Korean New Year celebrations

Sydney with its resident Asian communities has the benefit of being able to enjoy more than one New Year celebration. It might be called Chinese New Year or Korean New Year, or Vietnamese New Year, according to who is doing the celebrating, or were you are while they are celebrating it. But the observances all take place at the same time based on the phases of the moon, so it is often given the overall term of Lunar New Year.

Unlike the few hours that make up the Western celebrations,  these  continue for a very healthy….fifteen days! Various customs are practiced according to which day it is of the festival, with each day signifying something different.

I must say this variety beats hands down the single minded, crushingly repetitive and infantilising fireworks overkill Sydney dishes up like yesterday’s slops year after year, in lieu of any other New Year custom to practice. Is anyone else over this yet? In their attempt to up the fireworks ante, I swear one day under the tons of incendiaries they ignite on the bridge it is going to soften, melt and drip down into the harbour in giant metal gobbets. The Pylons left behind as smoking ruins like the chimneys they so closely resemble.

I mean…gawd…what a dog’s breakfast…

Why don’t they try something different? Like the stunning massed drones they had at the Korean Winter Olympics? The enormous scale of that was jaw dropping. The drones must have been controlled by satelite or something as they formed and re-formed all those sky sculptures.

The drone light show set a Guinness World Records title for the most unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously. (

Kicking off the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, viewers from around the globe were treated to a record-breaking light show during the opening ceremony. at the Olympic Winter Games in South Korea.

You could have them do this in Sydney too, even get them to simulate fireworks with colour rippling through, and you could sustainably trot them out every year doing different things. Even if they only simulated fireworks it would still beat the ethically dubious concept of literally burning money that fireworks entail. Or maybe they could 3D capture the fireworks each year, digitise them, and the next year hologram them back up into the sky with booming sound effects. They are so repetitive year on year no-one could tell the difference.  And that would be a once off cost that you could roll out every subsequent year in perpetuity. Which is exactly what they are doing now except it always costs $6m a pop.

Um, now where was I? Oh, yeah, I was enthusing about the 15 day Lunar New Year festivities.

In Sydney you can choose which events to go see according to where the different communities are located. I took these photos in Koreatown, which is located around the southern part of Pitt st in Sydney.

A musician and a festival volunteer without realising it mimic each other.

I couldn’t help but smile at this K-baby enjoying a premier view of a  calligraphy dispay being drawn on a giant scroll.

Attentive festival volunteers being briefed.

A magician surprises a girl by flipping the card she had written on and shuffled into the pack.

Musicians wait patiently in a side alley for their cue to perform.