Kiama’s KISSART Festival lights up the town with live performances and music making. Photos: KISSART festival.
Here’s the thing – Kiama mums of preschool aged kids do not get out as often as we would like to. Alas, laid-back venues with genuinely kid-friendly spaces are sadly in short supply (I’ll come back to Finding Fillmores and their terrific toy trucks later).
So when we do get out, mums want to Pack. It. In. We dream of a cocktail with appetisers, live music, dinner in a buzzy setting, followed by a stroll, with buskers perhaps, before ducking into another local spot with live music and dessert somewhere else – all before we retire at a kingly 10:30 pm.
When my friend and I attempted this in Kiama on a Saturday night, we managed the cocktails and appetisers, but couldn’t get dinner after 8:30 pm, settling instead for kebabs by the harbour.
While excellent, it was not exactly the cultural, bar-hopping foodie tour possible in places like Huskisson, Mudgee, or Newcastle.
We love Kiama for the same reasons everyone else does – beautiful coastal village charm with an excellent daytime cafe culture, but evenings revert to the same restaurant options and pub fare I grew up with.
Post-COVID funding has created some improvements – like the Winter Festival, which brings the main street and harbour alive for all ages after dark, but it’s brief and annual.
It is not for a lack of imagination or innovation either. Our local business owners and creatives talk wistfully of the night-time experience they’d like to provide for local families and visitors – afternoon entertainment by the harbour, a family-friendly dinner from a street food stall they’ve set up, then along to our revamped Hindmarsh Park where an outdoor screening of a kids movie is happening. A later screening for adults is also on the cards, perhaps with a pop-up bar and live band …
So why isn’t this already happening, you wonder? Simple answer: current regulatory settings make it too difficult and expensive to do.
Last year, we almost lost one of our most beloved family-friendly (and frankly, actually affordable) cultural fixtures, the KISSARTS festival, which lights up our town with immersive live performance and music making that we don’t normally get to experience here in Australia (Europe does it wonderfully).
The brilliant creatives behind the festival are Tamara Campbell and Dave Evans, who program the event, perform in it, set up and staff the pop-up spiegeltent and harbourside bar (beloved by locals and visitors alike) and pack the whole shebang away again.
Crowds flock to the foreshore to enjoy the KISSART Festival.
It is a mammoth task, made harder by limited funding opportunities and a long list of regulatory paperwork – traffic management plans, heritage protection plans, venue plans, Crown Lands usage plans, noise management plans and development applications for temporary structures – all required by law to be updated and submitted every year for the same festival!
This bureaucratic muddle has restricted the potential of regional towns like Kiama to attract and host a rich and varied program of small, pop-up cultural events, street performance, live music and fun year-round.
Now a small group of creatives, musicians, business owners and live music lovers have banded together to work with Kiama Council to establish a Special Entertainment Precinct (SEP) – a designated cultural zone in which longer trading hours, live entertainment, outdoor dining and pop-up cultural events are allowed and more generous sound limits apply.
Last year our group invited NSW Tourism and the Night Time Economy Minister John Graham and staff from the Office of the 24 Hour Economy to Kiama to talk about what our town needed and they all agreed that a SEP would help create a more vibrant town centre year-round and fire up our night-time economy.
The precinct, which could take in Hindmarsh Park, Black Beach and the harbour headland area as well as our central business district, will be determined by council in consultation with community, residents and businesses.
The agreed area would be covered by precinct-wide rules on operating hours, sound levels developed, standardised conditions and planning approvals which would significantly bring down event costs and leave more money for the creative stuff!
I started a petition to gather community support and with hundreds of locals and visitors signed on to the creation of a SEP, and the current councillors unanimously giving the idea the nod, we would love to see the upfront costs of setting up the precinct set aside in this year’s council budget.
It is vital to the future vibrancy of our town centre and vital to the success of local businesses, jobs and the enjoyment of residents and visitors as more residential development occurs in this area.
Which brings me back to those wonderful toy trucks at Finding Fillmores – our town needs a more diverse mix of businesses that cater for everyone, foster community and make live music and entertainment accessible and the best place to build that soul is at the heart of our town.
A SEP would strike a thoughtful balance – the precinct reforms include an “eyes wide open” provision, so anyone buying property or moving into a SEP area makes an informed decision.
Venues that host live music and entertainment venues gain crucial protection against complaints through reformed sound management policies that prevent single noise complaints from shutting down establishments.
And it is a decision our community can make together and through our council.
