Best things to do in Adelaide Festival season
The South Australian capital’s festival season has begun. Here’s 10 ways to make the most of March and beyond.
1 The locals call it Mad March, that heady month when Adelaide explodes with cultural events and general revelry. The headline is the 36th Adelaide Festival of Arts, which kicked off on Friday with a COVID-busting program of 10 world premieres and more than a dozen Australian premieres. Hot tickets include Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and homegrown acrobats Gravity & Other Myths staging its visceral performance of The Pulse, complete with a 30-strong backing choir. There will be theatre, dance and classical music shows streamed live from European playhouses, and nightly concerts of contemporary music at new festival hub The Summerhouse. Festivities continue until March 14; adelaidefestival.com
2 As Fringe festivals go, only Edinburgh’s is bigger. Adelaide’s month of mayhem this year involves more than 800 events and 20,000 performances, enough to sate any cultural craving, from ventriloquism to magic, cabaret to comedy. The largest arts festival in the southern hemisphere now comes with QR codes, social distancing and, in some venues, masks, but many gigs are free and most, such as the Royal Croquet Club event space at Victoria Square/Tarntanyangga, have reasonable entry prices. Past Fringe hits such as Dan Acher’s Borealis, a laser installation recreating the northern lights over North Terrace, and sunset DJ cruises down the Torrens River, return for a comforting sense of COVID normal. Until March 21; adelaidefringe.com.au
3 As one of the first pandemic-era literary festivals to be staged in the world, Adelaide Writers’ Week promises an especially lively exchange of ideas in 2021. Highlights of this year’s program will be appearances by literary sensations Trent Dalton (Boy Swallows Universe, All Our Shimmering Skies) and Booker laureate Richard Flanagan but not, sadly, Arundhati Roy. The festival has suffered some late scratchings but sallies valiantly on with more live-streamed sessions than originally planned and plenty of in-person presentations at the riverside Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens. Fittingly, the theme of this year’s festival is Unstable Ground. Until March 4, adelaidefestival.com.au/writers-week
4 The city’s annual festival of world music, staged this year in a custom-built venue at King Rodney Park, features an all-Australian lineup of talent comprising local legends such as Vika and Linda Bull, Archie Roach, Sarah Blasko and The Teskey Brothers. The three-day concert program commences on March 5 with singer Lior and composer Nigel Westlake performing with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and closes with the First Nations-Midnight Oil collaboration Makarrata Live, featuring a cast of Indigenous singers including Dan Sultan and Alice Skye; womadelaide.com.au
5 Tasting Australia, the annual celebration of SA food and wine, usually opens at the tail-end of March but this year will have a distinctly autumnal flavour. The gastronomy showcase starts a month later (April 30-May 9), giving director Simon Bryant a welcome chance to present late-season produce and top-tier Australian kitchen talent. The program caters to all tastes and budgets, from champagne-fuelled Tasting Australia Airlines flights to Eyre Peninsula to savour oysters, marron and cockles with Maggie Beer and Darren Robertson (Three Blue Ducks), to a sausage-in-bread day at the University of Adelaide. Perhaps the most classic local offering is the Penfolds Grange Sandwich, matching baguettes stuffed with Mayura Station wagyu and Australia’s most famous red. Such high-low dining is quintessentially South Australian, Bryant says. “It’s not unusual for someone to crack a bottle of Grange while they’re burning sausages on the barbecue”; tastingaustralia.com.au
6 New wine bar The Olivia Hotel, which opened on Hutt Street in December, is the latest incarnation on a site that’s part of Australia’s hospitality heritage. In this same building, in the 1980s, Malaysian-born Cheong Liew opened Neddy’s restaurant and launched Adelaide on to the national dining scene. More recently it was a pizza restaurant; now it’s a lively salon of vintage and antique furniture, rough timber floors and rose-print wallpaper where owners Jack Wilkes and Simon Schumann source wines directly from makers and serve them alongside cocktails, local beer and bar snacks. “We just wanted to do something simple and generous here,” Wilkes says; theoliviahotel.com.au
7 For more than 30 years, Jolleys Boathouse has been the genteel home of occasion dining beside the Torrens. It’s a lovely, light-filled room with glass walls framing river, eucalypts and the classical stonework of the circa 1879 Albert Bridge, Adelaide’s oldest. Former Southern Ocean Lodge chef Jack Ingram has recently taken over the kitchen at Jolleys, injecting fresh focus into an old favourite. His food is seasonal and soulful, from flavour-packed Adelaide tomatoes with stracciatella and pickled fennel, to a satisfying rump-cap tartare showered with cured yolk, and Coorong mulloway with warrigal greens and shellfish sauce; jolleysboathouse.com
8 Adelaide loves dressing up for dinner and Fishbank, a grand, moneyed space of chevron parquetry, marble bar, leather booths, statement chandeliers and grand windows over King William Street and North Terrace, is the smart set’s new haunt. On the menu is South Australia’s best seafood, treated with respect. Besides a big choice of raw fish, the whipped tarama, served with Yarra Valley caviar and toasted focaccia, is a sensational starter. Follow it up with a crayfish and smoked salmon club sandwich, crisp whitebait and wok-fried Kangaroo Island lobster with shiitake and shallots; fishbankadel.com.au
9 Finding a decent caffeine fix to fuel festival days is easy thanks to a new wave of serious coffee stops. East End favourite Exchange Specialty Coffee serves custom blends from Melbourne’s Market Lane as espresso and batch brews, alongside a winning breakfast menu. At the Scandi-look Crack Kitchen, the beans are roasted on site so the single-origin and house-blend coffees couldn’t be fresher. And Coffee Branch is a classic espresso bar tucked in the CBD’s buzzy Leigh Street laneway.
Best beds
10 The shiny new Crowne Plaza hotel has much to recommend it. As Adelaide’s tallest building, it’s a reliable landmark, visible anywhere in the city (handy for those who tend to get lost). The 10th-floor reception opens to a lounge bar, Asian-inspired Koomo restaurant and even a pool deck. Its 300-plus rooms are light, tasteful and textured, with walls of glass capturing views across the capital to the Hills. They’re equally suited to leisure or toil, with work tables, charging stations and speakers, Chromecast streaming and espresso pod machines. But the winning factor for Festival goers is the location in the heart of the East End, home to some of the city’s top restaurants and bars, party central during Festival month, and just around the corner from the cultural treasures of North Terrace; adelaide.crowneplaza.com
Kendall Hill was a guest of the South Australian Tourism Commission.
