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Wollongong New South Wales Australian Cultural and Creative Activity: A Population and Hotspot Analysis Wollongong

This report is an output of an Australian Research Council Linkage project (LP160101724) led by Queensland University of Technology in partnership with the University of Newcastle, Arts Queensland, Create NSW, Creative Victoria, Arts South Australia and the WA Department of Culture and the Arts.

Suggested citation: McIntyre, P., Kerrigan, S. and McCutcheon, M. 2020. Australian Cultural and Creative Activity: A Population and Hotspot Analysis: Wollongong, Brisbane. Digital Media Research Centre. Available https://research.qut.edu.au/creativehotspots/.

Strategic Summary Wollongong is increasingly recognised as a great place to live, be educated, work and raise a family. This is currently Wollongong’s major advantage. • Creative industries workers are an essential part of Wollongong’s economy, which has prospered because of proximity to Sydney and regional geography. • Many of Wollongong’s creative workers develop skills in Sydney’s international metropolitan hub while enjoying the culture and lifestyle opportunities of Wollongong and the broader Illawarra region. • Creative industries professionals have moved into the region seeking affordable housing and family-friendly communities to raise children. Wollongong has a diverse creative scene ranging from the alternative to the corporate. In 2016, 3,624 people earnt their primary income in the creative industries, an average increase of 2.4% each year since 2011. • Key growth areas for the creative services sub-sector of the creative industries are architecture and design, advertising and marketing, web design, software app development and games. • The cultural production sub-sector of the creative industries has a lively music scene, with an active night-time economy, a supportive network of published writers, a well-patronised radio network and a regional television news network headquarters. • Wollongong’s night-time economy is supported by visual and performing arts events and activities through galleries, theatres, libraries and museums. • Wollongong’s local entrepreneurs have made their mark in the creative industries. Many were raised and educated in the region, while others have moved in. • Wollongong has maintained a balance between traditional creatives and newer tech-oriented operatives, and most have local, national and international suppliers and clients. Cultural production, primarily arts, heritage and culture, contributed $46.1 million to the region in 2016-17, according to the Wollongong City Council Creative Wollongong 2019-2024 strategic plan. • The Council has been proactive in ensuring the heart of the city has been activated by cultural production activities.

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 • Strategies to support creative industries have been created by the Council and other agencies, to support the workforce, small to medium enterprises, and corporate players. • Strategic support for the creative industries has been stimulated by local and state government grants and, to a lesser extent, federal government grants. The supply of relevant and necessary infrastructure, of all types, by federal, state and local governments, keeps confidence high in these industries. • Local government provides buildings with co-working, studio and gallery spaces to support cultural production. • The NSW Government supplies grants to stimulate activity within cultural production. • The Federal Government is important to building critical infrastructure, particularly the National Broadband Network, which is now crucial for all commerce. All creative employment, whether it is specialist, support or embedded, is essential for the creative industries ecosystem to thrive in the region. • Creative industry workers are in small businesses and large national corporations, working as embedded creatives (40%), specialist creatives (29%) and support workers (30%). • Embedded creatives working in mining and health use the same software and skills as specialist creatives working as freelancers or sub-contractors with small to medium enterprises and national corporates. • Support workers are essential, as they link the creative industries ecosystem, which is highly interdependent and dynamic, to the rest of the economy. • Amateurs are able to move to pro-am and professional status, indicating a creative industries sector providing career development opportunities. The creative industries, as a whole, have been able to support and take part in other forms of critical entrepreneurial activity within the broader economy. • Wollongong City Council has worked constructively with institutional enablers to put together Invest Wollongong, a partnership between the Council, the NSW Government, the University of Wollongong, and the Business Chamber. • iAccelerate, a business incubator at the Innovation Campus, has activated innovative and entrepreneurial start-up opportunities for all industries. It exemplifies how multiple channels of funding and cooperation between state and local government, the tertiary sector and business chamber, can benefit the region. • Not-for-profit social enterprises offer embedded creatives entrepreneurial opportunities within budding local businesses. Recommendations Continue to brand Wollongong and the Illawarra region as a highly liveable location for creatives. Proximity to Sydney is an attractor for national and international creative businesses. • Inform and educate all government instrumentalities about the breadth of Wollongong’s creative industries. • Recommend to all levels of government that a determination be made as to whether Wollongong is ‘metropolitan’ or ‘regional’. • Accelerate the ongoing diversification of the broader economy through the creative industries. • Celebrate the cultural diversity in Wollongong and amplify this through the creative industries. • Ensure digital infrastructure continues to be affordable and accessible to all creative industries operatives as they trade locally, nationally and globally. • Continue to streamline bureaucratic processes, particularly at Council level, for the creative industries in toto.

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 Contents Strategic Summary ...... 1 Contents ...... 3 Acknowledgements ...... 4 Background and Context ...... 5 Strategic Theme 1: Interrelationships across the sub sectors of the creative industries ...... 12 CREATIVE SERVICES ...... 13 CULTURAL PRODUCTION ...... 14 Strategic theme 2: The relationship of cultural and creative activity to the wider economy ...... 18 Strategic theme 3: Hotspot Comparisons ...... 24 References ...... 25 Appendices ...... 28

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 Acknowledgements The research team gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the following people and organisations for providing the information and insights that made this report possible:

Nick Bolton, TEN ALPHAS Jaymee Beveridge, UOW Nicci Bedson, Painter and Art Gallery Assistant Aaron Curnow, Spunk Records Abhiruchi Chhikara, Project Contemporary Art Space Gallery Sofia Gibson, Wollongong City Council Chloe Higgins, Wollongong Writer’s Festival Susan Haddon, Roocreate and Roolands Simon Hinton, Merrigong Theatre Company Jason Hinds, ENWARE Adam Jordan, Main Street Studios John Kerr, iAccelerate Brianna Kennedy, Community Radio Omar Khalifa, iAccelerate Nina Kourea, photographer and community worker Stella Lauri, WIN Wollongong Molly Lasker, Writer Ted Mitew, University of Wollongong Chris Moore, University of Wollongong Lilli Pang, The Story Line Sandra Pires, Why Documentaries Richard Piper, Pipers Wollongong Music Centre Desiree Savage, Illawarra Mercury Sue Savage, Wollongong City Council Steen, Director Phoenix Theatre Molly Stubbs, Graphic Designer Ben Tillman, Yours and Owls Music Festival Karl White, Team B Alistair Webster, Print Maker and Musician

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 Background and Context Located on the ancestral lands of the Dharawal people, a coastal tribe who were skilled hunter–fisher– gatherers, Wollongong became a centre for heavy industry after Europeans arrived in the region. The city of Wollongong sits at the centre of this region. It sits inside an elongated and strikingly beautiful locality, contained to the east by the Pacific Ocean and to the west by the Great Dividing Range. With a large saltwater lake at its southern extremes, the liveable land becomes narrower and more imposingly beautiful the further north one goes. With its geographic proximity to the southern sprawl of Sydney, ready access to digital communication tools and conveniently located transport infrastructure, primarily rail and road and to a lesser extent air, and its long-term dynamic cultural diversity, Wollongong has been an attractor for many inward bound creative migrants which has helped it diversify away from its industrially reliant past. While Wollongong is the second-largest regional local government area in NSW in 2020 it still appears to be “in different parts, both underprivileged and luxurious, industrial and tranquil” (Waite & Gibson 2008, p 1225). As heavy industry lessens and diversity of employment takes hold these previously sharp distinctions have, nonetheless, become increasingly fuzzier. The northern suburbs of Wollongong have increasingly been attracting migrants from Sydney, because of push factors such as metropolitan cost of living pressures, increased housing costs and stressful internal commutes, and pull factors such as the lifestyle, beaches and rainforests to be found in this region.

