Guarding the Heart and Soul of St.Kilda
This webpage is maintained by Cyndy Vogelsang on behalf of the Esplanade Alliance
There’s been a lot of talk lately about building communities. One way of doing this is to protect the places that are important to them - the places where people meet, where communities grow. Communities build around shared experiences and interests, and most involve a place: the local school, strip shopping centre, pub, footy ground, camping ground, theatre, park, music venue. Many of these are under threat. All places not put to ‘highest and best’ use are vulnerable.
In this age of footloose capital and hunger for new investment opportunities, and every place and experience, even unlikely targets such as trams, national parks and alternative subcultures, are potential products. Pressures on real estate and changing business practices are transforming the way we use and think about places. The problem is that the commercial market is not adept at handling the uncommon. To ensure economic viability, an experience must be made mainstream: customers must be increased, the product standardised, the prices raised. In maximising profit the commercial operator often destroys the very thing, the special quality, that made people care in the first place.
Strategies to protect places are limited. Heritage protection only protects the fabric of a place. There is growing recognition in the heritage profession of ‘cultural significance’, where use and meanings and associations are as important as architectural and/or natural significance, but protection of use is complex. There are no precedents in Australia for protection of a use of urban cultural significance.
Australian State planning systems do not deal well with cultural subtleties. State and local governments can control the size of a tourist development, for example, but not the tone or cost of accommodation. They have planning powers over broad changes of use - say from hotel to residential - but not over particular style of use. They are powerless, therefore, against a change of use from independent music venue to up-market resort hotel and restaurant, or a thumping disco meat-market.
Should it be otherwise? Would this not be a case of government intervention gone mad? Who’s to say what style to preserve, and whose culture matters most? In the absence of a clear answer to this question, it seems that protection of important places is left to the communities that love and use them. And in Australia at least, the only way to protect something is to own it.
In a quintessential expression of Peter Costello’s volunteerism, this is indeed what is happening. Faced with the sale of its beloved hotel, the St Kilda-based Esplanade Alliance established a not-for-profit cultural organisation, the Esplanade Hotel Foundation - to try to buy the Espy. Its purpose was to maintain the venue for original live music and refurbish the derelict upper floors for non-profit alternative cultural uses such as community radio, comedy stages and fringe arts studios.
To protect the beauty and tranquillity of St Helier’s convent and surrounds in Abbotsford, the Abbotsford Convent Coalition is raising public and philanthropic funds to purchase the site. In Clifton Hill a community group is organising to buy the House of the Gentle Bunyip with funds raised from residents and church-based groups to preserve the use as housing for young people on low-incomes or with psychiatric disabilities.
All three campaigns involve maintaining and expanding non-commercial activities, and devoting as much space as possible to non-profit, public uses. Even so, each has been required to pay market price for the property. In the case of the Esplanade, this meant competing for the hotel on the open market.
The Foundation bid involved well-established hoteliers in the running of the bars and kitchen. Tax-deductible public donations and philanthropic and government grants would finance the upstairs works and subsidise the non-profit tenancies. The timeframe and uncertainty of the tender process, however, gave the Alliance little choice but to delay the full-scale public fundraising effort until it won the tender. Careful calculations on borrowings allowed a community bid of $3.2 million.
But there was another hitch: the Espy was being sold on a 200-year leasehold, not freehold, meaning no access to the title. There was a great deal of support for the Foundation’s proposal, but translating this into an unsecured loan to a community-based organisation with no initial assets was tricky. Despite owner Becton’s pronouncements of support for the Espy’s alternative culture, the Corporation went to no lengths to assist the only form of ownership that would guarantee that culture’s survival.
What are the alternatives? Outright State or Council ownership, given the current political penchant for offloading assets, is becoming less of an option. Indeed, State Government and City of Port Phillip bureaucrats made it abundantly clear to the Esplanade Alliance that no government funds would contribute to the purchase of the Espy.
Public-private partnerships, a hallmark of the Blair/Bracks approach to public policy, offer a spectrum of ownership arrangements. The Esplanade Hotel Foundation could have secured additional financial backing by allowing a greater proportion of commercial activity in the hotel, but this approached a point beyond which the exercise became self-defeating.
For partnerships to work in some public interest, there must be recognition that non-profit uses will not generate the same financial returns as commercial uses, and that community bids will necessarily be lower. In order to receive the social returns of diversity, alternative culture, quiet green space in the middle of the city, humanity, equity and uncommon pleasures, community purchases must be assisted.
To the credit of the Bracks government, St Helier’s convent and the House of the Gentle Bunyip are likely to receive government funds, contributing to two interesting and different combinations of public/philanthropic/government /private partnership. Sadly, this opportunity has been missed on the Espy.
If this is the way we want to go, we need a shift in culture that encourages community partnerships. The shift will involve more government support, a more active philanthropic sector, and private companies engaging in regular acts of corporate citizenship. Otherwise, communities will continue to be dislocated, and the only safe places will be those that turn top dollar.
Kate Shaw is writing a PhD on urban cultural heritage at the University of Melbourne, and is a director of the Esplanade Hotel Foundation.
This webpage is maintained by Cyndy Vogelsang on behalf of the Esplanade Alliance