Lilla Sports and Storytelling Festival brings remote students together

Every year, busloads of children from remote community schools across Central Australia travel to the Luritja homeland of Lilla, in the Watarrka National Park about 240 kilometres west of Alice Springs.

The small Northern Territory community, made up of just a few homes, sits at the bottom of a magnificent, orange escarpment, with a waterhole hidden among the trees.

About 40 children from Watarrka region communities — including Areyonga/Utju, Papunya/Warumpi and Mt Liebig/Watiyawanu — are there to attend the three-day Lilla Sports and Storytelling Festival, a school camp full of theatre, learning, cultural activities and sport.

The camp was established more than a decade ago by Reg Ramsden, a local tour operator who started the Watarrka Foundation to provide more education-based opportunities for children in the region in which he worked.

"I wanted to bring the local kids from surrounding communities together so they could come together and look forward to something every year," Mr Ramsden said.

"[It's] a bit of an incentive to go to school, if you go to school, you'll come to this festival … this festival is all about [saying] 'it's cool to go to school'.

For most Australian children, going on a school camp is a rite of passage, but for many children at these remote schools, Lilla Festival is their first school camp.

While there are special activities across the three days, sports including Aussie rules football, softball and soccer, are the clear favourites.

The festival is organised in partnership with the Kings Canyon Resort, and aims to promote employment and training opportunities at the park for central Australian First Nations school leavers.

Utju-Areyonga School worker Geoffrey Barnes used to attend the Lilla camps growing up, before returning this year as a school support worker.

The 21-year-old said he made the move after joining the camps as a student between 2011 and 2016.

"[The camp] is great, showing the kids [the] lands and countries, it's great to have them here," he said.