The recruiting pitch for South Australia is really a geography lesson: almost everything worth a weekend sits within an hour or two of the city. This chapter is what people do with that — and the festival month the whole year bends around.
The wine regions are all inside two hours and covered below. This is the rest of the state, to scale against each other — the trips that need a weekend or a flight, and the reason people who move here keep exploring for years.
Indicative driving times; the two flight options are why South Australians treat the island and the west coast as long weekends rather than annual leave. The Riverland and the Coorong sit between these, a couple of hours east.
The wine hours
Four of the world’s best-known wine regions ring the capital. The Barossa and the Adelaide Hills are inside an hour; McLaren Vale is forty minutes down the coast, where the vines run almost to the sea; the Clare Valley sits within two, its old railway now the Riesling Trail for a day’s cycling between cellar doors. The practical effect: a long cellar-door lunch is a normal Saturday, not an anniversary. Vintage, in autumn, is the prettiest time to live here.
Coast and island
The city’s own thirty kilometres of beach handle the everyday — jetty swims, esplanade runs, gulf sunsets that make the local news. Weekends stretch to the Fleurieu’s surf and coves, and to Kangaroo Island — a ferry or a 35-minute flight — for wildlife, wilderness beaches and remarkable food. Further west, the Eyre Peninsula is the serious ocean: oyster sheds, tuna towns, sea-lion swims and Southern Ocean cliffs, a short flight or a proper road trip away.
Ranges and river
North of the vines the land climbs into the Flinders Ranges — Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park and the vast natural amphitheatre of Wilpena Pound, some 800 million years of geology standing in the outback light. It is the state’s great camping and walking country, five hours up the road and worth every one. East, the Murray winds through the Riverland: houseboats, river red gums and the birdlife of the Coorong’s lagoons where the river meets the sea. South-east again, the Limestone Coast hides World Heritage fossil caves and the crater lakes — one famously, impossibly blue each summer.
The festival year
Ten weekends, to start
- Barossa cellar doors and a bakery crawl through Tanunda and Angaston
- McLaren Vale long lunch, then d’Arenberg’s coast road home via Sellicks
- The Riesling Trail by bike through the Clare Valley
- Kangaroo Island — Remarkable Rocks, sea lions and the island’s produce
- Wilpena Pound and the Flinders Ranges under outback stars
- Hahndorf and the Adelaide Hills lookouts, fog and all
- A houseboat weekend on the Murray from the Riverland towns
- The Coorong’s lagoons and the mouth of the great river
- Port Lincoln — oysters where they grow, and a swim with the sea lions
- Mad March: one Fringe show, one Festival night, one WOMADelaide afternoon
Nine chapters on South Australia. Everything national — Medicare, visas, registration, tax, super, schools — lives once in Moving to Australia. When you’re ready to talk about roles here, send us your CV.