David Penberthy: We need to be brash, even arrogant, about how genuinely bloody awesome SA is
If we are going to promote our state, we need to stop being so insecure about it. There’s so much we do better than everywhere else and we should be loud and proud about saying so, writes David Penberthy.
Opinion
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If you could make money out of insecurity, South Australia would be the richest state in the Commonwealth. During the past 30 years, a growing sense of neediness and despondence has infected our sense of self.
It has been fuelled by disparate factors and events – the State Bank collapse, the brain drain of young people to the east, the loss of the Grand Prix to Melbourne, the decline in our manufacturing industry, the repeated reduction in our number of federal electorates.
All these things have unpleasantly conspired to ensure that many of us live in a permanent state of ennui, which is a wanky French word to describe the sense that something really interesting and entertaining is happening somewhere else.
Now we have got our own advertisement to underscore the point. To add insult to reputational injury, it was made by Victorians.
I don’t hate SA Tourism’s Old Mate advertisement, I just think it’s a regrettable missed opportunity and one that points to all the worst features of SA.
It is most obviously the product of Victorian minds, as it is inadvertently imbued with eastern states prejudice towards our state.
The subliminal messaging is that no one in their right mind who is fit, young and active would ever visit SA, and then along comes Old Mate, the doddery old bugger, on the cusp of death, having wandered off from his nursing home and ended up at the Botanic Garden and meandering around the Henley jetty, and tearily realises what he’s missed out on.
By comical accident, the scene in the advertisement where he climbs the roof at the Adelaide Oval looks less like an ad promoting tourism and more like one for voluntary euthanasia. Written and authorised by P. Nitschke, Adelaide.
If we are going to promote our state, we don’t need this kind of sheepishness that plays to our insecurities. We need to be brash, even arrogant, about how genuinely bloody awesome SA is.
I know the premise of the Old Mate ad is that if you’re not in SA, you’re missing out, but its execution has the polar opposite effect, in that it makes us sound forgotten.
By using an octogenarian as its star, cementing the perception that we are God’s waiting room or, to borrow a line from Spike Milligan (about his late mother’s home, the coastal NSW retirement haven of Woy Woy), the world’s only above-ground cemetery.
Having still spent more of my adult life living in Sydney and Canberra than in Adelaide, the strengths of SA as a place both to visit and live strike me as obvious and superior to a place like Sydney.
Sydney has become almost unliveable. Don’t take my word for it, ask the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, who declared last year that Sydney is full and cannot accommodate another person.
In the tail end of my tenure in Sydney, it struck me that all the really good things about the place have been rendered inaccessible for most people by three things – cost, congestion and utterly self-interested planning laws that have turned the harbour into less of a shared public asset than a private playground for the affluent minority.
Sydney peaked as a place to live in its Olympic year, 2000, and has been on the slide ever since.
As for Victoria – sure, Melbourne is good, I suppose, if you like drinking coffee or craft beer that’s full of twigs in hipster bars. Or if you like shopping (of all the God-awful and infernally crap activities).
But the reality is that Melbourne is getting squeezed to death, too, with Victoria struggling to cope with the highest rate of population growth in Australia in this past 12 months.
Against this backdrop, Adelaide and SA are a genuine oasis of sanity and calm.
The ease and classiness of life here should underpin all of our marketing. Not just for tourists, but for investors and potential future residents.
Adelaide is far and away the most democratic of the mainland capitals.
There is no insurmountable class divide between the so-called “leafy suburbs” and the battling ones, apart from the very poorest of the poor.
You can still buy a house for less than $400,000 a stone’s throw from the beach at Aldinga.
You can do the same in Noarlunga with views of the Onkaparinga River.
You can get hectares in the Adelaide Hills for what you’d pay for a one-bedroom dog’s box in Parramatta or Frankston.
Every person I have managed to lure here for a visit from Sydney almost needs to be cattle-prodded to get back onto the plane.
I have written before about a 72-hour itinerary that I devised for some mates a few years back that started with Rundle St beers on a Friday, a moleskin derby under lights at The Parade as Sturt and Norwood slugged it out, with pizzas after at Amalfi, breakfast at the Central Market the next day, a trip to d’Arenberg for tastings in the arvo, a drive along Aldinga Beach, and back home in time to light the barbie at 6pm.
If you tried to have that much fun in Sydney, you would need to devote a fortnight to doing it to make your way through the traffic, let alone the cost of all the toll roads.
For many years, SA has meekly swallowed its anger as our eastern states chums jokingly ask about how many of our relatives we’ve got stored in barrels in our back shed and so forth.
Let them laugh, I say, because having spent half a lifetime there, I know where I would rather be.
They’re the dills, God bless them. We should be louder and prouder than we are.