‘Nothing left’: the dire state of regional towns and their art
A remote mining town is facing the closure of its only remaining cultural organisation, as a multimillion-dollar FIFO camp takes over. It’s a familiar tale playing out across the regions.
Dozens of faces peer out from the wall. Portraits of Australians – children, parents, the elderly – scanned, printed in three dimensions and mounted in a chorale of silence, watching you watching them. The moment increasingly begins to feel an infraction when the reality settles in that, amid these seemingly quotidian faces, are trauma victims, people with learning difficulties and refugees.
“I am only interested in what’s real,” artist Vic McEwan states soberly of Face To Face, his recent exhibition at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, in the NSW Riverina region. The project was born of a residency at the Sydney Facial Nerve Service at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse: a pioneering program employing art in the diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of patients suffering severe facial nerve disorders. It is a prognosis that too often proves devastating, an impediment to the most innately human of expressions – a smile, a scowl, a kiss.
McEwan has long found creative succour in the hidden crevices of Australian society: asylums, condemned spaces and forgotten towns. Founding the Cad Factory in Sydney in 2004, McEwan developed a subversive yet lauded reputation in that city’s visual art and performance communities, but soon came to feel himself “trapped in the echo chamber” of the cosmopolitan avantgarde.
“We were deeply part of the Sydney art world,” McEwan reflects, referencing his wife and creative partner Sarah McEwan. “But there was something I couldn’t articulate then, some sort of dissatisfaction: what is this all for? I came to the realisation that we were creating art for like-minded people with similar ideologies and similar interests. The world is so wonderfully diverse and complex, but we were taking the easy route.”
McEwan’s sense of creative deracination was met with a radical solution: to relocate from increasingly bohemian Marrickville to a remote country town in the Riverina, almost 600km away. The Birrego school house was near-condemnation when McEwan purchased it for $15,000 in 2007. But what it lacked in utilities – including running water – it made up for in promise: a sanctuary from where to create, far beyond the clamorous distractions of the metropolis.
The renovated school house, headquarters for the Cad Factory since 2010, is situated between the small hamlets of Sandigo and Boree Creek: pastoral settlements with fewer than 300 people between them. Once dynamic communities, towns such as Boree Creek – hometown to late National’s leader and Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer – have long been in decline, mirroring the experience of many inland pastoral and mining communities across Australia. This small-town atrophy, far from the purview of post-pandemic tree-changers, has only intensified in recent decades according to the latest data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, leading to the traumatic break-up of once-cohesive communities as people and services relocate to regional centres, such as nearby Wagga Wagga.
McEwan recognises the cynical potential of the city artist “gone provincial”, bringing with them the beneficence of high culture, progressive politics and artisan coffee. But his plans to build a rural enclave for the exclusive use of city artists were scuppered as he became increasingly acquainted with his neighbours and tuned deeply into the region’s distinct landscape, history and rhythm.
“Everything became more nuanced,” he explains. “You begin to notice things, like minor changes in the landscape as you move through or the early flowing of a wattle. You learn to read the land, something you could never do in the cacophony and static of the city. You learn about the interconnectedness of all things, and in that you find an honest reflection of yourself.”
Corporeal issues such as water allocation, food security, environmental degradation and community health began to manifest in his work, including the site-specific On Common Ground project in 2015: a work which explored the unresolved conflict between the Wiradjuri people and the colonists in the region directly surrounding the Murrumbidgee River, home country to prominent broadcaster Stan Grant. One installation confronted the historic practice of “swan hopping”: the destruction of swan eggs to eradicate the bird’s population and allow for the exploitation of the natural ecosystem for farming, at the expense of Wiradjuri culture and tradition.
“Historically the art world has spoken about when you work with community you need to ‘dumb down’ your arts practice, but it’s the absolute opposite,” McEwan says, laughing self-consciously, deferring to 19th-century philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas’ treaty that it is only through micro human transactions, face-to-face with the “other”, that we find truth.
“Moving to the regions and a smaller population means you build your community out of really different people,” he continues. “People with different lived experiences and different perspectives. Coming up against behaviours and opinions that push back against your own, it leads to real-world conversations about the complexity of people and communities. And that is then reflected in the art.”
As well as transfiguring his own creative practice, the reciprocal impact the Cad Factory has had on its adopted community cinctured around Narrandera has been profound – providing socially engaged exhibitions and events that encourage community participation and an exploration of site-specific histories and identities.
As former festival director at the Shepparton Festival in regional Victoria and now Executive Director at Regional Arts Australia, Ros Abercrombie knows firsthand the quantifiable impact of art and culture on communities beyond the ring-roads of major capital cities and regional epicentres. In her advocation of cultural organisations across regional Australia – which represents the bulk of the nation’s landmass and about one third of its population – Abercrombie has equally come to appreciate the finely grained nuance of “place”: an intricate topography of landscape and narrative, wholly unique to environment and community.
“Across all art forms, the creative industries allow for individuals and communities to create and engage, to connect experiences, to develop skills, to tell stories, to respond and recover,” Abercrombie reasons. “Through exhibitions, film, dance, performance and music we can generate stories, connection and narratives of place and identity and support the recovery (and) growth of regions and communities.”
Almost 3000km away on the fringes of the Great Victoria Desert in Western Australia, painter John Scott is a product of the visceral confluence of art and recovery. After more than a quarter of a century working in the remote nickel mining town of Kambalda, he found himself – like many others – made redundant with little warning in the late 1990s.
