Adelaide Fringe Festival no longer sitting on the fringe as crowds pour in

The ­Adelaide Fringe is hatching an ambitious plan to market itself as a must-see for every Australian and provide greater income for performers.

Adelaide Fringe director Heather Croall. Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt

Already the biggest arts festival in the southern hemisphere, the ­Adelaide Fringe is hatching an ambitious plan to market itself as a must-see for every Australian and provide greater income for performers as the arts sector reels from Covid.

The hugely popular event ­attracts 2.8 million people to ticketed and free events but remains largely an Adelaide secret, and organisers believe it can rank with Edinburgh, Glastonbury, Austin’s South by South West and the New Orleans Jazz Festival as a national and global drawcard.

With many arts festivals being taxpayer-reliant charity cases, a new report shows the Adelaide Fringe is delivering massive bang for the paltry bucks it receives from the state government and has vast potential to generate more.

For an annual investment of just $2.4m, the Fringe generated a net benefit to South Australia of more than $31.6m this year during what is known locally as “Mad March”, the month when the city comes alive with the Fringe, Festival and WOMAD.

That amount, while impressive, was down on last year’s Fringe, which injected $41.6m into the local economy on the eve of the pandemic.

Armed with a comprehensive new report by PwC, Fringe director Heather Croall has hatched a bold post-Covid vision to elevate the Fringe on to the national and world stage.

The report urges the state government to provide a $2m funding increase to pay for three things: $750,000 for an advertising campaign aimed at interstate visitors and travel bubble nations including New Zealand next year and Europe in 2023; $750,000 for one major crowd-driving headline act; and $500,000 to fund grants to artists and venues battered by Covid.

The Fringe started in 1960 when a group of artists decided to launch their shows on the “fringe” of the biennial Adelaide Festival. It is now an annual event and its popularity has grown massively under Croall, who has been artistic director since 2015, with tickets sales up from 530,000 in her first year to more than 850,000 last year.

“I have had friends from Sydney who have come here for weddings in March and when they’ve been here have said: ‘Far out, no one told me all this was happening!’ There is so much more we can do to elevate its profile,” Croall said. “Not many festivals around the world truly transform their city into a magical playground, but we have one that does right here in Australia.”