Maidstone Community Centre, 21 Yardley St, Maidstone. Phone: 9317 0747

This free event at the Maidstone Community Centre ticks so many excellent boxes for me I am entertaining visions of hordes of hungry, happy locals descending on Yardley St to graze hungrily among many dozens of food stalls.

So I am somewhat bemused to find the feast is considerably more low key than that, though no less enjoyable than expected – far from it.

The food serving is spread throughout several of the centre’s rooms and out the in the beaut back yard.

If the crowd is less populous and frenzied than I’d imagined, it is certainly a happy one, its members ranging as far and wide in size and age as they do in their dizzying array of skin colours.

And I expect many of them are just like me and enjoy a bash in which the term “multicultural” is one to be embraced and celebrated.

How did multicultural come to be such a dirty word with such negative connotations in Australia?

Rhetorical question folks! We all know their names.

Anyway, this lovely party is a poke in the eye for them – and especially those who of late have been making preposterous comparisons between Australia and the vastly different situations in, say, Germany, France and Scandanavia.

Oubt, you damn dog whistlers!

At each serving table there are neat stacks of a complementary cookbooks containing all the days recipes – very cool, eh?

I start with vegetable alicha and ye misir wot – a simple Ethiopian vegetable stew and a very dry lentil dish, both served with dark brown injera. Even before venturing elsewhere I return for a second serve!

Outside, I score a nice long snag on a slice of white bread, topped with South American roast tomato salsa. Ethiopian zilzil and satay sauce round out the topping choices.

In the centre’s kitchen, I obtain a homely and hearty bowl of polenta, white bean stew, basic short pasta in tomato sauce and a single meatball.

Outside again, I enjoy herb paste pizza that emanates from the wood-fired oven –  basic thin flat bread smeared with an oily, herby paste.

Seeing a range of drinks being dispensed in small cardboard cups that make the process look like mass medication, I jokingly ask if they have multicultural LSD before knocking back a couple of homemade lemonades.

Of the savoury dishes on hand, I miss only the rice paper rolls and tandoori chook. There are queues for both.

I pass by the lemonade scones and head for the Filipino buco pandan, a slithery, sexy, extremely green mix of grass jelly, condensed milk, cream, coconut, tapioca pearls and more.

The speechifying is kept to a minimum and every soul in the pace is having a fine old time as Ray Pereira gets a willing group of volunteers together for an African drumming session.

I believe this is the second Harmony Feast to be held at the centre, and I’ll be sure to make a point of attending the third.