ABSTRACT
Cultural creation and elaboration are key components of community gardeners practices of collective social action. The Plantation exhibition at Belgium Avenue Community Garden illustrates some of the elements of cultural production that community gardeners catalyse. The Return of the Sacred Kingfisher Festival is celebrated annually at CERES, a community garden and environmental education centre on a former tip site on the banks of Melbourne's Merri Creek. Drawing on cultural and social psychology, other scholars attempted to integrate emotions, cognition and creative practice into the study of social movements, also emphasising the agency of movement participants. The festivals and other cultural performances produced by Australian community gardens have counterparts in the United States community gardening movement. Arts and cultural events in Australian community gardens have sometimes been framed as multicultural celebrations, examples of the successful integration of recent immigrants. In social movement accounts of cultural performances like festivals and rituals, there is often tension between impacts on outsider and insider audiences.
