Day of festivity at museum reserve

Several thousand people flocked to the Otago Museum Reserve yesterday for a "very festive" and successful family fun day, linked to Otago Anniversary weekend, organisers said.

Billed as "a festival the whole family can embrace", "The Big Get Together" ran from 11am to 5pm and featured musical performances by New Zealand musical group the Funky Monkeys and their dog, Dizzy, as well as sword-swallowing and fiery hat-wearing by performer Slim Pickings.

Adding to the fun were a bouncy castle, face painting, a selection of weirdly shaped balloons, an array of assorted buskers and street performers, plus a large supply of fresh candy floss.

The museum has run the fun day activities for several years.

Museum exhibitions, planning and development director Clare Wilson said that although skies were initially cloudy, no rain had fallen during the highly popular event, which had attracted crowds of several hundred at a time and totalling several thousand throughout the day.

For the first time, the family fun day also featured performers from overseas, with some of the best science communicators from the Asia-Pacific region taking turns making presentations on a "science stage".

The communicators are in Dunedin to take part in an Asia Pacific Network of Science and Technology Centres (Aspac) conference, which starts at the museum today.

They were taking part in a pre-conference workshop.

The communicators, from Singapore, Taiwan and Australia as well as from elsewhere in New Zealand, received a positive response from onlookers.

The day had been "wonderful" and "very festive" and a positive prelude to the science conference, she said.

john.gibb@odt.co.nz