Coronavirus: Donors help keep Carriageworks on track for the arts

The contemporary arts centre has come out of administration and may reopen within weeks.

Contemporary arts venue Carriageworks, in inner Sydney, has been closed since the lockdown. Picture: Getty Images

Sydney’s Carriageworks will stay on the rails for another day after creditors on Tuesday agreed to a deed of company arrangement that will allow the contemporary arts venue to reopen within weeks.

A high-profile arts casualty of the lockdown that wiped out expected earnings, inner-city Carriageworks went into voluntary administration in May citing irreparable loss of income.

Under the new arrangements, Carriageworks will be back in operation with a 10-year lease on the former railway workshop, a five-year funding agreement with the NSW government and philanthropic support worth almost $3m in donations and loans.

Leading the supporters are Geoff Ainsworth and Johanna Featherstone, through their Oranges & Sardines Foundation, who have given a $200,000 donation and a low-interest loan of up to $1.8m.

Ms Featherstone said Carriageworks’ survival offers “hope, strength and the inspiration of the arts” at a time of great uncertainty.

The other supporters are the Neilson Foundation, the Gonski Foundation and the Packer family.

The venue that is home to resident performing arts companies and hosts large-scale exhibitions earns a large part of its income from hire fees, including from the Sydney Writers Festival and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia.

It saw off a mooted takeover by the Sydney Opera House, which was opposed by high-profile arts figures Kim Williams and Michael Lynch.

After the voluntary administration process conducted by KPMG, unsecured creditors agreed to payouts of between 20c and 30c in the dollar. Chairwoman Cass O’Connor said the donor support, the precinct lease from the NSW government and state funding of about $2.5m a year had secured the venue’s future.

But Carriageworks will have to tighten its artistic program by presenting events in collaboration rather than commissioning large-scale exhibitions.

“We will be opening over the next few weeks,” Ms O’Connor said. “We want to get the farmers market back when we can, we want our resident companies to come back when they can.”