NEIGHBOURHOOD FRAMEWORK BROADBEACH TO BURLEIGH HEADS CORRIDOR

SURVEY CLOSING - HAVE YOUR SAY https://gchaveyoursay.com.au/nfbb

The Gold Coast grows so fast that sometimes we are left wondering how to reconcile the changes. Yet, it remains important that we think about and engage with processes that shape the city. The community survey for this middle stretch of the Coast that I call home closes today so I dutifully responded, but there wasn’t much room to elaborate so I have jotted some additional notes below.

As a persistent badger for completion of the Gold Coast Oceanway, I note that the framework document omits to mention the Oceanway and state upfront that this beachfront path is integral and essential to transport and liveability objectives for lightrail stage 3 (GCLR3), and for the amenity and mobility within and between neighbourhoods.

My other comments are general, within seven headings intended simply to identify key issues for reference as the planning process gets underway.

Feel free to copy, adapt or contradict what I say…

PROTECT NATURAL GEOGRAPHY

Prominent geographical features – ocean beach headlands and associated ridges (Nobbys, Miami, Burleigh) are important elements of the Gold Coast’s character and natural heritage. Despite some regrettable built and approved precedents along Goodwin Terrace and Marine Parade, it is important to limit building heights and density to PROTECT (more than simply acknowledge) views to and from these features.

Plus - any opportunity to incorporate additional areas of nature conservation or scenic open space, and improve public access to these, should not be overlooked.

COMPLEMENT OCEANWAY

It was welcome news last week that the State Government will lead construction of the beachfront Oceanway, parallel to GCLR3 along Mermaid and Nobby Beach. Council works should complement and coordinate with Oceanway design and delivery.

To frame vistas and distinguish the highly urbanised coastal identity alongside this flat, mid strip of the highway, I would like to see groupings of the traditional Norfolk pines, complemented with ocean viewing platforms and plantings of casuarina, banksia and pandanus at the beach ends of east-west oriented streets.

PLANT STREET TREES

Along the Gold Coast Highway, pursue every opportunity to transform the corridor into a green, shaded, subtropical tree-lined boulevard. This really is possible with careful and intentional planning and design - like Melbourne Street in South Brisbane.

Along the east-west streets plant shade trees that will improve the pedestrian comfort and connection to the highway, and soften the appearance of the neighbourhoods which are becoming dominated by high concrete walls and garage doors.

PROMOTE MEDIUM DENSITY HOUSING

Improve housing choice by promoting well-designed, medium-density, midrise buildings. Here more than anywhere at the Gold Coast, is ideal, with flat, easy walkable topography, grid street pattern and proximity to open space and services – see my previous essay advocating for effort to promote this form of housing.

IMPROVE DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

There’s little point in labouring strategies for promoting local employment in this fortuitous location. With a great living environment and fast, reliable digital infrastructure that attracts businesses and enables people to work from home, productivity will generate naturally and retail, dining and commercial services will follow.

BUILD PUBLIC CAR PARKING STATIONS

To improve access and parking availability of the retail and dining precincts, plan for future multi-level, multi-use public car parking stations, smartly designed like in Yeppoon town centre. These will also help to ease problems in surrounding residential streets where lightrail passengers park-and-ride. Obvious locations to start with are Miami North and Christine Ave which intersect with main roads and potential future bus routes heading west.

RECONSIDER GCLR3 STATION AND ROUTE LOCATIONS

The Nobby Beach station might work better further north at Wave Street. It would be useful to see and compare design options.

South of Christine Ave, I envisage the GCLR3 tracks could use the lower GC Hwy and terminate at Burleigh State School. This would leave open the possibility that stage 4 could veer west to join up with Varsity station and trains travelling north-south. It would also create public transport opportunity for people living in residential communities west of the M1 – Reedy Creek, Elanora, Mudgeeraba and beyond.

MID-RISE, MID-DENSITY LIVING

A missing option in the Gold Coast housing market

When I rise, as the sun also does almost every day here, I often remind myself that this city offers lifestyle qualities that are beyond the wildest dreams of most of the world population. However, the urban design enthusiast in me sometimes frets about the impact of some recent and emerging developments. I worry that the whole experiment of urban life is failing at the Gold Coast, and we are on a fast track to destroying the very things that attracted us to live here in the first place. 

What I cherish most about the Gold Coast are the sunny climate and the beach. Perhaps as a consequence, I have been enamoured with highrise development as a way to maximise the number of people who can holiday, live, work, or study as I do, within a hop, skip and jump to the beach. I have an Instagram account called @LivingHigh, a hashtag #gctallbuildings, and an archive of photos taken over the last 25 years, which I curate as a kind of online history of Gold Coast highrise buildings.

Since the 1970s, in the national psyche the Gold Coast has been synonymous understandably with resort-style highrise hotels and apartment buildings. I have previously written about the evolution of tall buildings in this city in an essay for the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects titled ‘The view from up here: changing visions for the Gold Coast.’ What always remains constant is a pre-occupation with tall buildings by news and advertising media that overshadows attention on other housing typologies which are also critically important in the city’s residential mix.

I recently visited a friend who lives in an enviable new medium-rise apartment complex at Varsity Lakes. Another friend in Tallebudgera Valley proudly showed me his new solar panels that power the family home, in a garden that produces more vegetables than they can eat…though he did complain about patchy internet and mobile phone coverage. I also paid a pleasurable visit to friends who are renting a unit in the former Commonwealth Games Village at Southport. They love the ambience, with proximity to shops and the lightrail leading north to Brisbane or South to Pacific Fair.

There are many ways to live happily at the Gold Coast, and when you travel around different parts of our city, it’s plain to see that it isn’t just a tourist town anymore. The scales have definitely tipped in favour of permanent communities, a fact that has even been confirmed by the Betoota Advocate.

The population of the Gold Coast is well on the way to the projected 1 million by 2040. Most of these citizens will have various lifestyle preferences, needs, and budgets, and all will inevitably want and expect a range of housing options to suit them.

The COVID pandemic has forced changes to how we live and work. Many people are now working from home with the aid of online meeting tools like zoom. And this looks likely to continue. Urban strategists must now re-think plans for telecommunications and transport infrastructure, employment centres, and housing supply.

Not surprisingly, there is renewed interest in the virtues of suburbia. I really like the motto of the Suburban Alliance: ‘Better Suburbs = Better Cities’, and their focus on the opportunities of more distributed and decentralised cities. Reading their vision and strategies again prompted me to remember the late Professor Patrick Troy, who led the Urban Research Unit at the Australian National University.

Since the 1970s, Prof. Troy was a consistent advocate for low-density suburbia. This was despite opposition by newer generations of urban strategists like me who entered the profession in the 1990s with a strong bias for urban consolidation. We condemned  suburban sprawl, primarily for the road traffic and fossil fuel consumption that it generates. We believed in reducing car dependency by orienting residential development in higher densities around transit nodes and places of employment.

I have fond memories of growing up in suburban Melbourne, but since I was 21, I have purposefully chosen inner-city lifestyles. While the housing market is more expensive than suburbia, I prefer the walkability, immediacy, and vitality of these denser urban locations.

