Bellingen Shire branding strategy seeks to capture the spirit of our place

Anna Fisher and John Morse said harsher connotations of the term have come up a few times while they've been holding discussions with the community about the Bellingen Shire Branding Project.

"Because John and I have been raised in design and marketing, to us it doesn't have that negative feel," Anna said. "You have brand values, brand attributes, brand personality - these are positive things. But I do understand this issue with the word."

They explain a destination brand as the physical, emotional and spiritual elements that identify a place in people's minds.

"It's what visitors think of a place, and importantly, what we think of ourselves. In Bellingen Shire, this is something that should be guided and managed by the community - otherwise, it will be done for us by outsiders.".

Bellingen Shire Council withdrew from its tourism marketing relationship with Coffs Harbour City Council in 2019 and has now embarked on a project to create a destination brand that is 100 per cent Bellingen Shire.

Anna Fisher has been given the job of leading a local team that includes John Morse AM, artist Brentyn Lugnan and designers Lisa Daley and Dee Crichton.

Anna is a partner in Fisher Design + Architecture, but she's a graphic designer, not an architect. Her specialty is design strategy, and in 2019 she won a national award for the Gleniffer Reserves Interpretive Signage. She lives in Fernmount.

John Morse, a former CEO of Tourism Australia, has worked extensively with Indigenous communities on developing responsible and sustainable tourism strategies, particularly in Arnhem Land and Kakadu. He lives in Thora with his dog Snooki, who is a star in her own right.

So far, the pair have had about two dozen meetings with large and small groups across the shire, and expect to hold as many again by the end of this month.

They're talking to residents, environmental groups, tourism operators, Chambers of Commerce, youth groups, Indigenous Elders and Local Aboriginal Land Councils.

Sitting at this halfway point, they say there are already some strong themes emerging from the discussion process.

"At every workshop we've had quite a good representation from Gumbaynggirr people and the Gumbaynggirr culture is coming through very strongly as a major theme, not just from them, but from everybody," John said. "It's about learning, it's about respect, it's about healing, and it's about economic opportunity. All sorts of different dimensions. There's a great opportunity for us to do something spectacular and major here.

"The second theme is our unique environment and the third is keeping the local culture of Bellingen Shire strong and intact. You've only got to look at Bali to see how the culture has become a tourism commodity and we don't want that to happen here. The natural, slightly offbeat culture of Bellingen is something that's precious and rare, and needs to be protected."

John and Anna also said people have been expressing a strong concern about over-tourism, which is a problem for many desirable places around the world and something that Bellingen encounters every summer, especially at the Promised Land and the monthly markets.

But they stress the branding exercise is about appealing to visitors who are sensitive to the social, cultural and environmental values of this place and its people.

"Developing a Bellingen Shire 'brand' is NOT about big marketing campaigns, or unlimited growth and maximum numbers," John said. "It's about looking at the optimum combination of economic yield and visitor numbers. It's about managing the development of tourism which is sustainable and responsible."

To those who think we shouldn't be promoting Bellingen Shire as a tourist destination at all, he points to the the fact that it's a major employer in our area, particularly of young people, and it provides facilities that locals can also enjoy, such as markets, festivals, restaurants and cafés. According to ABS figures, tourism in Bellingen Shire contributes around $65.7 million to the local economy each year.

On the evening of Tuesday February 2, Anna and John held their fourth community consultation meeting, which was the second one in Bellingen.

The Courier-Sun went along to see what it was like, but it turned out to be an atypical session, because people raised so many concerns that there was no time left for the workshop part.

Anna was standing by to scribe notes under the heading "Defining our spirit of place - Bellingen", but as soon as the meeting was thrown open to questions, Gumbaynggirr man Bernard Kelly-Edwards began speaking passionately about Bellingen needing to clean up its house before it could think about inviting visitors in.

"We've got to come together and heal our wounds. We're still walking around hurt and divided. I walk in this community with love and I get spat racism at, quite blatantly," he said.

Sitting behind him was his nephew Matthew Smith, the cultural heritage officer with Coffs Coast Local Aboriginal Land Council, who spoke about why so few Gumbaynggirr people live in Bellingen.

"There's affordability, there's atrocities, hurt, trauma. There's sites, things that haven't been dealt with properly," he said.

"Until we get to that, the 'spirit' part of that sentence up there needs a lot of work before we can get to a state where we can come up with a brand that truly represents us."

"Truth-telling is what will define our spirit," Bernard said, citing the need for acknowledgement of the old wrongs, like the massacre in Fernmount, the destruction of songlines, the felling of ancient trees.

There's also the fact that we have a plaque dedicated to the first white child born in Bellingen, but nothing commemorating the strength of the Indigenous women who have birthed children in the valley for millennia. In the 1900s they had to walk across from Bowraville to Bellingen to reach the only hospital that would admit them.

"We need the real history to be told and Bellingen Shire needs to be the students that listen to it," Bernard said. "We need to know where we came from as a community."

He argued this should precede development of a branding strategy, but John and Anna said afterwards that although they believe healing is "incredibly important" and needs to start happening now, it is an ongoing process that will take some time.

"I think the conversation just needs to keep running in tandem," Anna said. "Clearly there's frustration, but I don't feel we need to defer the branding until that process is complete, because that's not realistic.

"I do feel, however, that what John and I can do is help, through recommendations about cultural awareness [training] for the community, for councillors and staff, and tourism businesses. These are things that I think would support what Bernard was wanting to achieve."

She also intends to convey all the issues discussed at community consultation meetings to council, including those that are broader than the scope of the project.

Other questions raised at Tuesday's meeting included whether this project should be financed via bushfire relief funding and whether council had provided Anna and John with records detailing previous efforts to build responsible and sustainable tourism in Bellingen.

"There is so much history, so much herstory," Annie Arnold said, adding that she'd been attending meetings like this one since 1996, when she opened live music venue Cool Creek Café.

She said the ecologically-focused outcomes of such meetings had shone brightly for a while, then waned due to lack of ongoing support.

Anna said she had been told about some of the initiatives Annie mentioned and would ask council if any archives were available.

People who are unable to come along to one of the consultation sessions are invited to express their views online at https://create.bellingen.nsw.gov.au/bellingen-shire-branding-project

To get in touch with the project team, email bellingenbrandingproject@gmail.com