Challenge

Everyone in the community has a story about this place. We were engaged to look at upgrading the existing facilities, and incorporating new program at the same time. And to do it in a way that would be as supported and loved by the community as it is now, even with all its flaws.

Response

We collaborated with John O’Callaghan Consulting to undertake extensive and actually really fun community engagement. We chatted with people at Ag Quip, the states largest agricultural field day, we chatted in the street, we chatted in the pub. We ran workshops with school kids, councillors and interested member of the community.

We heard a lot of stories.

A lot of them seemed to involve this cramped and unlovely service space outside the Town Hall, between the theatre and the community hall. It was literally a ‘everyone is in the kitchen at parties’ situation. The event was inside the town hall, but the real action was out in the alley. We took this as a cue and have proposed a masterplan that makes a gracious but unpretentious public courtyard in the centre of the cultural precinct. It is more than double the size and doesn’t have the garbage bins or the toilets in it anymore but we think people will still want to hang out there in between the events.