Blacktown Arts Centre and The Whitlam Institute
Contents 00 04
– Foreword
00 06 10
– Essays
00 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32
– Artists
34 36
–List of Works
–Jenny Bisset, Eric Sidoti
–Gary Carsley –Graham Freudenberg AM
–Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan –Darren Bell –Anthony Berbari –Gary Carsley –Simryn Gill –Deborah Kelly –The Kingpins –Grant Stevens
–Acknowledgments
Blacktown Arts Centre and The Whitlam Institute 29 April to 28 June 2014
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Foreword Jenny Bisset, Director, Blacktown Arts Centre Eric Sidoti, Director, Whitlam Institute
While for many the 1970s remain a vivid memory, for those of younger years and those who came to Australia in more recent waves of migration the seventies are a largely unknown land. In the early 1970s Australia’s population was collapsing. The country was involved in a bitter, divisive land war in South-east Asia, women’s wages were at 60% of wages paid to men in equivalent positions, immigration was based on narrowly defi ned ideas of race, China was isolated, and the journey towards reconciliation with Indigenous Australians was yet to commence in earnest. Against this background, in 1972 and 1974 Edward Gough Whitlam, fi rstly as Opposition Leader and then as Prime Minister, made the then unprecedented journey to Blacktown to deliver the Australian Labor Party election speech. For highly symbolic reasons, Mr Whitlam chose Blacktown as a representative site of the sins of the past and the promises of the future. From 1972 to 1975, Gough Whitlam’s government changed Australia for all of us, even for those who may have only seen his name in passing. The echoes of that time continue to resonate; indeed, they can be heard across the land from the corridors of parliament to the most distant reaches of Aboriginal lands. They ring loudest still in the suburbs of our major cities.
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When Gary Carsley suggested this exhibition might be called It’s Timely there was no argument. It perfectly captures all the elements of an exhibition that is drawn from the rich history of the Whitlam years and yet profoundly exerts what Gough refers to as a ‘contemporary relevance’. The exhibition takes as its starting point the exuberance of the 1972 campaign, captured in Whitlam’s address at the Bowman Hall on 13 November 1972, and the turmoil, frustration and determination evident in his campaign launch of the double dissolution election on 29 April 1974. These form a springboard for the insights of the exhibiting artists, who together have created an incredibly intricate, rich and meaningful exploration of the Whitlam legacy and contemporary Australia. It’s Timely is a coming home of sorts, bringing Blacktown and Whitlam together once again through a partnership between Blacktown Arts Centre and the Whitlam Institute. We would like to express our gratitude to Graham Freudenberg and Gary Carsley for their illuminating essays written for the exhibition catalogue, and to the artists: Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, Darren Bell, Anthony Berbari, Gary Carsley, Simryn Gill, Deborah Kelly, The Kingpins and Grant Stevens for their creativity and vision in re-presenting the culture of a nation. We would also like to thank The Honourable Antony Whitlam QC for officially opening the exhibition.
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Once Upon ‘It’s Time’ Gary Carsley
The meaning of the term ‘west’ shifts radically as it is applied in various local, national and international contexts. Locally, if you are standing in one of Australia’s big eastern seaboard cities and facing north, invariably the western suburbs are on your left-hand side. At the national level, if you left the Sydney CBD heading west and were to keep going past Blacktown and on through the bush, past a leering Mick Taylor, then, with any luck, you would eventually arrive in Western Australia. Speaking internationally, ‘the West’ is not a geographical marker at all, or even a point of orientation, but, rather, a paradigm located at the convergence of a set of political, economic and societal criteria. The beach aside, the west in all its manifestations is arguably the crucible of Australian national identity. It is a given, often reiterated by the media, that the outcome of national and state elections and the policies that determine their winners and losers are fashioned with a focus on the interests and priorities of those living there. Many presume this to be a recent phenomenon, part of a broader attempt to redress historical grievances, demographic change and decades of infrastructural neglect. Amnesia in the age of Instagram is a stronger influence than memory on the shape of life and art. And that can’t be entirely a good thing. If nothing else, forgetfulness facilitates the cycle of repetition and regurgitation that is (partially) responsible for the uninspiring quality of political, economic and cultural leadership.
