As per the last entry, here’s the similarities between Adelaide and Newcastle as I see them:
(1) The biggest similarity is that Adelaide and Newcastle are both ‘doughnut’ cities – cities that lost their overnight populations and thus have a huge suburban belt but little city life. The doughnut phenomenon is partly about the volume of empty space in the city, partly about the overnight population but moreover it describes whether a city has held its place as a regional cultural centre. Cities are, by definition, cultural hubs. If they’re not, they’re just glorified suburbs. Unlike Newcastle, Adelaide has succeeded in maintaining its day time life but after 5 PM on weeknights they look exactly the same – empty. The way I see it, a ‘cultural hub’ doesn’t shut down when the office workers leave.
(2) Adelaide and Newcastle both have spaces that have been empty for 12 months or more and are in a state of disrepair. We’ve had a few people contest this assertion, hence the empty spaces audit we’re currently running.
(3) The Bogan Factor. This sounds jokey but I’m serious. Both Adelaide and Newcastle have a reputation for feeling unsafe at night because there’s a high volume of people who come into the city specifically to get drunk and beat the shit out of each other on Friday and Saturday nights. I’ve had friends who tell me Hindley Street feels substantially less safe than Kings Cross. Actually, I talked to a female friend who inadvertently ended up in Bangkok’s red light district by herself at night and said that felt safer than Hindley Street.
The Bogan Factor is a major issue. A city that loses its sense of cultural and community life after 5 PM and replaces it with a weekend suburbanite drinking culture is less safe, less inclusive and less appealing to tourists, students and everyone who doesn’t like throwing up and getting in fights.
(4) A lack of micro culture. Both Newcastle and Adelaide have councils that have worked hard to be innovative and support cultural and community initiatives. In Adelaide, Council has supported the Fringe, the Festival, Feast, SALA and a whole bunch of other stuff. Those directives reflect a definition of community and culture that works on the macro level, engaging groups of people numbering in the tens of thousands, usually through single events that run over a short period of time. By contrast, we see community and culture as working primarily on the micro level. You don’t go to an event because there’s 10,000 people there – you go to it because three of your friends are there. And you don’t view a city as a cultural hub because it hosts a festival for one month a year. It gains that title because you go there every week because your friend’s band is playing or all your friends are going to a gallery opening.
Micro and Macro are mutually inclusive and support each other. But, post noise restrictions, with almost no 50 to 300 seat theatres and with the absence of support for artist run spaces and small arts production groups, the volume of micro events in Adelaide is staggeringly low. The end result is that, whilst the Fringe might make Adelaide amazing for a month, the rest of the year the city has a lot more in common with Newcastle than Melbourne, Sydney or even Brisbane and Perth.