But my preference is not the norm. Troy’s claim that the vast majority of Australians aspire to own and live in a separate house in its own garden is indisputable, as all the statistics show. At the State of Australian Cities Conference at the Gold Coast in 2015, Spencer, Gill and Schmahmann of SGS Economics and Planning presented an analysis of the density of cities, concluding that “Australia could perhaps lay claim to being the most sub-urbanised country in the world.”

Prof. Troy argued for suburban settlement patterns that enable people to grow gardens for food production, recreation, waste recycling, and micro-climate moderation. Instead of trying to accommodate growth by forcing disinterested populations into highrise and high-density transit-oriented development, he believed that it is more effective to improve the qualities and efficiencies of suburbia. And yet, urban policy makers have continued over recent decades to overlook opportunities to enhance the sustainability of suburban settlement. Low-rise, low-density housing estates have been allowed to creep at the edges of cities, with smaller lots, cheaper infrastructure charges, and few of the redeeming characteristics of the properly designed and provisioned suburban communities that Prof. Troy idealised.

At the other extreme, highrise, high-density development strategies in targeted growth areas are pursued aggressively to address persistent claims of urgent demand for new housing. However, these huge buildings on their tiny sites are producing environmental outcomes that many feel are undesirable: confined, soulless, and harsh streetscapes without ground level greenery to mitigate wind drafts and soften the ambience.

Meanwhile, medium-rise, medium-density residential development has reduced. Developers have been reluctant to explore and supply housing at intermediate densities. In some cities, it’s so conspicuous now that there’s even a term for it: “the missing middle”. Most State and some local governments working in partnership with built environment institutes and development industry associations have attempted to promote the uptake of medium-density, medium-rise development. They do this through design competitions and publication of good design guidelines. However, because of the excessively profitable deregulation of low-rise suburbia at one end of the market, and high-rise towers at the other, there is little incentive in the market to drive developers to even contemplate medium-rise, medium-density housing in garden settings.

At the Gold Coast, it is now uncommon to see development of the three-storey walk-up style unit complexes that were prevalent during the 1980s and 1990s. In places where the City Plan has intentionally promoted medium-rise development, such as Labrador and Palm Beach, the densities proposed and approved are categorically high. The cumulative impact is creating streetscapes and neighbourhoods that feel cramped and devoid of greenery. Four to ten-storey buildings at medium densities with ground level gardens are few and far between.

Prophetically, this was a key proposal of mayoral candidate Mona Hecke’s campaign for the election in March this year during the on-set of the pandemic. A small but lucky audience of local Urban Development Institute of Australia members got to hear her presentation about planning and development for a better city. Mona advocated to improve design of tall buildings and new suburban estates, and promote more medium-scale four to ten-storey apartment living, particularly between Broadbeach and Burleigh. Mona’s approach was to concentrate on making the Gold Coast the best it can be for locals, which by virtue will also make it attractive to tourists and other investors. Detail of this and more is in Mona’s response to the UDIA candidate questionnaire.

A recent frontpage news story with the headline ‘LIFESTYLE HOTSPOT’ quoted reassurance from a social researcher that “For the Gold Coast, there will be good times. 50 per cent of Australians are reconsidering the suitability of their current housing situation because of COVID and it will be the lifestyle cities which will be the net beneficiaries.”

Gold Coast Bulletin 9 November 2020, p1

The Gold Coast has an enviable climate and natural environment, and with reliable, fast telecommunication data we can live here and work anywhere in the world. Tourism, the industry our city has relied so heavily upon, has slumped and will be slow to recover. Rather than try to regain business as it was before March 2020, let’s make the COVID experience be a defining moment to reset the Gold Coast on a path to greatness. Now seems like an opportune time to shake off our dominant image as a tourist city and declare it to be a lifestyle destination.

Paradoxically, despite the development industry booming through the COVID crisis, we also have a housing diversity and affordability problem. Helping a friend search for a unit recently I experienced first-hand the current “squeeze on rentals” as dozens of prospective renters turn up to inspect units advertised at exorbitant prices.

Local political theatre, played by development industry and news media personnel, presents fear of a housing supply shortage. They lobby the sympathetic council for relaxation of development constraints to let them build denser apartment buildings and more greenfield subdivisions. Nobody, except community welfare organisations, wants to hear about, let alone consider, a wider range of policy levers and incentives that could be employed to achieve greater housing diversity, affordability and occupancy. They fail to acknowledge that there are more than 30,000 vacant dwellings in the city. And they have a particular blind-spot for what is potentially the one of the most effective remedies: medium-rise, medium-density mixed use and residential development.

The intermediate typology of medium-rise, medium-density housing in garden settings, is not foreign to the Gold Coast. I have started a new Instagram account titled ‘Gold Coast Mid Rise’ to record existing examples of good medium-density housing because I think it is ideal and we need more of it.

Instagram Gold Coast Mid Rise #GCmidrise

Filling the gap of this typology in our housing market could help to cure a range of our urban dilemmas. It can help to relieve pressure for less sustainable urban forms of new suburbia and super-dense highrise buildings. It can be clustered near public transport and services. With good design and garden setbacks it could create leafy, green, well-ventilated and walkable neighbourhoods. I know it would suit me, and my friend, and many others as a desirable housing option. Let’s add it to the repertoire for Gold Coast housing choices!

COUNCIL ELECTION REFORMS

I was excited, for an instant in October 2019, when I read this breaking news caption “Nation-leading reforms to Queensland’s electoral system will make elections fairer, transparent and just!” but most changes didn’t apply to local government. Several legislative improvements were introduced – a ban on donations from property developers, a requirement for disclosure of donations $500 or more, and some changes to remove undue influence of elected representatives. But they didn’t go far enough. These few amendments make little difference and worse, I believe they actually reduced fairness and transparency by sending the activities they intended to discourage, underground.

It seemed incredulous that polling in the recent council election proceeded in the midst of coronavirus threat. Fortunately, it appears that no community transmission resulted, and several good things resulted from the experience:

• We saw how polling booths can be managed better;

• The Premier announced that the next State election will be conducted by postal voting; and

• There is growing impetus to expedite introduction of electronic voting.

With these transitions to voting procedures in mind, I have made a list of 11 suggestions to help make future council elections fairer and genuinely representative. They are discrete, but interrelated, and should be considered as a package.

1. Limits on election expenditure, including traditional and paid digital advertising

2. Disqualification for non-disclosure of expenditure and support, financial or otherwise from political or third parties.

3. Identification of printing source on flyers and mailbox materials.

4. No election posters, corflutes, mobile signs or billboards anywhere.

5. Councils to provide a large board, clearly visible to voters at the entry of polling booths, for display of A1 posters provided by candidates.

6. Councils to administer an election webpage as a single, official source of information about candidates: photo, profile (max 100 words), statement (max 500 words), contact details - and Electoral Commission to provide URL for this page when issuing postal ballot papers.

7. Councils to host (and webcast) mayoral and divisional meet-the-candidate forums in public venues (between closing date for nominations and start of pre-polling).

8. Raise the bar for candidature: application fee $1000 (reimbursable to candidates who poll over 5%), required number of endorsements 100 electors - to encourage only genuine candidates.

