Things to do in Sydney this week

The City of Sydney is providing 1,000 free trees to local residents to help make the city and surrounding suburbs a leafier place to live. Pick up your tree, enjoy a sausage sizzle and chat to horticulturally-informed staff for advice on how to plant your trees and ensure that they prosper. You can choose from 24 varieties to suit your home, from native to exotic species and a range assorted citrus trees. Bigger leaf boys include jacarandas, cheese trees (no, not cheddar) and water gums. Littler flowing fellas include bottle brush, hibiscus and gardenias. Staff will be at Sydney Park from 10am until all trees have been given away. You need to be a City of Sydney resident to be eligible for this forest of freebies, so don’t forget to bring your ID to prove your current address. To score free foliage, you’ll need to live in one of the following suburbs: Alexandria, Annandale, Barangaroo, Beaconsfield, Camperdown, Centennial Park, Chippendale, Darlinghurst, Darlington, Dawes Point, Elizabeth Bay, Erskineville, Eveleigh, Forest Lodge, Glebe, Haymarket, Millers Point, Moore Park, Newtown, Paddington, Potts Point, Pyrmont, Redfern, Rosebery, Rushcutters Bay, St Peters, Surry Hills, Sydney, the Rocks, Ultimo, Waterloo, Woolloomooloo and Zetland.

Feeling a little stiff on the dancefloor once the weekend hits? The best way to beat those nerves and train your hip flexors is by moving your body throughout the week, and this rhythmic dance class hosted by Commune in Waterloo is a great way to kick it off. Every Monday night, dancer Ama Ryllis will be leading a group of groovers in 45-minutes of grinding, rolling and hip pumping. Like many forms of modern dance, this class has multiple influences, from Nigerian Afrobeats to Jamaican dancehall plus the best kind of party vibes. Commune is running the classes as part of their Our Hood program, which looks to bring together the community, celebrate culture and encourage self expression. This makes it a fab class for beginners and those wanting to meet like-minded movers. And if you book ahead of time, the education in grooving will only cost you a tenner.

Commune is the epicentre for inclusive, community-building creativity in Waterloo, but they’re also practiced party starters. They’re throwing another fabulous celebration in their expansive warehouse, this time with a colourful twist of nostalgic. ‘Take it Back’ will have a heavy dance focus and a retro theme. There’ll be a dedicated disco hall pumping ’90s bangas, a joyful dance workout with the Jungle Body and an old-school jazzercise class with renowned Sydney choreographer Cassandra Merwood – she’s the mover who helped develop Haiku Hands’ splendid synchronisation and the grooves of other artists including Hermitude, Sayah and Guy Sebastian. Make sure you maintain some energy reserves for a sparkling session of drag yoga with Dusty Glass, before you stretch your mind muscles at TEDxHaymarket. Commune regularly includes riveting talks and discussion in their events, and this time they’re promising a panel discussion about ‘opening the fun in Sydney’. You can also keep busy with workshops in life drawing, making Boomerang Bags and more. It’s a lot of action in one night, but luckily there’ll be a host of snacks and drinks to help you make the most of it. Southern Soul will take your favourite fried classics from America’s south and transform them into a plant-based feast (their vegan mac’n’cheese is legendary), while the 2 Boys in Saris food truck pump out authentic South Asian dishes. After all that spicy goodness, you’ll be grateful for a sweet frozen treat from Ove

Australia is a multicultural community. The most recent national census showed that we speak more than 300 languages and nearly half of us have been born overseas or have a parent born in another country. We’re privileged to have access to cultural practices, knowledge and cuisines from across the globe. But with the significant rise in both migrant numbers and overall population, there comes the question of how our nation will support its new residents. Employment, infrastructure, affordable housing, education, healthcare and community services all need to be addressed when considering our future. And that’s exactly what the speakers at this debate hosted by the Ethics Centre will do. The format for this lively discussion is like your classic high school debate night. There’s a motion – the suggestion to curb immigration – and two debate teams arguing for and against the concept. On the ‘for’ is environmental scientist doctor Jonathan Sobels and Indian-born writer Satyajeet Marar. Sobels takes the stance that Australia’s natural resources cannot sustain high immigration and growth, while Marar suggests a harmonic multicultural society is best maintained with limits on immigration. On the rebbutle is urban planner and housing policy expert professor Nicole Gurran and Australian Labor Party member doctor Anne Aly. Aly will use her expertise in politics and counter-terrorism to inform her counterarguments, while Gurran will focus on better systems for spatial planning, w

Calling all small business owners: the City of Sydney Council is running a seminar series to get your social media accounts working for your small business. If your online profiles are struggling, or customers aren’t finding you out there in the vast sea of likes and shares, you’ll definitely learn a few tips and tricks at this free event on March 27 at Customs House. During the night you’ll hear from Manettas Seafood Market and Doodad and Fandango, two very different online companies who are successfully using social media and digital platforms to sell their products completely online, and engage with customers. You’ll also learn everything there is to know about a digital strategy - something that is absolutely vital in the online age. Clare O’Connell, community boost trainer and Instagram aficionado will teach you all the tricks to harnessing the power of the app, which has become one of the most effective tools for a business to gain traction with consumers. This also includes a how-to on using Instagram business tools to your advantage. Other topics that will be covered on the night include linking social platforms to extend your marketing reach, how to make the most of the photos you post and learn about other networking opportunities that are out there for small Aussie businesses. Bring a pen, notepad and a lot of questions for the Q&A section of the night, where the social media gurus will be giving away golden nuggets of advice.

