The Adelaide Festival Centre is even more loved today than when it arrived in our lives 40 years ago as Australia’s first capital city performing arts centre. Opening night of the Festival Theatre in 1973 marked the beginning of the Festival Centre’s profound influence on our nation’s cultural growth. The Centre led the way in talent, originality and sheer showbiz daring on an international as well as local scale.

It still does, though times and ways and means are different now.

Heart of the Arts: The Adelaide Festival Centre at 40 explains how the Adelaide Festival Centre has moved from making magnificent musicals to capturing the imaginations of all ages on and off the stage in the 21st century. Often this progress has been made against the odds.

The stars shine in Adelaide’s Heart of the Arts. So too do the Centre’s dazzling creations of the past 15 years - the biggest and best cabaret festival on the planet, the world-first OzAsia Festival. At last count more than 900,000 people a year enjoyed the Festival Centre.

Truly the Heart of the Arts, this vibrant book will convince you that the Adelaide Festival Centre deserves the care and attention that will help it leap onto the next stage of its already brilliant career.