By Carol Altmann

I have been looking at visitor numbers for Flagstaff Hill and, I have to tell you, there are worrying signs.

Before I go any further, I need to say three things:

The figures are from Sept 2017 to Feb 2018. The media unit at the Warrnambool City Council will not give me more recent ones. I don’t know why. It also refuses to answer any questions about the figures that have been released.

In the past 15 years, at least $15 million of public money has been poured into Flagstaff Hill to keep it alive. Most recently, $3 million was spent on a new light/sound show and other improvements that opened in June last year. A year on, I think we need to know how things are travelling.

None of what follows is a reflection of the hard work done by the volunteers and many WCC staff who, in recent years, have busted their guts for Flagstaff Hill.

So how are things going?

The expectation was that once the $3 million upgrade was launched in June 2017, visitor numbers would boom.

As the council CEO Bruce Anson said himself, the colonial village needed at least 80,000 paying visitors a year to break even. This would stop the WCC having to spend $500,000, $600,000 or $700,000 a year to help it cover costs.

It was a big ask. Three years ago, paid visitor numbers were below 55,000.

The head of WCC’s tourism arm, David McMahon, who two years ago was handed the whip to flog Phar Lap, remained optimistic. In June last year he told The Standard:

A 30% jump by January was a lofty goal, but here is an awful, ugly, unadulterated fact: the overall visitor numbers at Flagstaff Hill are going backwards.

I have checked and re-checked the numbers and you can look at them yourself right here:

Let me take you through the red arrows:

• In December and January of 2018 – our peak summer holiday season – less people went to Flagstaff Hill than the summer before.
• The same applies to people who saw the new $2 million night show. After an initial spike in the months after the show opened, many more people actually went to the OLD show, in the summer of 2016-17, than they did in the summer just gone.
• In February, when the weather was still warm, less than 2000 people showed up for the whole month, about the same as last February.

This is a shock.

Maybe the person who drew this graph for the council got their colours mixed up, but I don’t think so, because you can see a clear ‘spike’ around November last year.

Why was there a spike? I suspect because Flagstaff Hill had a free open weekend to celebrate its $3 million upgrade.

Did you see the word FREE in that sentence? This brings me to another very important point: how many have people actually paid to get in or paid for tickets to the night show since last Sept?

I don’t know. It’s one of the questions that those who have access to these figures – David McMahon, Flagstaff Hill manager Paul Pinkerton and WCC media head Nick Higgins – won’t answer.

But this question is critical to whether these figures are being fudged. Are these numbers a true reflection of what is going on, or is it even worse?

Free entries do not help the bottom line and if free entries are being included in these numbers, then we are being duped and that, to me, is very serious.

We have been here before, with Fun4Kids.

After many successful years as an annual winter event, Fun4Kids started to bleed money. Then it started to haemorrhage.

Here is David McMahon again being quoted by the paper during last year’s Fun4Kids:

Seven months later, the WCC dumped Fun4Kids.

The cut came without warning, without any fallback plan, without any replacement and, it must be said, without giving the scaled-back F4K festival a chance to see if it could do better than the big-budget stuff of years before.

This is not how we should be planning our future as a prime tourist destination.

We need honest, transparent conversations about how we are tracking, what we can expect and what, if anything, we need to change.

I have written many times before that a fake colonial village that opened in the 70s and still flies the Union Jack high above its premises is no longer appropriate to where Warrnambool is going today.

What could replace it is a topic I will wade into later, but for now we deserve to be told the full story.

If you would like to keep seeing more pieces like this about local issues, please make a small contribution below.

Donate

Comment – Carol Altmann

WE all know the ever-vigilant Maremma dogs have saved the population of little penguins on Warrnambool’s Middle Island, but it’s doubtful they can save the Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village.

The 40-year-old tourist village made itself Maremma headquarters ahead of the national release of the movie Oddball, which gives a largely fictionalised version of the Maremma-penguin story and was filmed partly in Warrnambool.

Indeed visitors to Flagstaff Hill can, if they are there at the right time, meet the dogs and buy a made-in-Indonesia stuffed toy to help continue the Maremma program.

Flagstaff Hill manager and head of tourism for the Warrnambool City Council Peter Abbott has also been particularly active – and successful – in trying to generate media coverage for Oddball and its links to our city. (How we stop enthusiastic tourists from wading across to Middle Island itself is another matter).

But behind the scenes, Flagstaff Hill has just recorded its worst visitor numbers in a decade and it’s a long climb back to prosperity.

According to the council, Flagstaff Hill had 54,469 visitors in 2014-15 (excluding functions).

This compares to 60,000 in the previous year and continues the downward slide from the 81,000 that was recorded in 2003-04.

As council CEO Bruce Anson has said before, 80,000 is a break-even position.

This means at least another 25,000 people need to come through the front doors of Flagstaff Hill each year – not to show growth, but to catch up to where it was a decade ago and stop it bleeding around half a million dollars a year.

The “meet the canine stars of Oddball” is part of that plan. The other, even more significant part, involves another movie, if not quite as Hollywood as Oddball.

This is the $2 million being spent on updating the very-dated Shipwrecked sound and light show as part of a $3 million upgrade of the village.

What this new sound and light show will focus on has not been revealed, despite initial hopes to have the project up and running by now.

When Bluestone recently checked with the council, the project was still at the “expressions of interest” stage, which suggests it has not been easy to find the right people for the job, or perhaps $2 million is not enough to deliver what was hoped for.

In the meantime, the council is ploughing ahead with reconfiguring the front entrance (from memory, this is the third renovation of the entrance since the village opened) to blend the visitor information centre into the complex and improve access to Pippies restaurant.

The difficult truth, however, is that window-dressing the entrance and banking on movies to draw more people does not change the fact that the village itself will remain largely static.

This remains it’s biggest failing and the most common complaint from those who pay their entrance fee to find there is not much happening at all inside the cute buildings.

At best, Oddball will provide a visitor spike to Flagstaff Hill while the movie is fresh, and the new $2 million sound and light show may draw another 17,000 people a year until it, too, becomes dated.

The short use-by date of these attractions is why I would rather see the millions that are being spent on Flagstaff Hill plunged into our unique, permanent attractions that don’t date.

I am talking about our incredible natural environment and rich indigenous heritage.

We live on one of the most accessible and spectacular coastlines in the world with a rich indigenous history that is only now beginning to be taken seriously by tourism authorities, although there is still a long way to go.

Imagine what Tower Hill could do with $2 million of state funds? A fabulous bush foods cafe/restaurant might be a start.

Imagine how far $3 million would go in developing and promoting a trail linking Point Richie/Moyjil, to Tower Hill and on to the Budj Bim landscape around Lake Condah, Mt Eccles and Tyrendarra? The Budj Bim area is considered so special, it is on the verge of gaining World Heritage status and we should be ready.

If Warrnambool wants to pull tourists further along the Great Ocean Road, then this is how to do it: by becoming the jumping off point to an enduring and unique landscape and culture that fascinates people from around the world.

Tie this culture and landscape to quality accommodation, food and wine trails, biking and hiking and you have an attraction that is much more dynamic and organic than a static village.

This is the sort of long-term thinking required if we really want to see cameras and action, rather than a “spike” that lasts about as long as the popcorn.