Port Adelaide: The Year of the Port with Keith Conlon

Strewn with old stone warehouses and maritime industry office buildings and shops, Port Adelaide is a magnet for artists. Watercolourist Stuart Gifford's eye, however, looks at the port's rich heritage as a way of portraying its future.

He's passionate about the area, and he's coined the phrase "the Year of the Port", referring to 1999, because he sees so many projects that will revitalise the distinctive area as a thriving separate city rather than a suburb of Adelaide.

Standing on the wharf just up from the famous Black Diamond Corner, you can see several reasons for his fervour ­ and several of his watercolour subjects. The grand old red brick police station has a new purpose as well as a facelift; it's now the Visitor Information Centre. The stone two storey Customs House has stood near the inner harbour for 120 years. It may soon enter another decade as a boutique hotel.

On the site of the South Australian Company's McLaren Wharf dating from 1840, there are strong signs that Stuart's has a case. The Lipson Wharf development has entered the construction phase. It will soon see and block of cafes, another retail and residential section, and a third building of apartments on the water's edge. They are all sold.

Stuart Gifford took me on a tour of the Port to see where it is going to change in his year of the Port ­ or soon after. Several of his watercolours have been printed as postcards by the visitor information centre, which gives him a dual role in the dock area. He has developed an enviable reputation as a vegetarian chef and restaurateur in Adelaide, and his new home is "Sarah's", in a nineteenth century building on the footpath of Dale Street. A background of art school and town planning subjects has come to the fore again to share space in his life with the stove and his family.

Borrowing the old police launch "Archie Badenoch" from the Maritime Museum, we cruised the Port River ­ actually a saltwater estuary ­ past the ageing multi-storey Hart's Mill. It makes an appealing focus for one of his wharf-scapes, but Stuart looks ahead to a time when it will stand tall and busy as a community centre.

Whaler and sealer Captain John Hart, walked the Adelaide plains before the arrival of the South Australian Company's fleet of settlers. He passed on some advice to Col. William Light, who chose the site for Adelaide, the capital of their religious and economic utopia. Stuart Gifford surmises that Light found the port first and chose a site nearby for the city after that. His "finest little harbour in the world" became Port Adelaide.

Some sections of the old commercial centre round Lipson Street and Divett Street have caught Stuart's artist eyes, and also a new generation of portside businesses and residents who have already transformed the interiors of both unassuming warehouses and grand banks and nineteenth century offices.

Constance raised a rattling roll-up door, for instance, to reveal an ultra-contemporary art exhibition space and apartment built into the old loading dock within. Further along Divett Street in the basement of the gothic edifice that was the old Advertiser office, another resident, Craig, carefully revealed an intaglio print of another of Stuart Gifford's artworks. He's developing an artprint business, with works of the Port for sale in the Port, at the Dockside Gallery. In turn, it is now part of an art and antique crawl bringing visitors and renewed prosperity.

If you want to see the year of the Port and what's next on display already, you need only head upriver past the Jervois Bridge to find the Harbourside Quay projectŠ.more than 130 allotments, all sold, with people starting to move in to their new houses.

Back round the Hart's Mill bend opposite the marine theme architecture of the new TAFE college it is still all galvanised sheds, sawtooth factory roofs and yacht shipways. Stuart Gifford's soft toned watercolour of this stretch has an industrial edge as it looks to the future. It portrays daring down-to-the-edge mixed uses buildings, perhaps involving living and shopping and working places cheek by galvanised iron jowl.

Stuart's hope is that soon, not long after his year of the Port, we will come to look here at the modern twenty first century Port Adelaide as well as the old. You can contemplate his vision through the postcards and a book available at the Port Adelaide Visitor Information Centre. They will inspire you, as they did me, to take another look before it all happens. For more info email visitorinfo@portenf.sa.gov.au