Free things to do in Sydney today

It’s imperative that you do not eat before you visit the Carriageworks Farmers Markets. You’ll want to save maximum belly space for your personal version of The Bachelorette where you decide who gets your dollars and what delicious produce gets to come home with you. Maybe you like something soupy and savoury first thing? In that case go for the pho stand for a traditional Vietnamese start to the day. There’s a bibimbap stall that will even replace the rice with shredded cauliflower if you don’t believe in cheat days, and a classic bacon and egg roll for creatures of habit, from Farmer Rod’s Free Range stall. Once the hounds of your hunger have been quieted it’s time to prepare for your next meal, or seven. Maybe you need the sweet bite of Pickle Hill’s Worcester sauce for the pantry? Or some fresh goat’s curd from Willowbrae? While you’re there you may as well get some smoked salmon, fresh ravioli from Pasta Emilia, free range eggs, a load of beer and barley bread form the Bread and Butter Project, and some jersey milk butter to go on it. Chef Josh Niland of Fish Butchery and Saint Peter in Paddington now has a permanent stall selling inventive seafood using lesser known varieties and flavours. His prawn toast is a certified hangover buster, and the few cooked items sold change with the tide. There are usually take-home packs of fish sausages and Ballina prawns as big as your hand. You can spend a whole lot of money if you want to here, but equally you could just grab a kom

Carriageworks has been home to its fair share of large-scale artworks in recent years, including Nick Cave's monumental 'Until' and Daniel Buren's playground of oversized kids' toys. But Rebecca Baumann's 'Radiant Flux' reaches even further, turning the Redfern arts wonderland into a giant kaleidoscope of colour. For the installation, she's covered every glass surface of the main Carriageworks foyer – including the skylights – in dichroic film, a material that reflects and refracts light in a range of different colours, which evolve as the viewer moves and the light changes. Altogether, there's be more than 100 metres of glass wrapped with the film. 'Radiant Flux' will be open from January 8 until June 14. It's one of four major artworks commissioned by Carriageworks opening for Sydney Festival, transforming the galleries and performance spaces, each of them engaging with the architecture or history of the site.

For two weeks every spring, hordes of Sydneysiders head to the beach for the annual Sculpture by the Sea exhibition, which covers two kilometres of the city's most exquisite coastline, from Bondi to Tamarama. But the crowds can be pretty intense, and even if you're willing to brave them, most Sydneysiders are pretty busy – two weeks isn't really long enough for us to catch anything. For almost nine months, Casula Parklands is playing host to a new sculpture walk, featuring eight works from Sculpture by the Sea. Visitors will be able to follow the sculptures along the banks of the Georges River, starting at Casula Powerhouse. One of the key works you'll encounter on the walk is Southern Highlands sculptor David Ball's 'Celest', which stood proud on Tamarama Beach at this year's Sculpture by the Sea. The imposing corten steel sculpture will be installed in Casula for the duration of the sculpture walk.

Looping around the dandelion fountain in Fitzroy Gardens the Kings Cross markets are a community shopping fave. Though smaller than most Sydney markets, the curated Sunday offerings are diverse enough to ensure you have a gloriously full basket and belly. They also pack up at a hangover friendly 2pm, meaning you can scarf a crackling spiked pork pancake and impulse buy a house plant without having to get up at sparrow’s fart.Kings Cross markets recently updated their stalls to better reflect the changing Potts Point community. Posh puppies get a look-in with sachets of dried roo ribs and doggy craft beers (yes, really) from McPets. You can also pick up jars of Zeus’s ambrosial vice from Wanderer Honey, with selections in unusual yellow and amber gradients. Or, spice-up your antipasto plates with almond stuffed olives from the Stubborn Olive – a stall that also gives you $2 off purchases if you reuse your jars. You can also crunch on a four cheese blend toastie on Pioik sourdough from Great Wheels of Cheese.The markets are great for flowers and plants, with several stalls devoted to leafy finds. Massive bunches of blooms in buckets go for pretty cheap and apartment-savvy succulents and hanging plants are de rigueur. The Green Fingers stall has been going for over ten years and is a fab stop for scoring a healthy indoor plant to take home.

Every Saturday, more than 100 stalls line the grounds of Paddington Uniting Church and the neighbouring public school selling Australian-made fashion, handmade crockery and metal costume jewellery. The market has been operating on the same day since 1973, and the all-weather event is a profitable fundraiser for the church. Many of the stallholders return week on week, like the elderly Japanese couple selling Bonsai trees and the Spanish shoemakers selling espadrilles. It’s predominantly an art, clothing and design market – and alongside the kitsch bric-à-brac and Australiana-print tea towels you’ll find straw hats for $35 from local milliners and soft Tunisian-made ‘Turkish’ towels from young Eastern Suburb entrepreneurs. Antique, vinyl and vintage stalls are few and far between, but leather satchels, beach photography prints and patterned baby rompers are two a penny. On a hot day locals gather at the shaded tables and stools by the snack stalls. Turkish women hand roll yufka dough at the gözleme tent and vegetables are blitzed in a blender at the fresh juice stand. Chin’s Laksa stall, proudly MSG and gluten free, is a popular choice – as are the vegan cookies and sourdough scones on offer at the bakery stalls. It has a bohemian flair compared to its Oxford Street location and customers joyfully take up fortune readings for $60, as well as reiki and Japanese massage at $20 for 20 minutes. Gilda, a Brazilian singer, shakes her maraca as she serenades the marketgoers in Por

