Granny Smith Festival, 1957-2024

The Granny Smith Festival is the major festival organised by City of Ryde in its annual events calendar. Occurring on a Saturday in October, it attracts well over 100,000 people to the streets of Eastwood and celebrates the life of local orchardist Maria Ann 'Granny' Smith (1799-1870) and the tasty green apple named in her honour. With the parade along Rowe Street, the performance stages and the ever-popular fireworks as the finale in Eastwood Park, it's hard to believe that it could be celebrated anywhere other than Eastwood. Yet it was. When the City of Ryde organised its first Granny Smith Festival in 1986 as part of Carnivale, it was firmly centred on Top Ryde: a procession from Watt Avenue to Ryde Park via Pope, Tucker, Blaxland and Princes Streets and a family gala day in that park. 

It was not Ryde Council that organised the first ever tribute to Granny Smith. That honour goes to the Eastwood Chamber of Commerce, 30 years before. In 1957, the first ever Granny Smith Festival was opened with a festival dinner on 19 September; the procession along Rowe Street, Eastwood on the 21st of September attracted 5,000 onlookers.

By 1967 reports in newspapers of a festival were reduced to a Granny Smith Festival luncheon held in May of that year.

A poem about Granny Smith, which had been recited at the ‘recent Granny Smith Festival’, even made it into Column 8 in the Sydney Morning Herald. The Eastwood Senior Citizens wanted to send the verses to the National Library and needed to know the author’s name. Here is the poem:

Everybody, big or little, loves our Granny

At cooking bees she always takes the prize

Though she isn’t good at stitchin’

Introduce her to your kitchen

And she’ll make the most bewitchin’

Apples pies

In May 1971 the Eastwood Senior Citizens Club held what was described as its annual ‘Granny Smith’ luncheon at St Andrew’s Hall, Rutledge Street, Eastwood.

It’s unknown how long the Eastwood Chamber of Commerce was involved in the organisation of a festival and when the luncheon at the Eastwood Senior Citizen’s Club ceased. The Northern District Times 22 July 1987 reported that the festival, which was first held in 1957, had lapsed ‘through lack of public interest’.