Author: Nat Trimarchi
Date published: 16 September, 2003
Copyright: ArtWork Magazine

With or without ‘hard’ infrastructure, regional communities can make an impact on their situation by using cultural tourism, argues Nat Trimarchi.

A man I knew when I was growing up in regional Far North Queensland (now called Tropical North Queensland for marketing purposes) used to have a saying about someone in our little town, that went like this:

Where there’s smoke there’s fire and where there’s fire there’s BR. I can’t name BR, but yes, back then he had a small problem with the matches.

We used to regularly find him down the dump pouring kero on anything potentially explosive. And sure enough, before you knew it you were running for your life, BR running madly behind, wide eyed and gesticulating, sounding out the word “b…o…o…m” in a way that would make most people worry about the roo in his top paddock.

That is what I remember was good about growing up in regional Australia. Eccentrics were tolerated. No, encouraged – anything to drive away the boredom. And if, like me yo were Italian or something even more alien, then you were grateful for eccentrics. We had ‘characters’ and we had room to develop them. But we were also our only audience. Such is the mixed blessing, still today, of making a spectacle in the regional setting.

That might sound strange to people who are used to thinking of the regions as just Petri dishes for our country’s worst intolerance and attitudes. Regional disadvantages are obvious but I believe the one thing we are not disadvantaged by out here is the amount or quality of source material for making art.

No, inspiration is not really the problem out here. The main problem is what happens with it when it’s produced, and how the hopelessness of that answer, can stifle the possibility of producing more. In short, the key issues here are about access - access to resources and access to audiences.

Having done many community cultural development projects in both urban and non urban settings, I am by now convinced that the main differences are these two issues and they are the only challenges worth trying to impact upon because the others are either associated with these, or just too big. That is, unless you want to start talking seriously about ‘regional economic zones’.

In Mackay where I’ve been working with the Australian South Sea Islander community over the last two years, we’ve tried to meet these challenges.

Mackay is a regional centre of around 70,000 people with the largest population of the descendants of South Sea Islanders ‘recruited’ in the late 1800s to develop the sugar industry.

An Evatt Foundation report in the early 1990’s described this community as one of the country’s poorest and recommended programs of assistance be put in place. This is despite the fact that ninety years earlier this community spawned the very first black political organisation in the country, and has since figured prominently in the struggles of other black minorities. But that’s another story. What challenges did this community face two years ago? Their historical situation and disadvantages are now well enough documented and there have been some improvements in the last ten years. But having only recently finally received formal recognition by the State Government, this community had still gained relatively little in terms of dollars for programs. Many expected more should have fallen out of the government’s recognition process.

Psychologically, the community is still just emerging from a struggle that’s lasted a century – just “stepping out of the shadows” as one elder puts it – while the feeling of being freshly ‘dumped’ by government is still sinking in. When we started this project, the host organisation, Mackay and District Australian South Sea Islander Association’s daily operations were run by the President (voluntarily) with one half time paid staff. Resources were low but one of the organisation’s main opportunities lay in being a target of several generic small grants programs. (While these can’t possibly achieve what the community’s been fighting for now for years - a more actively strategic approach by government - at least it’s something).

A number of these programs focused on culture and heritage, but while this was a major concern for this community, there was no expertise available to utilise the available sources and develop this focus. There were no identified ASSI artists or artsworkers here. While many community members practice culture by engaging in artistic activities, few were being enticed to ‘give up their day jobs’.

In a community with a long history of poverty, economic considerations are real and it is not surprising people are not interested in swapping their ‘real job’ for an insecure future in the arts – i.e., a one-off project. (This is why funding longer-term skilled workers in the regions is essential, and shame on those funding bodies who still can’t see that!).

It’s a myth sometimes propagated by people in the CCD field that communities are more interested in culture than economic development. This community, having lost much of both, had no difficulty taking a more pragmatic approach. Seeking to make arts and culture a financially viable enterprise for this community would require a major shift though, and experience in other countries such as the US pointed to cultural tourism as a possible answer.

