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WELCOME To My Home Town

We live here in Parkes, Central West N.S.W.

The area is best known for "THE DISH" & "Parkes Elvis Festival".

dish Elvis

Parkes Elvis Festival

Parkes Elvis Festival is held each January in Parkes in Central New South Wales. The Festival is held on the second weekend in January to coincide with Elvis Presley’s birthday. Check out the promotional video for a taste of what to expect! Parkes has a population of 12,000 and is located 365 kilometres west of Sydney.

Why an Elvis festival in Parkes?

There are some passionate Elvis fans in Parkes: one local changed his name to Elvis by deed poll and another local couple operated ‘Gracelands Restaurant’ for many years. The Festival was conceived by these and other passionate community members who recognised the potential for a fun event. January was identified as the perfect time to stage the event, being a slow time in local tourism and coinciding with Elvis’s on January 8. The first festival was held in January 1993. Following the release of the Australian movie ‘The Dish’, Parkes was best known as the home of the CSIRO Radio Telescope. But now the town is widely recognised as the ‘Elvis Capital of Australia’ and the Festival has cemented Parkes as a tourist destination. The program Festival events are held over five days from Wednesday to Sunday. Each year the program extends and now there are approximately 150 individual events over the five days. The program includes the headline Feature Concerts Series, the Elvis Gospel Service, the Northparkes Mines Street Parade, nonstop free entertainment in Cooke Park, the popular Renewal of Vows, the Miss Priscilla Dinner, Poets’ Breakfast, busking, dancing, cake decorating and much more! The Elvis Express between Sydney to Parkes is an annual highlight for Festival visitors. The Festival experience begins even before visitors arrive in town, as they are serenaded by Elvis all the way from Sydney. The Festival’s incredible growth. A couple of hundred people attended the first one-night only Festival in 1993. Over the next 10 years more events were added to the program and the Festival became a two-day event. But still only a few hundred people attended. Then with the vision and efforts of new committee members, the Festival experienced a surge in popularity in 2004 and 2005, with word quickly spreading across Australia about this fun and quirky event. 9,500 attended the Festival in 2009. In 2015 more than 20,000 visitors attended this major event. The Festival now enjoys a worldwide media audience of 60 million with fans around the globe.


The Dish

The Dish is a 2000 Australian film that tells a somewhat fictionalized story of the Parkes Observatory's role in relaying live television of man's first steps on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

It was the top grossing film in Australia in 2000.