Adelaide: A trundle around Rundle

Moving through the crowd on Adelaide’s Rundle Street, closed to traffic and with people walking to shows, spilling out from restaurants, drinking at pop-up bars, it almost feels like a… what’s the word? Ah, yes. Festival.

Remember festivals? I wonder whether Adelaide ever forgot them. Last year, the city managed to just squeeze in the annual Adelaide Festival and Adelaide Fringe before coronavirus restrictions came into force. This year, both events have again been able to go ahead with changes like reduced capacity in venues, but no reduction of the atmosphere around town. Both festivals have wrapped up successfully in the past week, and the Adelaide Fringe claims it put on the largest festival in the world since the outbreak of Covid-19, selling more than 630,000 tickets!

Mad March, as it’s known here, certainly sees a dynamism in the city, but Adelaide is more vibrant all year round than I remember from visiting regularly when I was younger. This time, as well as catching a show at the festival, I get a chance to experience the exciting dining scene that has emerged in recent years. I have dinner at the lively Africola, famed for its South African-inspired feasts that let you taste a range of menu options. And another night I have an excellent meal at Fishbank which (as the name suggests) serves fish in an elegant high-ceilinged former bank on North Terrace. I could have chosen from dozens of other excellent options across the city.

“We’ve got this goal of delivering great products and the young chefs coming through are doing that and the young wine producers are doing that,” local food expert Mark Gleeson tells me. “Everybody’s trying to lift their game rather than just mass produce like Sydney or Melbourne.”

Part of Rundle Street is closed off to traffic during the festival season.

Mark has run a stall at the Adelaide Central Market for more than 30 years and he, along with other foodie guides, takes visitors on tours of the market, introducing them to the local producers and stall-owners, leading a journey through a world of cuisines and more than 150 years of heritage since the market first opened.

“We’re not just a bunch of shops, we’re a piece of history in terms of the culinary evolution of food in Australia,” Mark says.

Spending a few hours in the market with Food Tours Australia is fascinating and helps me look at the city in a new light. Tours like this are normally something we do overseas, not domestically, but I also find another Adelaide tour just as rewarding. In the afternoon, I jump into the back seat with EcoCaddy for a ride around the parklands and back alleys of the city.

An EcoCaddy is a tricycle with an electric motor and a bamboo shell for seating. It glides smoothly and silently as my guide Anna pedals and points out street art on the walls (when did Adelaide become so cool?), good cafes and bars hidden in the laneways (do they come with the art?), and interesting activities in the parks surrounding the city centre (now this is the Adelaide I remember!). Often as visitors, we just pass through the greenery to get to the ‘square mile’ of the CBD, but there’s so much to discover along the 20-kilometre loop trail within the parklands.

The Clarice Beckett exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

After our tour, Anna drops me off at the Art Gallery of South Australia, which has a fascinating permanent collection presented in themes, where you can explore how works from different eras and areas are linked. But I’m here particularly for the new exhibition of works by one of Australia’s most enigmatic artists, Clarice Beckett, running until 16 May. Underestimated (unknown, really) during her lifetime, she painted thousands of everyday scenes from dawn to dusk that were brought to life in the different lights of the day. About 130 of them are excellently presented here.

I’m starting to look at Adelaide in a different light as well. The city is certainly changing, and you can see that in the slew of new hotels that have opened in just the last year (with more to come this year). There’s the modern Crowne Plaza with epic views and very easy access to most of the venues used for the festivals. Hotel Indigo next to the Adelaide Central Market has a cool rooftop bar and a lovely restaurant on the ground floor, while Eos by SkyCity is hard to miss with its golden reflective exterior (and internal luxury to match). But my favourite is the Oval Hotel, seamlessly wrapped around the eastern façade of the Adelaide Oval with a calming park vista from the rooms and an epic view right onto the grass of the stadium from the restaurants.

There are still more festivals to come in Adelaide this year (including Tasting Australia in April and the Cabaret Festival in June) but there are plenty of other reasons to make a trip at any other time and program your own event.