Public listings checked 25/10/2026. Dates use each event’s local time. Check organiser details before travelling.
Explore the region
Explore Adelaide, its coastal suburbs and nearby Adelaide Hills destinations such as Hahndorf and Stirling. Each listing shows its locality to help you plan your day.
Listings across Adelaide, Glenelg, Goodwood, Hahndorf, North Adelaide, Norwood, Port Adelaide, Prospect, Semaphore, Stirling.
Free things to do
78 matching events listed in the next 60 days. Admission prices are shown where supplied.
The spectacular Hong Kong Dragon lantern returns to light up the Riverbank Footbridge this OzAsia Festival!
At 40 metres long, the Hong Kong Dragon greets everyone who passes by. As one of the Chinese zodiac's most magical creatures, the dragon is a symbol of strength, wisdom and good luck. Said to dwell in rivers and seas, Chinese dragons are friendly guardians of water and weather, and this one seems right at home above the river, watching over everyone with a smile.
Hong Kong artist Vivian Ho has imagined this dragon, drawing on everyday Hong Kong scenes and blending the hustle and bustle of city life with the tranquility of nature. Inspired by Kowloon Walled City, once a crowded maze of buildings, now a peaceful park, the Hong Kong Dragon becomes a bridge between urban life and the natural world.
Adelaide Town Hall Meeting Hall provides a welcoming space for musicians to rehearse in the heart of the city.
The spacious rehearsal venue is available for emerging musicians across all genres and career stages. It is ideal for preparing for a live performance, developing new music or bringing a new project to life.
Located behind the iconic Adelaide Town Hall, the Meeting Hall offers a unique opportunity to rehearse in one of Adelaide's most historic civic buildings.
The space is available free of charge, subject to availability.
Entombed in Joy is Damien Shen's most buoyant body of work, bringing together the visual languages that shaped him across childhood, culture and adulthood.
Familiar 1980s cartoon characters and pop-culture symbols adorn bold, shield-like forms patterned with references to Shen's Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna heritage. These paintings consider identity as something both inherited and customised: an accumulation of cultural memory, personal affiliation, protection and play.
Created after Shen stepped away from art during the COVID-19 pandemic, while working in South Australia's emergency response, the exhibition marks a deliberate return to creativity through joy. Yet the title retains an undertone of mortality. To be "entombed in joy" suggests being surrounded by the images, stories and symbols that gave life meaning. Through energetic colour and precise illustration, Shen transforms nostalgia into a meditation on belonging, resilience, and the enduring armour of identity through time itself.
Please note: Adelaide Town Hall will have no public access during Adelaide Fashion Week from Monday 5 October to Sunday 11 October 2026.
Shown across two window displays in Adelaide Town Hall's Southern Gallery, 'The City Dressed Up' celebrates the era when Adelaide's department stores transformed shopping into spectacle and a cherished social occasion. Presented as part of Rundle Mall's Golden Jubilee celebrations and developed in partnership with author and John Martin's historian, Paul Flavel, the exhibition explores the role department stores played in shaping the social, cultural, and commercial life of the city throughout the twentieth century. Bringing together photographs, packaging, and personal stories, it invites visitors to rediscover glamorous showrooms, the magic of the toy department at Christmas, and the timeless experience of "going to town."
Adelaide Town Hall will have no public access during Adelaide Fashion Week.
Spanning four decades of practice, The Long View brings together Daryl Austin's quietly observant paintings of the city, its people, and its edges, alongside new works that draw on the visual language of Adelaide's past. Through portraiture and urban landscape, his work traces how a place is shaped over time, and how perception shifts the longer we look.
Daryl Austin is an inner-city Adelaide artist and long-time Adelaide Central School of Art lecturer. Austin works between realism and abstraction, exploring shifting states of visual perception. He has exhibited widely with works held in major Australian collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Free Exhibition Entry.
Adelaide Town Hall - no access to venue during Adelaide Fashion Week.
Also encouraging you to see 'The Long View: Fictive Portraits', a satellite exhibition at the City of Adelaide Library, North Terrace.
'Tools for Quiet Activism' explores grassroots ecological restoration, drawing inspiration from the work of scientist-led organisation Bio·R in regenerating heavily-cleared native habitats. Through small, repeated acts of repair on degraded land, a form of 'quiet activism' emerges.
