’s on your Team? For July, during NAIDOC week, we had First Nations woman Jaye Clair hosting an informal ‘you cant ask that’ style yarning time. We yarned about people, history, cultural appropriateness and much more. We will be looking into hosting some workshops in the future with Jaye as she is a wealth of knowledge and creates an open space for learning and healing.

We were lucky enough to have Palawa artist Takira Simon – Brown come to Okines on the 8^th of July, during NAIDOC week to help run a mural painting workshop on the (newish) concrete floor of the garden kitchen. We had a fabulous turn out of families and all got stuck into the painting. Takira shared stories of her ancestors with us and talked about how it possibly would have been here in this area, where the salt water meets the fresh water on Tipina, the Paredarerme Oyster Bay nation of the Mumirimina people. Takira designed a ruri / seaweed mural in keeping with our area, to pay homage to our wonderfully rich and diverse environment.

A bumper issue of Term Three, 2021 Okines Newsletter is now available and this one is full of information about what has been happening around the house as well as what we have to look forward to.  If you would like to be on the newsletter emailing list please let us know via info@nullokinescommunityhouse.com.au otherwise you can enjoy reading a copy here.

PLEASE NOTE: Visitors to the Okines Community House space must check in using  either the Check in TAS app or by the pen and paper option that is also available. Upon arrival we ask that you please check in by your preferred method. You will find the Okines QR code easily visible at all points of entry. If you have difficulty scanning the QR code you will see a six-digit number which can be entered manually into the app instead.

*We would like to remind people that if you have booked into any of Okines activities and you are unable to attend please let us know – we have waiting lists and there will be someone able to take your place.

If you would like to look back over previous newsletters you can find them here:

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