After many months on the drawing board, the much-heralded Gingin Science Festival will be launched in August. The brainchild of Winthrop Professor David Blair of the University of WA, the Festival could well usher in a new age of scientific appreciation in the Shire of Gingin.
The inaugural Festival will be opened officially by Her Excellency the Honourable Kerry Sanderson AO, Governor of Western Australia at 11.00am on Friday, 14 August 15 in a ceremony at the historic Gingin Railway Station. This launch also sees the opening of the celebrated Wallal Exhibition, which details the amazing 1922 scientific expedition conducted right here in WA. The expedition party took precise measurements during a solar eclipse and proved correct, once and for all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity concerning the ‘bending of light’.
The opening ceremony will wind up with a bang when a rocket is launched in Granville Park to mark the occasion. The opening ceremony may be over at this point but the five-week-long Gingin Science Festival, celebrating music, art, food and drink, and all things scientific, will just be getting under way. With science presentations and stalls, live music acts and on-stage science demonstrations and experiments, quiz nights and coffee sessions, there will be something for everyone during the
Festival. Science will even go to the local ‘watering holes’ to shed some enlightenment.
Farther afield in the shire there will be farm tours and exhibits on offer, ranging from the humble honey bee to awesome angus cattle, lettuce leaves to olive
trees, electric fencing to well-boring.
Who would have thought that there is a big, shiny robot not so quietly going about its business in a Gingin shed? All this, and more, will be available to locals and visitors to the Shire of Gingin over the Festival period.
And there will be more rockets! Look for the detailed Festival program at www.ginginsciencefestival.com.au, as well as in next month’s edition of NVNews.
