BACCHUS Marsh used to have a lion park.
Well, I reckon Ballarat could quite easily respond with our White Elephant tour.
For whatever reason, our fair town seems to have more than its fair share of white elephants - tourist attractions that are just a bit NQR, or run down, or never really hit the mark in the first place.
So, all aboard! Look out the windows at all our pale pachyderms. See the lake with virtually no water. Marvel at the medieval castle where the knights and knaves wear sneakers. Be amazed by our tribute to Australian democracy,
the Eureka Centre, where tourists exercise their democratic right to stay away.
Then we have Civic Hall. What a glorious mess that is. Even allowing for the council-as-tenant plan does anyone know what the hell is going on there? No longer a Civic Hall, and destined not to be a boutique retail extravaganza
either, the grand old building is now a not-so-grand perch for pigeons. Judging from recent photos, even the pigeons look neglected there.
Now that's not to say every tourist attraction in Ballarat is rubbish. We still have Sovereign Hill, the Art Gallery, Ex-Prisoner of War Memorial and the botanical gardens to save us.
There is no silver bullet with any of these white elephants.
Kryal Castle is a privately-owned concern, for example, and the owners have the right to do what they damned well please with it. The TV ads I've seen show they're trying to do something different, and good luck to them because
I have fond childhood memories of the place.
And Lake Wendouree? It seems everyone's had a crack at that one.
Civic Hall, on the other hand, remains an utter embarrassment. For a publicly-owned asset in such a central location to be left to run down and abandoned, it's nothing short of shameful.
Surely there is some use we can put the place to and, if there is, put some money into the place to give it some purpose?
At the other end of the scale is the Eureka Centre. How much time, effort and money has gone into making a stunning, professional-looking tourism centre that, due to its position off the main thoroughfares, is largely ignored by anyone other than school groups? Yes, I know it's at the site of the historic Eureka Stockade event itself but, if people ain't going there, what's the point?
Maybe the solution to those two white elephants is to mate the two together and, with a bit of hybrid vigour, create an entity with the strength of both.
Move the Eureka Centre and all its paraphernalia, along with the tourism info centre, into part of Civic Hall. Spend the money that would be used to promote the current centre on doing up the rest of the old girl so it once again
can be a community hall. Put some life back into both.
As for the site of the Eureka Stockade itself, why can't it just be a park with a memorial? If that's good enough for Gettysburg, where tens of thousands died over a few days, it's good enough for Eureka.
Maybe it's all too hard. Maybe neither Civic Hall or the Eureka Centre can be fixed. But if something's not working and nothing changes, well nothing changes - and right now, that's the elephant in the room.
You know I'm right about this.
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