Adelaide: Southern charmer

Adelaide Central Market is one of the city's top spots for casual dining. Photo / Supplied

Native-born Australians ignore elegant, artistic Adelaide — and Mark Chipperfield is glad.

After 22 years in Sydney I recently migrated to Adelaide, Australia's smallest mainland capital city. Just before I left, Tim, the bloke in my local off-licence said: "Adelaide? You poor baaastard. You must have done something pretty crook to deserve that."

For most Sydneysiders, South Australia ranks just below Tasmania in the hierarchy of scorn - a colonial relic populated (they imagine) by country bumpkins, serial killers or, worse, tweedy Anglophile toffs sipping wine. South Australia is the only part of the continent not settled by convicts - a distinction that generates inordinate pride among its 1.6 million inhabitants.

Although I have been visiting South Australia as a travel writer for more than a decade, I was finally lured away from Sydney by a job editing a quarterly magazine in the Barossa Valley, the country's largest and most influential wine-growing region. But, in truth, the matter had been settled a few months earlier when I was escorting Simon Bates, the British radio presenter, around the Barossa.

"So why do you live in Sydney when you could be based here?" he asked, gazing out at the pristine bushland and its resident mob of kangaroos. I had no logical explanation.

This English infatuation with South Australia is not, however, shared by many native-born Australians. Trapped between mineral-rich Western Australia and the more populous Eastern States, South Australia has a serious image problem. Adelaide, surely the most elegant of all Australian cities, boasting tree-lined boulevards and glorious Victorian parklands, conjures up two powerful (and conflicting) images in the minds of non-South Australians: the revered batsman Sir Don Bradman, who is buried here, and Don Dunstan, a flamboyant state premier who outraged 1960s Australia by wearing pink shorts in parliament. He also supported multiculturalism, gay rights and justice for Aborigines - long before the rest of the country embraced such causes.

Except in relation to wine-tasting in the Barossa, or cricket-watching at the Adelaide Oval, South Australia rarely disturbs the national psyche.. Even the annual Adelaide Festival of Arts, a showcase of the finest theatre, music and dance from around the planet, fails to generate much interest among the well-heeled citizens of Sydney or Melbourne. Adelaide might as well have swallowed an invisibility pill.

But I'm pleased that the rest of Australia looks down on South Australia. It means the place is not overrun by the ill-mannered oiks who crowd Sydney's beaches. Like all great provincial cities, Adelaide has managed to retain an excellent quality of life and a sense of community.

Not only is Adelaide compact, clean and well ordered, it retains a strong physical connection to the country beyond the city limits. To the north lies rolling sheep-and-wheat farmland and, beyond that, the eye-glazing enormity of the Simpson, Sturt and Strzelecki deserts, and nowhere produces such spectacular blood-red sunsets as South Australia.

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Getting there: Air New Zealand operates direct services to Adelaide from Auckland between four and seven times a week.