The Guringai Festival is an annual celebration of Aboriginal culture and heritage. The festival aims to raise awareness of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in the Northern Sydney region. The Aboriginal people who reside there come from many different Aboriginal nations or countries throughout Australia and call this area - Guringai Country - home.

Founded in 2001, by a local Aboriginal woman, Susan Moylan-Coombs whilst chairing Manly Council’s Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Committee,  the Guringai Festival is an annual celebration of Indigenous Heritage, History and Culture. It is a modern day Corroboree which aims to bring the Northern Sydney region together to celebrate one of the oldest living cultures in the world.

Guringai Festival 26 May to 10 July 2011 "One Voice"

The festival aims to bring the Northern Sydney region together as a community to celebrate one of the oldest living cultures in the world. It is a time for people of diverse backgrounds, religions, ages and race to come together to celebrate Aboriginal heritage, history and culture.

Please view the 2011 Guringai Festival Program.

2011's theme “One Voice” looks at how we can all continue to address the unfinished business in this country and collaboratively work towards closing the gap with regard to social indicators that see Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people continuously rally behind the rest of the Australian population.

We need to continue to share our stories and find the commonalities in our lives and find "our voice" as residents of the Northern Sydney region and then we will exceed all our expectations and co-create a better place for our children and grand children to inherit.

The Government has recently set up an "Expert Panel" of 20 Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people to discuss the way forward and this is your opportunity to be part of the discussion in our region and give your input to "One Voice".

Guringai Festival 25 May to 11 July 2010 "Living Languages"

2010's theme “Living Languages” is in recognition of the extensive work that is happening across the nation, with language maintenance and revival.

In the first years of white settlement there were more than 250 Indigenous languages recorded in Australia.  Two hundred and twenty years later, that number has dropped dramatically with just nine languages considered safe and approximately 20 to 30 languages at various levels of endangerment.  So today, communities are retrieving dormant languages from colonial journals, books and early audio recordings, reviving language through the development of dictionaries to maintaining language through promoting and teaching not only Aboriginal youth, but all Australians.

Guringai Festival 25 May to 12 July 2009  "Star Dreaming" 

The 2009 theme for the festival was "Star Dreaming" to coincide with the Year of Astronomy.

Australia's Aboriginal people are arguably the world's first astronomers. Our complex systems of knowledge and beliefs about the heavenly bodies has evolved as an integral part of our culture, that has been handed down through song, dance and ritual for some 40,000 years. There are many traditional Dreaming stories about the relationships between ancestral beings and the sun, the moon, the stars and the planets.