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<\/p>\nI recently left an art display at the Art Gallery of Western Australia called Attachment Styles: Modes of Belonging in Modern and Contemporary Art with one very clear message: I don\u2019t belong in any part of the story that Perth Institutions tell themselves about Western Australia.<\/p>\n
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Screenshot: https:\/\/artgallery.wa.gov.au\/whats-on\/exhibitions\/attachment-styles-modes-of-belonging-in-modern-and-contemporary-art\/<\/p>\n
I have never been backward in stating that I don\u2019t care too much about what happens east of the Nullarbor, aside from what I am forced to care about in relation to taxes and legal impositions.<\/p>\n
Likely similar to how most in the Pacific Southeast feel about everything from Darwin to Esperance, but I imagine each state has a solid warehouse of artworks that it owns. Western Australia is no different, in fact we own some truly remarkable old pieces steeped in legend and tradition.<\/p>\n
One of these, for example, is The Foundation of Perth, by George Pitt Morrison. A truly beautiful painting of Helen Dance, a wife of one of the assembled sailors, about to make one of the first axe-blows after the colony\u2019s inaugural governor, James Stirling, has read out a declaration from King George IV. That image used to be a permanent fixture in the Art Gallery. Today it seems to come and go and is these days adorned with Aboriginal place names, always first, and with assertions about the \u2018impossibility of unifying the tranquillity of the naturalistic landscape setting with the violence against indigenous people\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
Likewise, Idleness, by Rupert Charles Wulsten Bunny, c 1909, or Down on His Luck, by Frederick McCubbin, painted in 1889. All overwritten now with statements like \u2018born 1964 Naam\/Melbourne\u2026\u2019 etc.<\/p>\n
You get the picture.<\/p>\n
Contemporary cultural institutions have a moral framework that treats European heritage primarily through the lens of guilt and non-European heritage primarily through the lens of victimhood or virtue.<\/p>\n
It is my view that the same reason people complain about two-tiered policing in the Uk is why we are not allowed to celebrate our own history.<\/p>\n
Instead, our history ends up being retold through the overwrought statements of a middle class that at once exaggerate and misunderstand the events of the age, while extending sanctification to basically everyone who isn\u2019t of European descent. It\u2019d be funny if it wasn\u2019t deadly serious.<\/p>\n
Second, as always, Perth thinks that Perth is Western Australia. Not the Albany whaling industry, the historic gold mining industry of Kalgoorlie and the Goldfields, not the ancient Kimberley civilisations (plural), and not the Pilbara where I grew up.<\/p>\n
The only mention of the Pilbara was one kids exhibit, on The Drovers Strike, which seems to be getting renamed to the 1946 Pilbara Strike, and the story seems to be changing a bit. Old Don MacLeod, who I met in his dotage in the Jigalong Aboriginal community near Newman, and the author of How The West Was Lost, had been assigned a bit part in this retelling instead of the central role he played. Something I found quite amusing.<\/p>\n
Lang Hancock and the story of iron ore is, by far, the most important West Australian story there is. Yet, there is regularly nothing at all about it in either the Art Gallery of Western Australia, or the WA Museum. Because, of course, once you mention Lang, you must mention Gina Rinehart, his daughter and inheritor of his fortune. A fortune she has turned into a far greater empire than Lang ever owned, and the urban middle class despise Gina Rinehart. Particularly after she gifted Pauline Hanson with an airplane.<\/p>\n
As an aside, the West Australian Museum is named in using a word from the local Aboriginal tribe. A language that changes quite a bit throughout the southwest and is nothing like the languages of the Martu, Pintupi, or Wongi up in the north, to name but a few. Nothing at all is named after any of the northern tribes.<\/p>\n
If the city wanted to fund and build a Perth Museum, I couldn\u2019t care less, but this is the West Australian Museum. My state. Twice the size of Texas and a third of the Australian land mass.<\/p>\n