I’m Leaving was the exhibition essay for I get it, you moved to Melbourne Adelaide Fringe 2020. Part op-ed, part memoir, it explores the reasons young people jump cities. Scroll through the PDF booklet below or read the plain text following.
I get it, you moved to Melb... by Tahney Alexandra May on Scribd
I am not from Adelaide
Born in a town by a blue lake
At ten months, walking
A new sun-bleached town.
the river was dirty.
I wasn’t allowed to swim in it,
I couldn’t swim anyway.
Schooled on five-acres,
Smelly tank turned seeds to towers
Sunday friends, proverbial preachers:
Jesus bled, the Beatles are evil, you’re a whore.
17 strangled by tote bags
One Adelaide bus
four hours, home-to-campus
A metro, my cousins for sleep.
One week, coming home
It was in boxes, that was it.
I haven’t seen that town since.
I don’t remember that year
In the town in the hills
Before I left without boxes.
3 months on, a first share house
3 musicians & a stunt artist.
My breath in a bed that’d collapse.
HECS let me go
to Bristol with Sara and Sara
at Jen’s. Cooking cod, mashy peas
Until she ran in front of a bus.
Back to Adelaide
crept to my degree’s end
in a rental with no hot water
and a housemate who never cleaned.
A graduate, in an inner-city unit
writing lists, laying on the floor
the lights off. Over and over.
fell off my bike, inertia hit.
Over and over.
A desk job where I
microwaved water.
Then, an email:
Your application was successful.
That was it- I drove away, I can leave.
Adelaide wasn’t home.
Maybe Melbourne could be.
I sit down at a cafe, my feet swollen from shopping around the city. A photographer asks if he can take my photo for his ‘People of Adelaide’ project. For some reason, I say yes, and then text my sister, who is running late because the city’s public transport system is… a joke. It’s Christmas holidays, the city centre is busier than usual, but I am still one of the only people at this cute French cafe. A guy a few tables down boasts to his silent friends about all the Japanese cafes popping up in Melbourne.
It’s short trips home like this that force rumination on why I was so eager to leave: Adelaide made me feel useless, in turn, I told the city it was inadequate.
At 19, after only four months of living in Adelaide following a regional childhood, I spent a semester abroad at the University of Bristol. I was exposed to a city that was at once vibrant and accessible, somewhere I could satisfy both my ambitions and whims. Not long after returning, Adelaide became claustrophobic, without a cranny unexplored. Feeling limited, I moved to Melbourne and my world once again widened.
My itchy feet were rubbed the wrong way and I was out of there as soon as I could find a reason (a master’s course). Meanwhile, friends and family stayed rooted, warmed up to a life within its boundaries, seemingly satisfied by Adelaide’s offerings. At first, I was judgemental, taking them as unambitious, while I gripped onto adventure. I no longer believe that naive narrative; it’s not that adventurous to move state. It’s about necessity. Still, I am not entirely positive about Adelaide, I am bitter about our incompatibility.
The next day, I meet up with a friend at a cafe. She moved to Brisbane after her divorce but is also home for the holidays. Her new partner is amused at Adelaide’s quaintness but empathetic to how people could get stuck in a rut here. She tells him, ‘Well, yeah, living here is bad for your mental health.’
Rut is synonymous with complacency and almost resembles the satisfaction I feel three years after the thrill of my Melbourne move. Currently, I am cuddled up to many happy familiars: I love my cottage rental with its graffiti laneway, daily runs down Merri Creek, the same cafes on lazy Sunday mornings. Yet, I couldn’t maintain this calm content with the anxiety of a lacklustre future. In Melbourne, my contentment comes with rewarded ambition. In Adelaide, my ambition was frustrated, warping fulfillment.
I am swung by personal bias- the opportunities in Melbourne are vital to my career. If I stayed in Adelaide, I would have been in a rut. Yet, it’s not only my personal preference, it’s also endemic. The city repels hordes of young, creative people.
‘For years, South Australia has faced an almost insurmountable problem — the lure of Melbourne,’ writes ABC journalist Rebecca Puddy. For some time, Adelaide has experienced population loss from interstate migration, around a third 20-35-year-olds moving to Victoria. Coined the ‘brain drain,’ there are fewer young people living in South Australia now than in the 1980s with BusinessSA surmising, ‘One of South Australia’s most valuable exports is, sadly, our young people’ and premier Steven Marshall concluding, ‘A lot of our best and brightest younger people just don’t see a future here in South Australia.’
