City marching on
GEELONG is on the move and there should be no doubt about that at all.
We were all invited to view the transition our region is experiencing in the Creative City magazine, delivered last week in the
Geelong Advertiser . The magazine followed the week-long Creative City, a Business Beat Special Series, which certainly whetted my appetite for more information.
Last month I devoted my column once again to Dundee, in Scotland and its transition from traditional industry to a vibrant, internationally-recognised biotech and IT centre.
I have seen Dundee as an example for Geelong to examine following the loss, first, of our textile industry and, later, Ford and the motor industry, Alcoa and other long-term local employers.
Creative City, I believe, demonstrates that Geelong is moving confidently and positively along its own transitionary road and can assist as well as learn from other national and international cities and regions undergoing change.
As I also said in last month’s column, I am optimistic about Geelong’s future, because I do drive around and visit sites such as Deakin’s Waurn Ponds cam- pus and its growing innovation precinct, the updating of the old woollen mills on the Barwon River, in Newtown and in Mackey St, North Geelong and the Fyansford paper mills, which are also finding a new life.
We can all see the new-generation buildings beginning to dominate the CBD skyline and the magnificent new library and the modernisation and expansion of GPAC.
Again, as with Dundee, the industrial transition has a flowon effect to the arts and the library and GPAC are the major physical reflections of this, but so is the more intimate changing cultural environment of areas such as Little Malop St and its laneways as well as the mills. It is very easy to be critical and, from time-to-time, I have been guilty of being so within my overall optimistic outlook as I saw potential problems if our major lobbying organisations, the City of Greater Geelong, G21 and the Committee for Geelong did not work more closely together. The CoGG and G21 seemed to me to sometimes have one set of priorities and the CfG another and appeared to lobby separately in Spring Street and Canberra. Perhaps I was wrong in my assessment, as what has been achieved in recent years when I read Creative City demonstrates our leaders have certainly achieved a great deal across the region and not just population and housing growth in Armstrong Creek, Fyansford and the northern suburbs. In addition to Geelong’s major lobby groups — which also include the Geelong Chamber of Commerce and Geelong Manufacturing Council — we have major economic drivers in Deakin University, the Gordon Institute of TAFE, CSIRO and Barwon Health all making major contributions to bringing change to Geelong.
And, as I have acknowledged in more recent times, smaller and more specialist start-up and innovative groups such as Runway Geelong and Creative Geelong, are also having positive impacts as they usher in change.
Despite my long-held commitment to encouraging and keeping up-to-date with change in Geelong — and, as editor/editor in chief of this newspaper (1977-1998) and in retirement, until the mid-2000s, I was a member of a number of organisations working for this objective — I was surprised by the actual scope of change outlined in Creative City.
If you wish to learn more about why Geelong has been named a UNESCO City of Design and how it will affect our region’s future, visit the City of Greater Geelong’s www.geelongcityofdesign.com.au website.
“We are all Makers and Dreamers” it says and traces our design history back to Wurdi Youang, a Wathaurong astronomical observatory stone arrangement that may be over 11,000 years old, possibly out-dating Stonehenge and the Pyramids.
Such exciting times in our distant Indigenous past … and, I reckon, continuing exciting times in our looming modern future.