We started International Women’s Day on Country, in the dark, with hot tea and the first edge of light over the wheat.

Wiradjuri Elders welcomed us. Women named what they were grateful for. The sun came up the way it does out here — wide and unhurried and impossible to look away from.

There is a particular kind of quiet that gathers in a circle of women before dawn. It is not a quiet that asks anything of you. It is just there, holding.

The sunrise gathering returns to the 2027 festival on Sunday 7 March — the closing morning of International Women’s Week.