The southern part of the region, on the other hand, has transformed much more slowly following the demise of heavy industry and steel manufacturing, with heavy job losses occurring over the last three decades. The gentrification of Port Kembla in the southern part of the region had already begun as those escaping Sydney migrated into the northern suburbs of Wollongong, and these have pushed the ‘locals’ out who themselves are beginning to move south to sites such as Port Kembla in turn impinging on those ‘locals’’ situation. These real estate manoeuvrers affect Creative Industry activities particularly the Cultural Production sectors of the Visual and Performing Arts. This sector has perennially sought and benefited from cheap rents and large unused commercial or light industrial spaces.

As Waitt and Gibson definitively concluded in 2008 “those parts of Wollongong’s linear string of settlements closest to Sydney are picturesque - small hamlets nestled between dramatic rainforest escarpment, national parks and popular surf beaches - and these have grown organically as hubs of creative activities without the need for place branding or creative industry development schemes” (2008, p 1225). Filmmaker Sandra Pires asserts, “everyone is going to tell you the same thing, it's beautiful. You know you've got the sea and you've got the escarpment, it's a good place for kids, it's not as busy and you know it's a little less stressful than Sydney” (Pires iv 13 April 2019). Wollongong has also attracted international CI workers. For example, Suzanne Haddon, a globally focused and multi-faceted design professional and educator asserted that “I didn't want to live in a big city, so I chose Wollongong because of the surf and because of the UOW being so close’ (Haddon iv April 15, 2019).

Population

Wollongong’s population is currently over 216,000 and its average age is approximately 38. A younger demographic is centred on the north of the region and an older one centred on the south around Port Kembla (ABS 2020). Historically the northern suburbs of Wollongong were initially settled by coal miners but today the population of the northern suburbs of Wollongong are middle class which is a direct result of the relationship with Sydney’s metropolitan area and possibly the largest employers now being Health Care, Social Work and Education whose employees often choose to live in the more picturesque beachside northern suburbs. The southern suburbs were historically much more industrially and working class focused. Over a number of decades the south of the region attracted multiple populations of British, Irish, Italian, Greek, Macedonian, Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish Russians, Bosnians, Croatians, Serbs,

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 Germans Turks, Brazilians and Chileans. Populations of Japanese, Indians, Filipinos, Malaysians, Koreans, Singaporeans and Pacific Islanders all arrived after the end of the White Australia Policy. Most of these communities came to the region to work in the BHP steel manufacturing works located in the southern suburbs and consequently lived close to their workplaces. The Illawarra population has also been swelled by later internal migrations. What Waite and Gibson had identified in 2008 as a “sustained in-migration of certain kinds of creative workers seeking more affordable housing and a lifestyle change…heightened because of the spatial configuration of Wollongong” (2008, p. 1225) appears to still hold true in 2019.

Table 1 Demographic profile by place of residence, Wollongong local government area compared with greater Sydney and regional NSW, 2016

Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016)

The population in the Wollongong LGA is spread relatively evenly across all age groups in comparison to the State capital and regional NSW more broadly and the gender mix is roughly equivalent to the rest of the state. The tertiary educated, as a proportion of the total population, is comparatively high against the rest of the state but lower than the metropolitan centre, indicating a strong presence of middle class professionals in the region. However, while the unemployment rate overall is higher than the State average, youth unemployment averages, typical of a post-industrial economy, are higher yet again. It is also a feature of the Illawarra that the Indigenous presence in the region is very much in the minority being almost half that of the State average.

Economy Although Wollongong’s reputation is still that of a mining and manufacturing centre, only manufacturing now maintains a place in the current top five employing industries in Wollongong. The remainder in that top five are service-based. Particularly note-worthy is the position of the education and training industry in Wollongong. It provides the second-largest source of employment with Wollongong home to a highly- ranked regional university and a TAFE institute. For these top five industry sectors the percentage of jobs they offer and the value add they bring to the region is as per the following list:

• Health care and social assistance – 17.6 per cent of jobs / 11.6 per cent of value add

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 • Education and training – 12.3 per cent of jobs / 10.4 per cent of value add • Retail trade – 10.1 per cent of jobs / 5.6 per cent of value add • Accommodation and food services – 8.5 per cent of jobs / 3.8 per cent of value add • Manufacturing – 7.3 per cent of jobs / 6.4 per cent of value add

Figure 1 Economic activity by ANZSIC subdivision, Wollongong local government area

It is notable that the Arts and Recreation Services and the Information Media and Telecommunications sectors, seen as here indicative in some broad ways of the creative industries, contributed 2.0% of all those employed full time in the region in 2016. Value add for these sectors also stood at 3.2% of the total value add for all businesses in the region at this time. Interestingly, the total ABN registered businesses, thus those businesses presumably turning over greater than $75,000 per annum, saw these same two sectors contributing 5.4% of the total ABN registrations. One could surmise, then, that these sectors turned over at least an estimated $158.2 million for the 2016 reporting period. In total the region seems to be doing well with a growth in all key economic indicators. From 2011 to 2016 the regional population grew by 1.2%, the Gross Regional Product (GRP) grew by 2.0% almost equivalent with the rest of the state, and the number of operating businesses in the region grew much faster at 2.3% then the rest of NSW which grew at 1.9%.

Table 2 Economic indicator summary, Wollongong local government area, 2016

Population Gross regional product Total Total ($m, 2017-18 dollars) employed businesses

Measure 203,630 11,012 88,250 44,336 Avg annual growth, 1.1% 2.0% 1.3% 2.3% 2011 to 2016 % of state 2.7% 2.1% 2.6% 1.9% Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016), (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018a), Australian Bureau of Statistics (2018b), .id (2019 ).

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 Creative Economy Wollongong’s cultural and creative economy has been the subject of some study by the cultural geography team at the University of Wollongong (e.g Waitt and Gibson 2008). It was reported that “the City of Wollongong was one of the first Australian municipal authorities to embrace culture, establishing a creative cities agenda and the aspiration to become the City of Innovation” (ibid, p. 1224). This was well before the ‘creative cities’ phenomenon had become passé. Again in 2008, Wollongong was reported to be still hostage to its industrial working-class past which was still shaping city politics and local industry development priorities. At this point Wollongong’s inner city had “not been emptied of its working-class community or heavy industries” (ibid, p. 1225). While these communities have not lost their presence in the city as of 2019 the inner-city now appears to be highly activated in terms of café culture, music and public arts.

Wollongong was also one of three NSW regions included in the ARC Linkage project Cultural Asset Mapping in Regional Australia (2008-2013), which involved 13 partner organisations and four universities (CAMRA, 2013). As the first Australian city to design a cultural plan to support economic development goals, Wollongong provided an ideal case study to demonstrate how the characteristics of a small city’s creative economy was a function of its size, geographical position and cultural legacy with project foci including:

• Mapping of ‘cool’ and ‘creative’ Wollongong by attendees at the 2009 Viva la Gong festival demonstrated that what are perceived as creative places are often not always the same as cool places. The maps can be accessed here: https://utsepress.lib.uts.edu.au/site/books/10.5130/978-1-86365-433-3/ • Three case studies of non-traditional cultural and creative practice, custom car design, surfboard shaping and indigenous hip hop. These case studies are summarised here: https://utsepress.lib.uts.edu.au/site/books/10.5130/978-1-86365-433-3/

Table 3 Employed persons in creative and other industries by creative occupation type, 2016, Wollongong LGA

Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016)

A snapshot of Australian Census data for Wollongong in 2016 identifies 3,624 people who earnt a primary income in the creative industries sector, with a creative employment intensity of 4.6% and an overall growth of 2.4%. In particular, the Creative Services (CS) sub-sector of the creative industries, that is Architecture & d Design, Adversting & Marketing as well as Digital which includes web design app development and games, are a key growth area. For example, there has been a significant shift found in the number of workers employed in Advertising and Marketing (growth of 0.9%) and Software and Digital Content (growth of 0.5%). For the Cultural Production sub-sector (CP) there is a lively music scene with an

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 active night time economy, a supportive network of writers, a well-patronised set of networked radio and TV outlets and support for theatre, libraries and museums.

