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November 3, 2007
This issue of Artlink explores the new Brisbane---the Creative City leading the Smart State. The contemporary ethos of creative Brisbane is deemed comparable to Adelaide's cultural renaissance under Don Dunstan. In 'New Brisbane' Stuart Glover and Stuart Cunningham state:
Brisbane's coming of age has been announced a number of times: with the 1982 Commonwealth Games; with World Expo 1988; with the fall of Joh and the National Party in 1989; in the city's re-invention in the 1990s as the ironically cool Brisvegas; and, most lately, with millennial-expansiveness, in its claim to be the Creative City leading the Smart State. Over the past 15 years as the city has spawned new enterprises, a new generation of artists, new cultural policies, new public buildings, and a new sense of grace - alongside a chump-ish, crowing self-satisfaction. It has also spawned new narratives about itself. Only from time-to-time does the city capture the national gaze, but local media and the state and local government regularly present Brisbane as a city transforming upon a number of axis: artistic, cultural, economic, governmental and lifestyle. These changes are sometimes seen as a party to globalisation and to global change, and other times unique to the city's own 'maturation'.
The narrative is one of the Creative city being born out of the cultural wasteland that was Queensland'. The 'Smart State' brand signifies the shift in the state's skill base from a mix of agricultural production, mining and services (including tourism) towards knowledge products and information services.
Though the Beattie Government's Smart State platform concentrated on bio-tech, it also embraces the cultural and creative industries sectors as part of the Smart State mix.
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Gary
re Adelaide's cultural renaissance under Don Dunstan. It slowly died in the 1980s under the John Bannon Labor Government, and was killed off the State Bank collapse at the end of the boom and Keating's recession.
SA can hardly be called a smart state and Adelaide is not a creative city. The cultural renaissance was followed by the cultural desert.