June 30th, 2025Hepburn Swiss Italian Festa
Hepburn’s Swiss Italian Festa is happening on October 24, 25 and 26 and promises to be a vibrant celebration of heritage, culture and lifestyle – with a feast of music, food, wine, art and sport. Kyle Barnes chatted to co-secretary Michele Green, pictured.
Kyle: Are you new to the committee?
Michele: I’ve been on the committee for the past three years but only just become an office bearer. I’m not Swiss or Italian, but I’ve learnt about the heritage, and it’s really interesting. So I feel like I’m kind of richer for it. There was a hiatus for a couple of years with Covid and I think, at that stage, they probably weren’t sure about where it was headed. But there was certainly a view that they wanted to make sure that this continued. And that’s mostly been driven by Jenny and Eddie Beacham. They’re really quite amazing drivers of community projects.
So this year we’ve kind of recalibrated and rethought about how to best deliver the Swiss Italian Festa in keeping with its purpose and origins. That is obviously to celebrate the Swiss Italian culture and heritage and what they brought to the community.
And I think what’s exciting this year is that we’ve got a very new, much younger committee and very enthusiastic committee members. And we now have our first project manager, Cathy Cole. It is about celebrating community. And we need to get young people, schools, families very much involved.
Kyle: Do you need more volunteers?
Michele: We would love more people to volunteer at the Festa or if they want to have involvement in some of the school projects. One of the things that we’re very keen on is to get the schools on board and the school children participating. And this is from primary school through to secondary school. Then you have the parents’ participation. So yes, we are really keen to have new volunteers, also because we’re a community-based organisation. We don’t have ongoing funding and are really keen to get sponsors who can contribute or donate to our raffles and other initiatives.
Kyle: Can you give a bit of a run-down of what’s on offer?
Michele: Sure, on the Saturday, October 24 we have the Hepburn parade starting early afternoon and that is followed by lots of fun activities down at the Hepburn Pavilion with food vans, art activities, a treasure hunt, music, acts, fireworks and the lantern parade. A big day celebrating our Swiss Italian cultural heritage.
Then on Sunday, October 26, we have a choir performance at St Peter’s Church, Yandoit heritage tours, Hepburn tours with Daisy’s Walking Tours and activities at Lavandula. We have also some exciting competitions like the children’s art competition, home-made passata competition and the school poster competition.
I also need to do a shout-out to our festa partners – Yandoit Cultural Society, the Daylesford & District Historical Society, The Phoenix Cinema@The Rex, Radius Art and Belle Real Estate.
Kyle: Are you looking for fresh ideas?
Michele: Absolutely. The thing we’ve done is reflect on the previous years and thought, how can we do this better? We’re going to try and really tap into that, use the pavilion at that beautiful old bottling plant building down in Hepburn for activities. And we’re also looking at the types of activities we might have within that pavilion over the Swiss Italian Festa period.
The Hepburn Bathhouse is very happy to work with us and facilitate workshops and activities within the old bottling plant. So we’re going to take advantage of our our natural heritage as the space for activities. It’s a beautiful old space. There’s a lot happening!
