Perth Voice Interactive

A poor turnout for the first-ever Pride parade to be held during the day has been blamed on the midday heat.

Ben Bowtell is musical director of Wasamba, who marched on the day. He says the band will carefully consider whether it’ll march in future daytime events.

“We have to run it by our members and see what the consensus is, but generally for health and safety reasons we are leaning towards not doing it if it’s going to be a similar heat because there was a lot of people who were struggling, almost fainting,” he told the Voice.

“Even though we made our members drink a lot of water and put a lot of sunscreen on, a lot of people were dehydrated and sunburnt at the end.”

Pride co-president Daniel Smith issued a statement saying “like all of us, we would like to see more participants in the parade, and we would like to see the massive crowds the event used to attract years ago.

“The truth is, participation in the parade, float quality and spectator numbers have been falling for about 10 years. For many, the parade had become a negative representation of our community.

The parade had become a negative representation of our community

“What we have started, this year, is a long-term strategy for addressing this.

“By staging the parade during the day, we aimed to send a positive message about LGBTI Western Australians—that we live our lives in full sunlight, in every aspect of society, not just in the clubs and pubs of night-time Northbridge.

“We want to make the event accessible and enjoyable by people of all ages, and of all backgrounds.”

His statement said shifting the parade to a cooler time of year heightened the risk of parade-destroying rain. Organisers will consider water stations along the way if the daytime slot continues.

Disclosure: The Voice’s Jenny D’Anger is a founding member of Wasamba and she reports crowds are usually five-deep at the barriers. This time around numbers were “distinctly sickly”.

by DAVID BELL