Patrick,

I was doing a bit of stirring.  But Sydney has such a large. mixed community
that the Powerhouse Museum, which is next door to our local Chinatown and
has connections going back to last century, regularly celebrates Chinese New
Year with a lion dance, and has often run August/September Moon Festival
events at our branch, the Sydney Observatory.  Darling Harbour (also next
door) is the home of the annual and usually pretty international Dragon Boat
Race which attracts lots of coverage.  I know we have the appalling Pauline
Hanson on the loose here now, but she has a very small following in Sydney.
 We celebrate anything that's going - Hanukkah, Christmas, the Dalai Lama's
birthday, Gay & Lesbian Mardigras....all the source of major public programs
and/or exhibitions at the Powerhouse - many with a very considerable input
from local community groups - next weekend we have a solstice festival with
the local Mediaeval society staging a tournament , and the following weekend
the Korean community has a program of traditional dance to go with the
Korean textile exhibition.  Like you, we have rarely had any kind of
negative comments from our visitors, in fact the Australia Day when the
Tibetan community built a riverstone mandala in our public space and held a
commemorative ceremony was one of the most successful ever.

It's nice to know other museum have the same community focus

Best wishes

Heleanor
 ----------
From: Boylan P
To: Heleanor Feltham
Cc: MUSEUM-L
Subject: Re: Holidays
Date: Thursday, 17 September 1998 7:48AM

On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Heleanor Feltham wrote:

> Patrick, whatever happened to the Moon Festival, Chinese New Year and the
> Dragon Boat races?

Heleanor:

Chinese New Year: yes, though usually outside the Christmas period - the
original discussion - but with Lion Dances rather than Dragon Boat races.
(Leicester is the most distant point from the sea I the whole of the
British Isles!).  The Moon Festival is not celebrated by any numerically
significant groups in the UK so far as I know - certainly none of our 80+
"ethnic" and other communities in Leicestershire, though a total of a few
hundred Druids across the whole of the UK now celebrate publicly the
Summer Solstice.  (For the first time in 15 or so years they were allowed
back into the Stonehenge prehistoric site (a national monument and
World Heritage site) for the 1998 midsummer's morning - but it was
completely clouded over!

Patrick Boylan