Michael Denholm Art and Politics and the Economy, the Role of Art in Australia in the Twenty First Century
… An art museum in Hobart that is like the Sydney Opera House needs to be built in an appropriate place, such as Droughty Point, so that the Art Museum will radiate out to Hobart’s harbour and be a shining example of a new Tasmania, a confident state where human capital is fully utilised to create buildings and objects of real value, so that beautiful artworks and other quality goods can be exported to the rest of the world.
AUSTRALIA, early in the twenty first century, is at a turning point in its history. The old is dying and the new is struggling to be born.
Art could play a crucial role in changes that could take place in the Australian economy in the twenty first century. For, beyond the facade of ‘progress’, the material prosperity in Australia very much fuelled by the commodities boom, there are fundamental structural problems in the Australian economy and the ongoing problem of the extent of Australia’s national debt, with Commsec’s chief economist Craig James noting early in June this year that Australia’s ‘debt was equivalent to 51.3 per cent of the nation’s GDP, which puts Australia on a par with heavily indebted nations such as Turkey, Nigeria and Chile’, plus the worrying growth of a social divide in Australia, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
It is hardly surprising then that one of the favourite novels of the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, is Tom Wolfe’s Vanity of the Bonfires ‘which explores a morally bankrupt New York teeming with executives consumed with greed and an underclass blighted by crime and poverty’, as Australia goes more and down the American road. The number of low-paid workers in Australia rose 50 per cent to 1.8 million in 2003 from 1.3 million in the mid-1990s. In 2005 the average pay of chief executives in Australia was 63 times higher than that of average workers compared with 18 times in 1989-1990. One of the moments Howard most enjoyed on his trip to the United States in 2006 was his visit to the New York Stock Exchange when he especially enjoyed its din.
The social divide has become so great in Australia that the level of unemployment and underemployment in Australia, the Age estimated in mid-May this year, is quite staggering. Thus, ‘of 13.7 million Australians aged 15 to 64, only 7.1 million — just over half have a full-time job.’ ‘One in five working-age people now have a part-time job’. Of these people, ‘the Bureau of Statistics classes 567,000 of them as “underemployed” part-timers who want more work, usually full-time, but can’t find the jobs, or lack’ requisite skills. ‘A massive 3.9 million (28 per cent) working-age Australians have no job at all.’ Tim Colebatch concluded his article with the warning that ‘Australia has many minerals to sell the world but even they will run out and Keating’s banana republic warning will still resound.’
Indeed Standard & Poors has commented that Australia’s AAA credit rating could be in jeopardy because of its external liabilities. Given the problem in Australia of the skills shortage, and the problem of the long-term unemployed in Australia, the current federal government has designed a programme where individuals will learn work-related skills from a tradesman, but such programmes, if they are to be continued, need to be far more imaginative than the present policies of the current federal government, and workers trained under such policies need to be paid more than the dole. ‘1.75 million voters are on the other side of the prosperity ledger’ in Australia.
The executive director of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Tony Nicholson, has warned that ‘our unwillingness to invest in the capacity of the unemployed and the disabled will come back to haunt us’. Nicholson cited ‘the riots in Sydney’s Macquarie fields and Redfern as a glimpse of what can happen when disadvantage becomes entrenched.’ The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2006 employment report ‘puts Australia near the bottom of the pack in spending on training for [the] unemployed. In 2004-05 Australia spent only 0.04 per cent of its GDP on training the unemployed.’ ‘By contrast, world leader Denmark spent 0.54 per cent of GDP to give unemployed workers the skills to find jobs’.
Faced with the likelihood, with current federal government policies, of a social divide increasing in Australia, there will be the need for an increased expansion of the state to meet the needs of the poor, otherwise Australia will become more and more a divided country, with the growth of a fortress mentality amongst sections of the rich in Australia in relation to the rest of the country.
