This year the Fechtschule Sankt Peter, one of the three schools constituting the Stoccata School of Defence, will host the tenth Australasian Historical Swordplay Conference.

UPDATE
The conference will not now be held in August, but later in the year, perhaps in November. Firmer information will be shown here in the next few days. In the meantime, the information below, and the program, remain valid, with the exception of specific dates, which will be set back. Rather than withdraw altogether such information as is here, which will continue to be useful, we ask only that you disregard dates for the time being.

2008 marks the tenth anniversary of Stoccata, which first opened its doors to students in Sydney in August 1998. It is also the tenth such conference held in Australia, the first having been hosted in Brisbane in 1999 by the Australian College of Arms.

The information on this site will be fleshed out as more details are settled. Please e-mail us with any questions or suggestions, and in the meantime read on for up-to-date information on:

Date
Venue
Cost
Program and Theme
Presentations


Date
The conference will be held from Friday 8th to Monday 11th August 2008. See the Program for details of what will be happening during that time

Venue
The conference venue will be Castle Mountain, near Wiseman's Ferry, about an hour and a half north of central Sydney. It will be a live-in, on-site affair, with all meals catered from Friday lunch to Monday lunch.

Cost
Cost per attendee is yet to be determined, but we expect at this stage that it will be $250 for the entire weekend up until mid-July, after which the price will rise to $300. This will seem expensive to some, but bear in mind that this includes all food and accommodation for the weekend.

As is traditional, the conference fee will be waived for presenters.

Program and Theme
We have chosen this year not to focus the conference around a particular theme, nor to invite an overseas guest as the key presenter.

Over the last several years, we have heard nobody express the view that they were attracted to a conference by the prospect eof meeting or learning from a particular instructor. On the other hand, we have heard many remarks to the effect that people had chosen not to attend an event because the declared theme did not mesh with their own chosen area of study or practice.

We hope that there will be something – indeed, plenty – for everybody at this year's event, distributed across at least three simultaneous streams. To allow for clashing sessions preventing people from getting to everything that interests them we may schedule repeats of some sessions.

This can only be a reality, of course, if people from every school make a contribution. At this stage we have about twenty hours of sessions and events planned, which is a long way short of where we would like to be. See the program for details – there are a lot of holes to fill, and nothing is yet set in stone.