Opinion: Welcome to Tauranga, cultural wasteland

Welcome to the cultural wasteland. Photo/file

Tauranga is getting a bit of a reputation as a cultural wasteland.

Other cities are sniggering behind their hands at us jumped-up townsfolk thinking our large population gives us a veneer of sophistication.

"But we have an art gallery, battle sites and a historic house!" I hear you proclaim. "We've loads of culture!"

I would have to disagree. Having pockets of culture doesn't make us cultured any more than owning paintings makes me an artist.

Culture is something that is woven into the fabric of a place. It can't be manufactured by ticking a few items off some sort of cultural achievement list.

It's not just that we don't have a museum. It's that anything artistic or cultural is seen as lesser than, rather than an important ingredient for a healthy, thriving city.

One of the largest newspapers in the country, the Otago Daily Times, ran a story on Friday about two of our talented teens visiting Dunedin after winning an essay competition run by Taonga Tauranga.

The teens were introduced in the story as: "Two refugees from a cultural wasteland".

The story continued: "Carla Roberts (15) and Amy McAulay (14) are from Tauranga, a city with no museum and a council that recently voted not to build one - which is why the two teenagers were in Dunedin yesterday, a city blessed with top-notch museums and more culture that you can poke a stick at."

Rebecca Galloway wrote an opinion piece for The Spinoff in May titled "Tauranga, the Miami of New Zealand, needn't be a cultural wasteland", comparing our city to how another cultural wasteland, Miami, managed to transform itself into a "cultural hotspot".

Tony Wall for Stuff also recently wrote an opinion piece with the headline "Voters in the cultural desert that is Tauranga say no to museum".

It's all rather embarrassing.

We appear to others as the white bread of cities - sustenance, but no real flavour.

I would love to see a change in Tauranga's mentality in which culture is treated with the importance it deserves, to the benefit of us all.

We live in such a beautiful place, let's make the most of that and bring culture to Tauranga.