Support needed for the Peregian Originals Concerts to continue

 We have provided 24 free, all ages, open-air community concerts a year for 9 consecutive years now at Peregian Beach. Please consider this contribution to our local community.

 Peregian Originals is a community service. We currently provide each concert free to the public, with an average total of $1100 to cover all running costs. During previous years, our average income was half this amount. Considering the consistent quality and long-term survival of our event, these facts alone, make our event a giant community success story.

We started Peregian Originals nine years ago because we wanted to contribute to our local culture by creating a high-quality, ‘whole-community’ event. We have received enormous support from day one from the community of performers and from the vast majority of residents in our local community. Our event has grown organically through the years, all the while maintaining its pure vision: a free, whole-community event, celebrating live performance of original music, outdoors in the beautiful place we live.

There have been many hurdles along the way, but remarkably, our event is now stronger and shining brighter than ever. Families, friends, teenagers, singles, children of all ages, babies, and elderly folks – everyone comes together twice a month in the park at Peregian to celebrate life. A local man thanked us at the end of the last concert, telling us, “We have raised our kids out here at these concerts.”

Due to the relentless pressure from the discontented neighbours and Council, we have come close to pulling the plug on Peregian Originals on several occasions. The time and energy required to sustain a ‘community service’ event, without adequate funding, is challenge enough; the added work required to meet the forces trying to kill our event has often made us question the personal efficacy of carrying on.

Peregian Originals is not just about the organisers, or the musicians; the event is now an integral part of the Peregian Beach cultural identity. It is about US, our entire community.

Council has requested we keep the content of the meetings on Peregian Originals secret; we can no longer honour this. We have done our best to meet the discontented neighbours with openness. We have done our best to work within ever-tightening Council permit guidelines and added costs. And still, the threats to revoke our permit, to put an end to our community event, continue to come. Council has repeatedly demonstrated a strong bias toward a very small group of discontented residents who presented a 12 signature petition against our event, and continue to pester us with complaints (some proven to be lies), in spite of the fact that we have made every effort to meet and address the concerns of this tiny minority.