Gough and Alison in 1977. Courtesy Alison Kendal
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Lest we forget, the fi rst significant politician to identify western Sydney as critical to the national consciousness was Edward Gough Whitlam, Australia’s 21st or 1st prime minister, depending on what image of Australia you would prefer to have defi ne you as an Australian. If White Australia, with its anxieties about race, geography and national identity is the nation you still call home, then Sir Edmund Barton, as the history books will affi rm, was your fi rst prime minister. If, on the other hand, you live in an Australia in which racial discrimination is a moral as well as a statutory
offence, in which the fi rst peoples are not denied rights extended to the second, and where our country’s geographical location as an extension of South-east Asia is not an agency for isolation but connectedness, then, in an alternative history, a strong claim can be made for acknowledging Whitlam as our fi rst prime minister.1 Many families, communities, cities and nations have foundation myths. Frequently phantasmagorical, they usually involve figures of ambiguous historical provenance, often with extra-ordinary powers and occasionally with claims to divine origin. Nevertheless, the tales we tell each other about how our societies came into being and the attributes our founding mothers and fathers transmitted to us are more than just symbolically important. They articulate a nation’s sense of itself and the things about itself that a society wishes to communicate to others and, over time, to embed in memory and history. In essence, foundation myths are diagrammatic of the moral, ethical and spiritual values a nation evokes to delineate itself from others, and in looking back to the past they help it to face the uncertainties of the future. Importantly, foundation myths also allow citizens to locate themselves in relation to their community’s core beliefs while providing a sense of common purpose and shared ideals. The foundation myth of Rome – the story of Romulus and Remus – is typical. The events conveniently occurred in the distant past, the twins had a princess for a mother and a god for a father. They were suckled by a she wolf and, according to some sources, nourished by woodpeckers. Raised by a humble shepherd, ignorant of their true origins, they quarrelled, Remus was killed and Romulus went on to found Rome and more recently, to lend his name to an imaginary extra-terrestrial species in the science fiction franchise, Star Trek. Similarly, the emperors of China and Japan once claimed to be the Son of Heaven (China) and a direct descendant of solar deity Amaterasu (Japan). This type of wondrous mythologising in the context of the antique societies
1 Australian Labor Party Policy Speech 1972, delivered by Gough Whitlam, Blacktown Civic Centre, 13 November 1972, p. 4.
of Europe and Asia is at worst benign; it is integral to their cultural cohesion and unites them around consensually imposed principals. Foundation myths are fundamentally different for those nation-states tracing their contemporary identity back to an intrusive act by one or other European power; for these societies, such story telling is at best vexatious and divisive. For the Indigenous inhabitants of lands around the globe, the foundation saga of these socalled ‘new world’ societies invariably marked the beginning of a process of dispossession, followed in quick succession by the demographic and cultural devastation of the local population. Etiologically speaking, foundation myths, in part because they tend over time to become sacred, are often used to justify and, by extension, perpetuate the status quo. In the case of the nowindependent states created as a consequence of European colonisation, they also work towards the entrenchment of privileges assumed by the occupier and, again by extension, the perpetuation of disadvantage imposed by the occupier upon the displaced. Australia’s commemoration of the ‘landing’ at what is now known as Botany Bay in 1788 is characteristic of how, rather than uniting a people around a shared set of ideals, a foundation myth can instead divide. It is not often that a country has the possibility of revisiting the defi ning attributes of its founding moment. To reinvent themselves, to reimagine who they are and what they stand for, is a spiritual and practical luxury afforded to few individuals and even fewer nations. That said, so radical was the transformation of Australia as a consequence of the changes brought about by the election of the Whitlam government that it provides a playful opportunity to contend that Australia after 1972 was no longer the place it had been, and Australians no longer the people they once were. In 1972, Australia was insular, introspective and with a stagnant population, anxious about its relationship towards members of its own population and to the region and its place in the world more
