Wakakirri - Make a Positive Impact on the World Around You
Wakakirri is a national story sharing arts festival that challenges schools to ‘make a positive impact on the world around you’.
Participating schools create stories with a community message, make their work sustainable, and share their story with as many people as possible.
Schools create stories using dance, song, telling, film, arts and writing and share them at live shows and online with other schools and the general public around Australia.
Established in 1992, Wakakirri is Australia’s largest arts festival for schools involving over 30,000 students in every State and Territory. Wakakirri has live events in 28 locations, a live audience of 60,000 and online events involving 20,000. Wakakirri stories reach over 1 million people each year.
Wakakirri is free to enter and accessible to every school in Australia.
Wakakirri has separate programs for City, Country and Outback schools in remote Indigenous communities and focuses on outcomes including:
- Promoting important community messages
- Promoting sustainability
- Bridging cultural divides
- Providing a unique teaching tool for teachers
“The learning outcomes and skills developed throughout the whole Wakakirri experience are invaluable” - Principal, Victoria
“Wakakirri is from the language of the great Australian Story Tellers and original masters of sustainable living, the Aboriginal Wangaaypuan people. It describes the process of story telling through dance”
Tom Calma is the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and patron of the Wakakirri National Story Festival. Wakakirri is delighted Tom endorses the Festival. One of his key roles as Commissioner was to combat racism and promote equality for all Australians, regardless of race, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin. To promote equality, it is important to preserve and celebrate the cultural diversity of Australia.
"The Wakakirri National Story Festival provides a special opportunity to encourage equality for all and respect for culture. By inspiring students to become more creative and open-minded about the world around them, and to share their stories, students will experience the cultural diversity of Australia and learn to respect others. In my role at the Commission I am particularly pleased to endorse two of the Wakakirri values - respect and understanding, and the opportunity for all children to become involved." - Tom Calma