9. First past the post - scrap preferential voting.

10. No candidates or supporters at polling booths (or limit pre-polling to 1 week only).

11. Maximum two consecutive terms for mayor and councillors.

HOME IS WHERE THE ART ISN’T

The case for a network of artspaces at the Gold Coast

How are you spending your coronavirus stay-at-home-time? I’ve been catching up on neglected chores and appreciating the time to quietly reflect and be creatively productive. I’ve also been watching TV, and this afternoon I came across an old episode of The Simpsons which inspired the title of this post.

It’s a story about the sale and theft and repossession of ‘The Poetess’, a famous painting which Homer becomes obsessed with at the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts. To raise funds, Mayor Quimby closes down the museum and The Poetess is sold by auction to a private buyer. But then the painting goes missing. At the conclusion of a twisted investigative plot of desires and deceit, ‘The Poetess’ is found and returned to the City of Springfield. The mayor puts it on display it at the football arena that was built with the money raised by selling public art.

Homer’s experience prompted me to reflect on the state of the arts in our own city, and the different perspectives and competing ambitions that we hold in relation to culture and the arts.

The most visible emanations of public investment in the arts at the Gold Coast in recent years have been HOTA, the Commonwealth Games Festival 2018 and, dare I mention, the two controversial public artworks: Hi-lights at Yatala, and the steel ferns which are yet to be planted.

I will save my thoughts about public art projects for a later post, and I’ll skip over Festival 2018 because that’s just a feint memory now. The most significant development by a long stretch is the permanent Home of the Arts (HOTA). I was privileged to have made an early formative contribution to HOTA as the author of the overall cultural precinct design brief.

Seven years on, HOTA is really taking shape now. The landscape is growing nicely over the outdoor stage, the blue-green bridge has linked Evandale to Chevron Island, and a new six-level art gallery now rising within the precinct and scheduled to open in 2021, will pronounce HOTA as the epicentre of the cultural life of the Gold Coast. The construction cost of $60.5m is less than half the projected budget of $120m for the multi-faceted 14-storey art tower in the winning design competition proposal. But then, that was predicated on the council’s intention to source funding contributions from the Federal and State Governments.

The new art gallery will be an exciting and momentous achievement for the Gold Coast to finally have a place where our vibrant visual arts can be proudly displayed and celebrated. A video animation of the interior design reveals a conventional look-and-see approach for display of art collections and exhibitions.

Many of the cultural production elements that the creative community had asked for which were specified in the original design brief have not been accommodated within the scaled-down budget and project scope. Consultation undertaken in 2011 identified demand and desires for the gallery to include: a writers’ salon and community publishing facility; a techspace for digital art experimentation; an art, history and design library; a retail outlet for Gold Coast Made products, training and meeting rooms and, most importantly, maker-spaces for interns and artists-in-residence.

It is not unusual for large capital projects to be refined in this way, it’s called value-management, a technique to secure maximum output from limited resources. Nor does this mean that some of the omitted elements will not eventuate. Some could take place elsewhere - in pavilions within the HOTA precinct, or maybe even atomised throughout the city, extending the cultural infrastructure beyond Evandale and closer to where people live.

That thought brings me to a chronic Gold Coast problem. There is a gaping hole in professional training and studio opportunities for artists. Studio practice courses at Griffith University have been discontinued and while some enterprising artists have set up studios in industrial areas, most struggle to establish operational sustainability.

In other Australian cities, training and studio opportunities for artists are much greater. Take Canberra for example, a city with a resident population of 400K. In addition to the national university and arts institutions and various art colleges, there are more than 100 art spaces of various types and sizes. Many of these have been publicly supported with start-up funds and some receive recurrent subsidies to operate.

For artists who want to live at the Gold Coast, most default to working out of their garage or bedroom. This may seem quite appropriate while we are in a public health lockdown, however, in the normal course of life, home isn’t the only place where the art-making should occur. Some creative practitioners function well in isolation. But we know that the rigour of group studio spaces, where artists, designers, craftspeople, photographers and filmmakers can mix with others and make work in a supportive professional environment, can elevate the quality of their creative practice.

In March, in the middle of an industrial estate at Nerang, a mix of more than 20 visual artists and musicians came together to display work and perform in ACID-TEST art show Vol.2. I visited on a Saturday afternoon with my friend Mona Hecke and recorded this brief interview with Michelle, the producer, about the importance of supporting local artists.

Despite the great vibe and obvious success of this initiative, conversations that day revolved around the challenges to set-up and be creative in places like this. The start-up and organic nature of such initiatives requires flexibility and affordability, without the frustration of onerous rules, fees, and town planning regulations. Some artists are involved with co-working spaces but most of these are typically business-oriented and fit-out for digital production and office type activities. Artists often need more gritty, experimental spaces. Artists also tend to not be so business-minded. They need assistance to jump through the hoops, over the hurdles and find ways to fund establishment and manage the operation.

To foster local culture, creativity, and the arts I’ve been imagining it would be easy, cost-effective, beneficial, social, and democratic to draw artists out of their bedrooms and garages into local group work and display studios in empty retail, warehouse, and public buildings.

Tim Minchin says “the difference between a good functioning democracy and not, is art” and there seems to be universal agreement across all economic sectors that creativity is key to future productivity.

While we are staying home trying to stay confident about gainful work prospects post-coronavirus, let’s think about how to foster a network of artist-run studio spaces, all over the city. It seems like a real opportunity that could help to recover and enrich the cultural life and economy of the Gold Coast.

GOLD COAST ARTIST-RUN STUDIO SPACES

Currumbin Waters - Dust Temple, 11 Past 11 Studio

Currumbin Valley - The Communal House

Reedy Creek - Creative Hearts Gallery

Burleigh Heads - Mo’s Desert Clubhouse, Mint Art House, Relative Creative, TBC Gallery

Miami - The Walls, Hotel Miami

Mermaid Beach - 19 Karen

Isle of Capri - One Arts

Nerang - Level One Seventeen

Southport - Creative Hearts Gallery

Please send names of places I have missed, to add to the list.

PERVASIVE MEDIACRACY

A message from my friend Derick to the Gold Coast Bulletin on Facebook flashed up in my notifications last night. I felt compelled to agree, but I got distracted and later I couldn’t retrieve it. I asked a few friends and no-one else could find it either so I checked with Derick, the author. He could still see it on his screen so we have concluded that it’s just not publicly viewable - but it should be.

I used to occasionally contribute comments on news articles on the Gold Coast Bulletin’s own webpage. I was conscientiously polite and constructive. I only ever added comments to deepen or advance conversations, but I got frustrated when I realised how they turn the access to comments on and off to mediate and conceal public opinions. Several times I wrote responses and they weren’t published - so I don’t bother anymore. It seems like not many other people do either so it’s inconsequential.

To Derick’s Facebook message, screen-captured above for anyone to read, I was simply going to thank him for speaking up for Mona Hecke. But now, since I’m on my own webpage, I’m emboldened to write my own truth on this matter.

Mona campaigned for a sophisticated set of ideas for a “Better City and a Better Life” www.monahecke2020.com

If Mona had been elected, I believe she would have been a brilliant Mayor. I say this as her friend, and not because she is my friend. Mona is my friend because she is a remarkable, intelligent person with a generous spirit and a strong belief that the Gold Coast needs a new, inclusive style of leadership. Mona did not deserve the treatment she received by local news media. And it’s not just Paul Weston. Potts, Woods and others seemed to take it in turns to misrepresent Mona, and Hancock, the Bulletin editor, enabled it without once giving Mona any right of reply. This behaviour wasn’t confined to the Bulletin journalists. Add the commercial TV news reporters, particularly Channel 9’s Brendon Wolf, and radio - myGC, Hot Tomato and others.

