Sydney’s supposed cultural reawakening in the city is already under way - but in its west

In The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes said the basic project of art was “to close the gap between you and everything that is not you … to pass from feeling to meaning”.

A “radical new plan” for a Sydney arts precinct risks widening that gap. The British architectural firm Grimshaw has floated “the biggest cultural reimagining of Sydney since the Opera House”. The vision would see swaths of the Domain converted into an arts precinct supported by a metro line extension and large-scale urban regeneration.

Artist impressions of the plan to turn The Domain car park area into a cultural precinct. Credit: Grimshaw

The concept would “likely contain a lyric theatre for major musicals, an Indigenous cultural centre and a rehearsal space”. According to Grimshaw, the ripple effect would transform the “trashy artery” of surrounds like William Street, and include the “wholesale renewal of Woolloomooloo”, saving it from “incoherent gentrification”.

Sounds like a great idea for a musical.

If this is to be Sydney’s arts and cultural ticket from “feeling to meaning”, then the destination is all wrong. Pouring an estimated $2 billion into already-bloated eastern Sydney arts coffers will deepen the city’s entrenched arts funding inequity.

Grimshaw claims Sydney “lacks an understanding of how to animate public life through the integration of culture, commerce, community and civic places”. But the animation it seeks is already happening.

Against the odds, western Sydney is fostering an authentic, organic, and truly global arts groundswell. Sydney’s most culturally and linguistically diverse region is giving rise to vibrant arts practitioners. It is also home to Australia’s largest Indigenous population.

A truly “radical” vision for the arts would instantly recognise western Sydney’s inherent arts and cultural anatomy. And if community-integrated art is about resilience, then south-western Sydney has that in spades.

The Bankstown Poetry Slam gave voice to the trauma its community experienced during extended COVID-19 lockdowns with a fidelity and coherence deserving of far greater support than the minimal amount it receives in public funds. Same goes for Outloud, SweatShop, UTP, WestWords and countless comparable arts initiatives further west of the harbour than the Domain.

“Incoherent gentrification” is the least of the challenges in western Sydney, where arts organisations estimate they lost between 60 and 100 per cent of self-generated income during COVID lockdowns alone, and without access to the generous public funds deployed elsewhere.

The last detailed analysis of arts spending across Sydney revealed western Sydney, home to about one in 10 Australians, attracts just 1 per cent of federal arts funding. The 2015 Deloitte study also found Sydney’s west received less than 6 per cent of state government arts and cultural funding.

Even with the coming Powerhouse museum development at Parramatta, the scales of public arts funding remain tipped well in favour of Sydney’s east. Case in point: $244 million in state government funds to support the Art Gallery of NSW expansion, or the $300 million to drive a “decade of renewal” in Opera House refurbishments.

While critics marvelled at how the House’s revamped concert hall, like “wine”, delivered “immaculately clear, subtly astringent” acoustics, western Sydney remains devoid of even vaguely comparable performance facilities.

The very few arts venues of scale that have been established in the west, such as the Rooty Hill RSL theatre, have reportedly been “built using pokies profits”. It is a socially fraught model for a region with the nation’s highest concentration of poker machines, gambling profits and gambling-related harm.

A sustainable vision for Sydney as a global arts hub would be one that promotes its people ahead of profit, and communities ahead of built form.

If we agree that art is indeed about closing “the gap between you and everything that is not you”, then let’s listen to – and be guided by – communities already bridging that divide.

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