Exmouth
Arts Festival

Exmouth, Western Australia
26th of May 2023

The Exmouth Arts Festival is held on West Thalanyji/Jinigudira/Yinikutura Country is called Ningaloo, a word meaning ‘deep water’. It refers in modern-day terms to the Cape Range National Park and surrounding areas. Aboriginal people have been living in the Ningaloo region for 60,000 years. Ningaloo's sites provide the oldest dated evidence for the development of marine resources and the earliest dated evidence of jewellery in Australia.  The jewellery was found after an archeological team had dug in a cave for a number of days without success looking for human activity.  They were told by a visiting Traditional Elder (Sid Dale) that they were digging in the wrong spot in the cave and that no one would live where they were digging.  Instead, he pointed at the area of the cave where they should be digging… and hours later they discovered the oldest known piece of Aboriginal jewellery!’ more

The Exmouth area was known to Europeans, specifically the Dutch, as early as the 17th century, and has a rich history of its migratory First Nations People rescuing shipwrecked sailors hundreds of years before colonisation. Phillip Parker King was forced into Exmouth Gulf in 1818. He explored the region for eight days and in the process named the gulf Exmouth, after Admiral Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount Exmouth. It was not until World War II that the huge airport was built. In 1963 a naval town serving the US Naval Communication Station, Harold E. Holt, and the Learmonth RAAF Base, was established until the 1990s. Tourism is now its primary industry. 

Surrounding Exmouth and Cape Range National Park are sheer cliffs and red, rocky gorges. On the Cape's northwest coast, Jurabi Coastal Reserve's tidal rock pools, beaches and seasonal nesting grounds for marine turtles. Exmouth is a gateway to Ningaloo Marine Park with coral reefs, colourful fish and migratory whale sharks and is 1253 km north of Perth, 13 m above sea level, and 1372 km southwest of Broome.

Accommodation and more information about Exmouth
Ningaloo Centre

Location

The festival program includes:

Heartland Street Party

Date: Friday 26 May 2023
Time: 5:30pm – 8:30pm 
Location: Kennedy Street
Cost: Free