Graffiti? In my museum? How dare our state’s archivists do their jobs

Did you hear that? It was the sound of a thousand pearls rustling as they were clutched by wowsers across the state who were aghast – aghast, I tell you – that the WA Museum dared do its job and preserve a moment of our state’s history.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, I’ll keep it brief, but it stretches back to early 2023, when two protesters from Disrupt Burrup Hub strode into the Art Gallery of WA and spray-painted energy giant Woodside’s logo on the Frederick McCubbin painting Down on His Luck.

Maintain the rage: The Perspex sheet protecting Frederick McCubbin’s painting ‘Down on His Luck’ has been embroiled in its own controversy.

I’m not an art history major, so the significance of that particular painting may be lost on me, but the protest was in opposition to Woodside’s expansion on the Burrup Peninsula in WA’s Pilbara, which is also home to thousands of pieces of Aboriginal rock art dating back tens of thousands of years and already under threat from encroaching industry.

There, the message of the protest becomes a lot clearer: Woodside is complicit in defacing priceless rock art, how do you feel about other Australian art being defaced?

Only, the McCubbin wasn’t defaced; a sheet of Perspex covering it copped the bright yellow spray paint.

The protester who wielded the spray can – Joana Partyka – was arrested, charged and fined.

And that brings us to this week’s storm in a teacup, when politicians, pundits, and the types of people who leave rambling comments on Facebook were horrified to hear that WA Museum Boola Bardip had acquired said Perspex sheet – graffitied Woodside logo and all – to add to its state collection.

Museum chief executive Alec Coles offered a pretty straightforward explanation on Radio 6PR during a heated interview on Thursday morning: “We’re just doing our jobs.”

“In five, 10, 50 years’ time when people are looking back, for instance, at environmental activism in the 2020s, they might just maybe pull that out of the store and say, ‘This might be a useful cypher, a useful example to demonstrate that’,” Coles told Karl Langdon and Steve Mills, the latter of whom seemed exasperated at the concept.

“Why would you want to publicise vandalism, Alec?” Mills asked.

Disrupt Burrup Hub activist Joana Partyka with the spray-painted Perspex at the WA Museum.Credit: Instagram

As the story morphed into one of those tiresome issues of the day that get thrown at politicians during press conferences, Deputy Premier Rita Saffioti drew comparisons to graffitied trains.

“We don’t keep train carriages that people have graffitied ... we don’t do that. We clean the graffiti off because it’s illegal behaviour,” she said.

Psst, no one tell Rita about the 2021 exhibition at the Art Gallery of WA, 100 Vandals, which documented (some would say celebrated!) such illegal behaviour.

WA Liberals leader Libby Mettam said we should “throw it in the bin”, then turned on the Cook government to suggest that under its “regime” the “vandals are being celebrated”.

Opposition leader Shane Love said displaying the Perspex would have sent a “terrible message” that such vandalism is acceptable.

Thank God for WA Premier Roger Cook, who brought a modicum of sense to the furore, brushing aside questions and declaring he would not “stand as censor-in-chief”.

“The museum has also said that it does not indicate museum support … rather it’s recording the event and sometimes history is uncomfortable,” he said.

“If we’re in the habit of deciding what did and did not occur in history, well then we go to a very dark place.”

Amen.

But surely, if pressed, any of those who professed to be horrified that such an act of vandalism could be held in perpetuity in our museum’s archives, must surely acknowledge that this was indeed a notable moment in our state’s history?

Here’s a few brief, but relevant, facts:

The extraction of natural gas to power homes, businesses, and industry, damages our environment, but is seen by many people as necessary for us to transition away from other fossil fuel energy sources like coal.

Many other people are unhappy about the continued expansion of fossil fuel projects, deeming it unnecessary when renewable alternatives are waiting in the wings. When those projects impact priceless rock art (an important part of history in its own right), the rage grows.

Some of those people express their unhappiness via the form of protests. In extreme cases, such as the one in question, those protests involve illegal activity.

If, as Coles suggests, in 50 years’ time, when the state runs completely on solar, wind, or nuclear power (or when fusion power is closer than 10 years away), and museum curators wish to look back at this period to get a sense of the public mood, then the graffitied Perspex would be a useful exhibit.

Too much of our life, our history, is being left to evaporate in an online ether, and much could be lost at any moment if just one tech giant were to fall into administration.

We are swamped by exponentially growing waves of information, much of it of questionable value, and an increasing portion of which is machine-generated.

Good luck trying to find that article you read in 2005, or that file you downloaded in 2007, or that thread you contributed to in 2010 on a message board that probably doesn’t exist any more.

Already, there are articles out there rendered useless by dead links, or embedded content from Twitter accounts that has gone missing after their owners decided not to hang around when Elon Musk swept in.

Even legal decisions face the problem of “web links to nowhere”.

Newspapers are used by many as the first drafts of history, but us journalists face the same vulnerabilities: a company’s shift to new servers, or the closure of an online masthead, could see years of news and countless articles wiped from the web.

And then what? In 50 years, 100 years even, what will we have to look back on and say “this happened in Perth in the 2020s”?

So, in that context, what does it matter that the WA Museum held on to a sheet of graffitied Perspex?

Again we must ask: is that not the museum’s job?

To suggest holding on to something tangible, something real from our history – something that won’t dissipate online – without even displaying it to the public, is somehow saying, “hey, vandalism is OK!” is silly.

Take a breath. There’ll be something else to get angry about tomorrow. And maybe we’ll write about it, but what will we have to show for that in 25 years’ time? Who knows.

Anyway, I wonder what Frederick McCubbin’s descendants think about all this.

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