Walks Around Adelaide

North Terrace

Adelaide's 'cultural precinct' is unique inasmuch as the performing arts facilities of the Festival Theatre, the State Library, South Australian Museum and Art Gallery of South Australia, the University of Adelaide, the University of South Australia, the Migration Museum, the Bradman Collection, the Helpman Academy and the Botanic Gardens are all grouped together on North Terrace, within easy walking distance of the main shopping and department store strip of nearby Rundle Mall. The dove-grey Parliament building and the more discreetly secluded Government House are also located here, on opposite sides of King William Street, as well as the Adelaide Convention Centre, the Adelaide Casino and a few of the best hotels in town, including the Hyatt, the Stamford Plaza and the Radisson Playford. Some of the finest of Adelaide's public monuments are scattered along this stretch, including two of the most important Australian Boer War and World War I memorials, and bronze statues of Matthew Flinders, King Edward VII, Sir Thomas Elder and Sir Samuel Way. Dead, white and male, certainly, but splendid in their old-fashioned way. This is clearly the cultural and political, if not the commercial, heart of Adelaide.

Which makes it hard to understand why there is such a limited choice of places to eat in the immediate vicinity. Rundle Mall, as distinct from Rundle Street, is a desert of the meanest fast food joints, and after dark North Terrace tends to be pretty bleak. Apart from the hotels - and these are, at best, a mixed bag - the most beautiful dining-rooms, those of Parliament House, Government House, the Adelaide Club and the Queen Adelaide Club are all private, and in each time has stood still for the last two, or possibly three, generations.

Things seem a lot more promising, however, during the daylight hours. Cath Kerry's Art Gallery Cafe, which is on the sunny, north-facing rear side of the refurbished Gallery building, has a delightful, sane and extremely flexible lunch menu, which the new Balaena Cafe at the Museum has attempted to imitate without much success. The Chapel Cafe, adjacent to the Migration Museum, and the Backstage Cafe in the Helpmann Academy are pleasant but not particularly convenient alternatives. The bleak State Library Cafe should only be resorted to in an absolute emergency. The famous, picturesque and very comfortable Jolley's Boathouse is certainly not out of the question, though having descended from North Terrace along Kintore Avenue to the river, be prepared for a steep climb back up again after lunch.

There is a wider, but more uneven range of possibilities on the other side of the street. Penang Hawker's Corner (in premises formerly occupied by Grumpy's Snack Bar) is a busy Chinese cafe that serves the Rundle Mall lunch trade from the relative seclusion of Austin Street, as does Chinese Asian Gourmet on North Terrace proper. Peppers is more shi-shi, and situated on the ground-floor mezzanine of Myer, in part of the restored Old Liberal Club building. Less salubrious are Pierrot's Coffee Lounge in Gawler Place, and the various cafes in the Festival Centre. Other options present themselves immediately west of King William Street, and in Bank Street, which runs between North Terrace and Hindley Street. These include Parlamento and The Balcony (above the poker-machine rich Strathmore hotel). The now-defunct 30 year-old Ceylon Hut in its most improbable two-storied basement location at the top of Bank Street has left an unfillable gap. R.I.P.

Hindley Street

I once met an Adelaidean whose mother had made her promise in early childhood never to set foot in Hindley Street, and she never had. To the extent that there is an equivalent in Adelaide of King's Cross or Fortitude Valley, this is it - a lengthy strip of sleazy takeaways, topless bars, pinball parlours, adult bookshops and exotic piercing establishments. The effect of this is partly illusory. To the evident dismay of afficionados arriving for a big weekend from Coober Pedy, high sleaze has for some time been giving way to new arrivals: tourist hotels, newish cinema complexes (with a fair number of vacant shops), a Macdonald's, a very busy police station, a good bookshop called Imprints and, somewhat improbably, the state ministry of the arts, which has recently moved into a bizarre, turretted Edwardian confection at numbers 104-118, the renovated West's Coffee Palace of 1903. The headquarters of the biennial Telstra Adelaide Festival of Arts have also moved into Hindley Street. Further west, across Morphett Street, the complexion of the neighbourhood is likewise being transformed. No longer a bleak, block of vacant down-at-heel shopfronts, Hindley Street West is being revitalised thanks to the arrival of the University of South Australia whose very large, brand new City West campus opened a few years ago, attracting crowds of students and businesses into the area. Add to this the Mercury cinema complex - currently between proprietors - the Experimental Art Foundation and the JamFactory Craft Centre, and the area may justly claim to be flourishing anew. This will not necessarily prevent you from being stopped by the occasional bad-tempered bag-lady, or offended by fat men whizzing past on deafening motorbikes, but it does offer the possibility of an inexpensive and unpretentious meal, and the promise of more neon lights than one normally sees in Adelaide.