Art could play an important role in revitalising the Australian economy through the building of a series of art museums in the regions, in the way that a series of decentralised art museums were established in France, and, in the way, in the 1930s in the United States, under the New Deal programme in the Roosevelt administration, artists like Jackson Pollock were employed to make artworks. Now, in an update of the Roosevelt programme, artists, and craftsmen and craftswomen, could be used to train unemployed Australians in how to make beautiful art objects.
Tasmania especially could play an important role in beginning such a programme. For poverty is more marked in Tasmania than many other parts of the country, and there is a magnificient site of some 54 hectares of land at Droughty Point that the State Labor government could purchase, if it had sufficient imagination, in the way that the former Labor Premier of Tasmania, Bill Neilson, safeguarded the warehouses at Salamanca in Hobart which eventually resulted in this part of Hobart becoming an important artistic centre, and the economic enrichment of this major historical area.
Such an intervention is needed, for attempts by governments in Tasmania to revitalise the state, and to make it an economically prosperous state, are currently in a mess, what with the ongoing dramas and difficulties with forestry, the problems surrounding Basslink, and the problems that confronted Tasmania’s Spirit of Tasmania III. All these activites have involved significient state investment in infrastructure, and are not returning appropriate economic returns, especially given the level of division forestry policies have had on Tasmania’s citizens, and the extent to which the state’s ecology has been destroyed.
If Tasmania is to economically flourish, tourism will play an important role in such a development, but, to do so, tourism will need to be promoted in a non hypocritical manner, so that Tasmania is truly a natural state that is the jewel in the crown of the Commonwealth of Australia.
A Museum of Art built around Droughty Point would be a significant step in this direction. The Labor Premier of Tasmania, Paul Lennon, has already stated that he wants ‘Tasmanians to be culturally confident’, and that he wants the equivalent of the Sydney Opera House to be built at the site of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart, announcing, before the last state election, the redevelopment of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and thus committing his government to the vision that the former Labor Premier of Tasmania, Jim Bacon, had for this state when Bacon stated ‘Let’s have the discussion about a world-class cultural precinct for Tasmania, but one that is ours, not a copy of someone else’s.’
Lennon, who made his priorities clear in his first budget as Premier, that he described as his ‘heart of gold’ budget, when he allocated $22 million to upgrade the Elwick and Mowbray racecourses in what was described as his ‘Taj Mahal’ fixation, angrily dismissed suggestions from reporters that his main interests were racing and gambling, saying that there was more to him than such activities.
The Tasmanian Labor government has logically said that it wants to proceed with the policies that it put to the electorate prior to the recent state election. The Minister for Tourism, Environment and the Arts, Paula Wriedt, will be in charge of the proposed $30 million redevelopment of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Money for this redevelopment ‘will not start to flow until 2007-08.’ On behalf of the Tasmanian government the Sullivans Cove Waterfront Authority has also launched The Hobart International Design Competition, that aims to attract world-class creative designs for Hobart’s civic waterfront space, the ‘City Hall Axis’, on 24 July this year, and, by 29 August, 502 people from 67 countries had registered for this competition which closes on 1 December.
This competition raises the key question of whether what is desired in the Sullivans Cove can be achieved without overcrowding this space. Leo Schofield has criticised this competition as he prefers ‘bold commissions’ to competitions, writing that ‘there is little argument about the need to protect Sullivans Cove from further architectural and planning disasters’, and has called instead for ‘the commissioning of a master plan for this city’s historic, cultural and spiritual heart.’ The competition also raises the serious question on why it has only narrowly focused on the Sullivans Cove area, rather than having a holistic concept of the whole of Hobart that includes Hobart’s Eastern Shore, the Droughty Point site, and the Harbour that explorers and yachtsman and tourist ships have travelled through and continue to journey through.
