Perth: A Twenty-First Century Cultural Leader
It is by their very nature that cities produce culture. Engines of repeated social interaction they are, in the words of the influential twentieth-century American urbanist Jane Jacobs, ‘prolific incubators of new enterprises and ideas of all kinds’ (The Death and Rise of Great American Cities, 1961). Seen in this way, the cultural capital of a city is not limited to the output of its creative industries. More significantly, the vitality of the creative industries is a useful measure of a city’s broader culture and its ability to foster creativity as a productive mechanism of its economy.
This article explores Perth’s historic and contemporary capacity for creativity. There are circumstances that stifle the emergence of creativity, just as there are conditions that cause it to flourish. Perth’s geography, sprawl, climate, the density and affordability of its housing, the quality of life, and the mindset of its inhabitants are at once conducive and detrimental to incubating creative enterprises and innovation. Understanding these determinants are central to keeping cultural growth apace of demographic growth. Could Perth be a global leader for culture? I argue that it possesses some of the ingredients. Ultimately, it is how Perth navigates the challenges and opportunities presented by its circumstances that will decide its ability to create and innovate, and perhaps more importantly, to attract and retain creative, innovative people.
What makes Perth creative?
Writing in Walkabout magazine in 1938, John K. Ewers, the Subiaco-born teacher and novelist captured the essence of the qualities that stood to make Perth’s creative scene. ‘Perth’s quiet serenity’ meant that life ‘passed in easy stages from one luxury to another.’ Such cities, he thought, could sometimes be constrained by ‘a lack of culture’ (The City on the Swan, Walkabout, 1938). But in Perth, the financial success of a string of 1930s creative performances produced by ‘competent amateur societies’ spoke well for the ‘appreciation of the people of Perth’ for cultural projects. Perth was experiencing a period of nascent cultural growth that extended beyond commercial cultural success. As the historian of Perth’s arts movement Dylan Hyde argues, the interwar years were an iconoclastic, politically charged, era of local creative revolution (Art Was Their Weapon, 2020).
Ewers put the booming pre-war cultural scene down to Perth’s distance from the established centres of Melbourne and Sydney. ‘Perth’s very isolation may lead to the development of an indigenous culture, rivalling that of the more neighbourly Eastern Australian cities’, he wrote. Ironically, Ewers’s use of ‘indigenous’ likely referred to a culture local to Perth rather than the specific culture of the region’s traditional owners. Today we realise more acutely what a tremendous asset Noongar culture is to Perth’s cultural landscape (a topic I will revisit in a future article). The key to Ewers’s observation, nevertheless, was the important truth that Perth’s distance from the east coast was an asset, and certainly not a hindrance, in determining a strong local culture.
A feature of many, though certainly not all, of the world’s leading creative and cultural cities is that they are peripheral to the national political centre. The Australian writer Robert Hughes saw Barcelona’s provinciality as ‘a source of great strength – and occasionally self-delusion as well – for writers, architects, and artists, many of whom viewed their own creative efforts as rebuttals of centralism’ (Barcelona, 1993). Other examples abound. Kyoto’s culture boomed after it relinquished capital status to Tokyo. Edinburgh flourished beyond the shadow of London, and Southern California became a hub for new scientific, technological and cultural institutions far from the American East Coast. Though the circumstances of these places are historically distinct, they have in common that distance from centres of authority encouraged the formation of strong local identities and cultural industries.
In his social and cultural history of Southern California Carey McWilliams identified the region’s separation from the ‘East and the other sections that make up the West’ as a driver of a ‘self-centred culture… that has matured more rapidly than the culture of the other western states.’ (Southern California: An Island on the Land, 1946). In his account, distance and the ‘independence born of geographical location’ were the makers of ‘entirely diverse commercial and industrial’ enterprises unrestrained by the conventions and institutions of New York, Boston, and Washington.
Southern California’s potential for generating creativity was also born from its climate. ‘The climate is the region’ declared McWilliams. The climate was, in his view, a commodity that had attracted ‘unlimited resources of manpower and wealth, made possible intensive agricultural development and located specialized industries, such as motion pictures.’ John Ewers, in fact writing eight years before McWilliams, similarly identified Perth’s ‘congenial and singularly reliable climate’ as a great proponent of a healthy and active population with an overwhelming preference for going about life in the ‘open air.’
The recent completion of Perth Film Studios offers a relevant and contemporary example of how Perth’s climate and isolation have combined to create a new creative enterprise. With a reliable climate and over 3200 hours of sunshine yearly, Perth possesses a similar climate to the one that made Southern California attractive for film production. More significant for Perth’s burgeoning film industry than a climate that guarantees cost-effective shooting is how the studio is a connector of large and small enterprises. Its proximity to the Malaga industrial area gives media production companies ready access to small and medium-size business that provide a range of goods and services that support filming. As Jacobs argued, the repeated interaction of people and enterprises in such contexts is an exponential generator of city diversity.
