Welcome to the landmark 400th episode of The Adelaide Show! This week, we’re celebrating a significant milestone with a special guest, Lord Mayor, Dr Jane Lomax-Smith AM. Our discussion delves into the challenges and opportunities of balancing heritage preservation with modern development in Adelaide, especially in the face of growing pressures to modernise historical sites.

Oh, and does Steve Davis sneak into the Adelaide Town Hall and play the famous pipe organ?

The SA Drink of the Week segment is a fitting tribute to Adelaide’s history, because we sip a beverage connected to Colonel William Light, the city’s founder. Join us as we explore the historical and cultural significance of this choice in a lively and insightful taste test.

And in the Musical Pilgrimage, we round out our celebration, with The Saucermen performing a song that resonates with the themes of heritage and progress.

Join us for this milestone episode as we blend history, music, and community conversation, marking eleven years of showcasing the passions that shape South Australia.

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The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.

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Running Sheet: Balancing Heritage And Progress With The Adelaide Lord Mayor

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:03:50 SA Drink Of The Week

The SA Drink Of The Week this week is a Penfolds Club Port.

This was chosen because I had recently met the Lord Mayor at Colonel William Light’s birthday celebration at the Adelaide Town Hall, an annual event since 1859 that honours Adelaide’s founder. On April 27 each year, a group of people invited by the Lord Mayor, commemorate Light’s influence on the city’s layout with Australian Port, symbolically drunk from a historic silver bowl. Curiously, though, we each had separate slices of a special fruit cake and separate glasses of wine instead of sharing from the bowl. I asked the Lord Mayor why that was?

00:10:03 Adelaide Lord Mayor, Dr Jane Lomax-Smith AM

Here we are, crafting a very special 400th episode of The Adelaide Show, where we’ve been shining a spotlight on South Australia’s passionate people for 11 intriguing years. Today, we’re joined by Lord Mayor Dr Jane Lomax-Smith AM, at a time when the echoes of Adelaide’s pioneering spirits are being tested by the drumbeats of modern development. Together, we’ll delve into how we can cherish and protect our city’s rich heritage while steering towards progressive change, a topic sparked by the recent uproar over The Cranker’s near-demolition. Dr. Lomax-Smith brings a wealth of experience from her dual roles as a former state minister and our current Lord Mayor, promising insights that bridge our past with the future. Welcome.

This interview has extra signficance for me because it completes the trifecta of having had three Lord Mayors (everything inside me wants to say Lords Mayor) on our podcast. Stephen Yarwood got the ball rolling by drawing the ire of Peter Goers who lambasted him and us and gave us some profile, then Martin Haese was part of the program, playing some guitar, too, and today we have the honour of your company as we mark this milestone episode. What is it like, being in a role that is often called upon to mark special occasions and anniversaries, even though such things are purely arbitrary?

When we began this podcast enterprise in 2013, we were motivated by the ubiquitous, lazy linking of Adelaide with the word, boring. We fought a strong fight and discovered that much of that slander had diminished by episode 80, which is when we marked our transition from Another Boring Thursday Night In Adelaide to our current name of The Adelaide. Do you think we have shaken off that connection? Do you find it still lingers?

A psychologist we interviewed, Alexandra Frost from Attuned Psychology, noted that people are largely in control of how “boring” their surroundings are. You could be just as bored in New York as Adelaide, if you stayed in your room and moped about. On the other hand, I often find that some of the criteria used to judge a city boring, relate to a desperate need for artificial, external stimulation, rather than taking responsibility for finding intrinsinc motivation for engaging with one’s surroundings. Furthermore, sometimes unique character gets marked down in the race to have the same stimuli that other towns have. How does a town craft and “own” confidence in its own skin?

At Colonel Light’s birthday celebration, you spoke passionately about the need to get the balance right between preservation and progress. What criteria do you believe should be used to determine which older buildings in Adelaide are worth preserving?

The recent controversy surrounding The Cranker has highlighted tensions between heritage preservation and urban development. What lessons can be learned from this situation?

I’ve performed stand up comedy at The Cranker, so it has a soft spot for me but many of us are not quite ready to relax about its future, given the risks of “accidental damage” during construction, such as the potential for a wrecking ball to inadvertently damage a heritage building. This is the dilemma for people protecting heritage vs developers – once we have lost what was there it is gone, whereas a developer can easily rebuild or reshape their construction. Is this just an age old source of anxiety that heritage proponents just have to live with?

Prepare yourself. This will be the longest question ever constructed: The Cranker is special to me because I have performed there. The old Bank Of Adelaide building was special because my dad and grandpa worked on it with their business, Field and Davis Constructions (in fact, my dad, Barry Davis, tells me he swung in there one Saturday afternoon and installed the three flag poles on the roof, all by himself). Other parts are or have been significant because we might have seen The Beatles wave from a balcony, or a premiership team parade through streets, etc. I wonder if we can reflect on the ephemeral nature of what it means to protect heritage items. This question hit me while listening to US comedian and commentator, Bill Maher, interview some children and he was surprised that very few of them had even heard of Elvis Presley and almost none of them thought there was any reason to be interested in his story. So, when we pass on, the connection between our lived experience and The Beatles on a balcony, passes on too, either with us, or when our following generation passes on. Deep in the DNA of the Heritage Inclination, is there a sense that we are vainly trying to fight the realisation that time and memories pass quickly, like sand through our fingers, and that, ultimately, it is a losing battle or one of little everlasting value because nothing is everlasting?

Would you indulge me in an imagination exercise? There was once a majestic building on the corner of Rundle Street and Frome Road called the Grand Central Hotel, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and many other illuminaries stayed during visits to Adelaide. It was built in 1910 on the site of the former York Hotel and was demolished in 1975-76 to make way for the Hungry Jacks car park. How would that part of the city be different today, had that building been maintained? And, yes, we could play this game with many other buildings; I’d just love to hear you think out loud about this.

The nature of city-based employment and engagement does seem to be fast-paced, head down, etc, which is why traversing these streets in the extremes of temperature can be trying. I am often reminded of Lovin’ Spoonful’s lyrics:

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck gettin’ dirty and gritty
Been down, isn’t it a pity?
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city
All around, people lookin’ half dead
Walkin’ on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

When we are in commuter, survival mode, I guess we just don’t have head space for appreciating the environment. But, have our town planners and landlords also gotten some things wrong by not providing for human spaces between the buildings?

Scientists tell us that just being surrounded by greenery in nature, actively helps calm our nervous systems. Do you think there’s a subliminal effect we get from built environs?

If someone is thinking about moving to the city to live, what sort of mindset would allow them to benefit the most from city life and contribute the most?

00:44:03 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage, we feature Valley of the Rattling Bones by The Saucermen.

We’ve previously played The Saucermen right back in our early days with One Day Dry in episode 13, and The Ghost Of Johnny Cash in episode 28.

In 2004, The Saucermen released their first original EP “Valley of the Rattling Bones”, penned by the lead singer and rhythm guitarist, Steve O’Malley, and and inspired by a co-worker’s warning. It set the wheels in motion for the band to write more original tunes. The guys love this song and love playing it and I think it fits for this episode because you could argue that Adelaide, like any city that’s been around for a while, is a valley of bones, to some degree, when you consider all the people whose lives have intersected with it. And, secondly, we’ve just been talking about how some of our early buildings have really stood the test of time and this song is a musical equivalent of that. Hope you enjoy it.

And if you hear this in time, you can catch The Saucermen (along with Weekend Rage and The Overits) on Saturday, August 31 at The Cranker. Tickets via Try Booking.

You can follow The Saucermen on MySpace and Facebook.