Now with Beer Garden for our smoking patrons.
From Indaily:
Underground tour guides make their mark
Monday, 20 August 2012
Liam Mannix
Banjo Weatherald, unruly brown hair covered by a blue-and-purple knitted beanie, is standing on the corner of Hindley and Morphett St.
“It’s named after Charles Hindley, who was a minister in Lancashire,” Banjo says.
“He became sick one day, and his doctor prescribed him three pints of whiskey over 72 hours (1.5 litres).
“He died.”
Banjo points down Hindley St.
“If you want to get drunk in Adelaide, this is the place to come.”
Banjo, along with close friends and former bandmates Jamie Wetherell and Mark Williams, is behind a bold new startup with a radical new take on city tours.
For two months now DoAdelaide tours have been giving people an insight into Adelaide’s underground scene.
Tourists are escorted around Adelaide’s many pieces of legal and illegal graffiti and street art. The tour treks through several of Adelaide’s laneways and includes visits to a laneway microbrewery and a thriving arts collective. There’s also a good dose of colourful history thrown in.
The tour guides are clearly experts in Adelaide’s underground history. Banjo himself seems to be on personal terms with many of Adelaide’s street graffiti artists, and recounts the stories behind several less-prominent artworks.
When the party arrives at the ‘free wall’ under the Morphett St bridge, Banjo hands out spray cans to everyone and conducts a quick lesson in tagging – all part of the DoAdelaide experience.
“There’s a need for this,” Banjo says. “There’s so much going on in Adelaide and so many don’t even know about it who live here, let alone tourists.
“There’s definitely lots going on here to be proud of and excited about.”
The tours are constantly evolving as the tour guides learn more about the city.
Perhaps the most unique part of the tour is when everyone is led into the Pilgrim Uniting Church’s lunch room in Flinders St.
“The first few tours we lost a lot of people because the blood sugar levels dropped so much, cause we’d go for three hours. Then I discovered the church with the free tea,” Banjo says.
Amongst the priest and congregation, everyone sits down for a chat and a free cup of tea courtesy the church’s lunch room.
Banjo says since he started DoAdelaide he’s become more excited about what Adelaide has to offer.
“It’s been an eight-week massive journey of learning. It just comes out of being interested.
“By our enthusiasm of the history of places, people open up.
“Everywhere has their own stories, and every kind of layer we went down we were like, oh my god, these streets have stories.
“You’re open to your own city.”
DoAdelaide was dreamed up while Banjo’s band was suffering from an existential crisis.
“We had a little kind of a crisis. I’m a musician, and we played this one gig, and the whole van of [band] gear got stolen.
“The next day the guy who left the van unlocked called me up, and was like, hey man, I’ve been thinking about it, we should start doing tours. I was like – yes!”
The guys originally planned to use the tours to make money to buy new instruments, but due to a donation-only policy and the cost of spray paint they’re currently running them at a loss.
“Maybe the original idea was to start a business that was going to make money, but we quickly learned it’s not going to be about that at all, but it’s just a great exciting idea.”
The group runs four tours a week, and reckon they’ve put through about 200 people in the last two months. They recently had their largest tour group of 30 people book in.
That’s all despite almost no advertising. There are a few posters and a Facebook page, but most of the promotion comes from the tour guides heading to the city’s backpackers hostels and telling tourists about the event.
“There’s quite a clear pattern of people who come to Adelaide, and almost write it off as a day to catch up on Facebook. They’re in transit.
“They’re either coming here to go to KI for a couple of days, and then they stay for 24 hours, then they go to Ayres Rock next day, and then they’ll go to Melbourne.
“Let’s try to get these people and show them an avenue to embrace it a bit.”
(so sneaky). I also saw heaps of Jacob's creek adverts and Coopers Pale Ale adverts in various pubs I went to. I was pretty stoked 