If you were out and about on the Hobart waterfront on the first weekend in August, you would have seen a lot of familiar faces from the MyState Australian Wooden Boat Festival. AWBF volunteers were out in force to deliver the 2018 Australian Antarctic Festival on behalf of the Mawson’s Huts Foundation.  The festival celebrated […]

The countdown has begun – we do not have long to go now, until the MyState Australian Wooden Boat Festival, 2019! As I sit down to write this message, I have just returned from at one of the local slip yards, where I happened to talk to some fellows who were working on one of […]

Tawe nunnugah is local Aboriginal dialect for ‘going by canoe’ and that’s exactly what’s involved in an adventure timed to precede the MyState Australian Wooden Boat Festival every two years. Co-ordinator Martin Riddle explains how it works: Southern Tasmanian small-boat Raid 2019 (tn19) What better way to warm up for the 2019 Australian Wooden Boat […]

  Sailor, wordsmith, circumnavigator and inspirational character are all words that will eventually come up when you talk about Kaci Cronkhite, our long-time friend and supporter of the MyState Australian Wooden Boat Festival. Kaci was, for ten years, director of the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival in Washington State, so she knows a thing or […]

We are very pleased to announce the inaugural Specsavers AWBF Photography Competition! This exciting competition is designed to showcase the amazing images which have been taken at the festival since 1994. Images of Wooden Boats – lots of them Our team of dedicated photographers have captured almost every aspect of the beautiful wooden boats and […]

Those of us who remember the exciting year of 1969 may recall the student protests in Europe, the Woodstock music festival in upstate New York or the appearance of Australia’s first ATM machine in Sydney.  But in Bay City, Michigan there was another sort of revolution going on, as brothers Meade and Jan Gougeon completed […]

The Maritime Marketplace for AWBF 2019 is filling up fast and applications will close soon. The Marketplace is a huge display of marine products and sevices – anchors, engines, paint, propellers and (almost) everything else for your boat. It’s also a great complementary activity for the festival, because of the presence of hundreds of boats […]

We are delighted that a team of experienced American boat builders, under the direction of master boat builder Sean Koomen, will be arriving before Christmas to commence a build of the classic Haven 12.5 in the boat-mad town of Franklin on the Huon River south of Hobart.  The team, hand-picked from scores of applicants, are […]