Events
Festival of Light hosted many events including visits by overseas speakers such as:
- 1973 Mary Whitehouse
The first major event of the Australian Festival of Light was the visit by “Clean-up TV” campaigner Mary Whitehouse to Sydney and Adelaide in October 1973. It was Shilton, while on a trip to Britain in May 1973, who invited Whitehouse to Australia. Whitehouse spoke to overflow crowds in the Sydney Town Hall and the Adelaide Festival Theatre, and led a march of 10,000 people to Light’s Vision in Adelaide on 14 October 1973, where the Festival of Light Proclamation setting out the breadth of its concerns was read out and endorsed by a total crowd of over 12,000.
Mary Whitehouse later recalled her first visit to Australia as one of the big events of her life. She told her biographer Max Caulfield that because of the intense media interest, “I became better known in Australia in three and a half weeks than I did in Britain in ten years.”
- 1976 Malcolm Muggeridge
Malcolm Muggeridge’s Australian Festival of Light speaking tour was equally successful in October 1976. An estimated 35,000 people heard his keynote address to the Family Celebration in Sydney’s Hyde Park on 10 October; he spoke to a capacity audience in Adelaide’s Festival Theatre on 14 October and significant crowds in other cities throughout Australia and New Zealand.
- 1978 Mary Whitehouse
Mary Whitehouse successfully toured Australia for a second time in September 1978, amid controversy over UK court action she had initiated against an offensive poem about Jesus published in a homosexual paper. Student demonstrators picketed her meetings and Brisbane police arrested two youths and five girls who threw strawberry pies at her. Despite the protests, large crowds came out in support – including 5000 at an Adelaide march Mary led from Rymill Park to Parliament House on 10 September, 800 in Hobart, 1000 in Brisbane, 2000 in Melbourne, 1500 in Perth where she was welcomed by Premier Sir Charles Court, and 4000 in the Sydney Town Hall on 27 September.
- 1981 Mother Teresa
The Australian Festival of Light and some Catholic leaders invited Mother Teresa to Australia to mark the 1981 United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons. Mother Teresa was the guest speaker at the Festival of Light “The Handicapped Child in the Community” conference, attended by 800 people.
- 1996 Gianna Jessen
Festival of Light Australia sponsored the Australian tour of US teenage singer and pro-life activist Gianna Jessen in February and March 1996. Jessen was born alive after an attempted saline abortion left her with brain damage and cerebral palsy. She spoke to packed venues in all states and territories.
- 2010 Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali
The September 2010 Australian tour by a Pakistani-born UK Anglican bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali, was the first major national event under the new FamilyVoice name. Speaking to the media, public and private meetings and seminars for Christian leaders (a total of over 2500 people attended in all mainland capitals), Nazir-Ali expounded the theme of “Courage in a hostile world”. He described “the triple jeopardy of aggressive secularism, radical Islam and a misplaced understanding of multiculturalism”.
Read more about this topic: Festival Of Light Australia
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“Since events are not metaphors, the literal-minded have a certain advantage in dealing with them.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)