Figure 2 Creative services employment by SA2 region Employment counts As a proportion of total employment

Source: ABS Census data 2016.

Figure 3 Cultural production employment by SA2 region Employment counts As a proportion of total employment

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 Source: ABS Census data 2016.

For both CS and CP professionals, while jobs are concentrated in the CBD, as a proportion of total employment, creative professionals are concentrated in the Northern Illawarra, reflecting the lifestyle choices and socioeconomic divide between the north and south. Comparing change in Creative Industry employment, total earnings and mean income and business registrations reveals relatively high increases in the numbers of very small businesses (those with no GST registration and therefore with a turnover of less than $75,000) active in Wollongong compared with larger businesses (those registered for GST). For Advertising & Marketing, Architecture & Design and Visual & Performing Arts, the steep comet trajectory shows growth in ABN registrations with no associated GST registration is greater than employment growth. This means that people in these industries are increasingly more likely to be self- employed than employed by a larger GST-paying business. However, the shift to self-employment is no guarantee of a higher income for all creative sectors – mean income for people in the Visual & Performing Arts industry increased, while for the Advertising & Marketing sector it fell. And for Architecture & Design, while ABN registrations with no associated GST registration increased, people are earning no more than in 2011. Growth in the numbers of larger GST-paying businesses is subdued in all creative industry sectors. The charts highlight how employment and total earnings in Publishing have both fallen – but mean incomes have increased, reflecting the organisational change underway in the newspaper industry in particular. It is of note that those working in Visual and Performing Arts sector are more likely to be earning incomes through a very small business (see green comets at the top of Figure 4) than, for example, Architecture and Design which is also a highly divergent category with a proportionate number of non-GST registered businesses. The maturity of this CP sub-sector of the CI appears to have been sustained and stimulated by the Wollongong City Council’s pro-active and long-term strategic plans as well as State and Federal level funding.

Figure 4 Creative industry employment, total earnings and mean income by place of work compared with business registrations, 2011 and 2016, Wollongong local government area

Note: Comparing employed persons and ABNs with no associated GST registration, a comet line moving at a steep angle above 45 degrees indicates that the increase in small business registrations is greater than growth in employment. Note that the Census data cannot be split by business type – it includes employment in both large business and small businesses not registered for GST but it is worth noting that all businesses, sole traders or

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 companies, whose turnover is greater than $75,000 per year must register for GST. Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016), Australian Business Register (2019)

Government Policy Context The Creative Wollongong 2019-2024 (Wollongong City Council, 2018) strategic plan builds on the Council’s previous plans, aiming “to grow creative industries, support community participation in creative life and celebrate our unique places and spaces” (Wollongong City Council, 2018, p. 4 ). The plan indicates that the heritage, creative and performing arts sector is significant for the city producing $46.1 million in total sales income for 2016-17. While the reconstitution of the northern suburbs through diverse creative activity took place largely through “a combination of market forces, speculative real estate investment, locally manifest cultural proclivities, proximity to Sydney, traditionalism and small settlements within an attractive natural environment” (Waitt & Gibson 2008, p. 1236), the Manager of Community Cultural and Economic Development for the Wollongong City Council, Sue Savage, believes that the Council is “very committed to the [2019-2024 strategic] plan [and] when we did our strategic plan, one of the goals was that we were a creative and vibrant city, and that came directly from our community. So that creative element is very important to the city and to our councillors” (Savage iv 16 April, 2019). While Wollongong City Council has historically been committed to supporting and celebrating arts, heritage and culture (Wollongong City Council, 2018a, 2018b) Savage notes that today’s commitment to ‘culture and creativity’ began about 15 years ago (Savage iv 16 April, 2019) and in recent years the council “has been working with key partners to position Wollongong as a vibrant and creative events city” (Ars Electronica, 2019). In adopting the ‘six principles set out by the Cultural Development Network Victoria’ (Wollongong City Council, 2018, p. 12) the Council set out to create a strategic plan that is focused on an evidence base with planning that is hoped to empower current cultural arts workers through councils assets to deliver outcomes focused on those planning approaches. The Council’s cultural plans have been one of the key elements in supporting the region’s cultural development and have been cited as one of a number of reasons why Wollongong’s music scene has thrived over the last ten years in line with the opening of the CBD as an entertainment precinct (Leeson, 2018). The City Council also works closely with Destination Wollongong to bring events to the city and part of this process has been to pragmatically implement a cutting-edge pre-approval process for city event sites.

Figure 5 Federal, state and local government arts grants by year, including in kind Total value of grants expended Distribution of grants

Note: Figures reported by financial year are allocated here to the calendar year in which the financial period ends. Sources: Create NSW 2019, Australia Council (2019), Wollongong City Council Annual Reports

Wollongong City Council, however, does not have a regularly sustained arts and culture funding program. Between 2016 and 2018, it did run a cultural grants program which provided local practitioners with

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 ‘small’ grants averaging $2500 and ‘large’ grants averaging $8500 (Figure 5). According to Sue Savage, interest in the program was highly variable with practitioners potentially not understanding the intent of the program. The Council then needed to heavily promote the scheme in order to attract a competitive field of grant applicants. Comparing the size of the grants being offered by the Council with funds being sourced by local practitioners through state and federal government sources, the lack of engagement with the Council’s program is perhaps not surprising.

At the State level, project funding support for the creative industries, specifically the Cultural Production sector (excluding filmmaking, screen production, mainstream animation or film festivals which is funded via Screen NSW), has been forthcoming from 2014 to 2018 at almost triple the investment in grant funding coming through the local council. It is noteworthy that there was a significant peak of successful grant applications approved for the Wollongong region in 2018. It is also of note that the State also intends to provide Local Councils with further opportunities for funds to deliver cultural activities over a period of up to three years, a program which “will commence from 2020/21 and will support the arts and cultural outcomes of an annual program of activity by a facility or unit of Local Government” (Create NSW 2020). From the graph above it can be seen that Create NSW’s funding for the Wollongong region in terms of direct grants has been consistently a third greater, at least, than that coming directly from the Federal arena via the Arts Council. For the Arts Council there are a range of programs designed to support “a diverse range of artists, artistic practice, organisations and arts activity” (Arts Council 2020). These include grants to help artists to develop their skills or improve their capacity to build enduring careers. From a low base in 2014 these programs have delivered approximately $190,000 per year to the Wollongong region.

Strategic Theme 1: Interrelationships across the sub sectors of the creative industries In a region with a relatively stable economy and moderate unemployment, the overall Creative Industries (CI) are statistically an area of strong growth in this region. Based on ABS Census data, employment in the total creative industries grew by an average of 2.4 per cent per annum between 2011 and 2016, with the average annual income for fully employed CI workers in 2016 being $61,700. The strongest growth occurring for creative specialists sits at 3.1 per cent across the total creative industries.

The Creative Industries are comprised of two major subsectors (Higgs & Lennon 2014). These are the Cultural Production (CP) and Creative Services (CS) subsectors. The Cultural Production subsector includes visual and performing arts, music, film TV and radio as well as publishing, while the Creative Services subsector includes architecture and design, advertising and marketing as well as electronic games and digital software. It is notable that employment in the Creative Services sub-sector is growing more rapidly than the Cultural Production sub-sector across both industry and occupation groups.

However, it appears that the relationship across these two primary subsectors, Cultural Production and Creative Services, is more complex than this simple bifurcated typology indicates. As the ethnographic component of the research – observation, in-depth interviews and artefact analysis (websites, pamphlets, notices etc) - has indicated, the dynamic interdependence of subsectors occurs not only at the B2B level but can most often be found at the level of individual careers where creative industries operatives gain incomes increasingly across and within each subsector primarily gathering multiple part time incomes. These come from across the increasingly casualised ecosystems that form both the CP and CS, or through the portfolio careers that see many operatives increasingly moving between the two subsectors. It is also a feature of the current manifestation of the creative industries that there are forms of CP necessarily

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 embedded within CS and CS elements utilised by those seeking to make a living and a profit from various forms of CP.

