February 6, 2014
The South Burnett Tourism Association wants better signs placed outside the region to draw more tourists to the South Burnett.
At its first meeting for 2014, held on Tuesday night at the Wondai Hotel and Cellars, SBTA vice-president Michael Boehm proposed the group establish a sub-committee to find locations where signs could be placed.
The group would also devise strategies to ensure the signs could be maintained in the future.
“This project isn’t about signage inside the region,” he told members.
“It’s about advertising the South Burnett outside our borders to draw more tourists in.”
For more than a decade it tried to get a sign set up at Blacksoil, near Ipswich, to encourage tourists to travel up the Brisbane Valley Highway to the area.
And a sign established by the Fraser Coast Regional Tourism Association on the Bruce Highway north of the Kilkivan turn-off in the mid-2000s – which aimed to encourage south-bound tourists to travel back to Brisbane via the South Burnett – drew heavy criticism for several years because of its “invisibility”.
Former SBRC Mayor David Carter told the meeting the sign had consumed “up to a third” of the South Burnett’s share of the regional tourism organisation’s budget each year but was so poorly located most drivers who passed it didn’t see it.
SBRC Economic Development Manager Phil Harding, who also attended the meeting, advised the SBTA the council had recently set up a signage committee to investigate how signage within the region could be improved.
He said he was happy to take the SBTA’s proposal to that committee, even though it was outside the bounds of what they were currently tasked with.
