The mega Aussie festival where you get to leave the winter behind

Have you ever left one city in the early dark of a freezing winter morning and stepped off the plane, hours later, into a velvety 33-degree afternoon in another? That was me, on a weekday in August last year, when I managed to escape a Canberra winter and emerged into the impossibly balmy, mid-afternoon-sleepy streets of inner-city Darwin.

It was an incredible 33 degrees, and I was startled by the sight of my bare arms. I found myself, almost involuntarily, slowing down to a saunter as I searched out somewhere for a late lunch. But despite the quiet city centre, there was a buzz in the air.

It's nearly 50 years since Cyclone Tracy tore through the city in December 1974, leaving 71 dead and 41,000 homeless residents. Five years later, a community-building festival was born, and no city - tropical or otherwise - could have needed it more.

Today, the Darwin Festival is one of those great, big multi-layered events that runs for three weeks and has something for everyone. There's theatre, dance, music, comedy, cabaret, food and movies, tons of colour and movement, all tied together with what have become the territory's flagship events - the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair (DAAF), the National Indigenous Music Awards and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.

And, best of all, it's held across 18 days and hot August nights in the dry season, when the weather is generally so perfect, you'd be forgiven for wondering why more out-of-towners don't just pack up their lives and move here permanently.

Within hours of my arrival, having changed out of my fussy winter clothes, I found myself heading to Festival Park in the centre of town, the event's central hub all strung up with lights and filled with people who obviously know how to enjoy life. And I joined them for drinks and food vans and an epic first show - A Simple Space by Gravity and Other Myths, a troupe of young hot acrobats who perform incredible feats that are so stripped back and raw you can see the trembling arms and sweat on their brows.

The crowd whooped. The sweat flew. The festival, in the heart of Larrakia Country, was officially up and running for 2023. Later, as the night wore on we took our seats at Moho Magic on Festival Lawn across the road, essentially a crowded neon-lit bar where energetic young Japanese bartenders performed magic tricks while we drank cocktails.

The next morning, the DAAF was in full swing, and I had the most surreal experience rifling through racks and racks of the most incredible paintings.

I say "rifling" and "racks'' as though it's some kind of rug sale and - honestly - that's what it felt like. There were piles of canvases on the floor, pinned to the walls of booths and stacked on tables, bark paintings alongside works on paper, with jewellery and craftware.

Amid all the lights, theatre, dance and buzz, the DAAF is a festival centrepiece. A free event, it's designed to bring everyone closer to the art world, cutting out the gallery or dealer as middleman, and allowing you to find and buy art as directly from the communities as possible.

The Indigenous art market is worth about $278 million a year, only a fraction of which makes its way back to the art centres. That said, the prices inside, which range widely, are set by the commercial market, making it a vast and interdependent ecosystem.

I'm also told about 20 per cent of the people coming through the doors are experiencing Indigenous art for the first time, and that if you can't find something you like in there - if your sense of Aboriginal art stretches only as far as ochre bark paintings and dotted landscapes you never tried to understand - you're not really trying.

Later, we headed to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, where the finalists of the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards were on show. These are the most prestigious awards for Indigenous artists, and seeing a vast range of styles curated in a traditional museum space was jarring, at first, after the kaleidoscopic stacks at the art fair.

But then the show, which had the 2023 winning work, Ku', Theewith & Kalampang: The White Cockatoo, Galah and the Wandering Dog, by Aurukun artist Keith Wikmunea, right in the centre, coalesced beautifully and made perfect sense. I would almost recommend viewing the exhibition before the fair, as a way of contextualising the joyful sprawl you're about to walk through.

There's a lot of levity and carefree wandering when attending the festival, but built into the program are tough reminders of the continuing trauma of the stolen generations and intergenerational consequences.

During my visit, slipping into the tiny Browns Mart Theatre on the grounds of Festival Park was an apt metaphor - it was a bright, soporific afternoon outside, hours before the festival heated up for another night of entertainment. But inside the theatre, I was completely transported into the turbulent lives of three characters on the stage. Set in the vast landscape of the Top End, Mary Anne Butler's play Cusp was intimate and gut-wrenching, leaving the audience in thoughtful silence as we made our way back into the late afternoon sunshine.

Later, still feeling dazed, I joined the growing queue outside the Spiegeltent on Festival Lawn for Blanc de Blanc. It was hot and rowdy and very late in the evening but the buzz was palpable. Everyone loves a bit of silliness, especially when it's mixed in with some very classy cabaret. I arrived feeling sombre, but quickly laughed myself sick at the on-stage antics - champagne, trapezes, incredible leotard action and people who can do weird things with their bodies.

I was all in; courage, class and silliness are three of my favourite human traits, and one of the evening comperes performed an entire segment with his scrotum hanging out. Disrespectful? No, more like a bold call to unseriousness, if only for an hour.

On our last night, we joined the crowds at the Darwin Amphitheatre by the Botanic Gardens to watch the National Indigenous Music Awards. It's a televised event that has paved the way for many Indigenous musicians, some of whom return to perform year after year. It was a casual, picnic-style affair, but the massive cameras swinging across the crowd and professional hosts brought more than the usual excitement to the air.

Everyone settled comfortably on the grass to watch some serious heavy hitters of the Indigenous music world. This being 2023, many of them were well and truly mainstream - King Stingray, Thelma Plum and none other than Yothu Yindi were there, and, inducted into the Hall of Fame, they actually performed their seminal hit Treaty, which, as someone who came of age in the 1990s, was a strangely perfect way to round off a Top End experience.

The Darwin Festival is on this year from August 8-25, with the final program unveiled this week (see darwinfestival.org.au) and tickets now on sale. The National Indigenous Music Awards are on August 10, the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair is from August 9-11, and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards ceremony is on August 9, with the exhibition running from June 22 until January next year.

The festival this year will kick off at Darwin Amphitheatre with Big Name, No Blankets - a rock 'n' roll show celebrating the journey of NT's legendary music group, Warumpi Band. This year's Spiegeltent offering is The Party with a lavish set, out-there costumes and eye-popping circus acts. Also keep your eyes peeled for world premieres, such as Song Spirals - Yolngu woman Rosealee Pearson's highly anticipated Indigenous dance event. Other highlights include Missy Higgins The Second Act Tour 2024 and Tom Gleeson's stand-up show Gear.

The festival program is designed to spread everything quite thin; I was only there for four days, and managed to take in theatre, cabaret, acrobatics, live music and so much art, not to mention all the food on offer around Festival Park and the surrounding streets. I also got the light and the shade - the celebrations of performance and art and the human spirit, and important reminders of the stories of Indigenous Australia. If you're only in Darwin for a few days, I'd recommend choosing across the spectrum of what's on offer, and using the days that Festival Park is quiet to check out the DAAF, if you're there early in the festival, and associated exhibitions.

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Getting there: Qantas flies direct to Darwin from Sydney and Melbourne, and from Canberra in winter.

Staying there: Argus Hotel is a short walk from the centre of town and the festival hub, and has discount rates for those who book directly with the code DFEST24. argusaccommodation.com.au

Explore more: darwinfestival.org.au; northernterritory.com

The writer travelled courtesy of the Darwin Festival.