Trials and Tribulations of being a live music venue owner.... Chapter 2....

I will start with how epically grateful I am to be surrounded by such incredible humans who continually fill our cup and give us all the reasons to keep going and fight for our passions, stay strong in the face of knock downs, make our souls smile and are our reasons why this space is so important and precious to our hearts

Make sure you've read chapter 1 before this.....

Chapter 2

September - November 2021

Since upstairs was now not being used for a restaurant, I didn't have the capability or the resources to be able to run it as another restaurant so we started thinking about any possibilities to fill the space to pay the rent.

This was the start of Cairns Melting Pot! The concept was to have an all inclusive community creative space to compliment what we already do downstairs.

We had met a gorgeous woman, who is an freekin amazing dancer and choreographer, Soulatina, and talked about her doing dance classes.

We decided to get it happening! They were wonderful in putting in floor to ceiling mirrors and kicking off Latin dance classes.

Thinking outside the square, we wondered how market days would also go, it was going to be coming into wet season, to be indoors and aircon was a yas and yas!! So we had a couple of these too! Including the successful LilJs Vintage Markets!

Also joining our lil community space, in the back office was Harbrow Mentoring, a fantastic youth mentoring organisation that truly inspires and deeply cares about who and what they do to help others. They also partnered with CentreCare for a great concept of a Gentleman's Club, that taught young adults compassion, chivalry and social etiquette. Such a great program! So proud to be able to hold space for something like that. Aaahhhhh yep, another one of my reasons why....

Now! Back to the MCU..... progress stalled again, with a missing signed document that ended up having the application submitted to Council 1 day after due date as our town planner wanted to submit everything all together.

We were notified a week later that we missed the deadline and would have to start the whole process again from initial submission!! At least they kept our money so we didn't have to wait for the refund to be processed as we didn't have the funds to pay a second time.

We got officially notified of the successful application to be food and beverage at the end of November.... right when the s!%t started to hit the fan!

The visit from licencing..... daaant dant daaaaaaaaa.... they were there to check our compliance with our food to alcohol sales ratio as we hold a restaurant/ cafe licence. An on premises subsidiary licence. It seems, someone local and in the industry, had bought it to licencings attention that we were not doing our proper ratio of food:alcohol. I admitted when they attended our venue, since we had taken back over the kitchen, no we hadn't.... we were trying to build it back up again..... i do have to add here, licencing and the cops have always been fantastic to us {even through restrictions and everything! Always talking to us, letting us speak and actually listening to us}

Due to this, they wanted us to look at going to a bar licence. So we started looking into it.

{We also had The Whitlams play 3 sold out shows... hence the pic! }

December 2021

After a good talk with licencing, we requested 3 months to build our food aspect up. They were indeed kind enough to allow us to try this, by letting us get into it until march.

Then mandates kicked in...... I was about to lose all but one crew member and also meant I wasn't allowed to be in our own venue! This also meant we had to find more crew and train them too.

Over this time, it was bought to our attention that again, other local businesses had bought our name to the attention of the heavy authorities, including big boys of police, local, state and federal governments and licencing with regard to a concern of wanting to know how they were going to deal with us for being known supporters of "freedom of choice"..... with alternative views.....

Taking all this in, dad and I made a decision to open in the mornings for take away only, to build our food, to keep our other crew in a job and to bring on a couple more who'd lost their jobs due to the mandates....

December also marked the entrance of the newbies from Melbourne purchasing the top floor unit out the back, directly behind us which is on the same body corps.....

which takes us into January! A new year!! Woo hoo!! With a whole new vibe, people to work with, musicians to meet and to experience a delicious new morning menu!

And a whole new pile of new poop on the side! Haha