Sydney Knitting Nannas & Friends were honoured to be invited to report on our non-violent environmental campaigning at the recent Raising Peace conference on Zoom. We spoke about saving our environment for the kiddies, what it’s like to be a Sydney Knitting Nanna, the Nannafesto and the Nannalution, our relationship with First Nations Australians, and lots more besides.
Our committee adopted the saying ‘Give Peace a Dance’ from the mother of one of our Nannas, and, having decided on that as a title, came up with the bright idea of including some actual dancing, inviting our audience to join in.
We used our own music, videos and the dance session to lift the spirits of conference attendees. Our craftivism featured strongly in a slide show of our home-made protest signs and knitted objects in action, and we even played a special video of our latest creation, a puppet politician in a knitted suit, dancing to the tune of a mining executive.
We had a lot of fun and so did our audience, who especially commented on how inclusive our group is, and what a breath of fresh air it was during the conference to have a presentation that looked squarely at the issues without being too heavy going.
In addition, we also got to learn more about the peace movement by attending the other talks. We were especially impressed by the Indigenous community’s day of presentations, and we learnt to contemplate the relationship of a healthy environment to peace. Without a clean, functioning environment to support all living things, rivalries and conflict become inevitable as communities compete for scarce resources.
Here’s our presentation, Give Peace a Dance now up on YouTube. Feel free to join in the dance segment! See all the Raising Peace Festival recordings