Heather Croall has worn nearly as many hair colours as she has directed Adelaide Fringe festivals over the past decade.<\/p>\n
Blue, pink, green, yellow and purple, the festival’s longest-serving director has never been shy with her fringe after returning from the UK to run Australia’s biggest arts festival.<\/p>\n
But after lifting ticket sales from just under 500,000 when she arrived in 2015, to more than a million each year since 2023, Croall has shown Adelaide what a little colour can do.<\/p>\n
“When I arrived, the Fringe was already such a huge festival, a great festival, with so many people involved in it and it had a great history for its open-access nature,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It’s a festival that lives in the hearts of everyone in Adelaide, so I think from the beginning I always knew that this was the people’s festival, by the people for the people.<\/p>\n
“I was coming in on the shoulders of many brilliant people.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Adelaide Fringe founding chairman, the late Frank Ford, was among those Croall took advice from. (Supplied: Frank Ford)<\/p>\n
Croall last week announced she was stepping aside from the Fringe to take up the position of director for Carrick Hill in Adelaide’s south-east.<\/p>\n
Describing the house museum and gardens as a “real treasure” that had been “flying under the radar” for some people, it’s easy to see why Croall got the role, given her track record of boosting profiles.<\/p>\n
Before returning to Adelaide, Croall was directing Sheffield DocFest in the United Kingdom where, during a decade at the helm, she increased delegate numbers from 500 to more than 3,000, and attendees from 2,000 to more than 20,000.<\/p>\n
Croall’s tenure at the Fringe, which included targeted marketing for international and interstate audiences, saw its box office takings lift from about $8 million in 2015, to $26.7 million paid out to artists and venues in 2025.<\/p>\n
Upgrades for a digitised world<\/p>\n
Her biggest change to the Fringe came about shortly after her arrival, when it was clear its digital platform for both audiences and artists\/venues needed to be updated for the smartphone era.<\/p>\n
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Heather Croall with Cirque Alfonse co-founder Antoine Carabinier at a suburban fringe venue in 2018. (ABC Radio Adelaide: Malcolm Sutton)<\/p>\n
“Customer expectations of digital platforms had dramatically changed across the world and we needed to build a whole new set of digital platforms that were fit for purpose in 2015 and into the future,” Croall said.<\/p>\n
“That’s not just a little band-aid change, that’s a really deep change to the brains of the organisation, but I had previously done similar digital transformations \u2026 so I was up for that.”<\/p>\n
Another key achievement was raising funds for artists through a new foundation that, for some, was the difference between putting on a show or not.<\/p>\n
Handing out $30,000 in that first year, Croall said it went up to $80,000 the following year, “then it was $200,000 and now for the last few years we’ve actually given out a million dollars in grants”.<\/p>\n
“That’s one of the major changes that I’m just so proud of \u2026 [I’m] so thrilled and grateful that we were able to raise so much money through donations, as well as increase government money,” she said.<\/p>\n
Moments in a ‘buzzing’ city<\/p>\n
Croall said her favourite moments at the Fringe included being among the opening night crowd, which was “always fantastic”.<\/p>\n
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The Fringe involves hundreds of venues, both indoors and outdoors, and thousands of performers. (Supplied: Charles Seja for Adelaide Fringe)<\/p>\n
“You just never know if they’re going to be as enormous or impressive as they were the year before,” Croall said.<\/p>\n
“When you walk around the streets of Adelaide and there’s people everywhere going to shows, and they’re all talking and buzzing about what they’ve just seen \u2014 it’s that moment when Adelaide clicks into Fringe and it’s just an amazing feeling.”<\/p>\n
She also loves visiting suburban venues to experience the Fringe in one of its “100 villages”.<\/p>\n
But a key memory was the final night of the 2023 Fringe, when it sold 1 million tickets for the first time.<\/p>\n
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SA Arts Minister Andrea Michaels with Heather Croall in 2023, when the Fringe sold 1 million tickets for the first time. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall\u00a0)<\/p>\n
“We were in the headquarters and were looking like we were going to do it, and in the lead-up in the few days before that we’d been on the telly and radio, telling people to see one more show, one more ticket.<\/p>\n
“So there was a huge celebration at that moment.”<\/p>\n
Seeking more tourists<\/p>\n
While the Fringe has grown \u2014 from 1,058 shows in 2015 to 1,400 shows across more than 500 venues in 2025 \u2014 Croall said it had never sought to increase its physical size.<\/p>\n
Adelaide fringe ‘still a fringe’<\/a><\/p>\n When the Adelaide Fringe Festival became a legal organisation in 1975, founding chairman Frank Ford never expected it to grow to be the world’s second-largest annual arts festival.<\/p>\n “We’ve never had any targets around growth in shows \u2026 we’re really focussed on growing audience numbers,” Croall said.<\/p>\n She pointed out that while the 2025 Fringe sold 1,066,515 tickets, a 2.5 per cent increase on 2024, its actual ticket inventory was close to 2 million available seats.<\/p>\n “So there’s room to grow because we want more and more shows to be selling out, but it’s not about growing the number of shows,” Croall said.<\/p>\n With a finite audience capacity in Adelaide \u2014 despite locals’ huge appetite for the Fringe \u2014 the team has been working to raise its profile interstate and overseas.<\/p>\n Croall said tourist numbers had increased from about 10,000 when she first started to nearly 60,000, and they were staying longer.<\/p>\n “Our profile overseas and interstate has exploded in the last decade, no doubt about it,” she said.<\/p>\n “The artists are more aware of who we are, but also the interstate and overseas audiences know who we are.”<\/p>\n Challenges for her successor<\/p>\n It remains an open-access festival, meaning anyone can put on a show \u2014 the very definition of a fringe festival \u2014 and the cost of seeing a show remains, on average, less than $40.<\/p>\n