The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/australia/page/5)
[Today we welcome columnist Inga Leonora Westerberg. In January, The Wild Hunt said goodbye to Cosette Paneque as she ventured off to engage in new and exciting personal projects. However, while it is sad to see someone leave, it is also nice to welcome a new voice. Westerberg will become our new Australian writer within our monthly Around the World column. Today she introduces herself.]
Hello, good Wild Hunt readers!
There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans and Heathens out there, sometimes more than our team can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up. This month, author and Witch Byron Ballard found herself the center piece of a mainstream news story titled, “Meet the Appalachian spell-catcher.” Local journalist Dale Neal published his article in Asheville’s Citizen-Times, the main paper for the region. Neal wrote, “In her travels, Ballard found many people put off at first by the idea of a pagan priestess …
Australia does not have festivals like Pagan Spirit Gathering or PantheaCon, which draw hundreds, thousands even, of Pagans from all over the U.S. That’s not a criticism; it’s simply a difference, one that largely reflects numbers and processes. However, Australia does have important and meaningful festivals that continue to shape Pagan culture Down Under. Australia is about the size of the U.S. with a population slightly less than that of Texas. According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the U.S. is the third most populated country in the world. Australia comes in at 52.
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MELBOURNE, Austrailia — Hermes is a god of communication and lies; commerce and thievery; craftiness and trickery. Some people equate him with Mercury whose eponymous planet challenges communication when it moves retrograde. Therefore, it may not be surprising that Hermes is now at the center of an imbroglio that pits corporate interests against an individual artist seeking to sell drawings of the gods.
In late August, the Mount Franklin Pagan Gathering (MFPG) ran into a hurdle after being handed a number of new requirements from Parks Victoria. MFPG is one of the oldest and longest running ‘free to attend’ Pagan gatherings in Australia with its first event held in 1981. Named after an extinct volcano, MPFG is always scheduled for late October. However, the organizers recently announced that they had been “informed of the changes in administration surrounding Parks Victoria …These changes impose upon us limitations and requests for documentation that are nothing less than astonishing in number and in time frame. Last year, the Gathering paid for two years’ worth of permits in full, however the requirements have now been changed significantly.” They go on to explain that Parks Victoria now requires a nine page detailed application, other fees, forms, and consultations.