CREATIVE SERVICES In terms of the Creative Services subsector, Wollongong’s largest source of creative industries employment is statistically within the software and digital content area. This area accounts for the largest numbers of jobs by both industry and occupation. Not only is it the largest employer of sector specialists, it also employs more support staff than any other creative industry sector. This is not surprising given software and digital content specialists are in demand across the economy and in 2016 were slightly more likely to be employed (embedded) in other industries than in creative industries sector-specialist firms. Demand is so high, for example, for IT networking specialists in the region that employers are taking on Wollongong TAFE students before they finish their diplomas (Huntsdale, 2019). Geographically, people working in software and digital content occupations are located largely in and near the Wollongong CBD and at the University of Wollongong’s Innovation Campus. There appear to be many small businesses of this type in the region, with desk research identifying firms delivering software solutions for small-to- medium business, developing digital content including web sites, games and apps which are part and parcel of the electronic games and digital software sector of the creative industries.

The architecture and design industry is the second-largest creative industry sector in Wollongong in terms of employment, however, it typically employs more people in support roles than it does specialists. Overall, for every specialist in a creative firm there are 1.5 support workers (2016 Census). Not only does architecture increasingly rely on the digital skills and support of web-designers, photographers, audio- visual and 3D immersive content makers working across both CS and CP, it also relies on the digital infrastructure supplied by Federal government to shunt CAD and other files around its networks and increasingly promote its activities on line. Its website builds, for example, are often outsourced to a variety of agencies and freelancers from other sectors of the creative industries. Notably, this sector employs more people in software and digital content roles than any other creative industry except software and digital content itself. Design studios, often with activities that blur the lines across a number of creative industries sectors, are also a growing area of the creative industries in the region.

One of the other largest sources of CS employment in Wollongong is in advertising and marketing. The digital age has transformed these two sectors where it would be hard to say they work completely within creative services or cultural production. Both of these sectors usually now refer to ‘agencies’ and no longer to the specifics of an ‘advertising agency’ or ‘design agency’ indicating an expanding list of creative services on offer. They are just as likely to include branding and strategy, design, web and app- development, media buying, as well as writing copy, the screen based production of television and radio commercials, building social media and making corporate videos, often employing, for example, film makers to produce corporate videos and ads, theatre people as actors or voice-over artists, photographers to shoot for websites and so on, all of which are occupations and services typically associated with the CP subsector. While this cross-sectoral work can be undertaken by sole traders or freelancers, the high-quality work is generally done by SME’s employing between 10 and 20 full-time employees or taking on freelancers on a brief-by-brief basis. These agencies in Wollongong have local and regional client bases and they themselves are also usually hired on a project-by-project basis.

Embeddeds are also important to this sector. Mining the Census and ABR data at SA2 level, it can be seen that there are clusters of advertising and marketing professionals located in, for example, higher and vocational education services (the University of Wollongong and TAFE), in banking and financial services

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 (the Illawarra Credit Union), emergency services (the SES), accommodation services, management consultancies and in market research and statistical services firms as well as elsewhere.

CULTURAL PRODUCTION In terms of the Cultural Production subsector, which is formally constituted by visual and performing arts, music, film TV and radio and publishing, it is the case that statistically music and performing arts, both of which constitute a large proportion of the night-time economy, and film, TV and radio are the largest employers within this subsector. However, the visual and performing arts are often perceived as the most obviously ‘creative’ of the groups located within this subsector so much so that, at times, this area is uncritically seen as the default for the entire creative industries itself. The visual arts, nonetheless, have had a continuing presence in the Illawarra. In the midst of a downturn following the demise of manufacturing in the Illawarra, and more recently the GFC which impacted the higher end visual arts in unexpected ways as buyers who had lost their discretionary purchasing power ceased to buy art, Port Kembla has developed as what is seen to be a ‘creative’, or more accurately, an artistic community dependent as always on affordable accommodation. As Sydney’s property price pressures extend further and further south down the Illawarra coast, the Port Kembla area is developing as a hotspot for non- mainstream visual and performing artists. The number of people in this suburb claiming the visual and performing arts as their main source of income increased from 52 to 80 between the census years of 2011 and 2016 – and has likely increased further since, as indicated by interviewees who have moved into the area since the last Census (eg. Nina Kourea).

Performing artists and institutions have a rich and multi-faceted history, with a presence through the supply chain. While Port Kembla has provided a refuge of sorts for an active group of visual and performing artists who see themselves operating outside the mainstream arts community, the Wollongong CBD has also been activated by public art and arts infrastructure. For example, the Wollongong Art Gallery is home to the Illawarra Arts Society and its collection includes approximately 3000 artworks. It presents exhibitions that profile local and regional artists and community groups (Wollongong Art Gallery, 2018). The Gallery is a key piece of council infrastructure and it is valued by the wider community. Further, in the Councils strategic plan, Creative Wollongong 2019-2024, it was noted that ‘85% agreed that arts, heritage and culture are important aspects of community life’ (Wollongong City Council, 2018, p. 9). In 2016 the Council released ‘The Cultural Development Co-ordinator for Wollongong City Council, Sofia Gibson, explained how the A City for People - Wollongong Public Spaces Public Life 2016’ plan was focused at creating a liveable city with an emphasis on close management of the City Centre ‘both operationally and through events and business relationships; but also to coordinate the delivery of our public spaces; public life implementation plan’ (Gibson iv 16 April, 2019). The ‘Made in Wollongong’ project also falls under Gibson’s remit (Wollongong City Council, 2018, p. 30). While Wollongong City Council is responsible for the strategic direction of sustainable arts and cultural activities and is often referred to as being regional, it is of practical concern that Wollongong and the Illawarra do not currently qualify for funding through the Regional Arts NSW program since ‘regional’ is defined as ‘all of NSW outside the greater Newcastle, Sydney, Wollongong conurbation’ (FAQ's Regional ArtsNSW, 2019). Other visual arts related activity has, of course, been going on and every one of the arts institutions, festivals, galleries and museums operating in the region, all of whom at certain times contribute various activities to the night-time economy, have come to rely on web designers, both professionals and pro-amateurs, to promote, advertise and market their activities.

Theatre, in particular, has a dynamic set of activities centred in Wollongong. All theatre companies in this region have become increasingly reliant on websites as sources of information for audiences and as repositories and promotional vehicles for their activities. Some sites are built in-house using platforms

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 such as Wordpress while others are custom built by web designers or, less typically for this sector, an agency. PR, advertising and ongoing marketing - activities typically associated with the creative services sector - sit at the heart of promoting this form of cultural production. As most of this sector’s performances take place as part of the night-time economy, promotion is crucial to it and all of this interaction demonstrates the interdependence of the creative services and cultural production sectors. For example, Viva la Gong, which launched in 2000 as an annual festival run by Wollongong City Council, is an award-winning, waste-wise arts and community festival offering a diverse range of performing arts activities and the Wollongong City Council uses its own website to promote this event using both audio- visual and text based content - someone was employed to photograph this event, someone was employed to shoot video and someone was employed to write the text. This Council website also promotes, through its Art and Culture section, aboriginal culture and heritage, libraries, the Wollongong Art Gallery, the location of public art and other creative spaces as well as the Made in Wollongong project, the museums and arts precincts crucial to cultural production in the region and various opportunities for artists and performers. The Council also underwrites the highly successful Merrigong Theatre Company. As the Director of Merrigong and IPAC? Simon Hinton asserts, Merrigong Theatre Company is “the largest regional performing arts organization in Australia, outside of any of the state capitals. Our turnover last year was $6.7 million…Our industry is about finding the resources” (Hinton, iv 16 April, 2019). Hinton explains that “all of the infrastructure is funded by Council […] we do operational maintenance” (Hinton, iv 16 April, 2019). Further, the company structure is unique in that “our company has one member and the member is Wollongong City Council. So, we're kind of at arms length, we have our own board, we’re financially and legally separate from council, but we are essentially a controlled entity of Council” (Hinton, iv 16 April, 2019). Hinton is convinced that “you couldn't operate facilities like this without significant subsidy because the commercial rate you'd have to hire venues to people would be unviable” (Hinton, iv 16 April, 2019).

