Head in the hills: city-based artists find inspiration in the Adelaide Hills
Looking for some creative inspiration? You don’t need to look much further than a stone’s throw from the CBD, in the nooks and crannies – or peaks and valleys – of the Adelaide Hills.
As someone who grew up stomping around the Adelaide Hills but now lives closer to the city, I find it comforting that they are never far from sight. I particularly love the view from Pakapakanthi, Victoria Park, where I can watch planes flying over the city skyline but need only turn my head a little to see cool, green hills ensconced in low clouds.
The Hills and the city feel like natural partners, and I’m not the only one enchanted by their synergy – and their tensions. As Writer in Residence at The Mill, I’ve crossed paths with many creatives in its Angas Street studios who also work with one eye towards the Hills.
Writer and filmmaker Piri Eddy is currently working on a speculative fiction play, The Spoil, that uses the Hills to explore themes of ecological crisis and food sovereignty.
To Eddy, the Hills have a “magical” quality, “abundant with life and stories”. At the same time, he notes that “as far as Adelaide goes, they’re one of the first spaces to be in danger of a changing climate”.
Eddy and I venture up to Thelma in Piccadilly for a coffee before wandering through one of his favourite trails. The Spoil, he explains, explores a future where, “the soil turns, monocrops we have relied on so heavily aren’t able to grow.” Set in a hidden, undefined part of the Adelaide Hills, the play follows a family trying to preserve seeds that may hold the potential to feed the world.
Playwright Piri Eddy creates new worlds with coffee and pen in hand, surrounded by the beauty of the Hills. Photo: Marina Deller
As we walk through a portion of the Heysen Trail together, Eddy reflects on those hidden places.
“The thing I love about this walk is that there’s a moment where you get up there… it’s like you’re peering into these hidden spaces and undulating valleys,” he says. “You’re wondering, ‘what’s on the other side of that hill or tree line?’”
This idea is echoed by watercolour illustrator, Eleanor Green, who is drawn to the otherworldly, untouched, “out-of-time” feeling she finds in the Hills.
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“These are mythical landscapes – deep, steep valleys with lots of trees,” Green says, standing in a small pocket of Ashton. “Beautiful sunrises and sunsets and light.
“It feels really different to anything else in Australia,” she says. “There’s the feeling that anything could happen here.”
You don’t have to have grown up in the Hills, or currently live there, to access this creative magic, but it certainly seems to help. A return to childhood – or childlike curiosity – underpins the work of these artists.
Green first became known for her beautiful and detailed portraits of animals and beloved pets. She has recently begun to explore landscapes, and in Ashton she returns to the trails she trod with her childhood horse years ago.
Now, with her greyhound or mum by her side, she revisits its uneven terrain and sloping trails at different times of the day to snap scenes that inspire her. Later, she’ll take those landscape images back to The Mill to paint.
For artist Eleanor Green every turn offers an inspiring new landscape or scene. Photo: Marina Deller
Eddy also grew up exploring the Hills, and remembers riding on his grandma’s shoulders, curiously exploring caves and gnarled trees.
“It was a happy place… it primed me for that fascination,” he says.
He now heads to the Hills frequently to “engage in the real world”, beat writers’ block, and spend time away from his phone and other distractions – like he did as a child.
“I’ll go for a walk when I’ve hit a wall, and it’s an act of trying to break through,” he says. “Sometimes I will go into it thinking ‘I’m not going to think about it’ and just let myself enter a kind of flow state.”
August Porter, an abstract painter, finds magic in the “unconscious landscapes” which the Hills inspire within her. She brings me to a stretch of road near Uraidla which sparks inspiration.
“Every time I come past here, I feel something in my heart,” she says. “Unintentionally it’s come through in my paintings.”
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Porter also grew up in the Hills and now raises her children here. It was while driving along this stretch of road to take her kids to school each day that her practice “really took off”.
“I was filled with wonder, at the sky and stretches of the Hills, the colours and the textures,” she says. “It made me want to paint.”
As abstract painter August Porter discovered, even a daily commute in the Hills can spark magic. Photo: Marina Deller
Porter is instinctive in how she interprets natural landscapes, working referentially rather than representatively, and with a keen sense of emotion in each brush stroke. A feeling of home and familiarity hums on her canvases. Taking the same daily drive allowed her to view the landscape as a changing form – across seasons, time, and her own feelings.
“How does this view make me feel?” she says. “It makes me feel like I’m coming home to myself.”
Since Porter’s children moved schools she no longer repeats her once-inspirational drive. Instead, she makes a daily pilgrimage to the city to work from her studio at The Mill, an enclosed studio space with windows to the rest of the larger warehouse. Porter readily admits she “can’t really function in urban, suburban environments”, but her practice had quickly outgrown her home studio – the family living room.
“It was getting really difficult at home, like ‘Sorry we can’t eat at the kitchen table, the paint needs to dry!’” she says.
The roads less taken are where creativity hides. Photo: Marina Deller
Moving between the Hills and the CBD is generating new inspiration, as Porter’s new context inspires a body of work centred on wildflowers and floral imagery, still rooted in the Hills but also looking inward.
“Things more internal are wanting to be expressed,” she says. “Femininity, sexuality, being a woman.”
While Porter’s heart is in the Hills, Green says she feels “most myself when I’m closest to the city”. Despite the parklands and green spaces of the urban environment, however, she says there is still a “need to break away occasionally.”
“I want the privacy and sense of being alone,” she explains.
This balance is allowing her to work towards book-length illustrations and continue to hone in on the sensory detail of the Hills in her paintings.
As a playwright Eddy is drawn to theatre’s communal quality – “you get to work with people, with actors, and it’s about the transference of energy and ideas,” he says – but the Hills also provide solitude and a connection to nature. When tackling difficult themes of climate crisis and resilience, returning to the Hills feels like a homecoming.
“Being in nature, surrounded by nature – and as humans we are nature – it’s good for our psychology,” he says. “We can feel and think better.”
The Spoil by Piri Eddy will feature in State Theatre Company South Australia’s Great Australian Bites program in December 2025
August Porter’s work appears in the exhibition Between Dream and Reality at The Mill, concluding 17 January 2025
Eleanor Green can be followed on Instagram at @illustrations.by.eleanor