You don’t need to look further than the clichés: Adelaide is boring, a sleepy country town stuck in the 1980s. With the second-to-worst economy in the country and rising unemployment, the ‘brain drain’ is not a short-term problem. The young and starry-eyed will leave permanently, dissatisfaction pushing them to seek lifestyles and job prospects ‘bigger than Adelaide’ (demographer Bernard Salt) in Melbourne. Sam Rodgers, in his blog Leaving Adelaide, noted that amongst his friends that had left, one had written an excel spreadsheet with 150 reasons prompting the move.
Yet, every now and again, perplexed Melbourne friends ask me, ‘Why did you leave? Adelaide is such an artsy city. Surely, you could have found work?’ These people, like those who think Hobart is an arts centre because of MONA, are overthinking the power of Adelaide’s pride and joy- Mad March.
Mad March encompasses Adelaide’s condensed, frenzied festival season. It began 60 years ago with Adelaide Festival, an innovation at a time when, ‘the city only had one motel, pubs closed at six and hedonists couldn’t order wine in restaurants after 8pm.’
Now, there are around a dozen festivals, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars and tourists en masse. It’s a time near and dear to local hearts, mine included.
After four weeks of late-night wine in the balmy parklands, seeing sideshows in tents or laughing at street performers, the international acts and visitors empty out. The tumbleweeds return, leaving you square in the face of the city’s actual economic and creative vitality.
As a student and then a fresh graduate with my eye on an arts career, the festival incubator felt phony. At the crescendo of the festival season at summer’s end, theatre nerds and Clipsal 500 bogans sat shoulder to shoulder at pubs. Yet, keen festival goers were nowhere to be seen at other times of the year. The condensed excitement bothered me to no end- why couldn’t it be spread out?
Overworking Mad March in lieu of ironing events into a year-long cultural calendar damages the community’s support of the arts and, therefore, the city’s ability to retain creative professionals. My creative friends constantly complain that most festival acts are international, rather than a showcase of Adelaide talent. These friends, artists and performers with talent far reaching beyond my skills, tell me of how they tried earnestly in Adelaide, showcasing their gifts and energy, but received little support in return. The city slept on them. They wanted to stay but had no choice but to leave. On the flipside, some international Fringe performers have criticized the city’s faux support of the arts, labelling local audiences as entitled and lazy with a poor attitude- and discourage other creative professionals from working in Adelaide. The local arts industry is suffering.
According to Rob Brookman, artistic director of the Adelaide Festival and founder of Womadelaide, milking the vibrancy of the festival season beyond March is too much for Adelaide to handle. He thinks an extended arts calendar will cause burn out. Basically, Adelaide can support the arts for one month, then not show up again for another eleven.
While Adelaide could host a month-long festival bender, I quickly looked beyond the smoke and mirrors toward the city’s actual economic and social appetite for the arts that I required for a nourishing arts career. This festered into distrust in my city’s ability to value me, especially at a time I hardly valued myself. I needed to go elsewhere to find my feet.
I moved to Melbourne. As the cultural capital of Australia, I hardly need to gild the lily. Amongst my circles, I probably can count local Melbourners on one hand. We have all moved here from across Australia and the world for similar reasons– a fruitful career in the arts or other competitive industries. Melbourne has one of the world’s highest densities of art galleries- among these, one of the most visited art galleries in the world. Art infiltrates everyday life and, at times, I can no longer tell the difference between my work and social lives. It’s reciprocal: the city is hungry for creativity, keeping us emerging arts workers hustling. It’s wonderful to grow into my professional legs by nourishing this hunger- rather struggling for scraps in Adelaide.
Creatives clustering isn’t unique to the Adelaide to Melbourne route. An idea first popularised by Richard Florida, a creative city is an economic and demographic equation. If a city attracts powerful service providers, especially big names in the finance, advertising and business sectors, more knowledge workers will congregate, inclusive of innovative creative industries. Knowledge workers, across these industries, in close proximity with one another, perpetuate urban density, stimulating access and sharing of ideas. With such clustering comes support and ambition to deliver ideas, elevating a vibrancy that is attractive to others looking for an inspired community.
