Peace Festival onboard the Peace Boat!

Click the image below to view the full sized invitation to join the Peace Festival on board the Peace Boat!

Peace Festival

Celebrate the positive energy of the arts as an antidote to war

Peace Boat is a Japan-based international non-governmental and non-profit organization that works to promote peace, human rights, equal and sustainable development and respect for the environment. Peace Boat will visit Sydney on 15-16 April as part of its 108-day 60^th Global Voyage for Peace.

While in Sydney, Peace Boat is joining with the Sydney Peace Foundation, the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, and Macquarie University’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies to hold a 2 day conference at Sydney’s Customs House called “IRAQ NEVER AGAIN: Ending War Building Peace.” Register online at www.usyd.edu.au/neveragain

This conference and festival will mark the milestones of the 5th Anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the 20th Birthday of CPACS and the 25th Anniversary of Peace Boat.

We welcome you onboard the Peace Boat to enjoy an evening of arts and music, floating on Sydney Harbour.

Performances include:

• Veli Toprak (Kurdish musician)

• Russell Smith (Brolga Boys)

• Arabic Spoken Word Poetry

• Presentation by Peace Boat’s Global University students

• Peace Boat dance performance

• Promotional advance screening of “Soldiers of Peace”

• Photographic exhibition and raffle

• Food & Beverages available for purchase

Date: Tues 15 April, 2008
Time: Embark from 6pm (photo ID required), Festival 7-9pm
Venue: Onboard the Peace Boat (TSS The Topaz), Overseas Passenger Terminal, Circular Quay

Contact: Before 10 April - +81-3-3363-8047 (Meri)
After 10 April - 0421-477-433 (Johanna)

Entry is free but REGISTRATION IS ESSENTIAL

Contact peacefestival15april@gmail.com by Thurs 10 April 2008

When The World Said No To War: Photographic exhibition

When The World Said No To War is a photographic exhibition and peace education forum inspired by the 35 million people who took to the streets in Febuary 2003 to protest the impending war in Iraq.

The aim of the project is to highlight the significance of the largest peace demonstrations in history and to contribute to the ongoing call for peace.

The photographs were first exhibited in Sydney in 2005 and are being shown again now, 5 years after the start of the Iraq war, as part of a suite of programming related to the exhibition The 1970s: a decade of protest - photography by Roger Scott at the Museum of Sydney.

“Although it may be difficult to envisage an end to war as a form of political behaviour, there was a time when people could not foresee an end to slavery, the emancipation of women, the vote for blacks or the end of apatheid, but these things came to pass. Not because some magnamious government or world body decreed them to be so, but because ordniary citizens said it should be so. We need not be Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Martin Luther King Jnr, or Gandhi, for none of those people effected change alone; behind each stood millions of likeminded individuals with their own acts of moral courage. Our strength lies in the recognition of this - our shared humanity - rather than in the seperation imposed by the constructs of the state, religion and ethnicity.”

Dr. Denise Leith, Bearing Witness : The Lives of War Correspondents and Photojournalists

“One little person giving all her time to peace, can make news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history.”

Peace Pilgrim