Rundle Street

Rundle Street, in the north-eastern corner of the city, is today home to no fewer than 45 cafes, bars and restaurants, and is the most concentrated night-time eating and entertainment neighbourhood in Adelaide. Italian, Greek, Turkish, Egyptian, Japanese, Malay, Thai, Chinese and Australian bushtucker menus are all available. Kind visitors have actually gone so far as to compare the atmosphere of Rundle Street with that of small European cities like Bologna, particularly on a busy Thursday, Friday or Saturday night during the summer months when tables and chairs spill out onto the street. One sees what they mean, but the reality is far more rough and ready. The locality can suffer from overcrowding, especially at high-traffic cinema hours. Leisure-hungry tribes of suburb-dwellers descend, locust-like, in search of a quick bite to eat for next to no money. Salvos, hari krishnas, druggies, the local drunks and bag ladies head into the throng and seem to do all right. At the same time, wave upon wave of wedding parties contrive bizarre cappuccino photo opportunities - well worth seeing - and rowdy parties of Adelaide youth hire stretch limos for after the football and drive round and round in circles. The local pubs are very popular, none more so than the Austral and the Exeter. The Botanic Bar and Cafe, the Universal Wine Bar, Eros Ouzeri and Bin 273 Wine Bar aim for the 'upper end', while places like the Rundle Noodle Bar and Restaurant - endlessly replicated up and down the street it seems - offer good value, if nothing much else.

Hutt Street

Hutt Street was named after Sir William Hutt (1801-1882), who in the 1830s, as M.P. for Hull, played a crucial part in advancing all the proposals for the establishment of a colony in South Australia. Sir William's brother John was governor of Western Australia from 1839 to 1846. Something of the good-works gentility of the Hutt brothers - another brother, Sir George, was Secretary of the Chelsea Hospital for old soldiers - seems to have rubbed off on Adelaide's Hutt Street. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union is situated here, along with the headquarters of the TPI Association (for totally and permanently disabled soldiers), the YWCA, Community Aid Abroad and various other charitable enterprises, leavened somewhat by the presence of a number of cosmetic surgeons' consulting rooms. The Wakefield Hospital is further north, beyond the Naval and Military Club, which lurks with its enormous monkey-puzzle trees and white flagstaff behind a stout wall at the north-west corner of Hutt and Angas Streets.

Fortunately, the prosperous residential quarter at the south-east corner of the city and the low-density business activity that goes on in the locality has attracted a good number and variety of eating places, including one of the best in Adelaide, Nediz, which is still one of the pleasantest restaurants in the city, mercifully quiet, and confidential - a quality one notices particularly when late-night revellers stumble untidily away from the nearby General Havelock Hotel, the horrible upper-end pub that continually draws attention to itself two or three doors north.

There are other options in the confortable middle to upper end range, too, including the very flexible Citrus and the Green Olive, on the north-west corner of Halifax and Hutt Streets, Tantino, a bustling Italian bistro of the long starched white apron variety, and the House of Chow, which is very large, comfortable, popular and rather devoid of character. Further down the scale come Woks Happ'ning, a small but essentially reliable Thai 'noodle and curry bar', and, further south on the same side, Roma's, a busy deli-style breakfast, lunch and coffee shop where you can also buy papers, magazines and a few groceries. In the breakfast department, Roma's now has direct competition from Isabella's Cafe and Citrus and the Green Olive. Yet Cafe One Five Eight is a cheap alternative hiding in one of the earliest surviving stone shop terraces in Adelaide, just north of Carrington Street. Nearby, Barbella, a loud 'pizzeria and cantina' shrieks at passers-by from the pretty north-east corner of Hutt and Carrington Streets. In the southernmost stretch, south of Halifax Street, there is another Thai cafe, plain and unpretentious, called The Thai Hutt and, finally, the Arab Steed Hotel on the south-west corner of Hutt and Gilles Streets, where you can eat simply, certainly plainly, but reasonably well for next to no money.

Angus Trumble
Curator of European Art
Art Gallery of South Australia
North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia 5000
Australia

© Angus Trumble 2000