Now cultural tourism has been talked about in Australia for a long time but we’ve never taken it as seriously as the American’s have since 1995. Back then the Clinton administration directed the major agencies of tourism, arts, and heritage to work together strategically to substantially reverse the trend that was killing their tourism industry. They took a national approach, gave the arts sector and communities a key role, and made huge leaps forward. By the year 2000, fifty new cultural tourism officer positions were created, and 71% of local arts agencies in the US had partnerships with their Conventions and Visitors Bureau – the equivalent of our Regional Tourism Authorities.

We, by contrast, still today have only a State driven scattergun approach, at best, guided largely by an ill-informed tourism sector that confuses culture with Bungie Jumping and selling corked hats.

Meanwhile, back in Mackay, MADASSIA’s long term community development objectives informed the need for a project such as the StoryTrail, a cultural tourism venture, with a
twofold purpose:

a) to preserve and protect cultural memories, sites and materials; and
b) to develop an economic base by utilising these for ongoing cultural and economic development by this community.

Successful product planning in this context is dependent on finding the ‘fit’ between the community and tourism. So, the following objectives guided the development of the
venture:

1. Ensure that the organization and the community has the ‘tools’ it needs not only to undertake a cultural tourism project, but to manage it effectively once it is completed, so that it is a
   source of community cohesion, and able to further progress their cultural tourism and community development objectives.
2. Produce an authentic and marketable ‘cultural interpretative product’ that is attractive to visitors interested in ASSI culture and history. Local emerging ASSI artists and community members will be the participants in the production process, which will utilize established CCD practices and principles.
3. Consolidate operational and marketing strategies of the venture and implement a three-year organisational plan.

A planning process was commenced hand in hand with a production process. The sorts of questions that needed answering were standard: How will this project link into long term ASSI community development needs/ objectives? How will MADASSIA and the community gain from the project? How will it be used? How will income be used/ distributed? What other projects link into/can be generated from this? What product/s? What process for their development? What management process, committee/other ongoing structure? What kind of operational and marketing plans need to be put in place? What long term stakeholders (in arts/tourism/ heritage/government/private sectors) need to be developed? And so on.

As well as meet the requirement of earning income, the product had to be developed to accommodate both tourism industry and community/organisational needs. Why is it so easy to talk about ‘product’ here – what about the ‘artwork’ I hear you say? Well art was not the only thing – or even most important thing – being produced. Still the product was, if anything, more important than the process in this instance. More instructive though is the fact that the community had absolutely no problem with the concept of culture or art as ‘product’. In fact, quite the reverse.

Let’s take a moment here to travel to America. In the remote desert of Arizona near Tucson is a group of Yaqui Indians at the very early stages of developing cultural tourism. When I visited them two years ago, they were trying to raise funds for a cultural centre and some activities. They had a special dance – a sacred dance - that they had performed tentatively once or twice to tourists, and they were weighing up the pros and cons of, to put it bluntly, making a buck out of it. They knew it would mean performing it in an unnatural setting and they worried about it losing its meaning, among other things. But what they were worried about more than anything was that if they didn’t get their young people dancing it soon they might just lose it altogether.

There’s nothing new here about this issue – it’s as old as the hills and it doesn’t only affect indigenous communities. But it is a common one for indigenous communities around the world and particularly in Australia.

Communities either take hold of this idea and make sense of it in terms of their cultural priorities and protocols, or don’t go anywhere near it. Sometimes they take hold of it without resolving their community priorities and it can cause problems. I believe (and I aim to prove) that if a CCD process is employed along with some common sense and good management, a community can take control of its cultural assets and safely commercialise some as a viable means of ensuring longer term cultural sustainability.

I’ll go further and say I think it’s incumbent upon the CCD sodality to actively promote this idea, and utilise cultural tourism as a community development tool. That is actually what is happening in the USA, and it’s having positive effects in regional areas.