This close relationship between theatre, as a form of cultural production central to the city’s night-time economy, and the Council, has for some, come at a cost. Steen, the Director of the Phoenix Theatre Company, highlighted how IPAC/Merrigong has come to dominate the Wollongong theatre scene since it opened in 1988: the 25 theatre companies that once flourished in the region are now reduced to around half a dozen community theatre companies and fewer theatres. According to Steen, works by local and emerging playwrights are being replaced in local community theatres by highly popular franchise theatre programs, which is often a poor strategy for regional theatre as these shows are expensive since profit margins after royalties are generally lower with local plays. Steen argues that what he calls Disney-fication has a tendency to shrink audiences since audiences appear to be less willing to go out and see new shows than ever before.

The music sector is thriving in terms of its contribution to the night-time economy of the creative industries in Wollongong and its interrelationship to other sectors of the creative industries. However, it does need to be pointed out that the music industry has three arms - the recording sector, the live performance sector, and the publishing sector. The first two are represented well in the Wollongong region. These areas are seen as being mature with a number of significant players. These include not only musicians, performers and songwriters, but also recording studios, record companies, venue owners, promoters, agents and music retailers. This aspect of the industry is highly interconnected and, at times, has been supported by local government activity. These sectors not only operate locally but have deep connections to the national and international scenes and the local Council has recently seen the benefits a healthy music scene can bring to the city.

A lot of the activity in the Wollongong music scene has not just been structural but has also been due to the actions of a set of significant and active local entrepreneurs, some born and bred in the region and

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 some moving out of Sydney to take advantage of the proximity to Sydney and the lifestyle the region offers. Crucial to this scene are people like Aaron Curnow from Spunk Records, located in the northern Illawarra, Adam Jordan, the record producer who owns and runs Main Street Recording Studio, Rich Piper who owns and runs Pipers Music, and, significantly, Ben Tillman who, along with his partner Jeb Taylor, is responsible for the Yours and Owls Festival. Tillman also books venues like the Rad Bar and the North Gong Hotel and other venues in adjacent regions, runs a record label and employs or contracts a wide variety of operatives from designers, PR and marketing people through to PA Hire companies, lighting crews, catering and security firms, who are the workers who provide the backbone of this part of the night-time economy, as well as signing local artists to his record label. Digital connections are highly important for CI operatives like Ben Tillman whose audiences for the performers he supports are localised into two major areas in the region. As Tillman states “we split it into northern suburbs, which is this area, Stanwell Park to Thirroul [and then] you've got the CBD. It’s like for everything south, the stuff happens in Wollongong. There's no venues anywhere else. All those people will either go into northern suburb shows, or they'll go to the CBD” (Tillman iv 2019).

While regional musical centres like Newcastle have had their night-time economies dealt a significant blow with the implementation of lock-out laws and one-strike noise pollution regulations, Wollongong appears to have moved in the opposite direction. Tillman asserts that after meeting extensive resistance during his small Rad Bar start-up phase, the Council realised “‘oh, that's actually a positive thing’. And then within two or three years there was something like 50 small bars in town” (Tillman iv 2019). It is of note that the Live Music Action plan the City Council adopted in 2014-2018 may have been a leading enabler for these active agents, specifically in terms of standing event Development Applications in NSW.

While many conflate the music industry solely with the popular music industry, and then conflate that down to the independent or alternative music scene, for a city like Wollongong the music industry is, in fact, supported by all types of music scenes and all types of musicians from the alternate to the commercial. This includes folk, jazz, classical and country musicians and their many supporters. With a busy set of music scenes like this there are also a number of luthiers and instrument makers and repairers supported by this activity. While retail outlet, Piper’s Wollongong Music, carries a wide range of musical instruments and goods sourced from all over the world in store, indicating a very busy and dynamic scene in the region, they also operate digitally, maintaining a web designer implemented site which is actively populated with images of instruments, text written instore and extensive video content shot and supplied primarily by their manufacturers and suppliers. Social media is unavoidably central to their advertising and promotion.

Wollongong is an important regional hub for television and radio broadcasting services, with an emerging independent screen sector. For the Film, TV and Radio sector, in particular the screen sub- sector of this, WIN Television is a significant employer in terms of broadcast and news production and this network is deeply connected to other arms of the creative industries. Headquartered in Wollongong, WIN Television is Australia’s largest privately-owned regional television network and it reaches more than 5.2 million viewers and produces and broadcasts an average of 150 news updates across the nation each day. Its local bulletins are broadcast to four states and the ACT every weeknight. The WIN network creates a half hour of regionals news from each of the 16 newsrooms it owns and that content has to compete with news streamed from other network hubs. Stella Lauri, currently the Network News Director for WIN, has 25 years journalistic experience in metropolitan and regional news services. She states that “the network’s presentation studios are in Wollongong and Wollongong is a major operational news hub. So the presenters are recording the intros to those bulletins, but the actual stories are gathered individually across the states” (Lauri IV 15 April 2019). Importantly in terms of cross sectoral interrelationships, she goes on to say that “we also have production facilities here in Wollongong. We have operational and news facilities, sales, traffic, administration, IT and engineering departments. Everything that has to do

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 with broadcast television” (Lauri IV 15 April 2019). WIN also uses, and profits from, in the form of advertising, all of the sectors of the creative industries in the region.

As well as supporting many of these players and profiting from many of the businesses located in both the cultural production and creative services sectors of the creative industries, WIN’s operations benefited from the change in the media ownership laws that occurred at the Federal level during Malcolm Turnbull’s period in government. These Federal Government changes enabled WIN to invest further in their production infrastructure. It’s worth noting that the location of this successful player in this creative industries sector in the heart of Wollongong is one of the reasons why employment in the Film, TV and Radio sector sits at 5.3% and also one of the reasons that cross sectoral interrelationships are so readily identifiable in this region. But WIN is only the most prominent of a set of companies operating in the screen sector in the Illawarra. Other screen professionals located in Wollongong run established corporate screen production houses. These include TEN ALPHAS and Why Documentaries. The ability to work within and outside the region sustains the careers of many other local film professionals living in the area but many of these exist “outside of the broadcasting model” (Pires iv 13 April 2019) and, since they are not usually art house filmmakers, are also therefore not generally eligible to apply for state or federal screen funding. The establishment of Screen Illawarra was an attempt on the part of the regional screen industry to solidify the interrelationships that are necessary to sustain the professional screen industries in the region. Trying to unite and promote the regional screen industries, including representing operatives in the adjacent areas of Kiama, Shellharbour and the Southern Highlands, Screen Illawarra was established in 2017 by local screen professionals as a sustainable not-for- profit representative body of the region’s screen production industry.

Wollongong regional radio contributes to a whole series of interrelationships both within creative industries itself and beyond into the wider economy. It is a very mature sector. It is represented by a highly active set of commercial, public and community broadcasters. The Grant Broadcasters network is dominant commercially in the region and also nationwide, region to region. In terms of public broadcasters all ABC networks are represented in the Illawarra either via broadcast or narrowcast digitally through the ABC Listen app. For the community sector there is VOXFM 106.9 FM and Pulse94.1 a religiously focused community radio station. VOX 106.9 FM’s website, which is alive with curated text and audio-visual material, indicates this community station “gives local talent the opportunity to be heard and it also caters for many of the various ethnic communities that call the Illawarra home” (VOX FM 2019).

