TOWN HALL FOURM, 19 OCTOBER 2009
By Professor Geoffrey Bolton

Western Australia has enjoyed three periods of prosperity during which it was possible for governments to plan for the cultural future of the community. The first came with the goldrushes of the 1890s and resulted in the building of the Western Australian Museum, the State Public Library, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Zoological Gardens and Acclimatisation Society, and belatedly, and largely as a result of the drive and philanthropy of Sir Winthrop Hackett, The University of Western Australia. These achievements reflect the influence of Sir John Forrest as premier for ten years, abetted by one or two contemporaries such as Hackett and Sir Walter James.

The second period of growth came as a result of the iron ore boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. The buildings that date from this period include the Perth Concert Hall, the Alexander Library Building, the Perth Entertainment Centre, the Western Australian Museum building (now abandoned) and the refurbished His Majesty's Theatre, as well as Murdoch University and the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University). The decision-makers who facilitated these achievements included the premiers John Tonkin and Sir Charles Court and the under-treasurer Sir Kenneth Townsing. It helped that figures such as Sir Thomas Meagher as chairman of the Museum Trustees and David Ride as his chief executive officer, or Professor Fred Alexander and Ali Sharr and Bob Sharman at the State Library enjoyed regular access to the senior politicians and public servants of their day. Such access has become less easy and less frequent since the reforming zeal of Peter Foss as Arts Minister in the 1990s reduced the powers of the boards of trustees to subsume them in the Department of the Arts and Culture. As the son of a clergyman Foss should have remembered that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and the results of this change haven’t always been happy. Nevertheless I intend to conclude by suggesting that
through the Department of Arts and Culture there may yet come salvation from the discontents that have brought us here this afternoon.

Let us now turn to the third period of prosperity based on the expanding mineral industry and the exploitation of natural gas. We may date this from around 1993, when the State's economy was recovering from the excesses of "W.A. Inc". What monuments have we to show for this era? We have the Maritime Museum at Victoria Quay, largely the child of the enthusiasm of Richard Court as premier. We have a new State theatre arising in Northbridge. And that, unless we wish to include the Convention Centre and the Bell Tower, is about the sum of it. On the debit side we have a State Record Office entrusted with hugely enlarged responsibilities as a result of the Commission on Government that followed "W.A. Inc" and housed in makeshift quarters in the Alexander Library Building with no hope of better to come. We have the Museum making the best of temporary accommodation in Welshpool since the building of 1971 was found to be riddled with asbestos. The State history museum in Fremantle has closed entirely, and the collections in the Museum of Childhood and the Museum of Sport are in storage and not on display. The information centre at the Midland Workshops is closed. We have all the major cultural institutions of this State under-staffed with vacancies left unfilled for years, beset by continual demands to reduce expenditure further, and struggling to maintain services at the levels which we took for granted ten or twenty years ago. Morale declines, good staff leave the service, and not enough of the younger generation can be recruited to meet the needs of the future. It is a shabby picture for prosperous Western Australia.

What is responsible for this state of affairs? Much of it is due to one factor: Procrastination, procrastination, procrastination. Let me give some examples. Probably our finest example of public architecture from the turn of the previous century is the Treasury Building on the corner of Barrack Street and St George's Terrace. Since it ceased to be used for government offices it has stood vacant for most of the last two decades. There are many uses to which the building might have been put. It might have been converted into a kind of 'History House' where the Battye Library, the Royal Historical Society, the Western Australian Genealogical Society, and other similar organisations could have enjoyed the benefits of shared facilities and entered into creative synergies. It might have become, as the Treasury Building in Brisbane became, the site of a five-star hotel. It might have been developed into something similar to the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, with attractive shopping arcades. It might even have been restored to its original use as government offices, although I suppose its inhabitants would have missed the river views which they can command by renting high-rise accommodation in St George's Terrace. Any of these outcomes would have been preferable to its present neglected and deteriorating condition. Perhaps at some level successive State governments have been employing the Treasury Building as visible evidence that, when it comes to the preservation of heritage and history, most of the modern Western Australian community could not give a damn.

This is not the only example, and it would not be fair to single out the State government as the only offender. Consider the fate of the Basil Kirke studio in the old Australian Broadcasting Corporation building in Adelaide Terrace. Generations of orchestral performers have testified to the uncommonly fine acoustic quality of this studio. Yet since the ABC moved into its new premises in East Perth the studio lies unused and under potential sentence of destruction. Consider Newspaper House, which is at last undergoing some renovation, but for years languished under a suspended sentence like an American convict on Death Row. But the habit of procrastination does not show itself merely in determining the fate of heritage buildings. It can be seen in the leisurely approach towards filling critical senior executive positions, so that the position of chief executive officer in the State Library or the Western Australian Museum may remain vacant for two years at a time. I cannot imagine that any well-run business, or any government department would find that position tolerable.