Most consumers of daily news don’t recognise the extent to which reporters manipulate narratives and influence public mindsets - because the practice is all-pervasive. But to anyone who followed the campaign reporting closely like I did, it’s evident and orchestrated in ways that I haven’t observed in other cities. The perpetrators seem to even derive glee - like a point-scoring game amongst a gang of trolls.

I find this deeply disappointing. Don’t they want the best outcomes for the city? Don’t they want a proper contest of ideas? Wouldn’t a diversity of ideas and opinions make better news and engage more people?

Mona Hecke 26 March 2020

All Mona wanted and expected through her campaign was a fair go, but news reporters stuck to their repetitive, singular, domineering perspectives which, frankly, I find uninteresting and regressive. I recently started calling this preponderance a mediacracy and to my surprise when I consulted Wikipedia, the term has already been coined - in 1974 - as a situation in government where the mass media effectively has control over the voting public. That’s not the kind of democracy I want to live with but it’s beyond my control to change the situation.

I’m pretty sure I could see Tom Tate’s tongue in his cheek at the close of a 9 News media conference this week when he answered a Dorothy Dixer with praise for the Bulletin. “I think it’s a good single source of truth” he said.

When I get back to my PhD research, I intend to add a chapter in my thesis about mediacracy. In the immediate future, I’m gonna concentrate on looking after my elders, and catching up on creative and productive endeavours. If I have need or time to follow news, I’ll go to sources that I feel I can trust.

OUR VANISHING HIGHWAY HERITAGE MOTELS

Motels have been a significant feature of the Gold Coast since they emerged in the 1950s. They were a popular and prominent tourist accommodation option for around 30 years, but since the 1990s, the number of motels has been declining to the point where it now seems like this aspect of our urban heritage will vanish altogether in the next decade. This story is a tribute to our early moteliers, the motels we loved and lost, and the few survivors. 

THE CRUISES

Twenty years ago, in partnership with the local branch of National Trust of Queensland, I produced an exhibition and event to celebrate the places and people associated with Gold Coast Motels. We held it in the Evandale Council foyer and called it Highway Heritage.

Paddy, Kathryn and Jo Cruise at the Highway Heritage exhibition launch, 1999

The richest reward from my extensive efforts to pull that together was a friendship that I established with Paddy and Jo Cruise. They lived in Southport and I visited them regularly for sandwiches and stories. Paddy was 91 at the time, and Jo was a couple of years younger.

Paddy was an Irishman who had met Greg Graham during WW2.  After the War, Paddy decided to migrate to Australia, and he began helping out the Graham family who ran a holiday guesthouse in Lakes Entrance in Victoria.

Mr Graham, ventured to Surfers Paradise in the early 1950s where he built and operated the El Dorado which may have been our very first motel. That stood where today we have the QT Hotel.

El Dorado Motel, Surfers Paradise

Paddy and his new wife Jo followed the Grahams and moved to Surfers Paradise where they managed The Californian Motel in Laycock Street. 

The Californian, Laycock Street, Surfers Paradise

After that they operated the Silver Sands Motel for many years and later the Candlelight Motel off Whelan Street. Jo ran that one on her own, because by then, Paddy had become an executive with the huge Quality Inns Hotel business that Greg Graham established in the 1970s with highrise accommodation including The Iluka, The Chateau, Apollo and The Islander.

Silver Sands Motel, Surfers Paradise

Candlelight Motel, Whelan Street, Surfers Paradise

Paddy and Jo told many wonderful stories about motels and their friends in the business. They spoke of it as a golden era, not without some low times and business rivalry, but certainly it had a sense of buoyancy and hospitality.

THE FIRST MOTELS

Davidson and Spearritt in their book ‘Holiday Business’ tell how Melbourne Architect Leslie Perrot in Walkabout Magazine 1952 advocated the erection of American-style motor courts or motels to address the deficiency of facilities available for the growing motoring public.

Moomba Motel

It is debatable to nominate which was the first motel in Australia because at the same time as new purpose-built flats began appearing, older holiday apartments too, were upgrading by installing cooking and bathing facilities and calling themselves motels.

Davidson and Spearritt suggest that the first motels opened in Orange, Wagga Wagga and Surfers Paradise in 1955.  I collect old tourist books about the Gold Coast and several actually record Greg Graham’s El Dorado being built in 1954 which could mean that it was the first.  Another Gold Coast publication claims that Surf Riders Motel at Main Beach was the first motel at the Coast.

El Dorado Motel, Surfers Paradise (photo by George Barnes)

Surf Riders Motel, Main Beach (photo by George Barnes)

Certainly, by 1960, this major new form of accommodation had planted itself on the Australian landscape. Queensland emerged as the motel capital of Australia with 59 motels, of which 36 were located at the Gold Coast. And ay the end of that decade, the Gold Coast Bulletin reported that:

“MOTELS MUSHROOM ON THE COAST: The Gold Coast – the biggest motel area in Queensland – has 119 of the State’s 511 motels... Indirectly, the State Government had promoted tourist growth by constructing 6000 additional miles of bitumen sealed roads, improving passenger rail services by dieselisation and introduction of air-conditioned carriages, constructed 13 boat harbours and 110 boat ramps and trebled the area of national parks and scenic reserves.”

— Gold Coast Bulletin 4 July 1969, p6

All but a handful of those motels were situated along the Gold Coast Highway from Labrador to Coolangatta. I estimate that the number of motels would have peaked at around 140 in the late 1970s. My 1999 Highway Heritage survey to document the history recorded 85 survivors. I would be surprised if as many as 30 remain today.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MOTELS

The original motels were small establishments of often no more than a dozen rooms, owned and operated by husband and wife teams. The buildings were basic in construction, typically asbestos cement cladding with flat roofs. Usually a dominant building with reception and living quarters for the owner/operators faced the highway and a linear or L-shaped block of motel units extended from that with car spaces adjacent to the units. Exuberance of style was focused at the front with exotic gardens, rock walls and often fun or fantasy decorative themes. Every motel had illuminated highway signs to attract passing motorists. Motel guides were published to help families choose which motel they wanted to stay in. Moteliers added features to enhance their appeal. Features like pools, barbeques and games parlours and rooms with television and refrigerators all added to the desirability. In-room breakfasts were a novelty, ordered the night before and served on trays via a hatch next to the door. And we must not forget the chenille bedspreads, fanned towels and mini soaps. Some motels even had small in-house restaurants.

THE FUTURE OF MOTELS

Today, motel accommodation is dwindling. Some motel buildings are rented as low-cost residential units to permanent tenants. Some stand unoccupied.

La Costa Motel, Bilinga circa 1998

Several motels have been refurbished and now trade on a retro accommodation vibe. Business at La Costa Motel at Bilinga is going gangbusters. The Ocean View Motel at Coolangatta was renovated and renamed The Pink Hotel in 2018. Mermaid Park Flats Motor Inn has recently been painted and renamed the Ventura Beach Motel this site also advertises Development Approval for a highrise tower, which is really like a pending death sentence. Development potential allowed by the City Plan on land along the highway trumps any nostalgic resistance to protect motels for their heritage value. It seems unlikely that any motels will survive the next 20 years.

