Sydney Mardi Gras 2013

Live Stream, Schedule, Start Time, Lineup

Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2 March

Well you can always trust the Australians to do things just a little differently, put their own inimitable style on popular events! In the case of Mardi Gras, their approach is to take the popular parade and festival idea made famous in locations like Trinidad and Tobago and New Orleans and bring it to the southerm hemisphere with a definite, well, homosexual feel.

Originally started in 1978 to mark the 10th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the Sydney Gay, Lesbian and Transgender (commonly abbreviated to LGBT) Mardi Gras is now one of the most well known in the world, and can certainly lay claim to being one of the most colourful.

I actually attended this event when travelling in Australia (more years ago now than I like to think too much about!) and it was most certainly a unique experience. You need to get there very early as the streets get unbelievably crowded pretty much as soon as there's some daylight and the party atmosphere really is something special. And don't worry that you need to actually be gay to attend, the vast majority of attendees aren't, they just show up in their numbers to show support for the equal rights of the community.

The Sydney Mardi Gras is widely recognised as a frontrunner in the now popular Pride parade movement, which sees parades take place in cities annually all around the world, most famously in locations as diverse as New York, San Francisco, London, Toronto, Cologne, Lima, Sao Paulo, Berlin and Mexico City.

The parade takes place on Saturday 2nd March, and officially runs from 7.45-10.00pm, but there will be plenty of entertainment and activities for several hours either side of the main parade.

The parade route is down Oxford and Flinders Streets in the Darlinghurst area.

In previous years the main parade has been televised by Australian television, which has opened up several online viewing options, but this year it has very surprisingly been announced that there will be no TV coverage.

The official site is however advertising a Mardi Gras TV page, which looks promising for some online streaming coverage:

Mardi Gras TV

Plus there is of course always stacks of coverage on Youtube, with the user generated videos giving perhaps some of the best coverage of the event:

Mardi Gras on Youtube

If you're planning on visiting Sydney for Mardi Gras and looking for somewhere to stay to attend the parades or other events you can check out availability and make reservations for local hotels here.

We would love to hear any personal experiences or feedback from the events we feature - if you've been or are going to this parade, please post any of your own comments or reviews in the box below.

For details of all the most popular parades, including those at Notting Hill, in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean carnivals, see our Parades page.