Sunraysia Arts Guide

This is an independent editorial guide. It does not run, represent or sell tickets to any event.

Mildura and Sunraysia

A guide to the arts of the Sunraysia region

Mildura has an arts history out of proportion to its size: experimental sculpture in the 1960s and 70s, a biennale spread across the Mallee, a literary festival born in a restaurant cellar. This guide records what happened and why it mattered.

Visual art

The Mildura Palimpsest Biennale

The Mildura Palimpsest Biennale ran from 1997 to at least 2015, taking contemporary art into the Mallee and following the Sculpture Triennials.

Writing

The Mildura Writers Festival

How poetry readings in a Mildura restaurant cellar grew into the Mildura Writers Festival, and how the festival became a standalone body.

Music

The Mildura Jazz, Food and Wine Festival

A short history of the Mildura Jazz, Food and Wine Festival, the Melbourne Cup weekend event that took jazz into clubs, cafes and riverside venues.

Festivals

The Mildura Wentworth Arts Festival

How the Mildura Wentworth Arts Festival brought theatre, music, exhibitions and free outdoor events to the Murray each autumn in the 2010s.

Music

The Murray River International Music Festival

The Murray River International Music Festival brought Italian and Australian classical musicians to towns along the Murray from 2003.

Writing

The Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal

The Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, presented at the Mildura Writers Festival since 1997, and the poet whose short life it commemorates.

What this guide covers

Sunraysia sits on the Murray River in Victoria's north-west and takes in Mildura and its neighbouring towns across the border in New South Wales. The Latje Latje and Ngintait peoples are among the region's original inhabitants. The Mildura settlement dates from the irrigation scheme the Chaffey brothers agreed to build in the late 1880s, and the name Sunraysia came later, from a public competition.

Each page here deals with one part of the region's cultural record: a festival, an award, a gallery, a concert. Most of them were associated at some point with Arts Mildura, a community organisation that began in late 1994 with a small weekend of music and writing and grew to run a suite of annual festivals. This guide is a separate, later publication with no connection to that organisation.

How to read it

These are reference pages, written in the past tense wherever an event belongs to the past. Listing an event here does not mean it is still running, and nothing on this site should be read as an announcement of a future date. Anyone planning a visit should go to the current organiser or venue for up-to-date information.

We write only what we can support from published sources, such as arts journalism, book-trade reporting, the Australian Music Centre and the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Where the record is thin or sources disagree, the page says so. Several festivals have conflicting founding dates in print, and we would rather report the disagreement than choose a neat number.