Adelaide has lost its title as Australia’s arts capital. But we could afford to take it back | Alexander Downer
In 2036, South Australia will celebrate the bicentenary of European settlement. Two things should be done in time for that, writes Alexander Downer.
Once Adelaide had the reputation for being the cultural capital of Australia.
Our Festival and Fringe were world renowned, our art gallery was extended and upgraded, our South Australian museum and library were modernised, our Festival Centre was world class and so the list goes on.
We won that reputation because of the vision and hard work of many people.
I’d nominate two, in particular, who lifted Adelaide to the cultural premiership: Don Dunstan and Di Laidlaw.
Don Dunstan’s record is well known, but it’s worth remembering that Di Laidlaw upgraded the Art Gallery, the South Australian Museum and the State Library, established the Cabaret Festival, set up the Windmill Performing Arts for Children, created the South Australian Living Artists Festival and invested in contemporary music.
Add to that, she brought Wagner‘s Ring Cycle to Australia for the first time ever.
Quite a record for one person. Still, whoever was responsible, there has been over many years bipartisan support for South Australia being the arts capital of Australia.
My sense is it has now lost that title. Other states have sprinted ahead.
Over the last four or so years, the South Australian Government has invested heavily in promoting sports events.
As a sports lover myself, I think that’s great. But the arts have been downgraded.
To be fair, the Festival and Fringe are still spectacular although Writers Week has descended into little more than a Left wing convention.
I think next year there’ll be some demonstrations against its partisanship and lack of intellectual diversity.
We are the only capital city without a concert hall for our Symphony Orchestra. That is an extraordinary thing.
Even Hobart has a small concert hall but for South Australian governments over quite some years this hasn’t been a priority.
Apparently it’s more important to redevelop the North Adelaide golf course than to start work on a concert hall.
Well Adelaide already has four world-class golf courses and to invest taxpayers money in upgrading an existing public course is a complete waste of a scarce resource.
Far better to try to recapture South Australia’s reputation as the arts capital of Australia.
For a long time there was an exciting proposal to create a museum of South Australian history.
South Australia’s history is particularly important, not just to us but to the world.
South Australia since Proclamation was a great experiment in liberalism. We never had convicts, we never had slaves, we subscribed to the Christian notion that all men and women are of equal value.
We were, after all, the first place in the world to give women both the right to vote and to stand for parliament.
In 2036, South Australia will celebrate the bicentenary of European settlement. Two things should be done in time for that bicentenary.
First, we should build a museum of South Australian history.
There are already plans for that museum to be incorporated into the Freemasons’ Grand Lodge building on North Terrace.
The Freemasons themselves have been prepared to allow 8000 square metres of the building to be used for the museum, and specific plans have been drawn up. Yet this project has been canned, at least for the time being.
Secondly, there was a plan to create an Aboriginal Arts and Cultures Centre. Already the South Australian Museum has an exceptional collection of Indigenous artefacts.
I think the real priority for the time being is to build the concert hall. With imagination it might be possible to bring the two projects together.
The truth is South Australia’s government has shown none of the interest in promoting the arts that its predecessors, both Liberal and Labor, did.
As somebody who believes in balanced budgets rather than going to the bond markets to borrow for loss-making projects – which is what all our governments do at the moment – you may well ask how I would get the funding for these projects.
I know none of you are going to agree with me, but I think it is a monumental waste of money to be trying to build nuclear submarines in Adelaide.
We should go ahead and buy up to five Virginia-class submarines from the Americans, which will cost us about $US5 billion per submarine.
As for the next generation of submarines, it would be best to build them on the production line in England where the British themselves will be building exactly the same submarines. That way, we would save anything up to a hundred billion dollars.
You see my point?
Just a tiny fraction of that money would achieve my ambitions to recapture Adelaide’s title as the arts and cultural champion of Australia.
Of course, there are many other ways we could redirect funding into these projects. The money has now been spent on the abandoned green hydrogen project but that was $285 million! Somehow, this state needs to recapture the ambition and vision of people like Don Dunstan and Di Laidlaw, who did so much to make South Australia a great centre for the arts. We’ve lost that title now, and we need to think about regaining it.
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