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generally. Recently, a lot of attention has been given to alternative history projects, in some instances because such histories allow for the redress of historical grievances, and in others because they appeal to the creative imagination. As an exhibition, It’s Timely proceeds from the latter to the former and, in doing so, it argues for Blacktown over Botany Bay as the founding locus of contemporary Australia, and for Edward Gough Whitlam over Captain Arthur Phillip as its founding entity. It does so with due regard for the old order of things but also with boundless affection for the idea that as a nation our new founding moment at least produced legislation that restored to Indigenous Australians some small measure of their rights to traditional lands (rights that the very concept of Australia initially erased). To take Blacktown rather than Botany Bay as the originating site of contemporary Australia is also to acknowledge the primacy of multiculturalism without marginalising any of the individual groups that makes up that rich mix. It is to recognise that our society has been fundamentally reshaped by legislation to prohibit racism, to bring greater transparency to government, to affi rm the viability of a locally authored culture and to engage meaningfully with the region in which the nation is located. On the 13th of November 1972, Gough Whitlam, then opposition leader, travelled to Blacktown, delivering there one of the most important speeches of a generation. ‘It’s time,’ he intoned, for ‘a new drive for equality of opportunities: it’s time to create new opportunities for Australians, time for a new vision of what we can achieve in this generation for our nation and the region in which we live.’ He went on to state: ‘We have a new chance for our nation. We can recreate this nation. We have a new chance for our region. We can help recreate this region.’2 A scant 18 months later, on the 29th of April 1974, Whitlam returned again to Blacktown to launch yet another election campaign, in which he asked the nation to ‘think again how it was when you elected us in 1972’.3 In thinking again about the differences between the early 1970s and the present, between
white and multiracial Australia, between how we were then and who we have become, I believe that these two speeches facilitated a process that enabled Australians to reimagine their nation – to commit to ideals of equity that, if realised, would reshape the country and the opportunities available to its peoples. Never again in Australian history would words lead so directly to actions and, in doing so, rapidly bring greater fairness to the life of the nation and its inhabitants. Once upon a time, Gough Whitlam stated that the three great aims of his reform program would be ‘to promote equality’, ‘to involve the people of Australia in the decision-making processes of our land’ and ‘to liberate the talents and uplift the horizons of the Australian people’.4 To achieve these ends, and on their behalf, he would among other things: abolish conscription and university fees, establish a universal health insurance scheme, and change the emphasis in immigration from government recruiting to family reunion. For the fi rst time in our nation’s history a leading political figure touched upon the great moral and ethical dilemma implicit in the term ‘Australian’. Early on in his address Whitlam stated: ‘We will legislate to give Aborigines land rights – not just because their case is beyond argument, but because all of us as Australians are diminished while the Aborigines are denied their rightful place in this nation.’5 Later on, in the same speech he would say: Australia’s real test as far as the rest of the world, and particularly our region, is concerned is the role we create for our own Aborigines. In this sense, and it is a very real sense, the Aborigines are our link with the region. 6
This prescient recognition – that others would judge us on the basis of how we treated the original inhabitants of this land – is especially relevant now that the densely populated nation-states in the region are beginning to eclipse Australia in affluence and power. Changing times have added an interesting geopolitical context to the injunction ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. 2
ibid., p. 1. Australian Labor Party Policy Speech by the Prime Minister, The Hon. E. G. Whitlam, QC MP, Blacktown Civic Centre, 29 April 1974, p. 1. 4 Australian Labor Party Policy Speech 1972, delivered by Gough Whitlam, Blacktown Civic Centre, 13 November 1972, p. 2. 5 ibid., p. 4. 6 ibid., p. 31. 3
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In each of the speeches Whitlam delivered at Blacktown, he reiterated the importance of equality: equality of opportunity, equality of access, equality between genders and races, and between those who live in our big cities and those who do not. All of the legislation promulgated during the two terms in which Whitlam served as prime minister either proceeded from an overarching commitment to fairness or worked to make greater equality a reality in daily life. So utter was Whitlam’s commitment to this principal that he talked about measures ‘to reduce hardships imposed by one of the great factors for inequality in society – inequality of luck’. Universal access to high quality education and health care were for Whitlam instruments in establishing a level playing field. His intention to allow people on low incomes to claim 100% of the interest rate payments on their mortgage as a tax deduction contrasts vividly with the sacrosanct and inequitable tax benefits afforded the affluent in today’s society, of which negative gearing is but one example. Australia, as it smugly likes to remind itself (and the world), is one of the richest countries on earth and has been for a very long time. It is to our abiding shame that when sacrifices are required the burden is imposed most heavily on those least able to bear it. Those without work and those in work on average wages have the means by which they live reduced, the resources they can devote to their own health and that of their children diminished, and the facilities for their continuing education and that of future generations curtailed. During a time of record profits and unprecedented displays of affluence, large sections of our population are in grave danger of having decades of gradual social and economic improvement erased. It’s timely to stop and think about this.
