Australian Cultural and Creative Activity: a Population and Hotspot Analysis
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This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Cunningham, Stuart, McCutcheon, Marion, Hearn, Greg, Ryan, Mark David,& Collis, Christy (2019) Australian Cultural and Creative Activity:A Population and Hotspot Analy- sis: Gold Coast. Digital Media Research Centre, Brisbane, Qld. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/203691/ c Consult author(s) regarding copyright matters This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. 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If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https:// research.qut.edu.au/ creativehotspots/ hotspot-reports/ Australian Cultural and Creative Activity: A Population and Hotspot Analysis Gold Coast Queensland Australian Cultural and Creative Activity: A Population and Hotspot Analysis Gold Coast 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 Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. Suggested citation: Cunningham, S., McCutcheon, M., Hearn, G., Ryan, M. D. and Collis, C. (2019). Australian Cultural and Creative Activity: A Population and Hotspot Analysis: Gold Coast. Brisbane. Digital Media Research Centre. Available: https://research.qut.edu.au/creativehotspots/hotspot-reports/ Strategic Summary City of Gold Coast: built on creativity, transformed by imagination (City of Gold Coast Council, 2020a). The Gold Coast has one of the strongest and most resilient city brands in Australia. Monikers such as the ‘glitter strip’, ‘Sin City’, ‘Australia’s playground’ and ‘famous for fun’ have variously been applied to brand the Gold Coast, with its identity long touted as revolving around ‘sun, surf and sand’. Belinda McKay (2005, p. 68) observes that the Gold Coast is often seen as a place to escape to, ‘where new possibilities can be imagined and enacted’: this sense of escape from the ordinary remains a strong element of the Gold Coast’s place identity. But so much about the Gold Coast no longer aligns readily with this image. The Gold Coast now attracts the media treatment a big city gets (crime, transport snarls and huge pressure to address major infrastructure deficits, socio-economic divides between the glitter strip amenity and affluence and ‘pram city’ in the new estates off the coast). And well it might. The Gold Coast is Australia’s largest non-capital city, has the second- largest municipal Council in the country (after Brisbane), and enjoys the benefits and challenges of a large and rapidly growing population, currently more than 600,000 and increasing by 2.9 per cent each year (see the background and data sources referenced in the appendices to this report). The Gold Coast is much bigger than two of Australia’s capital cities (Hobart, Darwin), is bigger than national capital Canberra, and is much bigger than the ‘second’ cities of the two most populous states (Geelong, Newcastle). Across the Old Gold Coast Highway, which runs parallel to the ocean and defines the beach strip that marks the Gold Coast as a pre-eminent international and domestic tourist destination, the rapidly growing estates, major shopping centres and industrial parks that accommodate the majority of the residential population growth look and feel like core suburbia in any Australian capital city. Technically a ‘major regional city’ but sometimes excluded from public programs because of its sheer size, the Gold Coast is Australia’s largest non-capital city international tourism destination (Tourism Research 1 Version 1 16 March 2020 Australia, 2019b). It has an increasingly busy international airport that receives direct flights from key tourism markets, and often outcompetes major metropolitan centres on convention/conference business (including in the creative industries—examples include the 2019 TV Week Logies Awards, Screen Producers Australia’s Screen Forever 2020 conference, and academic conferences such as the International Communication Association 2020). It also attracts large international sporting events, with a particular highlight being the first non-capital city to host the Commonwealth Games 2018 (CG2018). This latter achievement was meticulously planned to deliver game changing long-term benefits and they definitely show. The strength and resilience of its pleasure-focussed brand has been both blessing and a curse for cultural and creative activity on the Gold Coast. The curse has been that the brand has historically never included cultural and creative activity, and cultural elites have treated the Gold Coast as stereotypically superficial. The blessing is apparent in that being the place to escape to, ‘where new possibilities can be imagined and enacted’, the Gold Coast offers a Richard Florida-style sense of attractive amenity and opportunity. Interviewees often referred to a reverse brain drain, with creatives choosing to relocate or return home. A main through-line of this report is the extent to which the cultural and creative identity of the Gold Coast is rapidly evolving and adapting to incorporate edgy arts precincts, a signature cultural precinct HOTA, world leading entertainment attractions, two leading Indigenous cultural tourism centres, and sophisticated public art and music industry development strategies, even as it remains Australia’s traditional tourism-dedicated city, ‘famous for fun’. There is standout commercial practice at scale in international film production and cultural tourism, and outstanding Indigenous cultural tourism in Dreamworld Corroboree. Befitting a place that is in many respects a metro more than a regional city, the Gold Coast stands out amongst our regional hotspots, having higher growth across its economy and in the creative industries, with the total workforce growing at an average rate of 5.0 per cent per annum, and employment in the creative industries increasing at 4.0 per cent per annum. There is also less of a sense of separation of the cultural and commercial, business-to-consumer and business-to-business, analogue and digital creative activity, than may be in evidence in other hotspots. Leveraging this identity as a positive and evolving aspect of the Gold Coast’s DNA remains an important cultural driver across the region’s creative industries. Key findings: 1. The Gold Coast’s grass roots and highly entrepreneurial arts scene is professionalising strongly, aided by some quality leadership attracted to the opportunities on the Gold Coast, and strong Gold Coast Council and Queensland State Government investment radically boosted by the CG2018. Similar to Cairns, the Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate ‘gets’ culture, re-siting the Council Chambers and a mayoral office to the HOTA site at Evandale. The councillors are very involved in arts on the Gold Coast, attending events of their own volition, and their engagement is valued by practitioners and facilitators. Like all regional centres, the Gold Coast has had to bootstrap itself, working against the dominant image of the region, with no company funded as a Major Performing Arts Group in receipt of virtually locked-in multi- year funding. (Adelaide, the city one up in size to the Gold Coast, for example, has three such groups.) Arts and culture on the Gold Coast has drawn on strong traditions of entrepreneurialism, which has seen artists and arts organisations not presume on public funding, and prepared to work with anyone (for example surf festivals and breweries) and anywhere (including shopping centres and light industrial estates). The Gold Coast arts and culture community has the confidence to try new things, for example Blank magazine and the Swell Sculpture Festival were initiated by locals for locals. It also draws on a marginalised Gold Coast history, for example, of highly successful pop music venues such as the Playroom at Tallebudgera, and Bombay Rock. The Bleach* Festival brings this kind of history back to life. For these reasons, the largest university presence 2 Version 1 16 March 2020 on the Gold Coast, Griffith University, decided to theme its creative industries curriculum initiative around arts entrepreneurship. Quality leadership is another result of the Gold Coast’s ability to attract and retain talent. With Creina Gehrke and her team at HOTA, and Leigh Tabrett as Chair of the Bleach* Festival, strategies are thorough, highly professional and seek to build methodically nationally competitive arts entities which can compete with the metros for national prizes, national recognition and perhaps such prizes as Major Performing