UPDATE: Long-Awaited Nick Cave Statue To Be Crowdfunded For Singer’s Hometown
ORIGINAL STORY: A large mural of Australian music legend Nick Cave has been proposed for the singer’s hometown of Warracknabeal in Western Victoria, Music Feeds has learned.
Cave was born in Warracknabeal in 1957, and now the local council has received a proposal from a community group which hopes to have a mural of the musician erected in the town.
“What we’re proposing to do is, and it’s in its infancy at the moment, is to put a mural on the Tourist Information Centre wall depicting Nick,” says Yarriambiack Shire Council CEO Ray Campling.
“If it comes to fruition, I’d say it’d be 20 feet by 20 feet [in size].”
Campling says the mural has been “identified as an alternative” to erecting a statue of Cave, which was first proposed by the artist himself a number of years ago, but can’t go ahead without tens of thousands of dollars in funding.
“As a consequence of not being able to identify any funding for the statue, this [mural] has been identified as an alternative,” Campling says.
The Warracknabeal Tourist Information Centre / Image: Google Maps
Cave recently said that Warracknabeal had expressed a renewed interest in having a statue of him erected in the town, even though the idea was originally raised by Cave as a tongue-in-cheek joke.
Campling says his council would be “more than happy to entertain” the idea of a statue of Cave being erected if a local organisation (or even Cave himself) helped fund it.
“It’d be great to have a statue, but for a small rural municipality it’s fairly cost-prohibitive to us… Unless we were lucky for Nick to contribute or find a suitable a grant,” he explains.
Mr Campling says that if a mural or statue is eventually erected, it could mean a lot for the local economy.
“We do get a lot of European backpackers coming here wanting to see where Nick Cave was born and spent his first years, and obviously he’s highly credentialed and recognised overseas, possibly more than he is here,” he says.
“I think that if there was [a statue or mural] acknowledging that it would generate particular interest particularly from overseas tourists.”
Warracknabeal has already acknowledged Cave with signs at entrances to the township which mention he was born there, as well as a plaque bearing his name at the town’s Tourist Information Centre. If the mural goes ahead, it will also need its own funding.
Nick Cave was unavailable for comment for this story.
