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Adelaide Fringe

annual Australian arts festival

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 21, 2026
Entity authorityQ4681716 ↗
Source-derived summary

Adelaide Fringe, formerly Adelaide Fringe Festival, is Australia's biggest arts festival and is the world's second-largest annual arts festival (after the Edinburgh Festival Fringe), held in the South Australian capital of Adelaide. Between mid-February and mid-March each year, it features more than 7,000 artists from around Australia and the world. Over 1,300 events are staged in hundreds of venues, which include work in a huge variety of performing and visual art forms. The Fringe features many free events occur alongside ticketed events for the duration of the festival.

In 2023 Adelaide Fringe became the first festival in Australia to sell 1 million tickets. This has doubled from 500,000 tickets in 2015.

The main temporary venue hubs are The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Gluttony and the Wonderland and 500 other temporary and permanent venues hosting Fringe events are scattered across the city, suburbs and region. In a period in Adelaide's calendar referred to by locals as "Mad March", other events running concurrently are the Adelaide Festival of Arts, another major arts festival starting a week after the Fringe, which includes Adelaide Writers' Week and the four-day world music festival WOMADelaide, and also the Adelaide 500 street circuit motor racing event, with accompanying evening music concerts.

The Fringe attracts many international visitors as well as from all over Australia, and in 2019 generated an estimated A$95.1 million in gross economic expenditure for South Australia, which included A$36.6 million in spending by the 2.7 million attendees. Each year has brought a new record in all aspects of the festival for many years up to 2020.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Adelaide Fringe” is annual Australian arts festival. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Adelaide, Fringe and annual, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2023, 2015, 2019, 2020—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1960. For this dossier, Adelaide, Fringe and annual is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “annual Australian arts festival” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4681716. VIAF identifies the subject as 185864475. The Library of Congress control number is no2015074141. Authority coordinates are -34.923, 138.596. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2015, 2019 and 2020.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Adelaide Fringe”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Adelaide Fringe primary sources, Adelaide Fringe archive and Adelaide research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Adelaide Fringe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.