What’s stopping Perth from being more creative?
Coincidentally, film delivered one of the most famous explanations of what stimulates and inhibits culture. Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949) cynically explained that it was ‘the Borgias… warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed’ that produced the Florentine Renaissance. In contrast, ‘five hundred years of democracy and peace in Switzerland’ only produced ‘the cuckoo clock.’ Entertainingly cynical but ultimately erroneous (Cuckoo clocks are German and the Borgias were based in Rome) Welles’s line nevertheless raised the idea that if a polity grows too comfortable or safe it might lose its creative edge. It was in this fashion that Charles Landry, author of The Art of City-Making (2006), noted that Perth had a ‘looming crisis of attracting talented people’ because it lacked a sense of urgency: ‘Warm sun, good wine, and relaxed living… can dent ambition.’
Perth has related inherited challenges that risk stifling creativity. As Landry further pointed out, perceptions of a poor urban environment made people reluctant to stay. Perth’s massive urban sprawl makes difficult the kinds of densified housing, al fresco culture and urban neighbourhoods that are conducive to fuelling exuberant city diversity. As recent surveying from Creative Australia suggests, urban sprawl is also an inhibitor of cultural patronage. Of those surveyed, forty-two percent reported arts events are too far away from home and twenty-nine percent reported that poor public-transport and parking make attending arts events difficult. The implications of such data for Perth are consequential because separation from cultural experiences does not just mean fewer performances, but fewer repeated connections between people and enterprises – the very engines of diversity for a successful creative economy.
Even greater than the abovementioned cultural inhibitors is an enduring mindset that Perth somehow lacks a distinctive cultural identity. Ewers saw this as a risk in 1938, writing that ‘Perth’s one sin… is its endearing modesty.’ Perth had not ‘yet quite realized that she had shed her Cinderella rags and put on the princess-like fineries of a prosperous modern city.’ Perth has since come a long way in growing into itself, but there sometimes exists a tendency to sink below ‘endearing modesty’ to a self-conscious and self-deprecating mindset. Perth’s vast sprawl offers some explanation of why it can sometimes seem difficult to locate its beating cultural heart. ‘Perth is soulless’; ‘Perth has no culture’ and ‘Perth has no identity’ – here are the tired catchcries of an insecure parochial psychology that incorrectly views the things that make Perth special as penalties rather than assets. Regrettably such attitudes drive down investment, stifle creativity, drive away talent and are a barrier to the types of repeated social interaction that creates enterprise and encourages diversity.
Conclusion: Civic Culture is Creative Culture
The art critic Kenneth Clark noted in his masterpiece Civilisation: A Personal View (1969) that contrary to popular belief, the men who made Florence the richest city in Europe did not ‘foreshadow in any way the extraordinary episode in the history of civilisation known as the Renaissance.’ Rather, the improbable burst of creativity that gave the world Da Vinci and Michelangelo depended almost entirely on confidence and the Florentine state of mind. A creative city flourished because the Florentine bureaucratic class, wielders of major political and diplomatic influence, were believers in ‘the application of free intelligence to public affairs’ but ‘believers above all, in Florence.’
For Perth, Clarke’s message is resounding. If we are to capitalise on Perth’s potential as a twenty-first century creative global capital, we must believe, above all else, in Perth. This article has shown that some of the key ingredients are there, particularly in terms of Perth’s unique geographic position and the existence of a vibrant outdoor culture made possible by world-class environmental conditions. Twenty years ago, Landry proposed that cities might rally around a core aspiration supported by key civic projects. In this direction Perth has major cultural infrastructure prospects already underway. Perth Film Studios, the newly opened ECU City (host of WAAPA and a world-class hub for research and creativity) and the planned WA Aboriginal Cultural Centre, stand as examples that meaningfully contribute to the projection of a strongly held, shared local identity. It is not the infrastructure, but what we do with it and the degree to which we believe in the people who use it, that stands to enrich Perth’s distinct local, and Indigenous, culture.
Exploring the foundations that determine cultural growth and looking to the world’s cultural giants as case studies can help Perth realise that our regional cultural identity is stronger than we tend to believe. At Committee for Perth, we take seriously Jacobs’s warning that a city does not produce a distinct and great creative culture just for the fact that it is a city. As this article has argued, cities need strong cultural industries not only to connect people with creative experiences, but also to serve as a measure of a progress. If Perth’s cultural industries are flourishing, chances are its other industries are in good shape too. Strategic public-private partnerships and civic bodies like city committees, said Landry, had an important role to play in appealing to people’s higher ideals. A symphony to our ears at Committee for Perth, and there is no higher ideal than pursuing the conditions that enliven culture.