The most dazzling winter light festivals in Australia in 2024

May 24 – June 15, 2024

When the temperature goes down in Sydneytown, it means one thing: the lights are about to turn up for Vivid Sydney. Each year, the Southern Hemisphere's largest multi-platform festival lights up the sky for 23 incredible nights. Featuring daily panel discussions, interactive artworks, incredible drone shows, a flame-powered street kitchen, techno parties on the train, the return of Dark Spectrum and Lightscape, and plenty of free stuff to take part in (including the Vivid Light Walk), Vivid 2024 is looking pretty spectacular.

June 1-16, 2024

A chill tends to settle over Melbourne in June, but thankfully the city’s flagship arts and culture festival has cooked up more than 100 events to help heat things up. Across 16 nights and three weekends, Rising bathes Melbourne’s landmarks and labyrinthine laneways in a new light. In 2024, more than 480 artists from Australia and the world will converge on the city to present 32 new commissions, eight Australian premieres and six world premieres. A mix of free and ticketed events spanning contemporary music, dance, theatre and art will stretch down the spine of Swanston Street and beyond, well into the night. Spend an evening (or two, or many) wandering between large-scale installations, micro-bars and pop-up events around Birrarung Marr and the CBD.

June 14 – August 4, 2024

It's baaack! After two hugely popular winter seasons, Melbourne's favourite illuminated event is returning. From June 14 to August 4, take a nighttime stroll through the Royal Botanic Gardens and experience luminous pathways, lit-up tree canopies, soothing soundscapes and brand new installations. For the upcoming season, you can expect a reimagined 2.2km trail accompanied by stunning lakeside reflections, large-scale illuminated sculptures and other wonders, with more than 100,000 tiny lights on display.

July 4–21, 2024

Australia’s festival capital has its own dazzling light-centric festival to rival the likes of Vivid Sydney and Rising in Melbourne. They don’t call Adelaide the 20-minute city for nothing. Pretty much all the illuminated events and free installations are within a five- to 15-minute walk from the CBD, including the dynamic flaming sculptures of Fire Gardens at Adelaide Botanic Garden, after-dark puppetry and animations in Universal Kingdom at Adelaide Zoo, and experimental music festival Unsound Adelaide, which blends immersive visuals and electrifying beats.

July 5-28, 2024 (across Thursday to Sunday nights)

It's the news we've all been waiting for: after being cut short last year due to flooding, the spectacular Moama Lights event is returning to the Echuca-Moama region bigger and brighter than ever. The theme of this year’s immersive sound and light trail is Enchanted Nights: A Celebration of Light, and it will honour the captivating beauty of Horseshoe Lagoon and the surrounding bushland. Using Banjo Paterson's evocative poem 'The Daylight is Dying' as inspiration, the trail will shine a light (quite literally) on the elements of nature that come to life when the sun sets.

All year long

For many Aussies, the thought of travelling up into the Red Centre feels like a magical stretch of possibility and wild adventure. But the thought of gazing at wild light projections in the middle of a desert is something else entirely. Introducing: Uluru’s famous Field of Light experience. Designed by artist Bruce Munro, and named Tili Wiru Tjuta Nyakutjaku or ‘looking at lots of beautiful lights’ in the local Pitjantjatjara language, this delicate and huge web of glowing colours is currently the largest of its kind to date. Bigger than seven football fields, 500,000 spindles of different coloured waving lights are spread out at the foot of Uluru, promising a truly spectacular viewing of the nation’s most important rock.