Waverton’s new waterfront venue, the Coal Loader, is a superb spot for a sun soaked afternoon of relaxation. To take advantage of the glorious sunset before the world shuts off their lights for Earth Hour on March 30, they’re inviting Sydneysiders to an afternoon picnic. The family-friendly soirée on the rooftop lawn will kick off at 4pm with live music, interactive performances, kids' activities, food stalls and a pop-up bar. But the star of the show will be the tour of the night sky, led by Aboriginal Elder and artist Colin Walangari Karntawarra McCormack and astronomer Bob Fuller from 8.30pm. There will be some telescopes available on the night, but feel free to bring your own sky-searching machines for an investigation of the constellations and their relevance to Indigenous culture. Scouring the skies for this hour will be particularly illuminating, as the Coal Loader and many other Sydney businesses will be switching their lights off in support of the environmental awareness mission of Earth Hour. So, hopefully, you’ll be seeing the stars at their brightest with a little less light pollution.

There’s some amazing meals coming out of the kitchens in Sydney’s Western Suburbs, and Liverpool is a unique home to splendid international cuisine spanning Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Southeast Asian cultures. Now you can try them all in one big evening celebrating how food brings us all together at Liverpool on a Roll. This new food festival will set up the grills and fryers in Greenway Park and the first diners can expect a caravan of food stalls offering tasty meals all served on bread – think burgers, bánh mì and burritos. The edible line-up won’t feature a single dish above $12, making deliciousness achievable on a budget. The purveyors include Bun Me Baguette, who will have rice paper rolls and bready buns brimming with crisp pork and spicy stir fry; Black Elk Espresso who’ll put eggs benedict on rolls beside beef burgers; and Bellbird Dining and Bar with Pan-Asian bao creations like pork belly and kimchi, or enoki mushrooms with green chimichurri. There will be live entertainment to go with dinner, with highlights including Chipping Norton local Brigida Pirolo delivering big funk and soul sounds, and artist Clarissa Mei who played at Secret Garden festival in 2018. A pop-up beer garden will be dishing out brews, and the festival is also promising garden games as well as seasonal fresh produce for sale. It’s set for March 30, and with an autumnal breeze blowing by then, it’ll be dinner under the stars as the festival kicks off at 5pm.

Whether your regular Thai dish is an extra hot tom yum goong or a more mellow pad see ew, you won’t regret a day spent at the food stalls and produce markets of the Thailand Grand Festival. This cultural celebration is bringing a little bit of Bangkok attitude to Tumbalong Park in Darling Harbour for two massive days of feasting, shopping and traditional Thai performances. Alongside the mobile kitchens dishing out perfectly charred noodles, fragrant curries and spicy-sour soups, there’ll also be a pop-up Thai supermarket, where you can pick up produce to recreate the dishes at home, as well as a bar serving refreshing Thai beers. The Thai dancers and other live performers will keep you entertained throughout your eating adventure, and there will even be a marquee where Thai masseuses will pummel out all your knots. Got hungry kiddos? Stuff them with pad Thai and send them to the kids’ zone to play while you shop at Thai craft stalls or learn how to wield spices at the Thai cooking demonstrations.

Has the daily grind got you down? This day of talks by artists and business folk chasing their professional dreams is sure to refuel your reserves of creative energy and inspire you to take more bold steps towards your goals. The Self Expression Assembly will see speakers from splendidly diverse fields share their stories of entrepreneurial triumph. The line-up includes Shannon Dooley, the founder of Sydney’s favourite old-school dance class Retrosweat Aerobics, who will share how she combined her passion for timeless pop music, vintage fashion and mental and physical health to create a workout phenomenon; queer performer, writer and director Bj will discuss his works which explore toxic masculinity; and Kris Deminick will explain how she traded in a high-flying executive career to become a life coach and writer. There’ll be a Q&A section where speakers will answer questions about their own experiences, and speak to more general misgivings about uprooting the mundane and making positive change.

This is one discussion of feminist theory you won't want to miss. At a time when we're still seeing repercussions from the #metoo movement, different takes of feminism often come to a head. Now two prominent scholars representing two very different takes on feminism are coming to Sydney. Self-proclaimed ‘bad feminist’ and New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, Difficult Women and Hunger, Roxane Gay is sitting down with author, philosopher, and ‘factual feminist’ Christina Hoff Sommers for a discussion on modern feminism. On Friday March 29, This is 42 is collaborating with the two at Sydney Town Hall, where they’ll square off in an intellectual debate. Gay is known for her often deeply personal, no-holds-barred exploration of feminism. Meanwhile, Hoff Sommers’ work is renowned for her "equity feminism" stance fighting what she calls an “irrational hostility to men”. Come for this in-depth thought-provoking discussion of feminism in the 21st century by two intellectual heavyweights. Among their topics of conversation are the division of domestic labour, the representation of feminism in the media, social inequality, violence against women and sexual harassment. Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Sommers: A Conversation About Feminism will run from 7.30pm at Sydney Town Hall and tickets start at $57 each. Book yours at the This is 42 website.