The redevelopment of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is very much needed, as Hobart has been very backward regarding the development of art and craft in relation to the role of museums. An opportunity was missed in the Bicentennial year, 1988, while again another opportunity was not taken advantage of in the 1990s, so that Hobart, unlike its counterpart in Bendigo, did not receive a Federation Fund grant. An application was submitted in 1998 for funding from the Federation Fund but only after a group of people, that called themselves the ‘Out of the Dark’ group, that was formed following a meeting at the Hobart Hunter Street campus of the Tasmanian School of Art on 20 April 1998, had proposed that a Museum of Contemporary Art be established in Sullivans Cove. Such a proposal galvanised Hobart City Council alderman, Dr John Freeman, into action to try to ensure that the Dunn Place site was available for an extension to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Consequently, an application was rushed overnight through the Hobart City Council. When the then director of the Bendigo Art Gallery, Tony Ellwood, who is now Deputy Director (International Art) at the National Gallery of Victoria, visited Hobart in 1999, at the invitation of the author of this article, when he paid for the costs of bringing Ellwood to Hobart, to speak at a function on the Artistic Future of Tasmania at the Republic Bar & Cafe, North Hobart, at a lunch Ellwood had with Hobart’s Lord Mayor, he offered to give the Hobart City Council free advice about how the City of Bendigo successfully upgraded the Bendigo Art Gallery if the Hobart City Council decided to send an employee to Bendigo. The Lord Mayor did not take up Ellwood’s generous offer, nor did any members of the state government respond to an opportunity to meet with Ellwood.
The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery site is not the appropriate place to achieve the vision Lennon has propounded. Indeed, commentators like Peter Brenner and Anna Pafitis have warned of the danger that the Sullivans Cove area will be overbuilt. As Pafitis has pointed out in connection with the proposed redevelopment of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery:
A significant building of this kind would be inappropriate squashed into the Dunn Street site, creating a crowded wall of buildings at the entrance of Sullivans Cove. It requires a presence directly on the waterfront where it can seam together the activity of both the land and the sea and is surrounded by an expanse of public space where the people too can experience this activity at their leisure.
Pafitis, at that time, was advocating instead that a major art museum gallery be established in the Sullivans Cove area as a centre-piece to satellite museums.
An art museum in Hobart that is like the Sydney Opera House needs to be built in an appropriate place, such as Droughty Point, so that the Art Museum will radiate out to Hobart’s harbour and be a shining example of a new Tasmania, a confident state where human capital is fully utilised to create buildings and objects of real value, so that beautiful artworks and other quality goods can be exported to the rest of the world.
The site at Droughty Point is the site of the first business in Tasmania, as Trywork Point, at Droughty Point Peninsula, was the site of Tasmania’s first shore-based whaling station that was established by William Collins in 1805, an industry in Hobart that was mainly destroyed as a result of the greed of human beings, an ongoing problem in the history of humanity, and one that still bedevils Tasmania.
A Museum of Art and Craft at Droughty Point would highlight a majestic ocean gateway to the harbour and city of Hobart. It could be built like the Museum of Art at Louisiana in Denmark that harmoniously combines art, architecture and the natural landscape so that there is ample space for children to play, for families to congregate, and for the solitary traveller to commune with the universe. Here there should be a large number and variety of trees that will add to the sense of awe we feel at the mystery and wonder of the world that we inhabit.
But the Droughty Point site will not be available to be purchased forever, and the government needs to act before such an opportunity is lost. The Tasmanian Labor government needs a better vision for the future, one that breaks out of the old paradigms of the past. Ultimately the functions of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery need to be split, and thus, if the site where the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is currently based is redeveloped, it could be the prelude to the building of a grand art museum at Droughty Point. Purchasing the site at Droughty Point would mark a start to the building of such an art museum, a vision for the state that all the major political parties in Tasmania need to agree to, as we need a society that can rise above pettiness and bickering and embraces a grand vision.