Podcasting, a newer audio medium which draws heavily on the storytelling skills typical of radio in its golden age in the 1930s, is increasingly a feature of the cultural production sector in Wollongong but it also could be classified as part of the software and digital content area of the creative services sector. Podular Media, located at iAccelerate on the Innovation Campus just to the north of Wollongong’s CBD, is a good example of cross-sectoral interrelationships. This podcasting company marries radio, television and software applications and delivers 10 different podcast titles via their website. These podcasts are then networked through Acast, a podcast hosting service that also provides a PR, marketing and sales team and helps companies like Podular Media to monetize their podcasts through sponsorship, branded content and advertising. Podular Media also uses additional services from Acast including their cross promotional opportunities but the incorporation of sound FX, recorded music and narration by voice-over artists are core to all forms of podcasting. Podular Media’s Production Manager, Rod Crawford, sources these from a variety of places.

Digital interconnectivity is transforming and disrupting creative businesses such as publishing. Interconnections between publishing and the advertising and design sector, particularly for the media related arm of publishing, are also a feature of not only this region but the creative industries

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 worldwide. As a subsector of the Cultural Production arm of the creative industries publishing, is a well serviced, if now beleaguered sector in the Illawarra. Employment in the publishing industry fell by an average of 13.8 per cent per annum and employment in publishing occupations by 2.8 per cent between the Census years of 2011 and 2016. This drop reflects the impact of digital disruption primarily on newspaper businesses who have traditionally relied on classifieds and other forms of advertising to support their journalism. Many of these writers and their support personnel have had to retrain or relocate and often both.

With the advent of the digital world small owner-operated largely online publishing businesses have emerged, employing writers, often former print journalists, and advertising and sales staff on a casual basis as well as outsourcing work to various photographers and graphic designers. These publications are generally distributed electronically through platforms like Issuu, a digital magazine online hosting service, as well as being hard copy published for where they are most relevant, especially in relation to local tourism and the many seaside communities in the Wollongong region.

Surprisingly, given the massive digital competition from Amazon, The Book Depository and a number of other large multinational online stores which have penetrated local and regional markets like Wollongong via the internet, all of which has been increasingly enabled by Federally funded infrastructure such as the NBN, new bookshops have recently opened in some of the smaller communities in the region. Thirroul and Helensburgh, in particular, have supported local book proprietors who believe there is a need for their services and literary products. These book stores both depend on and help promote local writers’ work and what appears to be a proliferation of writers’ festivals including the increasingly popular Wollongong Writers Festival. Libraries are also important public spaces where local writers’ works are held, connecting them to the wider regional community. As a spin-off they help cross-promote bookstore sales through holding author nights, lectures and holding these author’s books on their shelves. Wollongong City Council operates library branches in the CBD, Corrimal, Dapto, Thirroul, Warrawong, Unanderra and Helensburgh. In April 2019 the Council announced upgrades to the Helensburgh and Warrawong libraries. These libraries are also dedicated and vital community centres which are essential places for the growth of community literacy. In Wollongong this is achieved through programs that target early childhood, as well as local history and heritage, usually using state of the art digital sites and software programs (Wollongong City Council, 2018, pp. 27, 31 & 37).

Strategic theme 2: The relationship of cultural and creative activity to the wider economy Mining the Census and ABR data by SA2 level it can be seen that there are clusters of creative industries operatives not only working across the interconnections between the two major subsectors of Creative Services and Cultural Production but there are those who are also embedded within other sectors of the wider regional economy. One good example is in advertising and marketing. Professionals from this subsector are located in, for example, higher and vocational education services (the University of Wollongong and TAFE), in banking and financial services (the Illawarra Credit Union), emergency services (the SES), accommodation services, management consultancies and in market research and statistical services firms as well as elsewhere. This includes being embedded within all forms of government in the region.

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 Government, Education and Innovation Ecosystems Wollongong City Council, which is a nexus point for much cultural and economic activity in the region, has marketed Wollongong since the 1990s as the City of Innovation and a location that offers local amenity and lifestyle with access to global markets (Wollongong City Council, 2019a).

The WCC along with the University of Wollongong and Destination Wollongong have been active in bringing the Ars Eletronica Festival to Wollongong. Unique in that it works across cultural, technological and scientific boundaries, the Austrian based Ars Electronica festival was held in Wollongong in February 2020. In March 2019, Ars Electronica announced that, along with Tokyo and Silicon Valley, it had chosen Wollongong to launch its multi-day 3 Festival. In relation to this announcement Festival Producer Adam Zammit noted on his Facebook page that “we are living in critical times with new answers needing new ways and the chance to promote the platform of interdisciplinary thinking and importance of the creative process at the centre of science and technology is exhilarating and always a bit scary! We have been working towards this moment for 2 years but couldn’t have done it without the support of DNSW, Wollongong City Council and the University of Wollongong and Destination Wollongong” (Zammit 2019) The Festival features exhibitions, symposiums on arts, science, technology, a contemporary music program, plus a focus on society and entrepreneurship (Savage, 2019a, 2019b) and demonstrates the interconnection between these sphere is probably more important than the disparities.

The Council is also a key stakeholder in developing interrelationships across both creative industries sub- sectors. For the Creative Services sub-sector, particularly for electronic applications and digital software development, the Council has also worked with other substantial stakeholders from across the broader regional economy, including the NSW State Government, the University of Wollongong and Wollongong Business Chamber, to build Invest Wollongong to “provide help for business owners to navigate the licencing and approvals systems of all three levels of government” (Invest Wollongong, 2019). The Innovation Campus features co-working spaces, as well as a business accelerator and incubator program. As William Janeway, a Cambridge-educated, venture capitalist and academic, argues in Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy (2012), ‘government investment builds the platform on which venture capitalists and entrepreneurs can ‘dance’’ (Parramore 2012, online). Invest Wollongong is one such platform focused on attracting investment and supporting business growth in key sectors across what is now known as an innovation ecosystem. These key sectors are identified as advanced manufacturing, knowledge services, trade and logistics and defence (Invest Wollongong, 2019). This partnership between government and education works to attract investment and support businesses with developing local networks, site selection and advice on government regulations, policies and incentives. Its investment prospectus highlights the region’s proximity to beaches and Sydney, and its affordability and talent pool (Invest Wollongong, 2019). Wollongong also performs strongly on technological benchmarking measures. For example, it had the highest level of digital inclusion of all regional centres in Australia (Thomas et al., 2018) and the second highest level of STEM qualifications (Regional Australia Institute, 2017). In line with these statistics the Creative Services (CS) sub-sector of the creative industries is also a key growth area. There has been a significant shift found in the number of workers employed in Software and Digital Content with a growth of 0.5%. This includes web design, software and app development and games. As the Anthill online publication, itself part of the cultural production sector, notes, “Invest Wollongong’s latest figures suggest the outlook for the city is extremely positive. Wollongong’s CBD is currently home to over 26,000 jobs, with a 20 per cent jobs increase since 2011. It has seen $1.5 billion in infrastructure investment since 2012 and boasts over 40,000 square metres of new commercial space in progress” (Anthill Magazine 2019). The city offers “startups and scaleups lower operating costs, a lower turnover of employees and the ability to recruit the high-quality staff needed to make their business a success” (ibid).

