by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh
This long weekend is the focus of a big event held in and around our “twin towns” of Tweed Heads and Coolangatta, here on Australia’s Pacific coast
Wintersun (yes, it’s officially winter here right now) is a nostalgia festival focused on Rock ‘n Roll & cars of the period.
One site declares Wintersun to be Australia’s and "possibly the world’s" biggest Rockabilly and RocknRoll Festival.
Some streets are lined with bands and some often very skilled dancers, and others with hundreds of lovingly maintained or restored cars on display, mainly from the 50s and 60s. For a couple of nights there is a parade of cars, driven by mature age rockers.
Not everyone goes to the extent of dressing for the era as the women in our photo have done, but many members of the various rock ‘n roll groups who come here en masse are obvious patrons of the stalls along the beach front dedicated to selling the shoes, the special petticoats and skirts, the leather jackets…
We took a day off from the computers, Twitter, Facebook and all that yesterday and spent some very enjoyable hours wandering among the thousands of visitors who descend on this relatively sleepy beachside joint for these few music filled days each year.
Seeing so many people so happy in their deliberate nostalgia was very heart-warming, even if a lot of them would know more about what the door handles on a ’59 Eldorado look like than what a Twitter handle is.