It’s psychological, too. My Melbourne relocation was largely influenced by its liberal secularism; I was emotionally drained by Adelaide’s prying religious eyes and stuffy worldviews.
Florida argues creative clustering occurs because creative people are open to new experiences and averse to small-town mentalities. They relocate to metropolitan areas, where cultural stimulation, foreign-born residents and the gay index is high (many of my queer peers say moving to Melbourne made life easier for them).
Although SA was the first state to decriminalise homosexuality, ban plastic bags and allow women to vote (a holy trifecta?), Victoria now takes the progressive front seat. At 14, during my first visit to Melbourne, my stifled quirky soul was enamoured as I witnessed people in bizarre outfits against a backdrop of vegan cafes and graffiti lanes.
Ten years later, I enjoy the physical and psychological benefits of Melbourne’s creative cluster. My circles – all knowledge workers- are joint by shared ambitions rather than Adelaide’s binder of the same highschool and, also, living within walking distance of our Brunswick rentals. Together, we attend films, exhibitions, gigs, theatre, followed by wine, chatting about what we’ve seen, what we want from our world and how we want to be part of it. This environment makes me feel inspired, supported and rewarded on the regular.
As the British Council describes, ‘When a diverse group of talented people intermingle in one place at the same time, creative magic can happen.’ The risk is, of course, gentrification (that’s another conversation) but the reward is a dynamic public collective providing critical mass of ideas, skills and opinions. Within this, artistic people have their vision encouraged by their immediate community.
In contrast to such an organic arts ecosystem, a short festival stint can’t support a well-rounded creative culture. Inhibitive and constrained attitudes repel the creative class and make a city’s soul stagnant, as observed by Adelaide-based critic Ben Brooker in Artshub, ‘the city’s festival mentality… conservative, mistrust of professional, and especially innovative, work; and the old boy networks [that] continue to circumscribe too much of Adelaide’s arts and culture.’
As it stands, it’s convenient to take an 800km plunge to one of the world’s most creative cities. Yet, I often feel like the pettiest, weakest thing to do was leave rather than support my home city. It’s positive that grassroots initiatives, like Carclew’s employment program for young creative people to train, collaborate and support each other as they establish themselves in the arts industry, are building a supportive network with a shared vision. But by yourself, you can’t revolutionise a jaded community. As ExAdders commented on Rodger’s blog, ‘I reached the point where I realized I could work until I was 75 to try to ‘lift up’ Adelaide so it might be a culturally interesting place to live. But what about your own stuff? You have to have an allegiance to that.’
According to the Guardian, Adelaide simply has a marketing problem for 11 months of the year- it’s just not showing you it’s best hand! I’ve been told many times about Adelaide’s underground scene, but I refuse to dig. The arts aren’t a subculture. But the Guardian is right, Adelaide could build upon what it’s already got. Basic accessibility and infrastructure development, such as improved public transport and extended opening hours, would allow people to congregate and enjoy the arts.
Another suggestion floating around is to mirror a city like Portland, understanding a small city can flourish by ‘carving out their own niche based mostly on supporting local creatives and celebrating the ‘weirdness’ of the city.’ Leaning into its intimate geography and population-size, Adelaide could blend its intimacy with artistic vibrancy, while keeping the big apples of Sydney and Melbourne at an arm’s length.
Yet, this change is hardly possible with current hard-line government approaches. In 2018, Adelaide’s new Liberal State Government dismantled the state arts department. They relocated responsibility of key arts organisations to the Department of Industry and Skills and the Department of Education, and cut $4.9 million, making almost half of Arts SA staff redundant.
At local level, the Adelaide City Council quickly discourages creative initiatives, like relocating hugely popular Royal Croquet Club from the city centre to the outskirts so older generations in the CBD could sleep.
Australia’s government already devalues the arts. If this doesn’t push creative professionals internationally to achieve recognition for their skills and passion, they are left with little choice but to stick to the most supported artistic communities, rather than simultaneously fight both state and federal disadvantage.