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 With the notion of innovation ecosystems (Anderson 2011, Frenkel & Maital 2014) now being seen as de rigeur by many involved in trying to stimulate the wider economy, the University of Wollongong’s Innovation Campus has been a timely initiative for the city. iAccelerate, housed at the Innovation campus, was founded by Elizabeth Eastland in 2012 while at the University of Wollongong. She is now the Director of Entrepreneurship at UNSW. Eastland realised that University of Wollongong graduates needed a reason to remain in the region and set out to ensure that this would be the case. iAccelerate’s $10 million seed fund was provided as part of the Restart Illawarra Infrastructure Fund and “$100million in State Government funding for 12 projects in the Illawarra Region” (Kerr iv, April 15, 2019) was also secured. iAccelerate’s Program Manager, John Kerr, explains that different programs have been designed to help would-be entrepreneurs hone their investment pitch and to build and grow their business. In 2018 iAccelerate supported 74 companies and was involved with the launch of 210 products. Its resident companies, some of them firmly located in the creative industries, now report revenues of $37 million (iAccelerate, 2019). The purpose-built facility situated at the University of Wollongong’s Innovation Campus aims to provide jobs for UOW graduates, attract innovative startups to the region and also integrate Council employees into small projects at this location. It offers space for 70 entrepreneurs. For those entrepreneurs the iAccelerate initiative is important.

The success of these programs, particularly in their benefits for students and former UOW graduates, suggests that there is a deep connection between educational institutions, their community and the creative and innovative industries in Wollongong. One of the least highlighted of these interconnections is that of the relationship between the University of Wollongong, the Indigenous community, its cultural activities and the creative industries. As Professor Chris Gibson from the University of Wollongong sets outs in his edited collection, Creativity in Peripheral Places: Redefining the Creative Industries (2014), creativity can be redefined as both an economic and cultural phenomenon. The Woolyungah Indigenous Centre (WIC) demonstrates you can certainly connect both of them.

Connecting the University, Government, Indigenous Communities and the Creative Industries

The Wollyungah Indigenous Centre (WIC), part of the University of Wollongong, is heavily engaged in film, TV, radio, visual arts, dance and other performing arts, with its feet planted in both the digital and ancient worlds. Jaymee Beveridge, the Director of WIC, indicates that the WIC is deeply connected, firstly, to the performing arts, as has the Indigenous community over a very long period of time. This interconnection has been expressed in a contemporary way. For example, there are a number of active dance troupes WIC houses a number of which have been funded through the National Art Gallery. The Wollyungah Indigenous Centre also interacts with the screen industry, radio and electronic media as well as the publishing sectors of the creative industries, using these outlets to not only promote itself to the broader University community but also to the rest of the country and beyond. The WIC also facilitates a number of other interconnections, primarily through its active website, with UOW researchers and administrators wishing to both promote and take advantage of the Centre. For example, UOW Global Enterprises has connected to the WIC to source Indigenous visual artwork for their Dubai campus and WIC is connected to Indigenous communities in North America via video with information about this program available through WIC’s website.

Additionally, many of the creative industries activities the WIC engages with are entwined with outreach and community building exercises. As one example, Beyond Empathy is a not-for-profit run by Phil Crawford which engages vulnerable Indigenous communities. While they are primarily focused at social housing, Crawford takes some members and the youth on an arts journeys either through shooting cinema or creating hip-hop music. With songlines being central to Indigenous culture and its very long- term survival, mapping and storing necessary information, knowledge and myths (Ong 1982), the Woolyungah Indigenous Centre keeps these traditional forms well and truly alive. For example, A/Lecturer

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 at the WIC, Jade Kennedy, has a collection of open songs which he willingly performs for the general community but, unlike most contemporary musicians working within the creative industries, he also has a store of closed songs, to be accessed only by limited groups within the community. He does not, by tradition, sing these closed songs at public gatherings but passes them on to members of the particular group they belong to, as they were passed on to him. Connecting Unique NFPs with the Creative Industries Also bringing the sacred power of music and connecting with the arts community (Moss & Sant, 2019), just as the WIC does, Tender Funerals, which is located on Military Road in Port Kembla, is the first community-run and not-for-profit funeral service in Australia which offers personalised ceremonies incorporating music and art contributed by local Illawarra creative practitioners. Linked to the GroundSwell Project, which “uses the arts to raise awareness and open up community conversations about aging, illness, death, dying and bereavement” (Tender Funerals 2019), Tender Funerals is part of the Our Community Project Inc. which is also a not for profit organisation that operates from the Port Kembla Community Centre. This unique service offers “a direct experience of the transformative power of art” (ibid).

Rumpus are a non-profit organisation using the idea of play to build skills and ensure that communities and workplaces are mentally healthy. They do this through a number of activities such as cooking on a budget, building things such as backyard oven, or importantly for this report through painting with watercolours. The NFP social enterprise has “supported over 1000 community members to share and teach their skills to others” (Rumpus 2020) through the various programs they run.

Culture Bank is financial service focused on the cultural production. It supports cultural activity such “art, poetry, music, film, circus, books, theatre, creative workshops among many other creative expressions” (Culture Bank 2020). It is operated through the Our Community Project in Port Kembla and is “aim is to use people centred innovation and social enterprise to empower and build access, equity, social action and community spirit” (ibid). It runs on a membership basis where the members, similar to a crowd funding exercise, contribute funds and make decisions about which cultural projects to fund often via what they call a Decision Dinner. Funding rounds are currently intermittent but generally twice a year. Increasing membership is a crucial aim of the NFP as they seek to “continue to give money to creative people” (ibid).

SCARF is an NFP that is focused on the refugee community in the region which “supports humanitarian refugee entrants to rebuild their lives in Wollongong and the Illawarra (SCARF 2020). It runs a variety of programs one of which is its Refugee Week activities. “In 2017, SCARF partnered with Merrigong Theatre Company to deliver two unique events…These were Multilingual Storytime/Rhymetime for pre-school and primary school aged children and their carers, and ‘A Mile in My Shoes’ – a story and culture sharing event at Wollongong Town Hall featuring stories and traditional cuisine from the SCARF Community” (ibid).

Space Activation and the Retail Connection with the Creative Industries There have been a number of retail space activation projects occurring in Wollongong. The Council Manager of Community Cultural and Economic Development, Sue Savage recalls “Creative Spaces was our first iteration of this, and we did it; probably if not before Renew Newcastle around the same time and the frustration was getting the property owners on board and we got a few on board, and that's why we ended up setting up the studios in the lower town hall because it was our property and we could manage it” (Savage iv 16 April, 2019). The council offers six low cost studio spaces for local artists in the town hall.

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 Renew Wollongong has had a predominant focus on the City centre similar to the Renew Newcastle model because “we have a situation where a lot of the vacant spaces are privately owned in the City centre” (Gibson iv 16 April, 2019). Sophia Gibson from the Council states that “we've renegotiated with Renew Australia a kind of unique model for that process, in that the contracts are between the artist, the property owner and Renew - not council - so we’ve stepped back from that process” (Gibson iv 16 April, 2019). Engaging with property owners in such a unique way has been critical because “a lot of them don't live in Wollongong which is the frustrating thing” (Gibson iv 16 April, 2019). Renew Australia was able to develop a particular program for Wollongong because “we found working with artists that some of the property owners and managers, they quite like working, sort of, maybe, at a bit of an arms-length from Council” (Gibson iv 16 April, 2019).

Apart from these efforts at stimulating retail activation using various sectors of the creative industries, it is worth noting that there is an intimate tie between most retail outlets in Wollongong and quite a number of sectors that exist within the creative industries. Walking along the CBD and observing the activity there, it is striking to note how much of the creative industries goes virtually unnoticed in spaces like this but its output and importance to retail in this region is ever-present. Apart from the night time economy of theatre, music venues as well as prominent street art giving an obvious presence to the creative industries in the retail precinct in Wollongong, it is a truism that the retail industry depends on promoting itself. Advertising paraphernalia that is locally, nationally and globally produced, is everywhere in the CBD, from the corporate, to franchises, to boutique local businesses. The use of photographs on wall posters and window stickers, for example, promoting everything from chemist products to high fashion, sitting in listings in real estate agent’s windows, and adorning every available surface, are omnipresent. Hand printed posters for exhibitions, performances and community events proliferate in the ever-increasing set of cafes, coffee shops and restaurants that form the cultural heart of the city and attract shoppers into the retail space. A poster wall or window is now de rigeur for the newer cafes as their existence tells the hoped-for customers that this retail space is community engaged and hip to the new trends.

