Zamps Festival Tour 2024

Antigone is a member of the Zamponistas, Australia’s premiere Bolivian roving panpipe band.  Since her stroke, I’ve been assisting by pushing her in a wheelchair for roving performances and I have been welcomed to the group although I haven’t yet learned to play panpipes.

This year we were invited to perform at three festivals – Yackandandah Folk Festival, National Folk Festival (Canberra) and CresFest (Creswick, Vic).

Since these festivals were on three consecutive weekends, we decided to take Peppa and our yellow caravan and make a road trip of it – a festival tour.

Aside from the Zamps performances, highlights at Yackandandah Folk Festival included several Royal High Jinx concerts and seeing and hearing the wonderful US accapella group Windbourne.

Between Yackandandah and Canberra, we spent a night at Gundagai.  We had a lovely dusk bike ride and caught this view of the full moon shortly after it rose.

We got to Canberra a couple of days before the festival.  One day we visited Parliament House.  Looking at the pictures of women parliamentarians, we were delighted to see one of them pictured riding a tandem bike, with a man riding on the back.

At the National Folk Festival, the Zamponistas’ street performances went well and we especially enjoyed one where we appeared from backstage at the Budawang (main stage) just after another act finished on stage.  The Zamponistas provided the music for the Sunday lantern parade.

Other festival highlights included several singing workshops – Harmony singing with Windbourne, South African singing with Valanga Kosa, Spooky singing with Stephen Taberner and the Festival choir with the Maes.

We also caught up with our friend Pamela Kinnear for Burley Griffin Parkrun – beautiful.

Next to the caravan park in Holbrook we were pleasantly surprised to see llamas – in keeping with the South American theme of a Zamps tour.

Next stop, Rutherglen Victoria, which had been home to many of Bob’s ancestors. 

A new memorial description has been added in the main street about my father’s father’s parents (William and Jane Cumming) who owned The Red Boot Shop.  

We visited the grave of William Cumming in the Carlyle Cemetery just outside Rutherglen which I had never seen before.  He is buried with his brother-in-law Robert Robson (husband of sister Jessie), who had attracted William and Jane to move to the Rutherglen area.

While at the cemetery, I was surprised to see the grave of my father’s mother’s mother’s mother Ellen Stones. 

I learned from cemetery records that four Hackford relatives (my father’s mother’s father’s family) – two parents and two infant siblings, are also buried there, but with no identification other than the Church of England section.

We visited the school which my father’s father attended in the 1890s and 1900s.  After finishing there at age 14, John Cumming taught infant classes there.  They must have been a bit stretched as the school grew from 84 to 400 students at that time.

After Rutherglen, we visited Benalla Cemetery where we visited the grave of James Dick, who was killed by a rail accident while working on the railways, aged 37, leaving her grandmother Ellen a widow with 9 children. She remarried Matthew Stones and had another two children with him. Thus, all four of my grandmother’s grandparents lie at rest in Northern Victoria. Also, two of her father’s siblings are buried at Rutherglen (aged 11 days and 6 months) and a sibling of her mother at Benalla (aged 16).