Surry Hills Festival Program Heralds First Ever Surry Hills Song Competition

Surry-loving songsmiths, sharpen your pencils. The Surry Hills Festival first program announcement is here and the standout of the scattering of events announced so far is the inaugural Surry Hills Song Competition.

The SHF organisers are inviting you to pen an original song about whatever it is you love about Surry Hills; that tree-lined sanctum of good coffee, the so-stylish-it-hurts set and sometimes insurmountable slopes, or the colourful history that predates all of that. You have until August 22 to work on your composition, which you can submit here. If you're selected as a finalist you'll perform your love letter to Surry on festival day, for the chance of Queen-of-Surry-Hills, Conchita Wurst-levels of stardom, relative to the size of the suburb, o'course.

If you're hoping to play a longer set on the day, get hoppin'. Applications for artistic performers and musicians close Friday at 5pm.

For those not so handy with chords and lyrics, there's plenty to look forward to, with hints of more participatory events for pretty much anyone who can do anything from disco dancing to storytelling.

On the agenda thus far are a dance-a-thon, a collaborative art project and something called Surry Hills Lives — a series of projections, prettying up walls of the neighbourhood leading up to festival day. The project will feature images from the 1960s doco Living on the Fringe, which filmed the people of the area back in the days when it wasn't quite as affluent, alongside your own neighbourhood snaps and local stories — see the website for more details on how to contribute your own piece of Surry history.

Festival day isn't till September 27 and the rest of the program is due to drop bit by bit as that date approaches, but now's the time to make sure you can get the day off from your Saturday job. Surry Hills Festival is an event that transforms the whole suburb into a one-day playground, doubling as a fundraiser for the community projects run by the Surry Hills Neighbourhood Centre. Advice: banish the beanie and treat the festival as a kind of unofficial welcoming of the warmer spring days to come.