In 1999, I flagged an urgent need to record the stories of motel pioneers but in 2000, work and life took me in a different direction. I moved to Brisbane for more than a decade and never found time to look back. And now I regret I didn’t pursue the opportunity to gather motel stories from more people like Paddy and Jo Cruise. Most, if not all of their colleagues in the motel business have departed this world.

What we are left with today, is a small sample of remnant motels, photographs, postcards and some recorded memories. There are contemporary artworks by artists including Anna Carey, Luke Roberts, Tracey Cooper and the late Dean Cogle who have each considered motels from different perspectives. And of course we have the 1995 novel by Matthew Condon ‘A Night at the Pink Poodle’.

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If I win the lotto soon, I will buy three or four of the most distinctive remaining motels and refurbish them to continue operating as Highway Heritage Motels.

In the meantime, I have started an Instagram account called Gold Coast Motels - like a digital museum where I can share my images, to prompt stories and keep alive some memories of our ‘highway heritage.’ I have an archive of photographs that I took in 1999 and since, plus a collection of vintage postcards that I will post as time permits. So, please watch this space Highway Heritage @goldcoastmotels, and add stories and information in the comments to enrich the historical record for everyone to see.

DUE DILIGENCE: RESIDENTIAL HIGH-RISE DESIGN SOLUTIONS

I have been reluctant to respond to the current round of proposed City Plan Updates because previous submissions that I have assisted other aggrieved residents to prepare on local issues seem to have had no impact. But today, at the 11th hour, since I have been beating the drum so long for better design of tall buildings, I decided to be duly diligent and submit, what I believe are some incisive solutions.

You can read more about Gold Coast Tall Buildings on my Instagram account Living High

Below is the substance of my submission…

THEME 1 - Height and density - creating a sustainable city shape (Items 1-6)

THEME 2 - Built form and urban design - the importance of a well-designed city (Items 8-11)

THE PROBLEM

Along with many concerned residents, I have been advocating through formal and informal channels for correction of deficiencies of the 2016 City Plan, in particular the High-rise accommodation design code (Part 9.3.10).

We are disturbed because instead of guiding good design, the City Plan and, what we believe is improper implementation of the design code, is actually enabling and promoting poor urban outcomes that citizens will come to regret in the future.

After long and deep analysis, we have deduced that it is not enough for Building Height to be the single trigger for Impact Assessment. What this means is that as long as applications propose to stay within the designated height limit, neighbours receive no formal notice or opportunity have their say. In practice, this exclusion of third parties from the planning process has become a problem, exacerbated by the council (with full knowledge, and by delegation) in what has emerged to be systematic granting of excessive design code relaxations, without reasonable justification.

Bloated development proposals pass through to approval without scrutiny or public recourse. Buildings exceed design code provisions like density and site cover. They fail to provide adequate car parking or setbacks to protect neighbourhood amenity and leave ground for gardens.

What frustrates us most about the complex volume of City Plan updates, is that if fails to bring clarity and offer real solutions. I don’t believe these changes will bring real improvements. I think there are two simpler ways to substantially fix this problem.

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

Firstly, the council can start being more responsible and faithfully require adherence to the City Plan’s design code.

Secondly, a lot of what neighbours object to, can be resolved through re-introducing a couple of key Impact Assessment triggers alongside Building Height.

• Site Cover should be an impact assessment trigger to ensure that there is space around towers so that we can still see the sky.

• Minimum Front Setbacks should be an impact assessment trigger in all areas except central Southport, Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach. This will ensure deep landscaping is provided to create greener streets.

• In those CBD areas where podiums are allowed up to four storeys, the towers can be very tall but they should also be narrower, not exceeding 25% site cover, and the ‘Urban Ground Guideline’ should be mandatory to ensure that our activity centres truly do provide comfortable, shades, safe, attractive and vibrant pedestrian experiences.

There is a dual purpose, and justifiable benefits, for making these changes:

1. To accommodate growth we need higher density redevelopment in established areas, and it must be of high quality to maintain and enhance our urban amenity.

2. For the benefit of residents and developers, we need to regain greater certainty in our planning and assessment.

 CONCLUSION

I request that the council seriously considers the solutions I have suggested. I would be pleased to elaborate, with examples to demonstrate how these will achieve wholesale improvements in built outcomes.

P.S. As I went to grab the weblink for the Urban Ground Guideline, I noticed the online file is Version 2 dated October 2019. Without a version control note or trawling through both versions to identify differences, I feel the need to qualify my support at the moment because I don’t have time to ascertain if the change is something agreeable.

P.P.S. Things have changed since I was a town planner. We used to be pedantic about transparency of version control.

I NEED A LITTLE BOOST FROM MY FRIENDS!

Over the next few months I will be supporting my friend Mona Hecke’s campaign to become Gold Coast Mayor at the next Council election on 28 March 2020. An easy way to boost awareness of Mona and her campaign goals is to support MonaHecke2020 online. 

Here’s a list of 10 ways anyone can help.

Follow and like @MonaHecke2020 on Facebook + Instagram
Invite your Facebook, Instagram + Email friends to like MonaHecke2020
Read and familiarise yourself with Mona’s Goals
Like and comment on Mona’s posts on Facebook + Instagram
Share Mona’s posts on your own Facebook timeline and other relevant community pages
Repost Mona’s s Instagram posts
Write a recommendation on Mona’s Facebook page if you know Mona and can vouch for her character and capability
Add links to Mona’s website www.monahecke2020.com.au or relevant goal page of the website
Ask your friends to subscribe and/or sign-up to volunteer on Mona’s website and check that you have done so yourself https://www.monahecke2020.com.au/volunteer/
To people who don’t have time to volunteer, but do want a change in the way our city is run, share the link where they can help the campaign with a donation https://www.monahecke2020.com.au/donate/

Every bit of encouragement matters and amounts to more votes on Election Day.

THANK YOU

THE CONVERSATION AU

A post about sustainable living by Sheelagh Storey in the  People United Facebook Page page this morning jogged me to remember how, in the shortness of time, it’s easy to get drawn into following the quick superficial grabs of commercial newsmedia. The quality of content on sites like The Conversation AU and ABC News is far superior.

Sheelagh shared this article about sustainable cities which is particularly pertinent to mayoral candidate Mona Hecke 2020‘s goals for our Gold Coast.

It’s commonly assumed that Gold Coast City’s approach to urban planning is laissez-faire. But this is not historically accurate. Former Mayor Dennis O’Connell at the City Plan community forum in Labrador this week, reminded the crowd about the progressive Planning Schemes that he presided over in 1973 and 1982. The 1982 scheme in particular, introduced the first ‘strategic plan’, and it facilitated and controlled the highrise development which our city became famous for. I was a town planner when the 1994 Gold Coast Planning Scheme came into effect. That scheme set a clear vision for the city. It was regarded as the rule book that developers large and small complied with - unless they wanted to do something contrary to the strategic plan, in which case a process that involved wider community input was triggered. I don’t recall the levels of angst around town planning that exist today. After amalgamation with Albert Shire in 1995, and into the 2000s, Gold Coast City Council did a lot of visionary thinking. The 2003 Gold Coast Planning Scheme focused on the premise of ‘Building Sustainable Communities’. It was underpinned by big strategies that were developed through lengthy, difficult, but ultimately rewarding, community consultation processes, and which required longterm commitment.

