How Australia’s most Australian of cities is gradually changing its mojo.
Imagine sprawling on a picnic rug sipping champagne on a warm, balmy night, with the sun setting in broad brush strokes of orange and red and lapis lazuli over the nearby rolling waves of a pristine beach.
Meanwhile, you’re watching — shoulder to shoulder with around 3000 other spell-bound souls — a spectacular drama that tells a 60,000 year old story through dance, music and video.
This is not Sydney or Noosa or Byron Bay. It’s not Venice or Sicily.
It’s Australia’s most Australian city, Darwin.
I’m like many Australians who grew up with a vision of the Gateway to Asia as a place where beer gutted, navy-singletted blokes consumed outsized Darwin ‘stubbies’ in quantity. Where thongs and shorts were de rigueur. Where Crocodile Dundees entered town in battered 4WDs after a week of cattle droving, in scenes reminiscent of gun slinging Western movies. Where women waited at home in printed shifts cooking kilos of meat for their men, dragging on a cigarette and brushing away barefoot children. Where kangaroos thudded down Cavenagh street at midday. Where the Big Wet drove sane people crazy.
But the ‘new’ Darwin is a world away from that caricature. It is now a multicultural blend of Asian, Aboriginal, South American and European faces, voices and food that is rapidly developing a reputation as one of Australia’s most sophisticated and creative capitals.
The recent launch of this year’s Darwin Festival — and the weekend of creative events that followed it — was another chance to experience this reputational rebrand and wonder at how it has been achieved.
A brand is a heart story, not a logo or a concocted tagline. It must be authentic and it must be based on deep unassailable truth.
The sustained efforts of the Top End’s highly collaborative art community, to position Darwin as the country’s indigenous creativity centre, have provided the foundation for this “truth” brand.
Founded in 1984, the Telstra NATSIAA (National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards) are now the richest art awards in the country, thanks to the generosity of our big Aussie telco. The winner receives a career changing $100,000 and another $90,000 is split across categories embracing general painting, bark painting, works on paper, 3D, multimedia and emerging. The awards this year went to internationally significant contemporary art pieces whose creators will be feted by gallerists and investors from New York to Paris to London.
Running alongside the awards is the DAAF (Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair) which showcases more than 2,000 works from 70 communities and has generated 11.6 million dollars in sales over the past five years. This is a chance for art lovers to experience authentic, certified paintings, sculpture and other works, a far cry from the mass produced souvenirs that masquerade as Aboriginal ‘art’ at airports and tourist spots.
The NATSIAA and DAAF (one does grow weary of the enthusiasm for acronyms but that, unfortunately, is the arts) has also spawned a whole secondary industry of retail and wholesale art galleries and consultants who take indigenous art to the salons of the world’s rich and famous.
Then there are the National Indigenous Music Awards. This year’s winners, revealed at a Saturday night outdoor concert, provided more proof of this Top End city’s indigenous creative leadership. For more than a decade the awards have launched careers such as Baker Boy, Dan Sultan, Jessica Mauboy and Thelma Plum and celebrated heroes such as Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu and Archie Roach.
The Darwin Festival itself is an eclectic fortnight of “Hot August Nights” featuring everything from the Australian Ballet to Tim Minchin to Tom Gleeson to electro indie pop group Telenova. The opening night that I described above was a spectacular free outdoor event showcasing the spellbinding music of Gurrumul with the Darwin Symphony Orchestra.
While this artistic and indigenous community collaboration is the visible and experiential illustration of ‘Brand Darwin’, like all good brands, there is a very deliberate strategic plan that sits behind it.
A City of Darwin community consultation process in 2018 led to a ten-year transformation plan, called ‘Darwin 2030: City for People, City of Colour’.
“City for People recognises Darwin as the most culturally diverse and inclusive city in Australia. City of Colour recognises our vibrant event season and significant landscape across the municipality,” is the plan’s mantra.
While I suspect that the plan battled during COVID, it seems to be firing now, evidenced by the warm embrace of the Festival by locals and tourists last weekend and a packed schedule of sporting, fishing, motoring and food events that will roll out during the rest of the year.
Of course not everything about this ambitious re-brand is perfect…yet.
Delivering the promise is not always easy or straightforward for a population of just 85,000 people, where 31 per cent were born overseas and 27 per cent have English as their second language. But at places like the Parap Markets, diversity and multiculturalism is a living and breathing street theatre performed to the scent of laksa, pad thai and espresso. There is no artifice here, just happy humanity.
There is the usual battle to supply quality tourist accommodation in the high season (remembering that during the summer wet season tourism dries up). But there is an ongoing and substantial investment in recreational and hospitality facilities, especially in the Waterfront restaurant strip.
It is important too that there has been no attempt to sanitise or filter the day-to-day experience of living in a city where Aboriginal people make up 7.4 per cent of the population (more than double Australia’s average indigenous ratio of 3 per cent). For the majority of urban Australians who have never met an Aboriginal person, this is a privileged opportunity to start a reconciliation conversation with First Australians.
And while the heat and humidity are unavoidable, Darwin weather is strangely cathartic — and a lot more exciting than the plasticity of the Gold Coast — after a chilled southern winter.
The takeaway for marketers is that in re-modeling itself over the last 10 or 20 years, Darwin has been true to itself and it is this very honesty that makes its brand so appealing and engaging.
Like its namesake, it has captured the essence of evolution rather than revolution, and in doing so challenged many other Australian city brands with its clarity and confidence.