Sydney Solstice festival set to make the city sparkle
More than 200 events will help the city limber up for the longest night of the year.
The winter solstice occurs when one of the Earth’s poles has its maximum tilt away from the sun. June 21 marks the southern hemisphere’s turn, our shortest day of the year. But in the NSW capital, it’s more a matter of limbering up in advance of the longest night of the year.
A debut series of Sydney Solstice events from June 8-20 embraces a vast and varied menu of more than 200 happenings designed to add sparkle to the city’s inner neighbourhoods and urban laneways after dark across dining, cultural and arts gatherings and fun entertainment.
Key city quarters include the CBD, Darling Harbour, Newtown and surrounds, and the Oxford Street area. Venues are as diverse as Sydney Town Hall and restaurants in the South Eveleigh neighbourhood, which are featuring special menus and chefs such as precinct ambassador Kylie Kwong. Special daytime goings-on include a series of three-hour Indigenous tour experiences on
Me-Mel (Goat) Island in Sydney Harbour that feature a welcome ceremony, cultural song and dance performances, demonstrations of traditional artefacts, campfire yarns and barbecued bush tucker lunches.
One of the most accessible experiences to kick off Sydney Solstice is a reprisal of the popular Badu Gili (“Water Light”) Winter Nights, from June 8-20. Staged on the steps of the Opera House, there’ll be live music and readings against a backdrop of those famous sails illuminated with projections of First Nations art and stories. Darling Harbour is holding a Winter Fair with an icy wonderland theme, including a skating rink and live music.
For the strong of spirit, there’s night-time sea-kayaking or, much more warming, a festival of brewing and distilling at Oxford Street bars and headline performers at Golden Age Cinema and Bar. Sydney Solstice is a state government initiative aimed at supporting hospitality businesses, cultural institutions and entertainment venues and hot-to-trot tickets are already selling fast.
Book club
COLD FEAR
Mads Peder Nordbo
It’s taken me a while to get harpooned by crime fiction from those great northern lands where corpses lie about, frozen in floes. I’ve loved telly series set in such unforgiving weather, even if watching requires padded couch costumes or at least a sled-load of blankets. I’m about to get stuck into Thin Ice, an eight-parter on SBS featuring Greenland. But is this unwise given that Sydney has just clocked up its coldest stretch of May days in 54 years? Over on Foxtel, those real-estate shows about moving to the Caribbean are looking very tempting.
But back to “floating growlers of glacier ice” and Mads Peder Nordbo, whose 2019 novel Cold Fear is described as a “brutal and thrilling Arctic saga”. It’s set amid “the remote ice sheets of Greenland” and is his second work, after The Girl Without Skin, to be translated into English. Nordbo is Danish but lives in Nuuk, Greenland (used as one of the settings in Cold Fear), and although I have some issues with the plot’s flashes back and jumps forward in time, it’s fast-paced and grisly and imbued with the menace not just of crazed killers but weather that’s out to get you. I should have read The Girl Without Skin first as there’s a continuation of characters and overarching theme but Cold Fear also works as a stand-alone mystery. The lead character, Matthew Cave, is a Danish journalist whose US military father was involved decades earlier in experiments at a base in Thule. He was accused of murder and either disappeared or died; we’ll soon find out.
But the real star is Greenland itself, a place that seems so unreal as to have been simply invented. It’s an island of otherworldliness. To outsiders some names are unfathomable. Ittoqqortoormiit, anyone? People hunt seals, dress in combat gear, swim in below-zero waters and, at least in this book, there’s the added horror of cannibalism. I started to keep a checklist of who’s who while I was reading. Tupaarnaq? A young Inuit hunter. Tasiilaq? The east Greenland town over which she watches and hates “more than anywhere else on earth”. Arnaq? Matthew’s half-sister, held prisoner by a Minotaur-style character. It’s a book that snared my attention from the perspective of wanting to learn more about such an enigmatic destination and the geopolitics of the region. All up, in one word, chilling.
Spend it
Australian company Carlotta + Gee has fast become well-known for its 100 per cent French linen bedding sets, including continental pillow covers, and tablecloths and napkins. But now the rest and relaxation experience extends to stylish robes in the same soft, stone-washed fabric and featuring colour-contrast striped edging, handy pockets and tie-waist. In sizes small/medium (6-10) or medium/large (12-16) and pale shades of olive, sand, clay and blush (pictured) or smart navy. The garments come with comprehensive laundry care directions and no ironing is required. Free postage across Australia, 30-day returns policy and colour swatches available. $135.