Getting the MacDonnell Ranges Glowing Is Just the Beginning of 2025's Packed 'Parrtjima — A Festival in Light' Program
This annual highlight at Alice Springs Desert Park is celebrating its tenth edition with works by 20-plus First Nations artists, and more than 100 performers and special guests.
Not once, not twice, but nine times, Australia's most-dazzling Indigenous arts festival has lit up the Northern Territory. 2025 will make ten. Parrtjima — A Festival in Light has so firmly established itself as a highlight of Alice Springs, the Red Centre and Australia's cultural scene that it's hard to imagine a time before it. Expect luminous sights again this year, including the reliable star of the show: getting a 2.5-kilometre stretch of 300-million-year-old MacDonnell Ranges glowing every evening.
The MacDonnell Ranges Light Show is one of two favourites returning to Parrtjima in 2025, again pairing its eye-catching display with classical music and Arrernte language. The other: Grounded, asking attendees to look down instead of up. A festival of lights in the NT was always going to incorporate the red earth, too, which is where large-scale projections turn the soil into a canvas. This year's version features six artworks.
If Parrtjima only boasted those two pieces across Friday, April 4–Sunday, April 13, it'd still be worth heading to the Red Centre to enjoy — but there's far, far more in store across the event's ten days. Four other installations, all new and focusing on the 2025 festival theme 'timelessness', are among the standouts of a lineup that sports contributions from 20-plus First Nations artists, plus more than 100 performers and special guests.
At The Gateway at Parrtjima's entrance, towering poles by artists from Antulye, Irlpme, and Mparntwe groups will greet guests. Also, Balanggarra and Yolŋu artist Molly Hunt's Three Generations of Station Women is making an animated comic strip that honours Aboriginal stockwomen, with actor Mark Coles Smith (Apple Cider Vinegar) on soundtrack duties. Then there's Bobby West Tjupurrula's Hypnotic Reverberations, creating a moving dreamscape out of beams of light, mist and reflections on a shallow pool. From Lyall Giles, Transforming Light & Country isn't just about sand dune patterns — it gets festivalgoers to play with them, using drums to create rings of light.
Troy Cassar-Daley is headlining the festival's roster of nightly performances, putting on a free show on opening weekend. On the rest of the bill: the Darwin Symphony Orchestra, in what'll be Parrtjima's first-ever orchestral performance, plus gigs by Bumpy, Dem Mob, and Warren H Williams & Western Wind. This year will also feature the fest's debut comedy night, with Andy Saunders and Sean Choolburra sparking laughs.
The Blak Markets are back, again showcasing First Nations paintings, jewellery, prints, baskets, sculptures and more — and Cassar-Daley, filmmaker Rachel Perkins (Jasper Jones), Michael Liddle, Armani Francois and Rudi Bremer are among the guests and speakers at the event's in-conversation sessions.
If you're keen to learn by doing, the workshops itinerary spans art centre Iltja Ntjarra Many Hands getting participants doing watercolour paintings in the style of Albert Namatjira, Chef Mark Olive and Kungkas Can Cook's Rayleen Brown exploring bushfoods and traditional recipes, Parrtjima Curator Rhoda Roberts leading a weaving workshop, drumming with Dobby, and using native plants in Aboriginal healing with language holder and ecologist Veronica Perrule Dobson.
Parrtjima – A Festival in Light will return from Friday, April 4–Sunday, April 13, 2025, at venues around Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. For more information, visit the festival website.
Images: Parrtjima – A Festival in Light.
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