Adelaide City Council will tonight decide whether to remove the Royal Croquet Club from Victoria Square by 2017.

South Ward Councillor Alex Antic will bring a motion to tonight’s council meeting asking that the council negotiate a “more appropriate venue” for the pop-up Fringe event in 2017, and impose tougher trading conditions on the Royal Croquet Club in 2016.

Antic told InDaily this morning that he would move to “communicate to the operators of the Royal Croquet Club council’s intent to transition the event to a more appropriate location inside the city of Adelaide for 2017”.


“The issue is, this is the civic centre of the city,” Antic said.

“The community has a right to use the space.”

He said the Royal Croquet Club was “a good event, and it certainly provides a lot to the city, and I certainly don’t want to see it lost”.

“This is totally and completely an issue of the venue rather than the event.”

Antic successfully moved a motion at a council committee meeting last month recommending that the council impose a 1am closing time for the event on Fridays and Saturdays, and a midnight ban on loud music during the 2016 Fringe Festival.

At the same meeting, Central Ward councillor Megan Hender warned those conditions may cause Royal Croquet Club organisers to abandon the event in Adelaide.

“We have no idea whether these restrictions leave them with a sustainable business,” she told the meeting.

The Fringe event has been criticised the operators of bricks-and-mortar hospitality businesses in and around Victoria Square for reducing their profitability during Fringe season.

Organisers of the Fringe have argued, however, that the event is vital to the ongoing success of the festival, and makes an important contribution to its reputation and international appeal.

Yesterday, Royal Croquet Club directors Tom Skipper and Stuart Duckworth used social media to ask the public to show their support for the event at tonight’s council meeting.

“We want to make sure the Adelaide remains iconically the festival state,” a widely-shared post on Skipper’s Facebook page reads.

Skipper told InDaily this morning that the proposed scale-back of trading conditions for the Royal Croquet Club was not consistent for other large Fringe Festival events “and we are obviously fighting it”.


“It’s unjust and unfair.

“We’ll just have to see how it plays out tonight and assess what our options are, going forward.”

InDaily was unable to reach Skipper late this morning to comment on Antic’s new proposal to remove the event from Victoria Square.

Not everyone within the Adelaide Fringe community is supportive of the Royal Croquet Club’s case.

Cassandra Tombs, manager of long-running Fringe small venue Tuxedo Cat, told InDaily this morning she has concerns that big hubs such as the Royal Croquet Club are changing the nature of Fringe from an art-driven creative festival to a corporate event that is more about money and sponsorship.

She said large venues were making it difficult for artists in other spaces to attract audiences, and ultimately affecting the viability of smaller venues.

“With the Fringe in the last three years, we’ve had a decline in Fringe acts coming out because they don’t make any money,” she said.

She said her issue was not with the “Croquet Club per se”, but “we’re training people to go to a park to a big shiny thing and they think that’s what Fringe is”.

Tombs acknowledged that her view was not necessarily a popular one, but said she felt compelled to speak out after Skipper and Duckworth’s rallying cry on social media.

She wrote to the Adelaide Fringe last year on the subject, urging that it put the focus firmly back on the arts and shows, rather than “having a beer in the park or playing a game of croquet”.

“My concern is that if this trend continues, where the bars are bigger than the shows, then we have a festival of beer gardens,” she wrote.

Tuxedo Cat, which was started by Tombs and Bryan Lynagh on a rooftop in Synagogue Place in 2008 – and has in later years been based on North Terrace and Hyde Street – has weathered its own share of battles, including when it was running one small bar alongside four shows a night in its early days.

“When we were on the rooftop all those years ago, we were harassed about liquor licensing,” Tombs said. “We were taken to liquor licensing court all the time.”

– additional reporting by Suzie Keen.

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