The festival will coincide with the official opening of stage one of the Wildlife Art Museum of Australia, WAMA, in Halls Gap on Saturday.
Halls Gap to glow
02 July 2025
An eight-week festival is set to bring light – both literal and metaphorical – to Halls Gap in the wake of one of the town’s darkest chapters.
The Glow festival, starting this Saturday and running until August 31, is a celebration of the town’s resilience following bushfires that ravaged the Grampians National Park during the summer of 2024-25.
The festival will coincide with the official opening of stage one of the Wildlife Art Museum of Australia, WAMA, in Halls Gap on Saturday – the first gallery in Australia dedicated to exploring environmental themes through contemporary art.
Organiser Blanche Leithhead said the festival was designed to showcase the region’s many attractions and entice tourists back to Halls Gap during what was typically a quiet period for the town.
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“Some of the businesses here lost 60 per cent or more of their annual takings just over the summer holidays. It was devastating – tourists literally weren’t even allowed to come here,” she said.
“We thought let’s just light up the main street and make it glow, because it’s really beautiful here during winter.
“That’s the funny part – not many people come here during winter, but we as locals know that it’s the best time of year to be here because the waterfalls are flowing, the heath is blooming and the eucalyptus is eucalypting.
“The idea was that if we host lots of little events that happen not just on the weekends but during the week, especially over the school holidays, it would encourage people to come here and stay a night. Then they’re in accommodation, they’re buying food and they’re doing activities, and that’s most of our entire economy, so everybody would benefit from that if people just came and stayed for a day or two.
“It’s an effort to try to look after our businesses and our community as a whole, and keep our businesses going because some of them were looking at having to shut up shop.”
Organisers have installed lighting displays along Halls Gap’s main street to tie in with the festival’s theme, with evening walks to view the lights organised throughout its duration.
Among the festival’s main attractions will be interactive shadow-and-light displays hosted by arts collective ACT Natimuk during each of the first four weekends, as well as events by local environmental art group WAMA Foundation.
Other events on the festival calendar include movie screenings, yoga and meditation sessions, icy dips in the Halls Gap pool, trail-running and walking events in nature, games and chocolate workshops aimed at children, community markets and more.
Ms Leithhead said organisers took a collaborative approach with Halls Gap residents when creating the festival.
“When the fires were still burning during the week between Christmas and New Year, a little committee of locals that we ended up calling ‘The Kitchen Cabinet’ got together, and someone from the council said they could expedite some money to do something for the community,” she said.
“With that money we threw a New Year’s Eve gathering for Halls Gap locals, which had a fantastic turnout.
“From then on we’ve been having weekly meetings. After the fires went out, we were doing a whole bunch of little activities just to keep our locals sane, together, connected and abreast of everything that was happening.
“We had a meeting with the local business people and about 30 people came along. We had a round table and just said ‘what are we going to do? How are we going to try to recoup some of the losses we’ve had?’”
Ms Leithhead said the festival was financially backed by Northern Grampians Shire Council and Regional Arts Australia.
She said organisers hoped the festival would become an annual fixture on the Halls Gap calendar, allowing people to discover another side of the region.