After dismantling the arts department, the Marshall Government tried to patch things up with the Arts and Culture Plan 2019-2024– the first major review of South Australian arts and culture in twenty years. Although one recommendation was to ensure that the sector thrives throughout the year, they also stuck their head in the sand with statements like ‘Adelaide is an excellent place for artists’ and that they would ‘not make recommendations requiring significant additional government expenditure.’
In contrast, a report by multinational professional services network Deloitte took a more transparent, albeit idealistic, stance. Some solutions are fluffy: stop belittling Adelaide and increase the population to 2 million by 2027. Yet, they note a necessity to improve industry ambition, such as the creative industry focusing on locally grown talent instead of international acts during festival season. From their perspective, such ambition can only be achieved by retaining young people:
For many years, too many young South Australians have left seeking better futures interstate and overseas. They leave with degrees from some of the world’s top universities. They take with them their skills, their innovative ideas and their passion. They leave our festivals, our wine regions and our affordable living – and most importantly, their family and friends. And yet they still go. This needs to change. We need to make a compelling case to young South Australians that you can have a successful future in Adelaide. That we’re a small city with big opportunities. That people who stay can make it big, and that people who leave are missing out.
You can’t sidestep out of a rut; you need to climb out of it. You can’t convince people about their bright future in Adelaide without recognising barriers that make it hard to stay. People aren’t leaving because Melbourne is shinier than Adelaide – it’s because Adelaide actively undercuts them.
Keeping the young and creative will be a lot easier if they felt like they were valued by their immediate environment and supported by a critical mass; a motivated, vibrant community willing to support an upward, dynamic career. When Mad March is over, it’s the responsibility of all to show up and not leave the arts, and its people, behind. Attitude change, alongside adaptations to current infrastructure and policy, is required to foster community patronage of the arts. I don’t know whether this begins with the dismantling of the age-old complaint about Australia’s cultural cringe or tall poppy syndrome (I digress, I’m only going to be abstract and idealistic with my solutions). It’s not about being the best, merely better, to give reason to devote ideas and talent to home, rather than booking flights to Melbourne out of desperation and isolation.
It’s a reciprocal betrayal or commitment. Perhaps, through a cumulation of change, appetite will be whet for the arts year round, the arts will stop being pushed into the corner, edge toward self-confidence and elevate Adelaide as a creative place. As confidence grows and art is incorporated into the fabric of daily life, the give-and-take of consuming arts and supporting artistic labour itself will be established. With solidarity comes sustainability and, at some point, creative people will cluster with explosive ideas rather than leave, and the city can thrive in partnership with its people.
As it stands, it’s a catch-22. In his blog, Rodgers summarised Adelaide’s dichotomy well, ‘It’s a Sisyphean task to create sustainable cultural infrastructure for a demographic that’s predisposed to not staying to enjoy it. And because there are small to no audiences, older, family-focussed types stuck in government bureaucracy aren’t going to help enable that culture, if they’re aware of it at all.’
A few years ago, I looked to anchor my restless mind in a meaningful future. I craved a public that celebrated and supported creativity, indicating the possibility of a sustainable career. Without that, I couldn’t justify staying.
Adelaide is no longer my home. It’s not my right to claim quick fixes or diagnose its needs. I can only outline the roots of my dissatisfaction. Living there, I feared missing out and wasting my mind. I couldn’t wait for the world to come to me. However, I wish I had more choice.
This text accompanies I get it, you moved to Melbourne, a pop-up social museum scrutinising Adelaide’s brain drain.
Sat 29 February – Sun 1 March
10am-5pm @ the Chapel, Migration Museum
Wed 4 – Sat 7 March
12:30pm-7:30pm @ the Tunnels, the Lion Hotel
Curated by Tahney Fosdike
Featuring John Frith, Jenny Allnut, Grace Harper, Julia Derwas, Chelsea Birrane, Alexandra Dobson, Abbey Witcombe, Will Preece, Amalia Krueger and Angus Hamra.
With special thanks to Adelaide Fringe, Jeffrey Frith, University of Melbourne Archives, State Library of South Australia, National Library of Australia, Mount Gambier Library, History Trust of South Australia and the Lion Hotel.
In partnership with Adelaide Fringe Festival 2020