The Arts and Avocado’s, Blackbutt’s focus for the next twelve months!
After being awarded the FRRR grant for ‘Tackling Tough Times Together,’ president Jeff Connor couldn’t be more thrilled at the investment into the Blackbutt Avocado Festival and Blackbutt.
Year on year the Blackbutt Avocado Festival works tirelessly to drive an event that stimulates the economy of Blackbutt for a weekend, driving over 4000 visitors into the town. After the cancellation of 2020 due to Covid, the committee has been continually reinventing the way that their festival can keep it’s contribution to the community at the forefront.
President Jeff Connor said ‘as a result of Covid, and the risk of further disruptions, we want to make decisions that allow us to hold events, even at times where face-to-face ability is reduced, but also to encourage drive tourism to Blackbutt in between festivals; not just the Avocado Festival and other Blackbutt Events, reliant on volunteers to bring people to our town, but more importantly to have them stop in our town. Blackbutt has excellent ‘bones’ to the perfect town to grow increased spend by travellers – we are located on a major highway, have an excellent CBD with good restroom facilities and great food. We want to add a major anchor point attraction, that means that more travellers will get out of their car, and see the rest of what we have to offer; a deep connection to art (which we naturally have) and a striking – ‘we’ve got to get a picture with that.’
‘We’ve been watching the Arts and the Tourism sector closely, monitoring current and future trends. We believe that this project will serve current and future needs and sees our town start to realise the most current findings of the Australia Council for the Arts 2020 ‘Domestic Arts Tourism – Connecting the Country’ report which identified that arts day trips in Queensland have increased by 20% since 2014. This means we want to have the attractions and marketing to put Blackbutt and the South Burnett Region front and centre when people are making those decisions from their home computer. We know that visitor numbers soared last year too, which means we have an engaged market to talk too – it’s exciting times in our sector.’
‘We are taking this as an opportunity to lead a community-informed vision and action plan for the arts developed through authentic community and stakeholder consultation. We want to harness the arts as an integral ingredient to recovering and renewing through the economic and social challenges of drought and Covid,’ said Jeff Connor, ‘We see this as an excellent investment for the community of Blackbutt, not just as a committee, but as a show of support towards a future that we all can own.’
The funding received by FRRR will go towards:
Development of the Blackbutt Arts Strategy, which will support and inform not only the activities of the Blackbutt Avocado Estival but also Arts initiatives more widely in the township of Blackbutt. The committee envisions that the Blackbutt Arts Strategy will provide a holistic, five-year strategic framework for the Blackbutt Community which will be developed over a three month period of community consultation and engagement with key stakeholders such as South Burnett Regional Council, Arts and Cultural Groups, Tourism bodies (Southern Queensland Country and Visit South Burnett).
Development of a ‘shovel ready’ project plan for The Big Avocado, positioning the committee to be investment ready and leverage the big-icon tourism movement for Blackbutt as seen in other communities such as The Big Pineapple, The Big Banana and The Big Watermelon. As Blackbutt is a highway town, the more noteworthy features, the more likely traffic will stop to take part in the art, or pass the message word of mouth to other travellers who will. This project will also form part of Blackbutt’s mission to be more ‘photo-worthy so that it’s online footprint can continue to organically grow.
Engagement of a dedicated Arts Project Officer for a 12 month period, as a means to address the committee’s identified challenge with volunteer fatigue and to support the initial implementation phase of both the Blackbutt Arts Strategy Objectives and progress of The Big Avocado Project.
This Blackbutt Avocado Festival project was funded by the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal in partnership with the Australian Government.