The idea of building a series of art museums in Australia is not a new idea. It has been advocated by Peter Hill and other writers, and has been connected with the idea of having a Guggenheim Art Museum in Australia like that in Bailbo, Spain, but such art museums would be more logically associated with the National Gallery of Australia. Thus in May 1999 Peter Hill wrote that ‘a city like Hobart would be the ideal venue to launch a National Gallery outpost … With the help of the National Gallery in Canberra it could become a quite magical place of pilgrimage, as St Ives, Stromness, and Liverpool have in the UK, and Munster has in Germany.’ Indeed, as far back as 1980, Paul William White stated, in an article in The Tasmanian Review, that Tasmania could become the St Ives of Australia.
Such an expansion of art museums in Australia should be done in association with the National Gallery of Australia as part of a vision for Australia in the twenty first century. As the former Arts Minister in the Hawke Labor government, Barry Cohen, once stated, there needs to be an increased expansion of taking art held in the National Gallery of Australia to the rest of Australia, especially to its regions, where art by artists of the calibre of Munch, Constable, Picasso, Bacon, Beuys, O’Keeffe, Hepworth and Brassai, as well as such Australian artists as Dupain, Cotton, Meadmore, King, Kngwarreye, Daws and Gazzard, let alone their younger counterparts, such as Cattapan, Laurence and Booth, or art from such countries as Indonesia, India and China, let alone from Latin America and Scandinavia, is rarely if ever seen, even though citizens of Australia in the regions are taxpayers, and deserve to see this art as much as the inhabitants of Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. Men and women of much vision and energy will be needed to run such arts museum to ensure that their standards are world class.
The Australian Labor Party has in many ways, lost its soul. It needs to return to grand visions, to the ‘Light on the Hill’, or what that great nineteenth century novelist, George Eliot, described as the Frate, the spirit of the hill, to visions that helped to build Australia after the horrors of the Great Depression and the nightmare of World War II, as servicemen and servicewomen wanted Australia to be a better place than the despair and hopelessness of never being able to have a job, a despair and hopelessness that many of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters know only too well, even though, according to the history books, the Aboriginals responded well to the challenge when they were given work when Australia was under threat from the invasion of the Japanese during the dark days of World War II.
It was, after all, the Labor Party New South Wales Premier, John Joseph Cahill, who backed Jørn Utzon in his vision, and it was a Tasmanian, Sir Davis Hughes, who was educated at Launceston High School, and who lied about his qualifications, stating, in an application for a position on the civil staff of the Royal Australian Air Force in June 1940, that he had read for a Bachelor of Science degree at the Universities of Tasmania and Melbourne, ‘completing it in the following subjects …’, a claim that was not true, who did his utmost, when he was New South Wales Minister for Public Works in the Liberal-Country Party coalition government, to destroy Utzon’s vision, as Hughes became determined to take over and become the man most associated with the building of the Sydney Opera House. Hughes is remembered, Utzon’s biographer, Philip Drew states, by a short, suburban street in Armidale, a cul-de-sac, that leads nowhere. The Premier of Tasmania, Paul Lennon, needs to be careful then when he makes references to Utzon. Either he means what he says or he doesn’t. By his statement, he now has a lot to live up to, to redeem the stupidity of Hughes. Tasmanians now will be watching with great interest to see if Lennon’s Labor government can live up to its plans.
The country of Australia is calling out for visions, for a better Australia, that does not involve locking refugees up in camps or attacking the working standards and incomes of ordinary Australians, but that promotes instead the maximum use of human capital in Australia to restore full employment in Australia and to end the worrying onslaught by the federal government on the living standards of Australians. Given the level of national debt, Australians will need to export more goods, and thus need to be shown the best way to create artworks and goods that can be sold overseas. Art museums can play an important role here, in demonstrating the importance of art that is inspirational and profound.
Michael Denholm is author of The Winnowing Of The Grain, Art and Craft Magazines in Australia, 1963-1996 (Carlton Street Press, 2006).
This book is part one of a ninefold series of books, that Mr Denholm has been researching and writing since 1991, that will be published in forthcoming years.
A shorter version of this article was published in Art Monthly Australia, No.195, November 2006, pp.39-41.
