Concept, History and Australian Origins
Rock Challenge has been running in the UK since 1996 (see above) and has been running as the Rock Eisteddfod Challenge in Australia since 1980 (see History in Rock Eisteddfod Challenge page) and has reached out across the world to New Zealand (Stage Challenge), Japan (Rock Challenge Japan), Germany, South Africa (ARA Be Your BestTM Rock Challenge) and UAE (set up by the British Be Your Best Rock Challenge). Rock Challenge also had a short and small stay in the US, but there has been no known activity since the confirmation of two events for 2004.
Just like in the UK, since its inception in Australia the events have grown in popularity, so much that the National Finals are shown on the Nine Network over a period of weeks on a Saturday Morning (after being previously recorded live). This television coverage has been happening since the early 1990s, but since its UK launch in 1996 it still does not have any major media coverage.
The most famous participant of Rock Challenge in the UK was the actress Emma Watson from the Harry Potter franchise. She participated twice, once in 2006 and once as the Rock Challenge leader in 2007 with her school in Oxford.
Read more about this topic: UK Rock Challenge
Famous quotes containing the words history, australian and/or origins:
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“Each Australian is a Ulysses.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)