The products of the creative industries are used everywhere in retail spaces in Wollongong. Many of the buildings have been architect designed, some by local firms, and when you enter many of these retail spaces it is obvious that the interiors have also been professionally designed to attract a very specific type of clientele. The music playing in the malls and in most of the retail spaces is also designed to do this exact thing. Public relations agencies are engaged to help these retail spaces, especially the multinationals, to put their best foot forward and many employ advertising agencies to craft their now highly-nuanced sales messages. These agencies employ video-makers, sound people, studios, actors and so on, some local, to craft these messages which then appear on WIN TV, are made as promos for the Grant radio network stations and appear as advertorial for the Advertiser newspaper. Many in the retail space, from boutiques to behemoth multinational traders, have not been able to avoid the use of social media or websites to both advertise and sell their wares. The digital telecommunications infrastructure that exists in the region is now crucial to this retail trade and the competition it brings has made retail even more thoroughly interconnected with creative industries’ cultural products and creative services. Tourism is also engaged in a similar exercise.

Tourism and the Creative Industries Geographically, Wollongong is heavily linked to the metropolitan centre of Sydney but it is just as deeply connected to the Southern Highlands, the Southwest and Canberra, primarily via highway links. As a result, it is very well situated to draw visitors from these adjacent regions allowing it to develop its specialised tourism industry. In particular, the region is seen as a holiday destination for these other regional, national and international visitors. In providing the facilities and promoting itself in this way, the

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 Illawarra region attracts 2,955 day trekkers from Sydney, for example. Tourism more broadly has a value add of $150.5 million to Wollongong’s economy. There are 1,378 people employed within the tourism industry and, like retail, they are deeply interconnected with the products and services offered by the creative industries. Tourism also employs many creative industries operatives as embedded employees.

Table 4 Tourism activity, Wollongong

If one looks very briefly at how the tourism industry in Wollongong promotes itself to the wider community, it can be seen that the creative industries are crucial to its operations. As just one example, Destination Wollongong, supported by the City Council, has an extensive website (Destination Wollongong, 2019) built by a web designer and maintained by a digital webmaster. There is significant amount of content on that page ranging across forms of written text, still images and other audio-visual material, much of which has been professionally executed, employing writers, photographers, graphic artists, filmmakers, PR operatives, bloggers and other creative industries workers. The site promotes events like Sunset Cinema Wollongong, the Illawarra Folk Festival, Art and Craft on the Grass and the Thirroul Seaside and Arts Festival. If one searches for writer’s festivals on the Destination Wollongong website The Heroines Festival comes up. This festival attraction “celebrates women writers who write women’s stories. With a focus on speculative and historical storytelling, the festival’s inaugural theme is Finding your past and imagining your future. Heroines Festival is a full day of panels, readings and book launches by women novelists” (Destination Wollongong, 2019). All of these events are run and operated by specialist, support and embedded creative industries operatives either working as freelancers, contractors for local SMEs or larger corporate suppliers of such things as performers, screens, lights, PA systems, security firms and catering all of whom run their own websites, some with various apps purposefully designed to aid customers in navigating their way to and from these events. The Destination Wollongong website is supported, among others, by the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre (IPAC) which “is the region's premier performing arts complex and is conveniently located in the Wollongong Arts Precinct” (Destination Wollongong, 2019). Not only is the proactive work undertaken by the Destination Wollongong important for tourism in the region but sites such as Tripadvisor have also become crucial. For example, the rating for the Science Space museum, located at 60 Squires Way in Wollongong, received a 92% excellent or very good rating on this website. With info like this, along with 53 photos uploaded of the museum itself and many written comments, the Tripadvisor software app has become a central tool in many tourist’s decisions and its impact is not to be avoided. Those putting a cultural tourism policy together would be wise to consult it.

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 Strategic theme 3: Hotspot Comparisons

Table 5 New South Wales hotspot comparisons Wollongong Coffs Harbour Albury & Marrickville & LGA LGA Wodonga Sydenham LGAs SA2s

ASGS remoteness category Inner regional Inner regional Inner regional Major cities of Australia Australia Australia Australia

RAI region type Regional city Regional city Regional city / Major Industry & metropolitan service hub

Resident population, 2016a 203,630 72,949 90,427 34,380 Employed persons, 2016b 88,250 29,620 41,098 18,441 Total creative employment, 2016b 3,624 907 1,340 1,746 Total earnings from creative $208.1m $39.9m $64.1m $89.5m employment, 2016 b Total businesses, 2016 44,083 18,491 21,361 12,576 Total creative businesses, 2016 4,100 1,140 1,125 2,428 Proportion of all businesses 46.0% 48.9% 51.4% 49.9% registered for GST, 2016 Proportion of creative businesses 33.4% 39.5% 39.9% 34.9% registered for GST, 2016 Regional domestic product, 2017-18 $11,012m $3,393m $5,192m $1,929mc Mean age a 39.6 42.0 38.7 38.1 Unemployment ratea 7.7% 7.9% 6.9% 5.6% Youth unemployment ratea 16.3% 15.4% 13.3% 11.4% Youth unemployment ratioa 48.5% 46.7% 42.0% 43.4% Indigenousa 2.6% 5.0% 2.6% 1.7% Volunteera 15.2% 16.1% 17.4% 14.2% Notes a. These statistics are provided by place of residence, and b. are by place of work c. RDP for Marrickville/Sydenham is estimated by multiplying RDP for the Inner West LGA by the proportion of employed persons located in Marrickville/Sydenham Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016), ABR (2019), .idcommunity (2019), Regional Australia Institute (2014).

Creative practitioners and institutions in Wollongong consistently attract grant monies from Create NSW and the Australia Council, totalling amounts in the order of $400,000 to $500,000 each year. This includes artists such as the Bulli-based Zani Begg, for example, who was successful in obtaining Australia Council funding in 2014, 2016 and 2017, IPAC with $135,000 in 2017 and The Comic Art Workshop with grants of $10,000 in 2015 and 2017. There is no record, however, of Wollongong practitioners obtaining arts and development money through other Federal Government sources, unlike the other hotspots in this study, in particular Albury Wodonga.

Across all the regions in NSW in the study there was evidence gathered of ecological interdependence where the regional creative industries are interconnected across sectors, networked within and between each other and exhibiting complementary activity at all scales. The constraining and enabling effect of policy actions was observed in all regions, while each exhibited a very deep connection between digitisation and the ability for regional players to operate competitively in both the local and the global environment. There was also an increasing importance of the connection between creative industries to

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020 the success of cultural tourism and the effect this has had on the ability of regional centres to weather economic cycles through the resilience that solid mixed economies provide. It also remains a fact that active agents are vitally important as one of the drivers of the creative industries in all of these regional communities and each has exhibited a patterned set of demographic movements. It is notable that the relationship between innovation and start-up culture with the creative industries has become more entwined and there are an increasingly wide array of approaches to gaining an income.

Table 6 Cultural grants, NSW hotspots, 2014 to 2018

Sources: Australia Council (2019), (Create NSW, 2018), (Department of the Communications and the Arts, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c).

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Appendices Data tables and heat maps are available via the following hyperlinks:

Appendix A Census data Appendix A.1 Creative employment: counts, growth rates, intensities and heat maps

Appendix A.2 Creative earnings: total earnings, growth rates, intensities and heat maps

Appendix A.3 Creative incomes: mean incomes, growth rates, intensities and heat maps

Appendix A.4 Creative employment by sector, heat maps

Appendix A.5 Creative employment by ANZSIC4 industry category, state comparisons

Appendix A.6 Creative employment by ANZCO4 occupation category, state comparisons

Appendix B Australian Business Register data Appendix B.1 Creative businesses: counts, growth rates, intensities and heat maps (forthcoming)

Wollongong Final Report 17 July 2020