Street parade tops off big week

Action from the Beef Week Festival Street Parade at Casino on Saturday. Jerad Williams

THE footpaths were densely packed and every inch of straw bale occupied for the Beef Week Festival Street Parade through Casino on Saturday.

Col Wilkes, who has lived in Casino for as long as Beef Week has existed, said he thought the crowd filling the streets was the largest he had seen at the festival.

They got the spectacle they had come for too, Mr Wilkes said.

“It’s been a good parade. In fact it’s been a great day altogether.”

As a former cattleman, Mr Wilkes said the highlight of the show for him had been seeing the animals, some of which were descended from cattle he had bred in the past.

Beef Week was “a great thing for Casino”, he said.

“Can you imagine how much money this event brings into the town?”

Many of the floats in the parade followed the Italiano theme, which for several local businesses meant the mafia and their ancestors, Roman centurions and even a grape-guzzling Nero, fiddling while Rome burned.

Others took a gastronomic perspective, with diners enjoying a vino with their spaghetti as the world went by.

There was Romeo and Juliet declaring their love, and two guys on foot whose banner admitted: “We just wanted to be in the parade.”

The coal seam gas protesters, who it was feared would disrupt the parade, kept their demonstration discreet, with the occasional banner and slogan t-shirts detected amid the smell of sawdust and the roar of the crowd.