On the road in Tasmania…
Celebrating a pungent plant
Lov & Faz were part way through Don’t Think Twice, the early Dylan number, when we arrived. Two women — a duo on acoustic guitars performing the song the way it was originally done.
“Let’s get there when it starts at ten”, Fiona said. “Then we won’t be caught in a long line of vehicles getting into the parking areas as happened last time.” Yeah, good idea. So off we set to join the long line of vehicles whose drivers all had the same idea. Sitting there as the line slowly moved forward, I turned to Fiona. “How can a vegetable attract so many people?”.
Koonya, where the Koonya Garlic Festival takes place, is not a town. It is not even a village. All that it is a rural district on the shore of Norfolk Bay on Tasmania’s Tasman Peninsula — a community hall, an old and small wooden church and maybe five or six houses scattered nearby. For the history-minded, the bay is named for the single-masted sloop in which Flinders and Bass discovered that Tasmania is no mere southern appendage of the mainland but is an island in its own right. Even today that makes many a Tasmanian happy.
It is the celebration of the flavoursome aromatic tuber that brings people to Koonya, there would otherwise be no compelling reason to stop here. The last festival was two years ago and like that one, this year’s attracted a crowd on a hot, late-summer day when the temperature reached into the high-20s Celsius.
There are three components to the Koonya Garlic Festival:
- presentations and demonstrations-growing; cooking; plaiting and the like
- a market — garlic sales, crafts, woodwork; alcoholic beverage tasting and sales showcasing Tasmanian wine makers —as well as Tasmanian beer and distillers (gin, whisky, liqueurs); food-Indonesian, Chilean, Taiwanese, Filipino and more
- music — folk, acoustic, rock.
The festival has a low-key, laid-back vibe. Crowds mill around the food stalls, form long orderly lines to buy garlic varieties that rapidly reduce stallholders stock to zero, sit in the shade of the big awnings or on hay bales to listen to the musicians. Some take time out from the hubbub of the festival to chill out behind the community hall where bushland slopes down to the sandy tidal flats of the bay.
The music was stylistically varied with solo performers; a trio on guitar, banjo and cello doing folksy numbers; another group who did a version of the American country numbers, Tennessee Waltz the boogie number Goin’ Up the Country, among others; and The Blackberries, a contemporary group all of whom were around nine or so years of age on keyboards, guitar, electric bass and drums and whose performance was together and competent. Speaking with the drummer, as adult I assumed to be a parent, I learned that the children were homeschooled.
Presentations? Fiona attended the garlic plaiting workshop but I decided to skip it as I couldn’t really see myself plaiting vegetables. I did attend the presentation on growing garlic by Seed Freaks, a small non-hybrid seed business, and permaculture educator Kirsten Bradley’s conversation around garlic with Paulette Whitney from local market gardeners, Providence Growers.
Kirsten spoke of garlic’s ancient lineage. A species of bulbous flowering plants in the genus Allium, the onion family, Kirsten said that garlic (Allium sativum) was known to the ancient Egyptians as well as to other cultures of the past and had been used for around 10,000 years. That would date it coming into human use at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. Given that the plant is native to Central and South Asia and Iran, that would make sense as the Iran region is known as the Fertile Crescent, a birthplace of agriculture.
I was curious about the 10,000 year date, so I consulted the online oracle we know as the internet through Notion’s AI interface and learned that wild ancestors of garlic may have been gathered by humans earlier than the archeological evidence of it coming into use around 5000–6000 years ago in Central Asia.
Dating the origin of the human use of plants is always dodgy as the plants are likely to have been used, whether cultivated or wild-harvested, for some time before someone documented or left evidence of it. It is like the banana — South East Asia is commonly cited as its centre of diversity, however evidence suggests that it was being cultivated in the PNG highlands as early as 10,000 years ago and that PNG might have been its centre of diversity. Dating the origin of plant use carries a significant risk of Type 1 error.
You can’t have a garlic festival without a garlic competition, and the varieties were interesting. How they pick a winner remains a mystery, including how you would judge the impressively huge elephant garlic which, I learned, is a leek masquerading as garlic and that looks and tastes like it. I figured that if it looks like a garlic and tastes like a garlic, then it must… oh well, guess it’s a case of cunning deception in the plant world.
It would be impossible to attend the Koonya Garlic Festival and not check out the Seed Freaks stall, as we grow veges from their seeds, so it was no surprise to see Fiona stuffing seed packets into her pack. Seed Freaks produce and sell a wide variety of non-hybrid seed and are often found at events like the garlic festival.
We went looking for garlic varieties to plant at home but the stall where we saw the long line of people waiting to buy had completely sold out not long after the festival opened. All he had left were a few baskets home made from willow… you know, those trees that stabilise stream banks that plant nativists call weeds? They were a traditional basket design from Sussex, called Trug.
So how do I sum up the event? It was a day under the warm Tasmanian sun, a day of learning, of music, of good vibes. A day whose positive ambience lingers as you follow the ribbon of asphalt all the way home.
Afterword: We should first thank the people who had the imagination and persistence to bring the Koonya Garlic Festival into existence. Then we can thank the exhibitors and stallholders whose products and work catches our curiosity and feeds us. And thanks, too, to the SES (State Emergency Services) crew for their traffic management. And, finally, thanks to all who made their way here on this sunny and hot Saturday to make it happen. This is Tasmania at its best.
Fictional tales…
…with just a little twist of truth
