The Southern Aurora Memorial, a project managed by the residents of Violet Town, has received the gold award for the best monument or memorial at the 2022 Australian Street Art Awards.
The memorial, which has pieces contributed by Tim Bowtell, Lachlan Cumming and Chis Mann, beat out the competition to earn first place at the awards ceremony, which was held on the Sunshine Coast.
The Southern Aurora Memorial commemorates the Southern Aurora passenger train, which crashed just outside Violet Town on February 7, 1969.
The crash killed nine people and injured a further 117.
The memorial uses art and design to tell the stories associated with the tragedy and promote positive human attributes such as bravery.
Southern Aurora Project historian Bruce Cumming said the memorial was built as a place of reflection.
“The garden space has been carefully designed and built as a calm and reflective space providing both artistic interpretations and factual information,” Mr Cumming said.
Awards director Liz Rivers called the memorial a great tourism draw.
“This unique memorial contributes significantly to making Australia a more vibrant, creative and interesting country — somewhere visitors want to explore more keenly,” she said.
The Australian Street Art Awards is a tourism awards for public art program which aims at getting Australians to explore the world-class street and public art that is on display year round.
The recent Australia Council for the Arts’ Domestic Art Tourism: Connecting the Country report has found that domestic arts tourists are high-value visitors who stay almost one-and-a-half times longer and spend about one-and-a-half times more per day than domestic tourists overall.
“Investing in outdoor art as an attraction mechanism also makes economic sense as art is typically less expensive to create than more traditional tourism attractions, while the pay-off is handsome,” Ms Rivers said.