As one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of dedicated urban planning and design professionals who contributed to these visionary strategies, I have been dismayed to witness regression of our city planning and development over the last two council terms. The silent and incremental withdrawal of commitment to longterm strategies for sustainability, in favour of quick development profits and inferior urban outcomes, is truly regrettable.

• I am sad that the 1997 Gold Coast Urban Heritage and Character Study is long forgotten and little care and attention is given to the qualities that make our city special. There was also a Nature Conservation Strategy, produced and adopted at the same time but I can’t trace that online anymore.

• I lament that the 2003 Guragunbah Local Area Plan to turn our biggest floodplain into a greenheart for the city is now all but forgotten. The council has not only failed to progress the greenspace planning and development. They have been approving new development to creep further and further into the floodplain.

• I regret that the 1998 Northern Wastewater Strategy which was a 50-year plan for treatment of water through creation of wetlands as a transitional alternative for the sugar cane fields has been abandoned. This was to deter the need for massive engineering projects like the $300m pipes under the Broadwater to pump wastewater to the ocean, it was also a means to create longterm cost savings and to retain greenspace and regain nature in the city so that the entire SEQ region does not become an endless housing metropolis.

• I resent that the 2011 Rapid Transit Corridor Study which had integrity as an urban transformation strategy got hi-jacked as a property speculation opportunity without the good quality design required to achieve great urban places.

These are just four of the many reasons why I am volunteering my time, night and day until the council election next March, to support Mona Hecke’s campaign to be our next Mayor.

I like Mona’s approach, and her ideas for making our city better. They are not radical or anti-development. They are pro-sustainable development. They paint a picture of the kind of city that I want to live in.

If you like Mona’s goals too and feel inclined to support her campaign, please subscribe and/or sign up to volunteer on her website. We all need to do a little bit, if we want change for good.

https://www.monahecke2020.com.au/volunteer/

https://www.monahecke2020.com.au/

HI-JINKS: GOLD COAST BEACH HOUSES

HI-JINKS is an essay that I wrote to contribute to the Gold Coast Art Gallery’s FIBROCOAST exhibition in 2014.

READ THE ESSAY HERE

Its purpose was simply to explain the cultural heritage significance of Gold Coast beach houses and suggest an approach to conservation of some of the best few remnants.

In retrospect now, I see that my outlook was overly optimistic. I suggested that promoting awareness and appreciation is the most effective conservation method, because regulation in this city would be futile, and at least with a positive approach, some voluntary private conservation efforts might result.

In this regard, there have been some successes, but you can count these on one hand. Places like La Costa holiday flats at Bilinga and the Pink Hotel at Coolangatta are trading well in a retro accommodation niche. The Elite Motel at North Burleigh has been refurbished as flats and I have noticed several houses that have been retained and renovated, but I expect these are just holding patterns, waiting until the property market grows to demand the magnitude of development that the council’s City Plan allows.

I still believe that conservation controls would not be effective in this city, but what, if anything can be done before it’s too late?

There are still several places that could be purchased and conserved and holiday-let as a cultural tourism niche offering the simple pleasures of 20th Century beach holidays, but I don’t sense there is political will to even try to make this happen.

That’s why I’ve started another Instagram account just for Gold Coast beach houses from the last century, to keep alive some memories this aspect of our urban history. If you’re interested to see more, please follow @goldcoastbeachhouses

P.S. The Hi-Jinks house was beachfront at the southern end of Hedges Avenue. Photo taken circa 1995

GOLD COAST COLLECTOR

I collect Gold Coast memorabilia. Many items in my collection are ceramics; Studio Anna, Harry Memmott, Scenicware, and there are all sorts of things like glassware, bamboo ware, drink trays, teaspoons, felt pennants, embroidered patches, badges, postcards, shell knick knacks, Gold Coast Barbies.

In many respects, most of the souvenirs I have accumulated are antithetical to my personal values and aesthetics. I shun mass tourism and conspicuous consumption and most of these epitomize exactly that.

When I travel to other places around Queensland, Australia and the world, I don’t collect souvenirs. I travel ‘lite’ and take pride in that. What I collect as personal mementos are photos. When home or away I am a constant photographer and given that these are digital, they don’t take up any physical space to store.

You might, therefore, ask why I bother to collect these Gold Coast things. I started picking up pieces in op shops when I moved here in 1994, mainly for their kitsch value, but then I discovered Studio Anna ceramics, which are hand-painted with lovely glazes and were a little bit upmarket, distributed through Prouds jewelers from the 1960s.

When I discovered eBay around 2003 my collecting increased. I guess that 80% of the items were acquired through eBay. Immediately after receipt and inspection I would tuck the acquisitions away in boxes out of view. It was only as I started to experience storage problems that I realized the collection had become substantial. My Ebay profile indicates that I have made 561 purchases. My purchases are infrequent nowadays because Gold Coast collectables became popular and prices have escalated. My collection strategy has necessarily become focused and I don’t really want to reveal the things I most covet for fear of competition. I also have several friends who are always on the lookout at garage sales and op shops and have supplied some of my finest pieces.

The simple reason why I collect these things is because I regard them as moveable heritage. As time passes, such objects become scarcer. I regard myself a custodian of this future heritage collection.

I’ll probably hang on to some of my favourite Studio Anna pieces, and my cans of sunshine because they give me joy, but I look forward to gifting the lot to a Gold Coast museum someday, except for the Queensland souvenir tea sets which I will give to the State Library for display in the tea cabinets of the Queensland Terrace.

Before I do that though, I’d like to research the history of their origins, design, distribution and diaspora. As a precursor to this I recently started an Instagram feed called Gold Coast Collector.

As time permits, I intend to photograph, describe and post the memorabilia here for all to see.

JANE JACOB'S WAS RIGHT - THERE'S A DARK AGE AHEAD

For a quick reality check - do yourself a favour and watch Carole Cadwalladr’s 15 minute TED talk about cyber-meddling in the Brexit and Trump campaigns. Before I viewed this I didn’t appreciate how it was done, but following Carole’s explanation it all starts to make sense. At first it seems like a hoax conspiracy theory, but the more you think about it in relation to your own experiences, the more it begins to ring true that social media is subversively influencing the minds and mood of electorates. We have tended to think of internet search engines like digital encyclopaedias, and social media apps as connectors, but when we understand how they feed different information to users according to their preferences and inclinations, we realise they can also be divisive. 

I’m now wondering if this is the invisible cause of the swing towards the Liberal-National Party (LNP) in yesterday’s federal election? It’s important to acknowledge the influence of obvious factors like the editorial control of traditional news media by News Corp, and the LNP/UAP preference deal, but these dark unseen forces at play through news and advertising in social media, seem to be real, significant and compounding.

