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Thank you for coming along to the Cultural Sydney talk. I'm going to start by telling you about the Yellow Plaque scheme, which has been running in Sydney for over forty years and has been incredibly successful. When you are walking around the city, you'll see some buildings with a small round yellow plaque on them. If you take a closer look, you'll see the name and details of a famous person who lived in that very place. This is a yellow plaque and it tells you something about not only the history, but the surroundings of Sydney. We have, at present, 130 plaques up in the city. The scheme has been great for tourism, but it was really started to raise awareness of the rich history of Sydney, both locally and nationally, and we think we've managed to do this. We also wanted to make people aware of the impressive list of important people who have lived in this city, and we've certainly achieved that. But that's not all. Quite independently of our original aims, the scheme has also helped preserve some of the older and more important buildings in Sydney because people now know that these buildings are a link to our past; some of the buildings are actually over 180 years old, which, for Australia, is ancient! We actually think that this is where the scheme has achieved the most success; in raising the profile of our rich history. Of course, it has helped tourism, but not only that, locals also walk around looking at the plaques. It has been really wonderful in highlighting our past. Some people are quite surprised to see who has lived here; take Errol Flynn for example. He was married in Sydney.
We are planning on putting more plaques up and a common question is how can people nominate a figure to be put on a plaque. It's quite a simple process. Applications can be downloaded from our website. If you want to nominate someone for a plaque you just need the person's name, where they lived and you need three signatures to approve your application. Our panel then checks that all the data you've submitted is correct and hopefully, within a year a new plaque will be erected. But you can't nominate just anyone! A plaque can only be given to a person who is famous and has achieved something out of the ordinary. like an important politician or a world-record breaking sportsman. for example. We aim to have fifty new plaques up within the next three years, and we have plenty of funding to do so. Our funding comes from three sources; the local council, community donations and the tourist board. Whereas in. the past the tourist board put in the majority of funding, now public donations count for sixty-five percent of all total funds! In fact, our funding is so healthy now, there are plans to expand the scheme.
At the moment, we only have yellow plaques for all the famous people, but we are aiming to produce different coloured plaques so that people can do specific walks. For example. if they are interested in famous sports personalities, they can do a tour following the red plaques (the colour we are aiming to use for these people). We are looking at introducing grey, white and green plaques as well. We are thinking of using grey plaques to signify people who have done important work within the government, for example, our existing prime minister has one at his birthplace, and white plaques for those who have done good works in the community. We think these people really deserve some recognition and are happy to highlight them. Lastly, our green plaques we think will be very popular, these will be for painters and sculptors, leaving our yellow ones for writers, actors and other people of note. We do hope you enjoy looking at the plaques around the city. We have guide books on sale in the gift shop where you can find all the plaques. These are priced at $11.99.
