A NEW cultural hub for the Dja Dja Wurrung Corporation is set to take its dreams forward, centralising its business and sharing its culture with the entire community.
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Funding for a Dja Dja Wurrung multipurpose cultural hub in Bendigo was among the promises for the region announced in Tuesday's state budget.
The hub is expected to provide a space for business, the corporation's operations, and sharing culture, language, performance and art.
State budget 2020-21:
- Shock budget win final piece of the jigsaw for Bendigo Senior Secondary
- Government funds health approach to public drunkenness
- State budget pours $8 billion into regional Victoria
- Castlemaine Goods Shed gets state budget boost
- Families welcome push for residential aged care ratios
- $10 million boost for upgrade to Bendigo Senior Secondary College
- Budget looks to reshape state with plans to create 400,000 jobs in five years
- 'Need for change': VCAL to be scrapped, replaced with single VCE program
- $12 million for former Kyneton Primary School works welcomed
Chair Trent Nelson said it would be a tremendous occasion to open a centre that was the Dja Dja Wurrung's, so the corporation could go forward and do business on country professionally.
Mr Nelson said the project would push forward aspirations for future generations of Dja Dja Wurrung poeple, and build a partnership with the wider community.
"It's an opportunity to share in the culture, share in the language, have opportunities for our own people to set up small businesses ...then also having natural resource management team under the one roof," " Mr Nelson said.
"We can all work together as one, and we can also share that with our community and local state government agencies that come and talk to us and create partnerships.
"It's also really important that it's an opportunity for tourism to share in our culture and what we do, as a hub."
Mr Nelson said the cultural hub was both a cultural hub for the Dja Dja Wurrung people and the corporation as a business.
He said office space, laboratory space for natural resource management, would sit alongside opportunities for sharing language, culture, art, artifacts and objects.
Mr Nelson said the hub became necessary because the Dja Dja Wurrung Corporation's business had expanded, while it remained spread over country for several years.
The corporation's next step will be to find out how much funding they had secured, and identify options for land to build the centre.
Mr Nelson said a concept architectural plan had already been signed off. He said planning and development for the centre would hopefully start in 2021.
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