In honour of Canberra’s Floriade Festival, ArchivesACT has chosen to revisit a previous Find of the Month which featured brochures from the 1980s promoting Spring-time tourism.
ArchivesACT said the original Floriade was intended as a one-off bicentennial celebration, but such was its success that it became an annual event.
“Floriade is billed as ‘Australia’s Festival of Spring’, but before its spectacular beginning in 1988, Canberra perhaps more modestly celebrated its spring blossoms,” ArchivesACT said.
“The idea for a flower festival didn’t come out of nowhere, though, and Canberra has been celebrating its ‘riot of Spring colour’ for many years,” it said.
Archives ACT said one of the brochures highlighted in itsFind of the Month was Canberra Spring: Flowering Trees and Map Guide published in 1981.
“This guide identifies many flowering tree species and suggests locations to view specimens,” it said.
“The brochure gives some insights into why Floriade became the huge success that it is, noting that the ‘remarkable regularity’ of the flowering each spring allowed gardeners to plan to ‘achieve maximum seasonal effect’, so that Canberra ‘appears to burst into blossom overnight’.”
It said a different brochure from the Canberra Tourist Bureau, published in 1982, promoted some of the many events that had sprung up to celebrate the glorious Canberra spring, several of which still run more than 30 years later.
ArchivesACT’s Floriade Find of the Month can be accessed at this PS News link.
