Andrea Vinkovic, Shape of Thought (detail) from Here & Now 14: Contemporary Western Australian ceramics
Image by Kevin Gordon for Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery via ABC Arts.
Yes, we’re here, the ingrates in the West. Never satisfied, apparently, with being out of sight and therefore out of mind. This week another familiar story unfolded as yet more national services to Western Australia were pruned.
This time it is the national broadcaster (I have to keep reminding myself that there is such a beast), the ABC, whose charter states that one of its functions is to broadcast programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community.
Well, it looks like one third of the Australian landmass is being excised from this charter as it becomes increasingly difficult for people living west of the rabbit proof fence to tell their stories to a national audience.
This is not just about the ABC and its reduced programming from the West. Sadly, what it reflects, and this is a constant source of frustration, is the seemingly ingrained attitude taken by many of the major organisations and government agencies located in Sydney and Melbourne that Australia stops somewhere around the 141st meridian, i.e. the South Australian and Victorian border.
Historically Western Australian artists and arts organisations have received less per capita funding from the federal arts agency than many of the other states. Why do we become so irate about this? Well, because we see so much of the wealth generated from this state being poured into the federal coffers and very little being returned to support our social infrastructure and ability to tell our stories [and have them celebrated] further afield. Maybe you have to be here to understand it.
A visiting senior arts curator from Sydney spoke recently at an arts prize event about her surprise regarding the quality of sculptural practice in the West. It was a surprise, indeed, when she then said that she had never been to Perth before.
A senior bureaucrat from Canberra with national responsibilities once told me how much she thought Perth had changed since she last visited fifteen years ago.
Faced with this reluctance to travel to Western Australia we must rely on other means of making the creative resources of this state known to the rest of the nation. By the way, while we are on the subject of travel, can we please drop the excuse that it’s a long way to go to Perth? We are very well aware of the distance since most Western Australians make the trip to Melbourne and Sydney on a regular basis and see it as part of living in a very large country. And please don’t get me started on the calendar invitations for 5am telephone hook ups…
So, back to the other means of sharing our stories. It could be argued that commercial television has a similar charter to share the nations’ stories yet program production disappeared many years ago from this state and the shows which pre-dominate are ones involving the drama of manipulated reality shows, surreal soapies and the sensational investigations of tawdry rip-off schemes.
The ABC is meant to be a point of difference and should be aspiring to show people what extraordinary diversity is out there rather than narrowing down tastes to ‘more of the same’.
People talk about the challenges and opportunities from the convergence of media. One of these challenges will be to prevent such a convergence of ‘likes’ so that initially marginal ideas will be crowded out of the conversation and therefore the opportunity to be heard by a broader audience will be lost. The community will be the poorer for muffling these diverse voices.
Western Australia, through its artists, holds a significant part of the creative wealth of this country. If only this renewable wealth was valued nationally as highly as the income from our mineral resources.
When it comes to arts and culture coverage in the West the national broadcaster’s footprint was already a toehold. The reductions announced this week have trimmed that to a nail clipping.
No wonder the ‘secession’ word crops up from time to time because we don’t feel a lot of neighbourly love coming over the fence.
Well may they say it’s “Your ABC”, increasingly little is left here in the West.
