Around the country, Australians continued to pay their respects to the South African freedom icon.
In Adelaide, leaders past and present signed a memory book as a tribute at the Hawke Institute.
Mandela had been its international patron since 2001.
Watch Mandela's memorial live online from 8pm AEST.
In Melbourne's Federation Square, the memorial service is being screened live on a big screen.
Former Cape Town newspaper editor Vic Allhadeff told SBS he will always remember where he was when he saw footage of Mandela walking free from prison in 1990.
"For all of the years, the almost three decades of his incarceration, nobody knew what he looked like," he said.
"We had seen photographs of him as a young man in his 20s but ever since he had been incarcerated it was, as I say, forbidden to publish photos of him."
The government blacklist worked so effectively that Mr Alhadeff said many in the white community had not heard of Nelson Mandela until he was released.
"As journalists, as newspapers, it was forbidden to quote banned people. Nelson Mandela was banned. The African National Congress was banned. You couldn't even publish photographs of banned people. So that mean that the white South African population did not know what the leaders of the black population were thinking, feeling, planning," Mr Allhadeff said.
Today, Mr Mandela’s image is an international symbol of freedom and all over Australia there are signs of just how dear he was to so many.
