SAM RODGERS looks at why our import students could be the key to energising the city
Photos by HARMONY NICHOLAS

Imagine you’ve just arrived at Adelaide airport. What kind of city greets you? You take a peek through the massive windows of the only terminal and see squat hills sitting lazily above flat suburbia, and just to the left is the city centre; a few boulders of concrete and glass sitting around the grandfather clock of Westpac House – a building that doesn’t exactly scrape the sky. It doesn’t look very impressive as far as cities go, but before you even got here you were told that it was a small, quiet city. The best choice if you want to knuckle down and study. It’s also the cheapest big city in Australia. The words ‘cheap’ and ‘student’ go together, right? Does that mean you’ll have any fun, though?

International education is South Australia’s fourth biggest export earner. It generated $673 million for the state in 2007, and has continued to grow rapidly, so that during 2008-09, an $892 million revenue was made from the 27 900 overseas students living and studying in our fair and gentle city. Between 2003-2006 South Australia’s market share of international students was double the national average annual growth rate. Our state is taking this industry very seriously. The government wants Adelaide to have a 9% share in the nation’s international students by 2014, making it a possible $2 billion export earner. And we have an edge for luring in the trade: we’re cheap for student living. On the Study Adelaide website they optimistically boast about this fact, stating that the cost of living can average only $270 a week. They also boast that Adelaide has had a disproportionate amount of Nobel Laureates who’ve studied here and that we are Australia’s ‘Learning City’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The cynic in me adds the adverb and the infinitive, ‘Still Learning to be a City’, for a witty critique.

For those of you who skimmed the grammatical garb from that last sentence, don’t worry, my day job is as an English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) teacher at Adelaide University and I’m supposed to know the constructs of a sentence. The job is also where I find myself surrounded by these commodities of the state, where they stop being statistics, and inform me daily on their new lives here. In the two and a half years I’ve been teaching I have heard many accounts of an overseas student’s experience in Adelaide, and it’s not always the positive let’s-share-an-icecream-on-the-jetty experience advertised to those choosing this obscure city.

One thing I want to emphasise here is that yes, Adelaide is an obscure city in an obscure country, one lucky enough to have the unofficial lingua franca as its mother tongue. To counter this, Adelaide sells itself as ‘one of the most liveable cities in the world’ and refers to Mercers or the Worldwide Quality of Living Survey to attract the attention to how cheap, safe, and clean we are. Last year we came in joint 30th with Helsinki and San Francisco, just before Paris. What this says about Adelaide is... Wait, what does it say about Adelaide? Especially when you consider the top cities on this table were criticised as quite dull places. We also tend not to mention that Sydney and Melbourne always rate better than us anyway. Students know this, too. The number flocking to our ubiquitous Eastern rivals grows steadily, and Education Adelaide says that to compete we can only offer relief for their overflowing schools.

And then you’re an international student in Adelaide. What then? Go on the Popeye for a third time? Catch a bus to Marion? The Study Adelaide website has a list of Adelaide’s ‘hip hangouts’, a total of nine places including a cafe, a multi-national book shop, a boat ride, a clothing shop, beach volleyball, a music shop, a bike ride, and the Central Markets. This last one, I would say, is the only place I would call ‘hip’, if I was forced at gun point to use that archaic adjective. This is because it is a place where you feel like a lot is happening: I go there on Friday nights just to feel like I live in a switched-on city. And this, for me, is the crux of how Adelaide can easily change its boring label. A lot of the students I teach are from much bigger cities, but that is never the answer to what students want from this city; it’s not a matter of Adelaide becoming bigger to be more accommodating, but smarter.

I wrote a questionnaire for my current class asking them about their first impressions of this city, the things they like about it and also their grievances. My last question asked them to imagine if they could change something about this city, what would it be? All said they’d change opening hours in the CBD.

If you’ve ever been in the city centre after 6pm you know it’s like a ghost town (except on Fridays). Maybe you’re a Japanese student who comes from a city similar in size to Adelaide, but you’re used to being able to shop until at least 8pm every night of the week. By that time, you’re more likely to spend money in a city restaurant. So why bother with these opening hours? Well, it means there are more people around to make the CBD safer. It also means students (and tourists – and locals) feel more at ease to spend money, and it creates ‘buzz’. Adelaide doesn’t need festivals every month to create buzz, it just needs people to stay in one place longer, and not flee off into the ‘burbs. We feed off each other’s energy and don’t need to be force fed ‘things-to-do’ – maybe you’re a Spanish student whose village has a better vibe to it than Adelaide.

My favourite suggestion from the class was a weekend night market. Let’s put it, say, in Victoria Square, the infamous dead zone of Adelaide. It would bridge the ghost town feel of Adelaide after retail trading finishes. It would create a family-friendly atmosphere, rather than that foreboding adults-only sensation one gets before Saturday night drinking starts. Which brings us to another point: there should be more pub-alternatives – if you’ve seen how popular Cibo on Gouger Street is on most nights, you’ll know what this means. Believe it or not, the pub, while an Australian institution, is not a uniquely Australian thing – what you’re thinking of is binge drinking. Students don’t really see it as a positive cultural experience.

Things are changing already, though. You might have noticed recently that a gap in the market is being filled by Asian-owned dessert cafes (adding to the already popular Elephant Walk and Spats). These places are attracting a lot of people who, like the Cibo crowd, just want a drink, some food, and a comfortable place to chat with friends. I hope more of these ‘social’ spaces (not just dessert bars) open up around the city so that your options for a good night out don’t revolve around beer-fart smelling establishments. If the City Council makes a move with the Renew Adelaide scheme, we might see the city change into a more diverse, interesting, entertaining and safe place that people want to hang out in. Adelaide doesn’t need to ‘keep up’ (phrasal verb) with the Eastern states, but be different (adjective): we can be the first choice, not the consolation.