Peats Ridge is an hour north of Sydney, a leisurely drive up the road if you will, surrounded by bushland and rivers. Peats Ridge is the New Year's party to attend if you, like many of us, abhor December 31st in Sydney spent desperately trying to find a spot which at once allows you to see some fireworks and not get vomited upon. Where: Del Rio Campgrounds, Wisemans Ferry All beside a river, with a whole lot of excellent music. Which is not to say there's no crazy, glitter-bodypaint-induced fun – Playground Weekender also features Australia's largest fancy dress party, as well as a swimming pool, cocktail bar, cabaret act and market stalls. Falling at the end of February when even the most enthusiastic festival punters are over the sweaty drunken crowds, Playground Weekender bills itself as a chilled alternative to ease you out of the festival season. Spread over three days, Playground Weekender features a good mix of international and local acts – 2011 featured Kool & The Gang, Cut Copy and Caribou – but selected in such a way that you won't find yourself running frantically from one stage to the next in what's always a failed juggling act. An hour and a half out of Sydney, on the banks of the Hawkesbury River, this is one of those festivals where you can let loose the kid inside of you. There are many things that are exciting about Playground Weekender, but here are my two favourites: one, you can sleep in a tepee, surrounded by other tepees and two, you get there on a ferry. Every year the festival grows and improves, and with the state government recently giving the Festival a heap of cash to extend their program, it makes the prospects for this summer's partying very exciting indeed. The Sydney Festival now has a total audience of about 1 million, making it the most attended cultural event in Australia. But mostly what the Sydney Festival does is bring us some truly spectacular performers – Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear, Emmylou Harris, Camera Obscura and this year's headliner, PJ Harvey, who is perhaps my favourite musician of all time. The whole city is turned into a summer wonderland, there's something amazing to do every single night, and people flood The Domain to see sophisticated performances while merrily sipping beer, cider, goon or all three. The reinvigorated Sydney Festival has completely transformed our city in summer (note the flagpoles which every year proclaim just that) and it's made Sydney a truly amazing place to be in January. They seemed to be insinuating in a not-so-subtle manner that Sydney was making a futile attempt to encroach on their territory as Australia's arts capital. I remember having read some very scathing things said about the Sydney Festival in a Melbourne newspaper a couple of year ago. Where: Sydney College of the Arts, Rozelle It's a hundred different kinds of amazing. The acts over the past two years – Florence & The Machine, The xx, Echo & The Bunnymen, Beach House, Deerhunter – have been some of the best at any festival in the country, and 2012 has presented the kind of lineup that strikes you with awed stuttering: Feist, Laura Marling, Austra, Cults, M83, The Horrors, Toro Y Moi, and on it goes. It's generally a pretty sweaty affair, what with being held in the middle of February, but the crowd is always relaxed, and while there'll generally be an ironic hipster beard bristling against you in the crowd everybody is having way too much fun to mind. In 2010 the Sydney event moved to the beautiful, albeit slender, site of the Sydney College of the Arts at Rozelle, which becomes pretty magic once the skies begin to darken and the lights refract upon the sandstone. And the heart of Laneway's success lies in their ability to present a line-up of consistently amazing, impeccably curated acts in some truly beautiful locations. After beginning life as a teeny tiny festival in Melbourne, Laneway has grown and now travels all over Australia as well as New Zealand and Singapore. The Laneway Festival was a massive revelation when it came to Sydney in 2006.

In the meantime, get ready to dance kids, because summer's coming. Watch this space – we'll be updating it as line-ups are announced and dates are set in stone. It also makes a list of the best festival experiences spectacularly difficult to compile.īut here is Concrete Playground's shortlist of Sydney's ten best festivals to help you get the best out of the forthcoming warmer seasons.

That makes us spoiled for choice and overwhelmed by indecision. Australia has more festivals per capita than anywhere else in the world.

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