It’s timely to ask why access to opportunity for a few has been facilitated by blocking avenues of advancement for the many. There is a conformity to art and life in Australia as a consequence. Empowered individuals mock dissenting voices. Official culture has all the inventiveness of predictive text. Community and industry leaders give back only a small amount of what they take and then expect to be praised (and act aggrieved when they are not). We continue to resist meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous Australians and we persist in degrading the environment. Progress is linked to increasing inequality, not reducing it – our taxation system directly and indirectly subsidises the rich and powerful. We have forgotten that the national estate belongs to all Australians and that too many children continue to begin school with a material disadvantage that, given the enormous expansion of wealth in the economy in the last fifteen years, constitutes a moral and ethical crime. Once upon a time in Blacktown, Gough Whitlam said: All of us as Australians have to insist that we can do so much better as a nation. We ought to be angry, with a deep determined anger, that a country as rich and skilled as ours should be producing so much inequality, so much poverty, so much that is shoddy and sub-standard. We ought to be angry – with an unrelenting anger – that our Aborigines have the world’s highest mortality rate. We ought to be angry at the way our so-called leaders have kept us in the dark [in order] to hide their own incapacity and ignorance. 8
Some things have clearly changed and some things have defi nitely not.
It’s timely to question the creation of new economic and cultural elites whose material elevation has occurred at the expense of the community as a whole.
7 8
Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 4.
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Double Dissolution 1974 Graham Freudenberg AM
Not by our choice, this ceremony falls on the eve of another campaign, another hard struggle for our party, another landmark in our nation’s history. The challenge we now face is, of course, not as perilous as any of those John Curtin faced, but it is momentous nonetheless. For we are all involved in decisions which for good or ill will turn the history of this nation as crucially as any decision the Australian people took in his time‌ In the time of his deepest difficulty, his most awesome responsibility, John Curtin drew strength from his deep belief in the intelligence and idealism of the Australian people and their sense of fair play. They are, I believe, things upon which any Australian leader can always rely with confidence. Gough Whitlam, speaking at the dedication of the site of John Curtin House, Canberra, 28 April 1974.
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The Forgotten Election
Denial of Legitimacy
Gough Whitlam’s confidence in the men and women of Australia was not misplaced. He became the fi rst Labor prime minister to win two successive elections, very largely because the voters felt that his fi rst government had not been given a fair go.
The struggle to assert the legitimacy of the Whitlam government, or even to establish the idea that it was normal for Labor to be in government, was made all the harder by federal Labor’s wilderness years between 1949 and 1972. No Labor voter under 47 had ever cast a vote that helped elect a federal Labor government (Chifley in 1946). No Labor voter under 64 had ever cast a vote to elect a Labor government from opposition (Scullin in 1929). The long drought helps explain the ambitiousness of the Whitlam reform program and the sense of urgency driving its implementation in the fi rst 17 months.
Although sometimes referred to as ‘the forgotten election’, the double dissolution of 18 May 1974 belongs fi rmly in the trilogy of Whitlam’s electoral successes, along with the spectacular recovery of 1969 and the ‘It’s Time’ victory of 1972. The result in both the House of Representatives and the Senate seemed a decisive endorsement of the Labor government’s sweeping reform program. It seemed both a renewal of the government’s mandate and a recognition of its legitimacy. It annihilated the Democratic Labor Party, the breakaway group that had kept Labor out of office since the great Labor split of 1955. The historic sitting of the House of Representatives and the Senate following the double dissolution – so far the only one in Australia’s history – passed landmark legislation. It quickly became clear, however, that the Liberal and Country Party opposition no more accepted the legitimacy of Labor’s second win than it had the fi rst. The leader of the opposition, Bill Snedden, famously declared: ‘We didn’t lose. We just didn’t win enough seats.’ His statement seemed fatuous at the time; in fact it was a warning that they would continue the course of obstructionism that had precipitated the double dissolution. The road to the dismissal of 11 November 1975 began on election night, 18 May 1974.
