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.