TRAVEL
WINTER AFTER DARK:
3 DAZZLING AUSTRALIAN LIGHT
FESTIVALS TO SEE IN 2025
Words & Photography by Kylie Bell
Three stunning winter festivals not to miss in 2025 spin darkness into immersive, mesmerizing art—beamed up to space, where concentrated pockets of coloured light glow on the continent. One shimmers at the bottom of the heart-shaped island of Tasmania, spilling from the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) into the wintry streets of Hobart—Dark Mofo, a surreal, mythic extrusion of underground art and primal fire. Another radiates from the eastern seaboard, around the great harbour of Sydney—Vivid, a luminous fusion of light, music, and ideas transforming the city’s skyline into a living gallery, igniting imagination on the cool, misty nights of New South Wales. And further west, at the edge of the vast Great Australian Bight, Illuminate Adelaide emerges from the Botanical Gardens and spills into the city—an ultra-modern collision of innovation, light, and sound, wrapping the streets in a futurist glow unique to South Australia’s cultural soul. Each festival a glowing signature, each city with a different persona—together they reshape winter’s darkness into something transcendent.
VIVID SYDNEY (NEW SOUTH WALES)
Friday 23rd May - Saturday 14th June 2025
Lacing the edges of Sydney Harbour at the city’s heart and twining its illuminated fingers through Australia’s iconic cultural capital, Vivid Sydney transforms this beloved city into a radiant spectacle, with the 2025 theme, ‘Dream,’ exploring the surreal, prophetic, and imaginative realms of dreams. Buildings, laneways, and public spaces become a living canvas for artists and musicians—rippling and pulsating with light, movement, and sound. Fireworks burst above as shimmering reflections dance across the harbour, doubling and deepening the winter festival in a black, inky mirror—one that reflects the festival’s brilliance, the arc of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and celebrates onboard boat-sailors with their toppling glasses of bubbles, laughter bouncing back at them before being scattered by lasers and bursts of pyrotechnics. Bars gleam with spirit-toasting locals, cosmopolitan dwellers, and jubilant visitors from around the globe. The sails of the Sydney Opera House pulse as monumental projection screens, radiating colour and deepening the city’s cultural heartbeat. For several weeks, music, art, food, and ideas spill through the streets as the festival weaves its glowing path from the Harbour Bridge and Circular Quay to Darling Harbour, Martin Place, and beyond.
From technicolour trees and tubes of light to sidewalks reimagined as mini glowing stages, the city becomes a spectacle of luminous storytelling. Buildings transform into projection canvases, animated with art that dances across their facades. The Vivid Light Walk features more than 40 large-scale installations and projections, turning Sydney’s nights into an enchanting, pulsing, cosmopolitan winter playground. Whether you’re a local rediscovering your city or a globetrotter in search of unforgettable wonder and energy, Vivid casts Sydney in an electric, magical, and truly unforgettable cultural experience.
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Welcome to Lost Oar — a curated journal of travel, photography, and storytelling inspired by Tasmania and the world beyond. Through thoughtful editorials and vivid imagery, Lost Oar explores the intersections of nature, hiking, architecture, design, and food through evocative photography, immersive storytelling and a passion for travel.
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DARK MOFO (TASMANIA)
Thursday 5th – Sunday 15th June 2025
Shocking the city of Hobart—and the world soon after in 2011—MONA’s arrival in this southern, Antarctic-adjacent capital has since pulsed and grown, sending waves of creativity through its romantically historic streets via Dark Mofo: an utterly unique arts and cultural festival unlike any other. Nestled at the southern end of Tasmania, where the River Derwent splits, this maritime city blushes in shades of red during the depths of the Tasmanian winter—the stage for an extraordinary ritual-like celebration.
After a brief hiatus last year, the 2025 deep winter festival returns with a notable ‘pop’—as Tasmanians don their puffer jackets, ready to brave the winter breath beneath the mountain. The city’s streets are draped in a filter of red light, cascading across heritage buildings, winding alleys, and into hidden basements—spaces rarely open to the public. Festivalgoers are swept up in a program of delights that culminates in Australia’s iconic winter nude swim.
The Winter Feast plunges deep into primal pleasures—open fires stoke the night, flames split into the icy air in rhythm with festivalgoers’ grinning grins and visible breaths, as Tasmania’s finest chefs from across the island serve daring culinary delights: wallaby wings, possum baos, octopus sliders, and more—all converging into an almost pagan-like celebration.
At the festival’s heart lie its ritual moments: the burning of the Ogoh-Ogoh effigy—an intense procession inviting you to confront and feed your deepest fears into its core; the Night Mass—anointed a “temple of unrest” and a “shrine to excess”; and the Nude Solstice Swim, with red swimming caps fastened as the only layer of warmth and modesty. Together, these moments weave an utterly singular experience.
Meanwhile, the iconic laser beams of Spectra, launched from MONA, blaze into the night sky—alerting space and all of Australia to the festival’s presence—while local and international artists strum their creative energies, mingling and playing the brilliant shafts of light and sound like a deeply evocative harp.
ILLUMINATE ADELAIDE (SOUTH AUSTRALIA)
Wednesday 2nd - Sunday 20th July 2025
Spun from the heart of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and spiraling outward into the cultural soul of the city, Illuminate Adelaide weaves its magic through the green belt of parklands that hug and wrap itself around the historic city center. Along North Terrace, it climbs the facades of heritage buildings and spills into laneways and public spaces; installations popping up along the pavements.
Conservatories, with their leafy interiors, are transformed into luminous, ethereal chambers of light—bathed in evocative lasers, ambient music, and immersive projection. On the streets, waves of sound and art installations pulse in rhythm with festival-goers of every background, creating a living, breathing energy in this proud, historic "big country town." Loved by families and drawing curious minds from near and far, Adelaide inhales as the festival begins… and exhales in radiant colour.
Illuminate is more than a festival—it’s an experience that fuses culture, world music, innovation, and interactive art into something utterly unforgettable. It reaffirms Adelaide’s seasonal metamorphosis into a beacon of winter light and art and one of Australia’s most livable cities.