Starting life as an art therapy program supporting Aboriginal men facing alcohol and substance addiction, as run by the Anyinginyi Aboriginal Health Organisation, the Tennant Creek Brio (from the Italian word for vivacious life) has taken on a life of its own. Many local men have embraced the healing positivity of the project, guided by artists Rupert Betheras, Fabian Brown, Joseph Williams, Jimmy Frank and David Duggie. It has become so popular that the Brio boys now live at Nyinkka Nyunyu, Tennant Creek’s dedicated art and culture centre. Fusing Aboriginal desert traditions with abstract expressionism, street art and art activism and a love of repurposing junk, a rebel streak underpins each artist’s work, and a desire to shake up the status quo. You can witness their work at Artspace during Biennale. 

Budding horticulturalists who like plants with attitude should head to the Royal Botanical Gardens for a free exhibition of carnivorous greenery. The Calyx is filled with 25,000 of the world’s hungriest, most clever plants. Watch as the venus fly trap lures unsuspecting insects with nectar and snaps them up in its jaws, where they’ll spend their final days being slowly digested. Or meet the drosera, who use their sticky tentacles to attract and snatch their prey before devouring them. Then marvel at the simplicity of the pitcher plant’s hunting technique, which is to lure hapless bugs with honey and let them fall into the pool of digestive enzymes in their pitfall trap. The Plants with Bite display does sound a little like a horror film, but it’s really all bark and no bite (for humans, anyway) and families can expect a very kid-friendly experience. Plus, there is a range of themed education programs, workshops and a regular feeding display that will intrigue little greenthumbs and their grown-ups.

Artists Jomakhan Jafari and Danny Kennedy met at Auburn library’s English conversation classes and struck up a friendship that has become an enduring artistic partnership. Their exhibition A Familiar Place I’ve Never Seen marks the re-opening of the Casula Powerhouse. It was the result of a residency at the Peacock Gallery and Auburn Arts Studio in 2012, during which the pair interviewed residents from across the length and breadth of Western Sydney, asking them about their dreams. The region is of the city’s most multicultural areas, with 40 per cent of Liverpool’s residents born overseas, and their stories contain vast riches. “Every night the dreamers of Western Sydney travel to thousands of different places,” the artists note. “Many go around the world, to unseen places, or simply down a local street. People relive events from their past, have extraordinary experiences, or just go about their daily lives, worries and hopes. It is this combination of geography and memory, the fantastical and the mundane, the local and the global that allows dreams to sketch a complex portrait of a city and its individuals.” Kennedy took photographs, which Jafari then augmented with ‘siyah mashq’ (Persian) calligraphy, as well as contributing sweeping paintings daubed in tar and petrol. Jafari’s painting ‘Opportunity’ recounts a bittersweet fragment from a person who had never been educated. “When I woke up during the night, I was very upset. I felt like I had lost everything. I couldn’t go

Billionaire art collector Judith Neilson’s Chippendale haven for Chinese art is continuing its tenth anniversary celebrations this year with a new exhibition of works collected over the course of the last decade. You’ll be able to walk through Zhu Jinshi’s ‘The Ship of Time’, a huge tunnel crafted from 14,000 sheets of xuan rice paper and 1,800 pieces of bamboo, and see Ai Weiwei’s former studio assistant Zhao Zhao’s ‘Constellations’, a confronting seven-panel silk embroidery. For film fans, there’s an acclaimed three-channel video installation by Liu Chuang, which brings found and filmed footage smashing together with recognisable cinematic references to explore what it means to be displaced and alienated.

Off the main drag, but still central enough to attract the tourists, Manly’s weekend markets brings together organic food stalls with souvenir sellers that makes for an easy one-stop-shop for a bite to eat and a quick browse before you hit the beach. Sydney Road has market stalls on either side, which can get stiflingly busy in summer sunshine. On a Sunday morning you’ll find Patrick’s Farm and Rita’s Farm proudly selling certified organic produce from the Hawkesbury and Wallacia. You can pick up Hass avocados for $3, lush green veggies like broccoli, leeks, fennel and spinach, plus earthy Dutch cream potatoes and butternut, and boxes of free range eggs. Alongside the two main produce stalls at the church end of the street, there are fresh-cut flowers such as flowering gum for $25 and eucalyptus for $12, but also more weathered bunches of roses and dahlias. Chippendale café Brickfields also has a stall selling sourdough loaves, almond croissants and generously sized white Chocolate passionfruit lamingtons. There’s also Brooklyn Boy Bagels and Paddy’s Irish Soda Breads, as well as coffee and Golden Gaytime brookies at Milklab Coffee. When we visit there’s only one ready-to-go food stall selling handmade gnocchi with napolitana sauce and parmesan. Though the food stalls pack up around 2pm, the bulk of the market’s clothing and gift stalls are there till 5pm. The range is hit-and-miss, from backpacker chic yak wool cardigans, natural skincare products and silver jewellery to the