New queer festival for Shepparton

Move over Daylesford, Shepparton is latest regional centre to host a queer festival in Victoria with hopes to replicate the success of the popular ChillOut Festival.

The Out in the Open Festival will kick off next weekend and will mark a first for the region.

Drag performances from Vanessa Wagner and live music from contemporary singer Jade Leonard are the headline acts for the Carnival day held at the Queens Gardens.

A health and wellbeing forum at the Goulburn Valley Hotel over the weekend will showcase presentations about the inequalities faced by the local LGBTI community in the region.

Uniting Care Cutting Edge diversity project officer Damien Stevens is organising the festival and said the overall theme was about inclusiveness and raising awareness about the region’s community.

“It’s basically going to be a mini version of Daylesford’s carnival day in the hopes we can grow to have the success of Daylesford in years to come,” Stevens told the Star Observer.

“The theme of the forum is really, again, about engaging very broadly our professionals, our councillors, our psychologists, our teachers.”

Henry von Doussa and Dr Jennifer Power from La Trobe University’s family recearch institute, the Bouverie Centre, will be presenting a set of best practice guidelines for mainstream service providers who might see same-sex parented families in the area.

Hospitals and GPs are just some of the services these guidelines are for, so they know how to deal with same-sex parented families with children in their infancy through to adolescence.

Von Doussa said inclusion was the main issue for such services as well as presenting the right information in a sensitive way.

“Most people tend to feel they’ve had a pretty good service that’s certainly what we felt from the parents that we spoke to,” von Doussa said.

“There was certainly room for improvement and again that was just around feeling included.”

A social support group for young people has run in Greater Shepparton now for 15 years but Stevens said the community had never held any public event “to celebrate who we are”.

“We wanted to do something that as part of my role in my employment at Uniting Care Cutting Edge actually invited the whole community to be part of those conversations and celebrations,” Stevens said.

The Out in the Open festival runs November 16-18 at Shepparton’s Queen Gardens and Goulburn Valley Hotel.

Stevens said he hoped this would become an annual event.

INFO: www.outintheopen.org.au