Artist Stephanie Doddridge embodies this gentle resistance in her 'toolkit' for ecological restoration. Seed orchard plans, stitched plant identification lists, and poetic tools crafted from experimental bioplastics embedded with native seeds, become metaphors for the process of regeneration.Please see exhibition opening hours here.
NOWHERE IS EVER REALLY THAT DARK is a new exhibition of paintings by artist Hamish Fleming.
Working within his signature gritty realist style, Hamish presents a series of nocturnal scenes, backstreet roadsides and spaces of intimate solitude. Works depict everyday scenes seen through new light, pragmatic building such as fast-food chains and service stations are reframed through the slow and lingering attention necessary for painting from life.
Hamish contrasts modern subjects with his traditional approach creating what he calls a 'harmonious contradiction'. He writes 'These paintings possess a sense of inherent solitude, drawn from lived experience. The resulting works used this common experience to invite the viewer into an intimate dialogue that is at times amusing, bleak and comforting.'
Step behind the lens and into the wild to see jaw-dropping images that capture nature at its most dramatic, beautiful and raw.
Returning to Adelaide Botanic Garden this spring and summer, the world-celebrated Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition is on tour from the Natural History Museum in London, with its 61st collection of extraordinary images.
Nestled inside the lush green setting of the Bicentennial Conservatory, the exhibition features exceptional photographs that capture fascinating animal behaviour, spectacular species and the breathtaking diversity of the natural world.
Using photography's unique emotive power to engage and inspire audiences, the images shine a light on stories and species around the world and encourage a future of advocating for the planet.
Combine the exhibition experience with a stroll around the beautiful garden for a fantastic nature-filled day out.
The Unspoken: Intimate portraits & silent dialogues is a solo exhibition by Sharifah Sorayya as part of OzAsia Festival 2026.
Using the photogravure technique, this layered, mixed-media series explores her identity as an Asian woman of mixed heritage, reflecting on family, her transcontinental existence as a global citizen and the resilience forged through life's unexpected challenges.
Amidst ecological polycrisis, what practical, cultural or mystical remedies are possible?
The works offer different ways into this question: A yarning circle creates space for conversations about Country, care and planting native species. Eucalyptus leaves frame and scent the gallery. A temple offers a place for quiet retreat and the care practices involved in drinking tea. Other works turn to ecological restoration, performance, ritual, magic and noise as ways of responding to environmental anxiety and grief.
Living with ecological crises has become a part of everyday life. Climate change, habitat loss and environmental degradation bring with them anxiety and grief about what is happening to the natural world, and uncertainty about what comes next.
Leaves: Eco-Anxiety brings together seven artists whose leaf-based artworks respond to these feelings sympathetically and remedially. Across the exhibition, caring for Country and restoring native habitat sit alongside contemplation, restoration, divination and drinking tea. Together, in different ways, these approaches consider how we might care for the natural world while living with the knowledge of its increasing precarity.
Cutback is a major retrospective exhibition by Tutti artist Scott Pyle. It brings together 17 years of his art practice. Scott's art is full of energy, inspired by pop culture, fantasy, and Adelaide's train history. His paintings are full of colour, movement, and structure. They reflect how he sees and understands the world.
Cutback features art across different mediums such as painting, film, print, and zine.
Opening event: Sunday 27 September, 3 – 5pm | General viewing: Wednesday 30 September – Saturday 31 October, Wednesday – Saturday, 11am – 4pm
Wheelchair accessible venue
'The Last Age of the Falling Grace' is a meditation on our relationship with the land in the midst of climate emergency – a form of activism that seeks to create sensation that moves the viewer to act. It is also Jayne's story; a story of life on the land for the land. It is about belonging, a shared notion of "place for the benefit of place" and by extension us all, and about collapsing time, experience and perception into a shared sensation of love for the land.
Talismanic flora appear in states of flux; a gum leaf suspended in a void gently glowing, surrounded by an ember of its own destruction; a Fire Orchid preserved as virtual life repeatedlytransplanted in thin air.In an experiential invocation of story and place, 'The Last Age of the Falling Grace' incorporates landscape under threat with critical flora realised as spatialised content across three synchronised screens. A slow evocation of story in the expanded cinema tradition, beautiful and gentle – with a fiery unforgiving heart at its core.
