I had a look at the 'City of Adelaide' at the Port today.
I was disappointed to hear that the custodians of various tourism assets at the Port still can't get their heads around the idea of working together towards a common goal of making Port Adelaide a decent tourist attraction.
The problem is that the City of Adelaide ship people consider the SA Maritime Museum their deadly competition, and vice versa. Kevin Jones, the director of the initially innovative Maritime Museum has fought the City of Adelaide ship project every step of the way. He is worried that the ship will take government funding from his museum, and that if successful, the ship would steal his customers.
Similarly, the 'ship people' want nothing go do with the Maritime Museum, or with the historic inner Port precinct at the heart of which the Maritime Museum sits.
The ship people identify more with Semaphore, and don't even mark the inner Port historic precinct or Maritime Museum on their maps. In fact, the ship's promoters want to build their own reproduction historic port precinct, never mind the real one just across the river. Suck it up, Kevin Jones!
This is from the city of Adelaide web site:
"Fletcher's Slip, with the world's oldest clipper ship City of Adelaide as the star attraction, would make an excellent outdoor/indoor exhibit, and maritime educational and activity centre. We plan to bring the City of Adelaide back to Port Adelaide and establish the clipper as part of such an outdoor Seaport Village, desirably alongside other Adelaide maritime treasures such as the ketch Falie and tug-lighter Nelcebee. The heritage Fletchers Slip is a potential site for such a Seaport Village. The surviving bilge-stone buildings of Fletcher's Slip form a cloistered courtyard around the head of the slip.
A Seaport Village is an experiential education tourist destination where a colonial seaport is recreated so that the visitor can step back in time. It offers ‘sense of place’ and ‘sense of time’ attributes, together with ‘clamber over’, ‘hands-on’ and ‘minds-on’ activities. The cloistered heritage courtyard of Fletcher's Slip offers an excellent 'step back in time' venue. The Seaport Village concept is much like the Mystic Seaport - "The Museum of America and the Sea" in Connecticut, USA. In the Australian context, it is much like Sovereign Hill at Ballarat - but focussed on the marine trades instead of the gold trades."
"'The cloistered heritage courtyard' of Fletcher's Slip is code for the fact that the area is completely surrounded by buildings or a massive 12 metre tilt-slab wall. The entire tourist attraction off the make-believe Seaport Village would have to exist out of sight behind the wall and buildings - but what a commercial advantage that will give!
The near invisibility, say the ship's promoters, will give the ship and Seaport Village a huge advantage as a tourist attraction, with none of the terrible problems the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, has being so visible. People will be so much more willing, say the promoters, to buy tickets for an attraction they can't see. The public are put off buying tickets to visit the Cutty Sark, they allege, because they can see its 'vast scale' from public places. The Cutty Sark would raise more revenue, say the City of Adelaide promoters, if visitors had to be 'enticed into a cloistered environment' to see any of it.
They must be joking, you'd think, but it's all there on the City of Adelaide website.
http://cityofadelaide.org.au/the-projec ... -slip.html
I bet the Cutty Sark's tragic visibility and unfortunate 'vast scale' has not put off any of the City of Adelaide team from visiting the restored tea clipper.
'Lionel', from the City of Adelaide team, told me that the City of Adelaide ship was a private project managed by six directors, who wanted nothing to do with the government.
A great start.
I've worked on the Gloucester Docks tourism area in the UK, for the Gloucester City Council architect's office, and I've worked at Mystic Seaport in the US. I have also managed the Rundle Street East End traders association. In each of these places, the idea of different attractions working together was paramount, whether they were buildings and boats, pubs, restaurants and shops or whatever.
The Gloucester Docks and Mystic Seaport succeeded admirably with government help and goodwill, and by cooperating with other nearby attractions. Rundle Street works best when the traders see themselves as parts of a whole.
I suggest that the City of Adelaide ship project will work a lot better if it is planned and operated together with the other attractions in the area, not jealously separated from other venues etc which are considered to be 'competition'.
The real competition for the City of Adelaide ship, and the Maritime Museum, is not each other, but the Barossa Valley, the Fleurieu Peninsula, the North Tce cultural precinct etc. For the Maritime Museum and the ship to pretend the other doesn't exist because one might take funding or visitors from the other is blind, stupid and I reckon, commercially suicidal.
Check out this location map from the City of Adelaide website. Location of the Maritime Museum? The Port Adelaide historic precinct? Not a mention. Incredibly, to the City of Adelaide ship promoters, those entities are 'the enemy', with the ship promoters hoping to build their own, fake 'historic seaport village' at the Fletcher's Slip site while they refuse to acknowledge the real historic port a few hundred metres away. The ship promoters even go to great lengths to tie the ship to Semaphore Road and Fort Glanville!
??? Is there anyone involved here with any expertise in tourism? It seems unlikely. And as for TourismSA, they gave up considering the Port a tourist draw decades ago, dolphins and wrecks aside.
I innocently suggested to 'Lionel' that it might be a great thing if the former dock at the river end of Commercial Road were re-excavated and the ship placed in there,wet or dry, as a centrepiece to the historic Port, with the restored Customs House on one side, maybe as apartments and tourist accommodation, and pubs and cafés on the other side, with people able to walk around and on the ship. His response was that the ship was going to Fletcher's Dock, well outside the Port Adelaide historic precinct and that was that.
I asked 'Why isolate it from the Port's other historic tourism attractions?'. Lionel reiterated that the directors had made their decision, that I was being negative, and told me, not very politely, to go away.
It seems that the six directors of the private City of Adelaide venture and the very long serving director of the Maritime Museum, Kevin Jones, are as bad as each other in their refusal to recognise reality. They are each prepared to sacrifice the future of their 'baby' rather than work with each other.
'We will never have anything to do with them (the state's Maritime Museum),' say the City of Adelaide people, and 'The ship is our competition,' says the Maritime Museum.
Until they fix that little problem, and get a few people on board each venture who have some common sense, the futures they fondly imagine for themselves will never happen, I suggest.
Bluntly, the management of the Maritime Museum and the City of Adelaide ship need to be working with each other, not against each other.