“I didn’t quite know what to do,” he explains, still evidently unsettled by those traumatic days. “So I started to paint, to do it seriously. It was the only thing that made sense.”
Now aged well into his 70s, Scott is one of the most recognised artists in WA’s Goldfields region, with his distinctive bushland motifs festooned on the side of prominent buildings in the nearby regional centre of Kalgoorlie Boulder.
Scott’s work captures the discordant hues of this landscape: where cardinal red hills collide into the incandescent-white carapace of Lake Lefroy: a seemingly infinite salt lake pockmarked with surreal islets that shimmer like apparitions at the horizon. At dusk the lake – believed by the Wongai people to be cursed– casts a spectral glow, as the bark of the gimlets radiate like burnished bronze statues in a museum.
After the gold reef seemingly ran dry in 1907, Kambalda was hastily abandoned and condemned: yet another ghost town pockmarking the hostile landscape of spinifex and fool’s gold. Nickel, however, would be discovered in the 1950s, transforming the town’s fortunes and that of the nation. Western Mining Corporation would acquire the lease in the 1960s, going on to create an equally experimental and egalitarian worker’s community: a desert Arcadia of full employment, high wages and no private property, with everything owned and administered by the company. To animate its almost surreal providence, locals would spend their leisure time sailing yachts on wheels upon the 510sqkm salt pan, while the rest of the country was enduring dole queues, breadlines and recession.
By the 1980s Kambalda’s population had crested to more than 5000, with two public swimming pools, countless sporting clubs, a drive-in cinema, multiple retail outlets and a thriving community arts group. But the 1990s would bring ruin: indiscriminate retrenchments and a mass exodus of the population as global nickel prices collapsed. The utopian experiment was over.
Unlike most, Scott decided to remain in Kambalda as the asphalt crumbled, the shopfronts shuttered and the abandoned houses surrounding him fell to ruin. “I love the landscape,” he reasons. “The colours, the contrasts, the reflection of the light on the different trees. There’s nothing else like it. It inspires me to paint.”
With the demise of the existing arts group, Scott founded the Kambalda Cultural and Arts Group in 1999: a sanctuary for what remained of the community to gather, create and try and find meaning at a time of acute existential upheaval. “If only to get out of the house and share a cuppa,” Scott’s wife and fellow artisan Halina states. “The men had all lost their jobs and no one had any money. The (arts group) was the only thing left – a chance to come and meet people, and get out of the house. To talk about mental health and (explore that) through art and craft. Craft is good for the soul. The workshops have a huge impact on people’s lives.”
Today the KCAAG hub – a disused service station on the outskirts of town – is home to a pottery studio, craft space, art studio and historical and archival collection. As well as hosting classes – from photography field trips to workshops in pottery, textiles, ceramics, beading and painting – the centre has become an unofficial information centre for people researching local history, landscape and flora. Unifying both seniors and school groups, the KCAAG has also rehabilitated the town’s faded facades with a number of prominent public mural projects.
The group, however, is facing imminent closure with the Shire of Coolgardie unwilling to commit to a lease on its headquarters beyond mid-2024. And with nowhere else in town suitable to relocate, Scott is fearing the final death knell for the town’s only remaining cultural organisation has sounded.
In a written statement, Shire of Coolgardie President Malcolm Cullen cites the KCAAG’s “volunteer poor climate” and “declining membership” as its greatest impediment to survival, while not responding to direct questions as to the Shire’s ongoing commitment to KCAAG, for whom it currently provides highly subsidised rent.
Accusations levelled at the Shire of nepotism – putting corporations before community as global demand for nickel, gold and lithium all crescendo – are mounting. With the last fish and chip shop boarded up and the final counter-meal at the bowls club long since served, fenced-off “worker’s villages” exclusively servicing the transient FIFO workforce are rising from the red earth, complete with amenities and services that ensure little-to-no reason for their residents to engage with the main township.
While observing the local football team – Kambalda’s last surviving sporting club, itself now facing imminent collapse without enough players to field a viable team – getting inexorably decimated by nearby Boulder, one local referred to the newly approved $164 million FIFO camp planned for the abandoned golf course as “dancing on the wounded soul of the community”. When at capacity, the 1500-room camp will push total FIFO numbers well beyond the permanent population of Kambalda.
“There is literally nothing left,” Scott says with a sense of helplessness in his voice, adding that the KCAAG’s ability to grow their membership is further impeded by the predominate 12-hour mining rosters, atop of a lack of Shire commitment to supporting the calibre of community resources, infrastructure and amenities that would attract more permanent residents to town, including families. “We’re it,” he deadpans. “We’re the sum of what’s left of the history and spirit of Kambalda.”
Augmenting the complexities surrounding the survival of small regional arts groups across Australia are the intransigent funding objectives of governmental bodies: where groups such as KCAAG, with less than 100 members, are incapable of complying with strict grant criteria on demographic, cultural and social diversity and inclusion. Answerable to three different governmental departments in WA, organisations such as KCAAG often fall through the Daedalian funding cracks, left largely to rely on the immediate support of their local councils.
Scott walks through the arts centre he and his impassioned group of volunteers have lovingly built over the decades. Three-dimensional artworks featuring haul trucks and headframes adorn the walls amid historic photographs of the township and cabinets of pressed native flora, together weaving a distinctly regional chronicle. He steps outside, where one of his large murals depicts the historic land sailing club on the shores of Lake Lefroy, since expunged to make way for mining.
“Bit by bit, the town is disappearing,” he concludes. “It’s these stories that keep it alive. That deep connection to a people and a place. When we die, it dies with us.”
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