Videos of The Laura Aboriginal Dance Festival in North Queensland, Australia

Aboriginal culture is still strong in Northern Queensland and a Dance and Cultural Festival, held every two years 15 kilometres from the outback town of Laura, 300 kilometres north of Cairns in the south of Cape York Peninsula, is a wonderful celebration of this.

People come from far and wide, from as far north as the tip of Cape York and as far south as Townsville. This is a selection of participating groups, coming from the following places:

• Palm Island, also known by the Aboriginal name Bwgcolman (Bukaman), is a tropical island with a resident community of about 2,000 people, 65 kilometres north-west of Townsville, on the east coast of Queensland.
• Mornington Island is the largest of the 22 Wellesley Islands in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. The majority of the islanders are Aboriginal: Lardil are the traditional owners of the land and surrounding seas. The Kaiadilt clan arrived more recently (1947) from nearby Bentinck Island.
• Gimuy Walubara, an Aboriginal dance group from the Yidinyji people and the Kawanji Aboriginal dance group are from Cairns, the main town in Far North Queensland.
• Djarragun College is a school for mainly indigenous students, coming from Aboriginal communities in Cape York and the Torres Strait Islands; it is situated in Gordonvale, 24 kilometres south of Cairns.
• The Mayi Wunba dance group comes from Mona Mona community near the picturesque mountain retreat of Kuranda Village, just 25 kilometres northwest of Cairns and surrounded by a World Heritage Rainforest.
• The Bamanga Bubu Ngadimungku dance group is from Wujal Wujal, a small Aboriginal community on the north and south sides of the Bloomfield River approximately 30 kilometres north of Cape Tribulation and 60 kilometres south of Cooktown.
• Hope Vale is situated 46 kilometres north of Cooktown; its people mainly belong to the Guugu Yimidhirr clan.
• Coen is a historic former gold town, the hub of Cape York.
• Aurukun is one of the larger Aboriginal communities in western Cape York, with approximately 1,200 people. It was established as a Presbyterian mission in 1904.
• Lockhart River is a coastal Aboriginal community and the northernmost town on the east coast of Cape York Peninsula with a population of around 700, mostly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, whose descendants were forcibly moved to the area beginning in 1924.
• Injinoo is a community at the mouth of Cowal Creek or Small River at the top of Cape York peninsula in Far North Queensland.

Apart from the ones on this page, there are more videos of the Laura Festival on my YouTube channel