I chose Bendigo as my new home because its university had the most innovative and respected arts degree in the country. Incredible for a city of 70,000 people.

During my first year of uni, we’d head to the Mount Edgecombe Hotel on a Thursday night. Happy hour was one-dollar pots, and you could play pool all night for 20 cents a pop.

Twenty cents was a lot of change in 1989. It bought you a game of pinball at Rechter’s Café, or a decent bag of lollies at the View Street Milk Bar.

I lived just around the corner in Rowan Street, long before the term “arts precinct” was part of the local vernacular.

View Street was somewhere you walked along on your way home from the shops. The cultural highpoint occurred if the milk bar was still open and you could purchase a Gillies pie in that familiar cellophane bag.

How things have changed. For starters there are 40,000 more of us than when I arrived.

But it takes more than numbers to make a city. Bendigo has really stepped up to the plate both civically and culturally in the past decade.

Ben Quilty said on a recent visit that our art gallery is not only the envy of regional Australia, but a place where our country’s finest artists want to exhibit.

In August we’ll host our fourth national writers festival, bringing the cream of the country’s literary talent to our arts precinct.

Our new generation library has been transformed into an inspiring interactive community hub – a place of learning and connecting with each other and the world. While public spaces, like Dai Gum San have transformed the city and given us ever more beautiful and useable spaces to come together.

On Friday night I was lucky to experience another great moment in Bendigo’s future with the gala opening of the Ulumbarra Theatre.

It represents all that’s great about our city, growing as it has from a true collaboration between the education sector and the city, with bipartisan support from every tier of government. 

But what I and the other thousand guests will never forget is the way our stunning new theatre was launched. Not with pomp or chest beating, but with honest, heartfelt local stories of the Jaara people; a genuine celebration of, and welcome to country – the Dja Dja Wurrung landscape we are all now a part of.

The parochialism of the past dissolves in the spirit of Ulumbarra.

As James Henry’s lyrics, written especially for the opening of the theatre, say so poignantly: “Gates and fences once tried to keep our worlds apart – We are all one beating heart.”