Over an eight year period, Home Is Where The Hall Is saw hundreds of community led projects occur in the stunning community halls of regional Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.
Early years of the program saw all sorts of activity including bake-offs, dance competitions, photography exhibitions and film nights, with the final year of the program featuring Bollywood dancing, a mad hatters tea party, house concerts and kinder ballet. You could almost say we have ‘seen it all’.
Halls are special places, and this project demonstrated just how much these spaces mean to the diverse communities of Regional Australia. Halls hold memories. They build partnerships. They are the places we gather, mourn, celebrate, share and connect. In an age when social isolation is at a peak, and we have the wonders of the internet to access and disseminate culture far and wide (often directly to our lounge rooms and homes), this project reflected in a very public way the ability for physical places to positively impact our sense of community and communality.
We congratulate all of the incredible events that have been part of this project, and offer thanks to all of the passionate community leaders who enabled such innovative programming in our community halls.
With this chapter of the project now closed, one cannot help but think upon the legacy created by this project. Rising from the energy of Home Is Where The Hall Is are initiatives such as as Regional Arts Victoria’s Connecting Places program, and we encourage you to get in touch with the RAV team to talk about these programs if they are of interest to you.
Regional Arts Victoria would like to acknowledge that this project was made possible with support of the Federal Government Regional Arts Fund through the Strategic Projects initiative from 2012-2016.
We would also like to acknowledge our project partners Tasmania Regional Arts and Country Arts South Australia, without whom the expansion of this project across borders would not have been possible.
