The Sydney Easter Show can be one of the most glorious days of your year: get your hit of oxytocin by patting cute baby animals, adrenaline on the rides and dopamine when you think you’ve nabbed the best-value showbag you can get your hands on. And it’s the only place you can shamelessly order up a chip on a stick as a starter, cheese on a stick for entrée, award-winning pie for main, hot cinnamon donut for dessert and home-made lemonade to wash it all down. On the flipside, the Easter Show can involve waiting in lines, spending big bucks on staying hydrated and dealing with dehydrated kids losing it while waiting in said lines.
Lucky for you, Time Out Sydney Editor Alice Ellis hit up the 2025 Sydney Royal Easter Show with her family to suss it all out and bring you a few insider hacks, to help make your day more dreamy than nightmare. Below are her top tips:
1. Download the Fun Pass app
Seriously, we’re not about helping the Easter Show nab your data (we think they’ve already got that). We’re here to help you stay out of those lines for buying ride credits. Once upon a time, there was no way to avoid waiting for 37 minutes in a line to get your hands on a card that gave you access to a few rides. With the Fun Pass app, you can upload any amount of dollars onto the app and then you’re ready to tap your phone at each ride. The Fun Pass honestly amps up the fun factor by decreasing the wait factor, and we love it.
2. Clue up on the 43 showbags under $10
The Easter Show costs can rack up, so this year, Showbags.com.au (Bensons Trading) have gone to some effort to offer 43 showbags under $10 (some for as little as $5) to help alleviate some of the cozzie livs pressures local families are facing. Some of the under-$10 bags include Cadbury, Chupa Chup’s and Wizz Fizz Cotton Candy. You can find out more (or even order showbags online) over here. Side note: Did you know Showbags.com.au is a family-owned biz? They've been packing showbags in Oz since the 1940s!
3. Here's where to get the "Free Water"
Free water – you’d think it’d be an easy thing to get your hands on. Not so much. We only saw three water stations all day. Grab a free map (they get handed out at the entrance) and the water station locations are marked on the map. Instead of spending your hard-earned cash on H2O, spend it on tanghulu (more on this below), and get your fill for free. It’s hot out there, people.
4. Hit up the most popular activities first – in this order:
- Fruity Poppin': The longest line we encountered all day was at Fruity Poppin', which is in the Showbag Pavilion along with some other trending sweet-treat vendors like THICC cookies and Hakiki Turkish ice cream. If you want to get your hands on the trending snack tanghulu (or tang hulu), you might want to get in line early. Tanghulu is a traditional Chinese dessert made by dipping bamboo-skewered fruit into a sugary coating. Its popularity has spread beyond China more recently thanks to TikTok. (It's very 'grammable.) Another warning: If you want the trending 1-metre tanghulu, you'll pay more than $30, which seems like a lot for some candied strawberries and grapes and mandarin segments.
- The Farmyard Animals: Every family at the Show wants to get in that big hay-filled pen with the baby goats and sheep and chickens and ducks to stuff their tiny furry faces with handfuls of straw. But if you want any chance of getting in there without waiting in line, you’ll want to make this your first stop (preferably before midday or on a work day).
- The Rides: Hit these up as early as possible, too. If you get there too late for the little kids’ rides near the front entrance, head over to the more grown-up rides – there are some big, scary, fling-you-upside-down rides in this mix, but there are also some options for the scaredy cats among us, and because there are way more options, you won't have to wait as long.
- The Cake Decorating: Word has got out and the cake decorating displays in the Craft Hall are a fun time, and there’s going to be a thick stream of people trying to get a squiz. So early birds get the best views of these sugar-laden masterpieces.
- The Woodchopping: Don’t even try to get into the Woodchopping at lunchtime – not only will you be sitting in the direct sun sans shade, you’ll be competing with every other person wanting to enjoy their smash burger while being entertained by seriously strong axe-whackers.
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