for a day in a call centre, making cold calls inviting farmers to attend a conference about something, somewhere. I can’t remember the details, other than by the end of the day I knew I couldn’t face it, so I quit on the spot! I covered a lunchtime shift in one of Australia’s leading telecommunications company’s headquarters inbound call centre, thankfully for only a few hours. I spent a couple of weeks working for a leading Australian insurer, as… wait for it… a Demetaliser! I made up my title to make the job of removing staples from endless documents to be digitised sound a bit more high-tech. I remember the great elation I felt when I was promoted to scanning from staple removal!
One job I’ll never forget played an incredibly significant role in my life. It’s another reason Sydney is so special. The infamous Route 69 pub crawl had been advertising for ‘reps’ and I thought it sounded like fun. It sounded like a guarantee for the good, slightly wild, social life I sought. I’ll let non-Australian readers do your own online research into the Aussie slang involved in this business name. I was poor at the hard sell of getting backpackers to buy tickets to join our bus to visit Sydney’s coolest pubs and clubs. But I did meet Dan, a fellow UK backpacker, also living his best quarter-life crisis under the bright lights of Sydney. Dan quickly became my best friend, my partner, and in recent years, the father of my children!
One beloved job was a temporary role as a receptionist at Tourism Australia. I’m not good at reception skills. I had a bad habit of hanging up on people while trying to transfer their calls, but I remember applying my creative skills to developing up an A-Z of Reception FAQs during the quieter times. And, of course, being an engager at heart, my welcome was always warm. Having dabbled in tourism recently in the McLaren Vale region, I wish I could return to that role just to eavesdrop on the conversations in the corridors. Maybe my path crossed with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who was one of the Managing Directors there at the time. Maybe I even hung up on him!
One sunny Saturday morning, in between backpacker jobs, I was sitting on the balcony of my shared Pyrmont apartment flicking through the newspaper. Curiosity about the job market beyond the backpacker scene had me glancing at the employment section. One advertisement caught my eye. Parramatta City Council was looking for an Arts & Cultural Development Officer to join their Community Development Team on a three-month contract. I couldn’t believe it. Here was a job I could do. I had the qualifications that perfectly suited the demanding visa restrictions. Of course, I applied, I attended the interview with a confident spring in my step and was offered the job. And so, my wild backpacking days transformed into a daily commute on the train from Central Station to Parramatta. And I loved every minute of it!
Sydney was the first big city I’d ever lived in. My hometown of Gloucester is a city because it has a cathedral. But it’s not a ‘city’ city. Sydney was the first place I’d lived that had a Central Business District, where people rushed about en masse , in suits. It was the first place I’d lived where the buildings were taller than four or five storeys. While I’ve never been a suit-wearer (my absolute favourite thing about community engagement is the unspoken right to wear denim to work). But I absolutely loved the rush of passing through Town Hall Station at 8 am on a weekday, followed by the dash along the platform at Central Station to board one of the double-decker trains to Parramatta. Here I was being lucky again. I had an opportunity to immerse myself in a community. And how exciting to be on the other side of the world, exploring and learning about a community in a totally different country.
As part of the Greater Granville Regeneration Plan, the Council was eager to undertake community engagement regarding perceptions of safety within this diverse suburb, known for its high proportion of older residents, single-person households, and large families with remarkably diverse backgrounds. Of course, there are limits to what you can achieve on a three-month contract. And I was in a totally unfamiliar environment. But I had enthusiasm and passion (and dare I say, the energy of a woman in her mid-twenties) on my side. My boss gave me leadership of the ‘Perceptions of Safety’ project, and I embraced it. An interesting plot twist helped me succeed. The funding was to be used for arts and cultural development. So my brief was to add creativity to the engagement process. Hmmm…. here was my opportunity to do something really cool!
Community engagement was already underway for the overall Regeneration Plan by planners Hassell, with Sarkissian Associates Planners taking the lead. Wendy and her team were already using a comprehensive suite of creative engagement tools to generate discussion and draw out community contributions, including a key stakeholders’ workshop, a SpeakOut, and ‘A Week with a Camera’ exercise where local children contributed their assessments with the help of teachers at two local primary schools. My job was to undertake additional engagement, specifically regarding people’s perception of safety in Granville, targeting young people and older people.
As with any new project, in any community, from my experiences hand delivering The Matson News, my first task was to immerse myself in the neighbourhood to gain an overview of where I was, what the neighbourhood was like, and to generate ideas or inspiration for making a start on delivering this project. A few weeks earlier, I’d been manually removing staples from documents in a backpacker sweatshop. Suddenly, here I am, cruising around western Sydney’s sunny suburbs in a close-to-brand-new Toyota Camry from the Council’s carpool.
This was the first time I’d driven in Australia. I felt overwhelmed, yet excited, by the street grid, wide roads, huge volumes of traffic, and the bright (yet low) winter sun, requiring constant use of the visor. These were pre-GPS-satellite-navigation days, so I needed the Sydney & Suburbs street directory as I explored my new territory. I had to pull over regularly to check where I was and to stay on course.
This was also the first time I’d explored a community in Australia with any kind of diversity or disadvantage. My exploration had been limited to the Sydney CBD, the leafy suburb of Pyrmont where I lived, and day trips to the Hunter Valley and the Blue Mountains. I’d also briefly travelled along the East Coast, including the tourist hotspots of Byron Bay and Surfers Paradise. But there my exploration was limited to bars, beaches, and burger joints!
I was immediately fascinated by the difference in housing stock. A comparable UK suburb would have very dense, high-rise Council housing. But here in Australia were pockets of high levels of deprivation in estates of detached government housing -some with gardens on quarter-acre blocks! As I drove around, I soon noticed visible signs of unemployment, crime, poverty, and more. I learned that that deprivation could exist even in the presence of ample space and glorious sunshine.
Taking detailed notes, I found community centres, churches, schools, cafes, shopping centres, parks, and childcare centres. I observed bus stops, bus routes, and train stations. I noted areas where I saw graffiti, abandoned shopping trolleys. I searched for street furniture with shade or drinking water fountains. I studied community noticeboards, which are always guaranteed to provide glimpses into community life, wherever in the world they are.
I now call this my ‘community immersion process’ and I undertake it on any project with a new community. It’s my critical exercise in learning about the people who live there and understanding how they live. Of course, most of my observations are assumptions initially and they may not influence the final project plan. Nevertheless, it’s critical for an engagement practitioner to try to understand what makes a community tick. I see this process as our obligation to that community. And we need to do that even if it makes us feel uncomfortable.
My fascination with how a community looks and feels, and how the people interact or move around it helped me, no end. My immersive exploration led me to a community hall that offered social programs for older people, luckily, as my objective was to engage older people about their perceptions of safety. And, as my Gloucester community health promotion days taught me, working with organisations to reach a target group makes a lot of sense. My initial conversations revealed that the organisation was totally open to changes in their
