About

This site is an independent editorial home for Australia’s major performing arts — opera, ballet, symphony, theatre, dance, the festivals that sit alongside them and the venues that house them. We are not a peak body, a government program, an industry association or a ticketing platform. We are a small team of writers who spent our working lives on the Australian arts beat and built this title because we wanted the publication we always wished existed.

The publication we set out to build

The press release will tell you a season is “unmissable.” The marketing email will tell you tickets are running out. Most arts coverage in Australia falls into one of three buckets: a programme announcement on launch day, a 600-word review the morning after opening night, or a glossy preview that reads like the company’s own catalogue copy. None of those bucket-shapes answer the question we kept hearing from friends who don’t live in Sydney or Melbourne:

“That sounds great. Is it worth flying down for?”

That question, repeated for fifteen years, is the seed of this site. We wanted somewhere a curious reader anywhere in the country could sit down with a coffee, browse the season’s major announcements, find out what the ten or twelve big national companies are actually putting on stage this year, and decide whether to make a weekend of it. We wanted a publication that connects the show to the trip — the dinner before, the regional tour you didn’t know was rolling through your nearest city, the festival you could pair with a long weekend somewhere new.

That is the project. Cover the major companies properly. Cover their seasons, festivals, and venues seriously. Make it useful for the people who don’t live three blocks from the State Theatre.

Who we are

Four writers, all of whom have spent careers in and around the Australian performing arts beat — print reviewing, ABC arts producing, festival publicity, programme notes, university chairs, the lot.

• Margaret Chen — editor. Twenty-five years on the Australian arts pages. Reads everything before it goes up.
• David Pemberton — theatre. Bell Shakespeare, MTC, Belvoir, Black Swan, Queensland Theatre, the state companies and the independents. Has sat through more Hamlets than any sane person should.
• Anna Lavrenchuk — dance and festivals. The Australian Ballet, Sydney Dance Company, Bangarra, Australian Dance Theatre, Circa — and the festival circuit, from Adelaide and Perth in the autumn through to RISING and Dark Mofo.
• James Wakefield — symphony, opera and the regional circuit. The six state symphonies, Opera Australia, the state operas, Musica Viva, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and the regional touring routes that take national companies to Wollongong, Toowoomba, Cairns, Albury and Geelong.

What we cover

• The major companies — the dozen or so national ensembles that anchor Australian performing arts, plus the state theatre, opera, ballet and dance companies that share the same stages.
• Their seasons — what each company has announced, what we’ve seen, what’s worth booking, and what we’d travel for.
• The festivals — Adelaide Festival, Perth Festival, Sydney Festival, Brisbane Festival, RISING, Dark Mofo, the chamber-music and cabaret festivals, OzAsia, Ten Days on the Island.
• The venues — the major flagship rooms (Opera House, Arts Centre Melbourne, QPAC, Adelaide Festival Centre, Perth Concert Hall, Theatre Royal Hobart) and the regional centres that take national tours.
• The archive — a curated collection of older reporting on funding, philanthropy and the policy debates that shaped the sector through the 2010s. We keep it live because that record isn’t cleanly preserved anywhere else.

The travel angle

Australia is a country where seeing the show often means flying for it. Our editorial sister project covers state-by-state Australian travel — QLD, NSW, VIC, SA, WA, TAS and NT. Where the season pairs naturally with a couple of nights away, we say so and link across, so you can plan the dinner, the hotel and the next morning’s walk in the same browser tab.

How we work

We pay our own way to performances. Where a company has comped a ticket we say so in the piece. We don’t accept gifts from companies we cover. Where we link to a ticket vendor or a hotel partner the link may be commission-bearing — we label those clearly and they don’t change what we write or what we recommend. The site is funded by those links, by display advertising, and by occasional paid features on tourism partners that we vet before agreeing to anything. Editorial independence is the whole point; we’d rather lose a partner than lose it.

For more detail on our process, see How we work.

What we are not

We are not a peak body, a funder, a government agency, an industry association or a ticketing reseller. We are a publication. The domain you’re reading this on previously hosted an industry organisation that has since wound up; this site is editorially independent of that prior use and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a successor to any industry body. The archive section preserves the historical record of that earlier reporting; everything else here is our work.

Get in touch

For tips, corrections, season previews or partnership enquiries: contact us here. We read every email and reply to most within a few days.