The Australian Labor Party shouldn’t beat themselves up over this election defeat. It surprised the political analysts. Until the results started to roll in, they appeared to be suggesting that Labor’s campaign was stronger. Bill Shorten, with a united, experienced and talented team, presented a substantial change agenda with progressive policies. By comparison the LNP campaign ran on a vacuum of new policy, and promises of stable government, despite a track record of mutinies and an exodus of senior members.

All of this is troubling for anyone who cares about the future and fairness of elections at any level of government. A knee-jerk response might be to outlaw sponsored political ads on social media but how do you trace or circumvent the algorithm spinners who, for hidden fees, covertly control the information we are fed. They have ways and means to sneak around and ahead of our consciousness.

And, I am particularly perplexed because this is pertinent to my thesis which is about the role and power of urban narrative on the identity and shape of cities. I have been gathering and distiling prevailing narratives in news media to show how they influence development and the image of the Gold Coast. Adopting anthropologist, Clifford Geertz’s definition of culture as “the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves”,  I made an early assumption that to grow an authentic civic culture, citizens should simply start telling more stories about the place and their connections to it. Eventually, as the narrative evolves, the true identity of the city will become the stories they keep repeating. But here is a clear demonstration why it’s not quite that simple because it is vulnerable to manipulation.

Urban activist, Jane Jacobs

In ‘Dark Age Ahead’ (2004), urban activist Jane Jacobs wrote about possibilities brought by digital technology and media for better understanding the image of cities. She identified the increasing significance of information and communication technology as a force majeure in the construction and projection of urban narratives and the image of cities. She saw opportunities as infinite and exciting, but also unwieldy and prone to homogeneity, superficiality, and even corruption. This was a decade before the emergence and spread of algorithmic culture. Only now are we beginning to recognise this phenomenon of algorithmic culture “spreading lies in darkness with illegal cash” and disrupting centuries of electoral laws and principles.

For my research, this has implications that I can’t ignore and will need to re-think. I’m also worried about what this means for our next local government election in March 2020. Are the dark forces supporting corporate and commercial interests over community and cultural interests, already at play?

This certainly seems like a real and wicked problem. If anyone has solutions, I’d be very grateful if you’d let me know because these complications are not something that I ever really wanted to have to think about…

P.S. It was reassuring this became a topic for discussion on #qanda post-election on 20 May 2019, especially the words of Ming Long, Chair of AMP Capital Funds Management calling for the government to stop misleading and deceptive advertising in political campaigns.

THE MOST IMPORTANT STORIES ARE THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES ABOUT OURSELVES

This photo taken in 2009 shows a monumental entry sign-come-statue that flagged the existence of an arts and craft market on Hope Island. It’s a figure of an ancient Greek god-sculptor chiselling himself to life out of a giant block of stone. In actual fact, he was moulded, not carved, and the material was faux sandstone, probably fibreglass coated with a concrete scree, like a spray tan.

The market was short-lived, and in subsequent years, the giant stood alone, out of his context, where he interacted with curious mortals. One time I saw him holding a colourful bunch of helium balloons. Another, he was dressed in a State of Origin football uniform. And in this picture you can see that some joker had painted a Joker’s smile on his face.

Around 2012, he disappeared, and since then the plinth he stood on has remained empty. Anyone passing this spot for the first time now will have no clue as to its former inhabitant. His existence and cultural relevance, are almost entirely erased from our urban memory.

This all happened before the advent of Instagram so I’m glad I have this photo to help me to remember his image and recall what I thought, which is - that he, and his ephemerality, were perfectly symbolic of the culture of the Gold Coast – a city that carves its own future, generates its own imagery, and cares little for its past.

Urban historian Norman Klein wrote about Los Angeles being prone to a ‘history of forgetting’ (Klein 1997). Similarly, the Gold Coast has shown little interest in documenting its history for posterity. Gold Coasters typically take pride in the perpetual morphing of the cityscape as some kind of advanced mutation which sets us apart as a new urban breed, more comfortable with change than conventional urban communities. Seldom, until recently, with drastic deregulation of town planning controls, has there been much public expression of doubt or angst about loss and change in the cityscape. Up to now, at the Gold Coast, it has been more convenient to lose rather than retain memories of our past.

But if we care about the identity of the Gold Coast, in all its aspects, it’s not acceptable to simply shrug our collective shoulders and say ‘that’s progress’. Because if we do, then from a cultural perspective, we lose the substance and depth of identity which enables the city to grow in a self-conscious manner. To deny this is to consign the city to a perpetual adolescence. In order to mature, any city needs to retain layered evidence of stages in its development, and of its distinctive places as repositories of personal and collective memories.

Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ (Albrecht 2005, p. 41) to describe to existential distress caused by large scale environmental change in rural communities. It is very likely that some Gold Coasters experience solastalgia too, from the relentless erasure and replacement in our urban setting.

Demolition of buildings happens here on a daily basis. The sight of rubble always makes me recall a storybook called ‘Motel of the Mysteries’ by illustrator David Macaulay. This tells of a team of archaeologists who discover a twentieth century city buried by a volcano. They set about trying to interpret a site and its artefacts from excavation evidence (Macaulay 1979, p. 95).

Motel of the Mysteries, ceremonial head dress demonstrating misinterpretation of history (Macaulay 1979)

Without the benefit of photographic records or stories, they misconstrue the function and attach sacred and absurd symbolism to the most ordinary of items. Of course, this is a parable, warning that we will be in a similar predicament if we fail to capture stories from people as they are lived. It suggests that we must collect mementos and conserve heritage places that enable recollections of the past so that future generations won’t need to fabricate our history.

I have been taking photographs and collecting tourism souvenirs of the Gold Coast consistently since I first came to live, work and play here in 1994. And perhaps related to my initial choice of town planning for a profession, I am prone to scrutinise and enumerate things in the environment that create and represent the distinctiveness of places.

Friends simply see my photo documentation and souvenir collecting as quirky hobbies that create a growing storage burden. But my activities are quite strategic and selective, and I do it because I think it may benefit future generations who may try to excavate and mine our history.

I say may, rather than will because I’m not sure what the future holds and whether Gold Coasters will ever be revisionist in more than superficial, nostalgic ways.

Nevertheless, I persist, because too often in this city, we hear people crying, like Joni Mitchell, ‘That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’ Recording and collecting is a way that I can help to salvage memory of this city.

I don’t journal or keep a diary. I have had too many false starts with that. Conveniently, my abiding commitment to photography of places and things that I encounter has served to chronicle and map events and circumstances in my life.

I remember when my photo-documentation started, or to be accurate, when I realised it had become a deliberate thing. It was the 1991 Australian movie called ‘Proof’ in which Hugo Weaving plays a blind man who takes photographs which he gets others to describe. He does this for proof that the world he interprets through non-visual senses, is the same as the reality experienced by everyone else. And also to test if he can trust what different people tell him. This struck a chord with me. Not because I am blind or have reason to mistrust others, but because I can’t always trust my own memory - or the reliability of other memories. Photographs capture moments of time. Hugo Weaving’s character says ‘they cannot lie’. They serve as proof of history and triggers of memory. I look at a photo and I don’t need to speak the thousand words it tells me. Of course, pictures can be interpreted in different ways, but at face value they hold some undeniable elements of truth.

And the reason I say all of this is because I want to tell you how I have stumbled into a new endeavour that combines pictures and writing.

