The 7 best winter light festivals in Australia in 2025

May 23 – June 14, 2025

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, eclectic concerts, a flame-powered street kitchen and plenty of free stuff to take part in (including the Light Walk), Vivid 2025 is looking pretty spectacular.

June 4-15, 2025

A chill tends to settle over Melbourne in June, but thankfully, the city’s flagship arts and culture festival has cooked up more than 65 events to help heat things up. Across 11 nights, Rising bathes Melbourne’s landmarks and labyrinthine laneways in a new light. In 2025, more than 320 artists from Australia and the world will converge on the city to present 15 new commissions and nine 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 Fed Square and the CBD.

June 20 – August 10, 2025

It's baaack! After three hugely popular winter seasons, Melbourne's favourite illuminated event is returning. From June 20 to August 10, take a nighttime stroll through the Royal Botanic Gardens and experience luminous pathways, lit-up tree canopies and soothing soundscapes. For the upcoming season, you can expect a reimagined light trail accompanied by 20 brand-new illuminations, a stunning 'lawn of light' and glowing floral canopies, with thousands of tiny lights on display.

June 28 to July 19, 2025

Just a scenic two-hour drive from Hobart, Tassie's major winter light festival, Bicheno Beams, lights up the cruisy east-coast town with three weeks of technicolour family-friendly festivities. Rug up in your winter woollies, bring a thermos of hot chocolate and settle in for the dazzling light display, with two free laser light shows alternating each night.

July 2–20, 2025

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 Night Visions – a brand-new, multi-sensory journey through Adelaide Botanic Garden, utilising cutting-edge light, lasers, projections and sound. 

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.

All year long

If you’re looking to bust out of the big smoke and dive into a mesmerising experience on one of Australia’s most beautiful islands, look no further. Illumina tells the story of the World Heritage-listed K'gari island through a symphony of glittering lights, colourful projections and laser beams. This mesmerising new installation launched in late 2024, becoming Queensland’s first-ever permanent interpretive light show. Illumina’s debut exhibition, Return to Sky, unfolds in three acts, portraying K’gari’s incredible journey of regeneration and growth.