Even where there is an obvious need for a new building – and probably the State Record Office and the WA Museum are the two most obviously deserving cases of recent years - the habit of procrastination brings paralysis. The previous State government hesitated to start new major building projects for fear of overheating demand in the construction industry, with only four major firms thought capable of undertaking such projects, and with no apparent means of introducing new competitors. The present State government makes a virtue of cutting expenditure - and I shall come back to this factor in a minute or two - and therefore doesn't start new building projects. It is an exquisite case of Catch-22. The previous State government took a long time to decide whether the State Record Office or the WA Museum should be the next major undertaking, and when the Museum was given the nod, there was debate as to whether the site should be in the Cultural Centre at Northbridge or the East Perth Power House. Each of these sites had both advantages and disadvantages. Neither was the perfect choice, but a choice had to be made, and East Perth was decided. It might have been thought that this decision was safe from the vicissitudes of party politics, but not a bit of it. When the government changed last year East Perth was scrapped in favour of Northbridge, and three years of planning went down the drain. Meanwhile, as another monument to procrastination, the asbestos-ridden Museum building of the 1970s remains forlornly undemolished.

A similar contempt - or, putting it more kindly, a similar thoughtlessness - can be seen in the persistent underfunding of our public cultural institutions. Let me illustrate this from recent experience with the Western Australian Museum. In the 12 months 2007-08 the Western Australian Museum institutions attracted 891 thousand visits; Queensland attracted 747 thousand, South Australia 737 thousand. How was performance rewarded? In the 24 months to the end of June 2008 the South Australian Museum gained an 11 per cent increase in operating income and the Queensland Museum 7.4 per cent. Even the New South Wales government, usually derided as the basket-case among State economies, found a 2 per cent increase for the Australian Museum in Sydney. And how was the Western Australian Museum treated by its prosperous State government? It had to cope with a 10 per cent reduction. This has been followed by the annual 3 per cent saving required of all government departments. I do not believe that this is an isolated case, and I do not believe that it can be blamed exclusively on any political party in government.

Some may argue that the private sector should play a part. But here the picture is as gloomy. One of our most significant privately owned museums, the Motor Museum at Fremantle, has had to close. We have philanthropists in Western Australia, but the demands on their funds are many and it is hard to discern a Swan River Guggenheim on the horizon. Private generosity will always be welcome, but so far as we can see it will be exercised on a basis of government infrastructure.

Of course the arts and culture are not the only publicly funded activities to complain of underfunding. Hardly a day goes by without cries of pain from education, from the mental health services, hospitals and other agents of public health, from agencies of Aboriginal welfare, all of them likely to appeal to the public as more critically in need than the libraries and art galleries and museums. The erosion of our culture is a less obvious process, but our children and grandchildren will not thank us if they don't have access to the educational opportunities, to the stimulus to the minds that we enjoyed in our generation. Also, at a more pragmatic level, it must never be forgotten that if our cultural institutions are well regarded they will attract tourists, and tourists are good for the economy. We can't expect an improvement overnight. But there is a way in which it might be possible to generate a ray of hope for the future.

More than fifty years ago the State government of the day, foreseeing that Perth was likely to develop rapidly in the second half of the 20th century, commissioned an eminent town planner, Gordon Stephenson, to draw up a metropolitan regional plan as a blueprint for future growth. Without that plan it is unlikely that we would be enjoying the facilities of the present day: a highway from Joondalup to Bunbury, new railways to Currumbine and Mandurah, the preservation of open spaces in the Swan Valley and elsewhere. Though the population has trebled since that time we were able to accommodate growth.

In the next forty years our population will double again, and Perth will become a city of three million inhabitants. It is time to draw up a blueprint of our community's needs in the field of culture and the arts which must be planned and fulfilled during the next forty years. It is here that the centralised Department of Arts and Culture can play, and may be ready to play, a constructive role - and it is helpful that the department is in the hands of a senior and experienced minister. Let them bring together the stakeholders represented here today, and let them draw up an orderly prioritised agenda of the improvements which we want to see: the restoration of adequate levels of staffing, the provision of new buildings where these are required, the changes that may be needed to meet the challenge of new electronic media. And then let successive governments keep to that blueprint, and let there be an end to the procrastination, the muddle, and the shifts of plan that have too often characterised policy-making in recent years. We can endure our present discontents if we know that there is a genuine will in government to lift the arts and culture out of their despondency, and not take too long about it.

If Perth is to fulfil its potential as a great city, able to receive without shame visitors from London and New York and Singapore and Dubai, then Western Australians must show that they value their cultural institutions. The historians of the future must be able to write that those who held power during our present era of prosperity shared the same generous vision as their predecessors in the 1890s and the 1970s. It would be disgraceful if, instead, our generation went down to posterity as a generation of philistine provincial pygmies. We are here tonight to urge that the right choices are made.