After months of speculation and bureaucratic back-and-forth, the Herald Sun reports that an Australian Music Hall of Fame will finally be established. According to News Corp, the Australian Music Hall of Fame will serve as part hall of fame, part museum and will be housed at the Victorian Arts Centre.
Kylie Minogue, Molly Meldrum, and Mushroom Records founder Michael Gudinski will be patrons of the Hall, which will have free entry and will bring an end to what Gudinski referred to as a “15-year-plus struggle” to get an Australian Music Hall of Fame built, something of a passion project for the veteran promoter.
“It would have been shattering for Molly and me and Kylie if it happened anywhere else in Australia like Sydney,” he told News Corp. It seems the $10 million in State Government funding the Andrews Government had earmarked for a Music Hall of Fame wasn’t simply empty party rhetoric spouted in the lead-up to the state election.
The venue was originally the cause of a major bidding war between famed Melbourne music sites. Among those who were vying for the government cash was St Kilda’s iconic Palais Theatre. “We think it would make a lot of sense for it to be at the Palais,” Mayor Amanda Stevens told The Leader in 2014. “There’s a huge amount of musical history in St Kilda and we’d be really keen to secure the extra funding.”
The Victorian Arts Centre will be redeveloping its Gallery 1 area to house the Hall, which will feature items donated by Minogue, Meldrum, and Gudinski, as well as exhibits from the Arts Centre’s own collection. The Australian Music Hall of Fame is set to officially open in November 2017.
“It will be an opportunity for all generations and all types of people including the next generation to be educated on music and the experience of it,” Gudinski told the Herald Sun. “If people are going to walk through it and if they feel inspired in any way then we’ve achieved our goal.”
It’s not yet clear whether the Australian Music Hall of Fame will operate in a similar way to the US Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which is located on the shore of Lake Erie in downtown Cleveland, Ohio and hosts yearly inductions in New York City. ARIA already maintain a Hall of Fame, selecting one inductee per year, though it does not maintain a physical, brick-and-mortar hall of fame.
