Susan Mitchell on Adelaide

From InDaily http://www.indaily.com.au/

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Adelaide, Adelaide, ever lovin Adelaide

IT’S time to talk about the plight of our city.

I speak as a fifth generation Adelaidean. Both sides of my family arrived here soon after settlement and most of their offspring have remained here.

They all believed that Adelaide was the nation’s best kept secret and they liked it that way. Not for us the convict culture of vulgar displays of wealth, the endless bragging about how well we were all doing, the insidious comparisons with the rest of the world.

We were not international in our dreams, nor did we wish to be. We were contented with our way of life. That is still, by and large, our default position.

However, every living thing in order not to die out must change and adapt to changes outside itself. Adelaide seems to have an inbuilt resistance to change. “We like things the way they are. They suit us. Don’t rock the boat” are phrases still heard in the majority of Adelaide homes.

Nevertheless, we have experienced, but only rarely, leaders who have attempted to make radical changes to this city’s view of itself.

In my lifetime, Don Dunstan was one of these leaders. I left Adelaide in my early 20s, like most enterprising young people in the late ‘60s to live and work in London and Europe.

In the early 1970s due to the ill health of my parents I returned home. What I confronted was amazing. The quiet, self-satisfied, parochial city that I had left was now a cauldron of radical changes and the focus of national and international attention.

People were flying in from other states and other parts of the world , eager to work for the new government. A Premier called Don Dunstan was enacting changes and passing legislation that the rest of the country, if not the world, considered radical. The pace of the city had gone from bucolic to buzzing.

The good citizens of Adelaide were at first stunned but consoled by a sense that this new phase would quickly pass, like a swarm of locusts. But it didn’t pass. It lasted a decade.

Dunstan was bold. He made changes that were far from popular, changes that split the city and divided families but nothing deterred him from his vision of making us the most advanced and civilised small city in the southern hemisphere.

He continued to be re-elected but only ever by a few seats and in the end it took a terrible toll on his health. He withstood vitriolic attacks on his background , his birth, his family, his sexuality and certainly his politics. But he never gave up.

Those 10 years in the 1970s provided a template for change that no political leader since has been bold enough to imitate. It takes guts and passion to be an agent of change and even those who loathed him and everything he stood for, were forced to admire his guts and his determination.

Unfortunately, once he left office, so did all those talented and creative thinkers who had followed him to this city.

The time is ripe for another leader of his courage and vision to recharge this city and make the changes that are necessary to take it into the current global world. We need another leader like Tom Playford or Don Dunstan, both of whom had the guts to act. In politics as in life, as in literature, character is action.

The only motto Adelaide’s leaders need to follow now is “Just Do It.”

Don’t dither and dick around.

Make a decision and act on it.

Don’t listen to the naysayers and the whiners, just plough on.

If you doubt that our city is not moribund, then please answer these questions.

How did we ever get a freeway that went only one way?

Why, when we were the first to have an Arts Festival, are we the last to make it annual?

Why have we taken so long to have a first class sporting facility at The Adelaide Oval?

Why have we taken 20 years to discuss changes to Victoria Square?

Why is Victoria Park being allowed to remain a wasteland?

Why is Port Adelaide still so undeveloped?

Why do we have new trams that go nowhere?

Why has the River Torrens and its banks remained so undeveloped?

These are just a few of the unanswered questions that I keep asking everyone since I recently returned to live in this city?

The State is booming, thanks to mining. Everywhere I visit, outside of the city, is full of individuals who have had the guts to start wonderful businesses in local produce like cheese and olive oil and wine and present fantastic food in all sorts of cafes and restaurants.

Nothing of this energy, initiative and enterprise is happening in the city where I have chosen to live. Why? Consider this an ongoing conversation.

Can somebody give me the answers? www.susanmitchell.com.au

Yes Susan, in two words Mike Rann!