Adelaide is the envy of the nation — and it only took us 30 years | David Penberthy
There’s been a big change in our cousins from Sydney and Melbourne that’s very easy to spot, writes David Penberthy.
Opinion
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I moved to Sydney to cover NSW state politics for The Daily Telegraph in May 1999, the month that the story of the Bodies in the Barrels murders broke.
As an expat South Australian new to Sydney, the timing of my arrival provided a rich vein of ghoulish ridicule for my new colleagues.
On my first day at work we had some cocky upstart from Pymble Ladies College doing work experience with us at Parliament House on Macquarie Street. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Adelaide,” I answered.
“Well you got out just in time,” she replied.
There was a big community of ex-pat Adelaide journalists in Sydney at the time.
There were heaps of us at News Corp, several at Fairfax, and Channel 7 in particular looked like a full-blown Adelaide reunion with talented TV people such as Peter Meakin and Chris Willis running its news operations.
Seven’s then boss, the immensely politically incorrect David Leckie, always made a point of using his preferred nickname for Adelaide – “the city of shallow graves”.
A big boom-tish to all of these eastern states comedians.
But all this tedious gallows humour told a depressing truth about the way Adelaide and South Australia were perceived by the rest of the country.
It showed that the rest of Australia presumed that anyone who had left Adelaide had basically fled.
It showed that the rest of Australia believed that save for the occasional weird arts festival, the only thing of note that ever happened in South Australia were bizarre and brutal murders.
Thirty years on and the perception of Adelaide has completely changed.
Back in the early 1990s in the aftermath of the State Bank collapse the hollowing out of SA’s young middle class seemed unstoppable.
A few years ago I wrote down the names of everyone I’d been mates with at school and uni and everyone I’d been close with in my early days at the Tiser who had left South Australia.
This was the list: Paul Schoff, Simon Morris, Anne Freeman, Kate Juttner, Simon Healy, Rachel Healy, Jeremy Storer, Geoff Griffith, Adam Woolwark, Richard Vowles, Dave Sag, Chris Joyner, Dave Joyner, Steve Jackson, Mike Bridge, Paul Holden, Clive Mathieson, Dave Krantz, Sarah Roberts, Helen McCabe, Miranda Murphy, Jo Dyer, Damien Storer, Annabel Crabb, Phil Coorey.
It was a mass exodus of almost everyone I knew, all of them leaving to pursue careers in the law, media, public policy and the arts.
If Adelaide could have been defined in song at the time, it came from Johnny Cash in his plaintive cover of the Nine Inch Nails song Hurt – “Everyone I know goes away in the end.”
Fast forward 30 years and it feels like things have genuinely started to change.
There has been a gradual rethinking of Adelaide which has quickened under the premierships of Steven Marshall and now Peter Malinauskas.
Marshall – a terrific appointee to head up the Australian American Association – was the first Premier in decades to oversee a reversal in migration into SA.
His support for new industries such as space and advanced manufacturing through Lot Fourteen told a new story about SA.
Through the level-headed leadership of Grant Stevens, our less onerous experience of Covid made SA a place to envy in contrast to the gulag next door in Victoria.
We enjoyed multiple accolades as one of the world’s most liveable cities and the most liveable city in Australia.
The two great perception-changing achievements of Peter Malinauskas have been LIV Golf and most importantly the AFL Gather Round.
Some people are quick to dismiss these two initiatives as bread and circuses. They certainly bring in plenty of bread as people are falling over themselves to get tickets to the circus. But it’s not the short-lived attendance of these events that matters most. It is the enduring perception-changing benefit of presenting Adelaide as a place which, it turns out, is surprisingly excellent after all.
The most important change is not outside SA but inside SA with the mindset of our young.
Talented and ambitious kids will always leave smaller cities for bigger ones. New York and Paris and Buenos Aires and Rome are filled with people who’ve come from smaller cities and towns for the lifestyle and opportunity the big lights provide.
But the sense that you absolutely have to get out of Adelaide – that unstoppable force that drove all my mates away – is no more.
There is not only a belief that you can make a decent life here, but that you’d be kind of nuts to think about doing it anywhere else.
And this is where that recent report by the Business Council of Australia is so important.
It has a Covid context to it as well, given the devastation which draconian lockdowns and their aftermath wrought on Victoria, where SA is now rated as the best place in Australia to do business and Victoria the worst.
My daughter is going into her final year at uni and is almost the same age I was when virtually everyone I knew decided to leave town, and not long before I left town myself.
Of her sizeable friendship group, she has just one mate who is leaving South Australia, purely to pursue a specialised degree not offered in SA.
The other thing is that while all but two of my expat friends mentioned above are still living elsewhere, there seems to be a wistfulness on the part of many of them that they are not living here.
It comes from seeing their city go from an economically depressed wasteland in the wake of the State Bank debacle, to something very different today, where there is plenty of fun to be had, and plenty of jobs to be filled by their kids in an increasingly diverse economy.
Anyway I thought I would end the year on an upbeat note in this city we are lucky to call home.
Have a great Christmas, thank you for reading during the year, I’ll see you back on these pages in January.
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