– Ballarat Mayor Samantha McIntosh
White Night has become an entrenched and much-loved part of our city’s thriving events calendar.
With plenty of new content in this year’s program and the inclusion of highlights from the Melbourne event, White Night Ballarat 2019 is shaping up to be phenomenal!
David Atkins has achieved outstanding outcomes from the last two White Night Ballarat events, so we are thrilled that he is once again coordinating the event for us in 2019.
We’re extremely excited about the high number of local artists involved in this year’s event. Opportunities for local artists is something we’ve pushed for as part of our Creative City Strategy, and White Night is once again supporting this vision.
This year, 76 local artists will be engaged to flex their creative muscles. The program will also have a more diverse curated offering than ever before with 59 unique works, including artwork by award-winning Wathaurung artist Aunty Marlene Gilson whose work invites us to learn about on the oldest continuous cultures on earth.
White Night Ballarat is a chance for us to use our beautiful city as a canvas to carry the creative works of others. The premise of White Night aligns completely with our Creative City Strategy, priorities which include introducing our wider community to the power of art. White Night is a wonderful platform to introduce newer generations and different audiences to creative thinking, and sharing our positive creative culture with our wider community.
Events like White Night are more than just a great spectacle. They are a critical driver for tourism and our local economy – putting our city in the limelight.
Over the past two years over 100,000 people have come to Ballarat for White Night.
The economic spend during 2017 was $3.09 million, growing to $5.01 million in 2018 – filling beds, tables and shops across the city. This has boosted local businesses and created jobs – generating more than eight million dollars for the local economy.
This year’s White Night Ballarat event has a slightly larger footprint, providing greater opportunities for the city’s traders to benefit from the significant economic impact of the event.
We’re also excited about the move to September. As a city we are not afraid of change, in fact we embrace it.
We’re a city of adventurous people, so we expect to see plenty of footy fans continuing the BFL grand final celebrations into the evening alongside tens of thousands of new and returning visitors.
The shoulder-to-shoulder crowds that fill our streets and the chatter on social media that follows each White Night Ballarat event is a good indication of how much this event is appreciated.
I certainly look forward to being immersed in all that is White Night Ballarat this September 21.