What this means for regional Australia, is obvious. We need an audience. The only one around (besides ourselves) is visitors – both domestic and international. The diversity of people living in regional areas is always underestimated and neglected, and therefore provides a fine source for new products. If produced properly they can appeal to visitors (even educate them), provide the community with income, and stimulate substantially more cultural activity than your average regional grants program. One regional area in the USA, North Western Carolina, boasts an annual income generation of US$122 million from one cultural tourism venture alone.

But that’s one end of the spectrum. On the other end is the Mackay and District Australian South Sea Islanders who don’t expect to become rich fast, but who now at least have a platform on which to build a viable cultural business. This, without yet even having a single artist or artsworker with any substantial profile or track record. If this is possible here – with some of Australia’s most disadvantaged people - why wouldn’t it work in just about any regional community?

Very often, when I look at cultural tourism product, it doesn’t look right. It’s either too gimmicky, too ‘theme park’, or if it’s in a community setting it’s a bit like a peep show. It’s intrusive and it looks fake. To their credit, this community has shown true character and generously revealed information and important sites that have never before been shown to any outsiders. Some of this information has taboos associated with it, but never once in the whole process did this present an insurmountable obstacle. Why? Because the elders, in particular, were committed to working through it in order to leave a legacy, and they knew they’re running out of time. They have had to tread that fine line between respecting their heritage, and honouring their children’s future. The sheer honesty of that, I believe, comes through clearly in the product which deliberately mixes contemporary and historical stories.

The Lagoons Meeting House where the StoryTrail is presented, is a traditional style building near the city gates on the south end of town, directly opposite the town’s Visitor Information Centre. Perfect highly visible location for all the tourists that every day drive straight through Mackay to Airlie Beach! The community built it some years ago, but there have been several attempts to raze it to the ground. Some have been racially motivated, some for reasons unclear. Eventually that will stop and people will come to Mackay knowing who Australian South Sea Islanders are, and why they are a major part of this regional city’s history and identity; why they in fact represent the true character of this place. Maybe one day they’ll have their own festival, and cultural centre. Maybe then the other locals will come to look closer at what’s been here under their noses all along.

With or without the ‘hard’ infrastructure, regional communities can make an impact on their situation by using cultural tourism. They can’t do this alone and without the proper expertise – and I believe it is CCD expertise that needs to be applied. When the only significant initiatives coming out of government are glorified capital works programs like the Queensland Heritage Trails Network, the ‘soft’ infrastructure will never grow to be able to develop decent products. The result will be a lot of ‘white elephants’ that can’t possibly hope to respond to the changing tourism market that is emerging around the world.

All smoke and no fuoco.

Worse than this, our diverse communities will get no “b..o..o..m” for the bucks.

Nat Trimarchi is Principal Consultant of Rainwater Productions, an arts and cultural development consultancy based in Mackay. Nat is the recipient of a CCD Fellowship (2001) whose program included the development of a community cultural development model for cultural tourism to be published in the near future.

Footnotes

1. Australian South Sea Islanders were first formally recognised as a separate ethnic group, and for their contribution, by the Commonwealth Government in 1994, followed by the Queensland State Government in 1999.
2. For a fuller critique and details on research undertaken in the USA see my paper: Two Steps Back From An Ersatz Cultural Rendition presented at Museums Australia (Qld) 2001 State Conference: The New Museum.
3. I distinguish between ‘interpretative products’ (as they are called in the tourism industry) and ‘cultural interpretative products’, which specifically interpret ‘the culture’ in a dynamic and interactive way involving the living host culture directly.
4. What’s being suggested here is different from what’s long been happening in some communities, where cultural businesses are controlled by an entrepreneurial individual or group. That’s not necessarily problematic, but if the process of ‘business’ development involves some form of ‘community cultural’ development, then I believe there are more potential benefits.
5. See Two Steps Back From An Ersatz Cultural Rendition, case study: Handmade in America.
6. The site of Mackay was first surveyed in 1864, just a few years before the first Islanders arrived on the Prima Donna (1867) and it was largely their muscle and sweat that developed the sugar industry.