I’m a competent writer, but I have always practised writing as a means to an end, rather than a creative pursuit.

Through academic studies I have written essays, papers and a thesis.

My work as an urban planner, policy maker and project manager, involved extremely careful writing. Through 25 years in the public service I produced reams of reports, speeches, policy and promotional material which literally shaped, or at least influenced, environments.

I honed my writing skills to optimise effectiveness through being concise, meaningful, factually accurate and politically neutral. And of course, everything was in the third person which serves to distance the writer from the subject.

It’s only in the last couple of years that I have started to write more liberally, and in the first person, where I put claim to opinion.

I have written short essays for professional design publications like Architecture Australia and Foreground, and found that I enjoy the freedom that’s not allowable in government documents or academic journals.

And more recently, I have realised the virtues of Instagram as a brilliant medium for a new genre of micro-essays. Although Instagram is geared for visual content, functional updates have made it increasingly practical to narrate the images. Since I have explained my photography habits, it should be no surprise that I’m an avid Instagrammer. My primary account is called More_Than_Sunshine. It concentrates on capturing the environment through my personal frames of view and observation. You’ll rarely see a selfie or even other people in my pictures.

 I typically add captions and hashtags to aggregate and create retrievable collections of images on particular patterns or elements. For example: #GCYellow #GCNorfolks. My objective in doing this is documentary rather than social or promotional but I’m happy to be followed and liked too.

The ‘ah ha’ moment for me with Instagramming was to discover that more than simply recording, captioning and aggregating, by narrating the pictures, there is potential to extrapolate the meaning, and potentially influence the way viewers think.

Instagram allows text of 2200 characters for each post. This equates to approximately 300 words. So I started writing short factual stories for some posts. Over time, the relationship between my images and words has become equitable. Sometimes, I have the narrative first and find a complementary picture. Other times pictures prompt the narrative.

I don’t fictionalise. I don’t think I ever could. It would feel like fibbing which is contrary to my interest in divining the truth. However, straight facts and data are boring, so I am drawn to a narrative non-fiction style.

The usefulness of narratives is in their truthfulness as readings: they translate across the past, present and future; and my revelation was that the narrative itself has power.

I like sociologist Catherine Riessman’s explanation of narrative inquiry. She says ‘Narratives do not mirror, they refract the past. Imagination and strategic interests influence how storytellers choose to connect events and make them meaningful for others. Narratives are useful in research precisely because storytellers interpret the past rather than reproduce it as it was. The ‘truths’ of narrative accounts are not in their faithful representations of a past world, but in the shifting connections they forge among past, present, and future. The narrative itself has power and can influence urban phenomena.’ (Riessman 2005, p.1)

Last year, the Arts & Culture Unit of the Gold Coast Council invited me to participate as a ‘narrative maker’ in their inaugural round of an Instagram arts project called LENS. The aim of this initiative was to develop artistic voices that can frame and articulate the Gold Coast’s cultural identity. I teamed up with Aaron Chapman, who is an alumni of the Griffith Creative Writing School. For this assignment, Aaron assumed the role of photographer and I was narrator. We produced a dozen posts that focused on different aspects of the built environment, and I credit the council and this process for getting me in the narrative groove.

I’ll read one of these now. I’ve chosen one that touches on the theoretical basis of my doctoral research which I’ve been skirting around, because it’s too big to explain in 15 minutes. It’s called Paradise Is and it was posted on the first day of the Commonwealth Games.

https://flic.kr/p/fLqWct

Paradise Is

The Games are on! There’s excitement in the air. And a strong sense the Gold Coast has finally ‘come of age’ as an internationally recognised city. And yet, no one seems quite sure what that means: this is an unconventional city and precise definition of its image and identity is elusive.

Demographer, Bernard Salt speaks of the Gold Coast as “a city that has been willed into existence”. Certainly, self-creationism is at the heart of the culture of the Gold Coast. As an urban phenomenon, it’s been born out of fantasy and speculation, designed for fun and profit, and remains unfettered by historical precedents. It has flourished in these conditions, constantly generating its own imagery, mostly around visions of a Paradise.

If we accept anthropologist, Clifford Geertz’s definition of culture as “the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves”, then to grow an original culture we should simply start telling more stories about this place and our connections to it. Eventually, as our narrative evolves, our identity will become the stories we keep repeating.

But it’s not quite that simple. It’s also possible for narrative to be corrupted or hijacked for the wrong reasons. Propagandist, Joseph Goebbels famously said, “A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth”.

The way to preclude this is for as many individual voices as possible to be involved in telling the stories, so that mistruths cannot predominate, and the more authentic narrative forms the city’s true identity. The more we all talk about what it is like to live here, the more distinctive will be our sense of this place.

Following LENS, I did a similar project – a takeover of an Instagram feed called The Coburg Plan which documents the local area history of that suburb in Melbourne where I started work as a graduate town planner in 1990.

One of the positive things about ageing is the ‘getting of wisdom’ and as I passed the half century, I realised that, as well as my photo and souvenir collections, I have gathered a large reservoir of knowledge to draw from and write about.

Recently, I have started several topic-specific Instagram feeds with narration that is bolder than my typical passive commentary.

One is called Living High, and through this I am rolling out stories about good, bad, old and new tall buildings. Another called Oceanway 2020 is seeking - and succeeding - to build momentum for completion of the 36km continuous beachfront pathway which the council has been stalling on.

These are intended to have political influence, for the common good. I sometimes disagree with urban design and development that transpires and I feel a duty to tell things like I see them because I care about the quality of the Gold Coast. I conscientiously try to avoid being rude or sounding like a naysayer. I prefer to offer constructive perspectives or ideas. I keep to topics about which I can write authoritatively. I research and check facts for accuracy. Sometimes, I think of my posts as pro bonocontent. I provide alternative or counter narratives which I hope others will repeat and share. And the more I do this, the braver I become and the more I see need for more stories - which is why I think I have finally found my groove as an urban narrative-maker.

To close, I want to alert you to an official Gold Coast social media initiative called GC Way Ahead. You may already follow it. On Facebook it has almost 70K followers, and 14.6K on Instagram. GC Way Ahead took over from More Gold Coast, which was established by the council to be ‘an apolitical collaboration of local partners and contributors… in tune to tell a story of transformation as the Gold Coast prepares for the 2018 Commonwealth Games and beyond.’

I think the transition occurred around July last year, but it wasn’t obvious. The content of posts has remained similar - beautiful pictures of aspects of the Gold Coast, accompanied by brief, upbeat comments extolling its attributes. While the featured topics and people differ, they certainly do all seem to be in tune. In fact they sing the same song about the future with endless opportunities, growth, and a lifestyle like no other.

The overall result feels a bit contrived, inauthentic. The pretty pictures and praises gloss over the complex nature of our city, and it risks perpetuation of superficial stereotyping of the Gold Coast as a city that lacks substance.

And as if to demonstrate this point, last Friday the Mayor posted a video to spruik GC Way Ahead.

The Mayor says, ‘Every city has a story to tell.’ I say this city has endless stories to tell, and with the wide range of media available to us now, we are better equipped than ever to write and share our stories.

We need to participate in the narrative-making to enrich the city’s identity, and by doing so, shape how we want it to be in the future.