In the euphoria of the It’s Time election on 2 December 1972, it was hardly noticed that there was a fatal gap in Labor’s hard-won hold on power: the election had been for the House of Representatives only, not the Senate. The elections for the two houses of parliament had been out of kilter since Menzies’ premature House of Representatives election in 1963, and the new government, from the beginning, was in a minority in a Senate elected in 1967 and 1970. The numbers were: Labor 26, LCP 26, DLP 5, independents 3. But nobody on the Labor side, or the press or the public at large for that matter, seriously thought that the central principle of the Westminster parliamentary system – that governments are made and unmade in the lower house – would be challenged. But the leader of the opposition in the Senate, Reg Withers, later cheerfully boasted that as early as April 1973 ‘we embarked on a course to use our numbers in the Senate to force a House of Representatives election’. Withers spoke for those who thought of the 1972 election as, in his words, ‘an aberration’ a ‘fit of temporary insanity in the two most populous states’.
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Obstruction
The Grab for Power
By April 1974, the Senate had twice rejected ten bills – among them the Medibank legislation for universal health insurance, the centrepiece of Labor’s social program – and it had rejected nine other important bills. Behind this unprecedented obstruction lay the threat, hitherto unthinkable, of a Senate refusal of supply to force a House of Representatives election.
To exploit the outrage, real or simulated, at Whitlam’s opportunism, the diehards of the opposition prevailed on a reluctant Snedden to take the ultimate step of refusing supply. But in this story of miscalculations on both sides, there were other factors at work. I quote from my memoirs A Figure of Speech (2005):
A chance to turn the tables on the opposition suddenly appeared. The election for half the Senate, which had to be held before 1 July 1974, was set for 18 May. In March, Whitlam learned that the disgruntled former leader of the DLP in the Senate, Vince Gair, could be tempted to vacate his Queensland Senate seat if offered the ambassadorship to Ireland. The calculation behind this dubious ploy was that it could create six vacancies in Queensland instead of five, and that, under the proportional voting system, Labor stood to win three instead of two places. Given the likely vote in the other states, this might give Labor equal numbers with the opposition, or even a majority of one. But the plot was botched. Whitlam failed to secure Gair’s resignation in writing before the wily premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, got wind of what was afoot! Before the governor-general, Sir Paul Hasluck, could meet the requirements of the Constitution and arrange for the state governors to issue writs for the Senate elections, Bjelke-Petersen had the governor of Queensland issue the writs for the election of the five senators from that state. Exsenator Gair, however, laughed all the way to Dublin.
‘Why on earth, Bill, did you blokes bring on the double dissolution last year?’ There must have been something in the atmosphere of King’s Hall in the old Parliament House that encouraged unlikely intimacies and confessions. I had accosted Bill Snedden not long after Malcolm Fraser had deposed him as Liberal leader in March 1975. I said, ‘The probabilities are that except for the election, you would be leader, we would be heading up to an election, and with things as they are, you would have won and you would be prime minister?’ Snedden replied: ‘The pressure was on me from Anthony [leader of the Country Party, now the National Party]. We thought you had a good chance of getting control of the Senate at the half-Senate election, or enough to get a redistribution through.’ He meant a redistribution on the basis of equal electorates, one vote – one value, anathema to the Country Party. And that would mean, Snedden said, ‘you’d be in forever’.
Whatever Snedden’s motives, his ‘grab for power’ – the apt title of Laurie Oakes’ account of the 1974 election – galvanised the Labor Party. It enabled Whitlam to recover any moral high ground he may have lost by his deal with Gair. On 10 April, Withers moved that ‘the Senate refuse to grant supply, to the government, until it agrees to submit itself to the people’. The government leader in the Senate, Attorney-General Lionel Murphy, warned that the government would treat their motion of refusal of supply and that ‘the prime minister, who is conversant with the absurd proposition which has
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been put here, will forthwith call upon his Excellency the Governor-General’. I stress that in advising the double dissolution, Whitlam utterly rejected the proposition that the Senate had the right to send the House of Representatives to an election. His decision was, in fact, a pre-emptive strike in defence of the principle that governments are made or unmade in the House of Representatives. This was also to be the key principle involved in the crisis of October/November 1975. As Jenny Hocking writes in her defi nitive biography of Whitlam: [Whitlam] had turned a threat to reject supply into an election for both houses of parliament without supply ever being voted on much less ‘rejected’. Indeed once the double dissolution had been confi rmed after the governor-general’s proviso of the granting of supply, the Senate reconvened and passed the government’s supply bills at a late-night sitting just as Whitlam had anticipated.
Jenny Hocking’s account reveals a fascinating and significant aspect: the constructive role played by Hasluck in guiding Whitlam through the constitutional and procedural maze in March 1974. The contrast with Sir John Kerr in November 1975 is as stark as the two outcomes.
Gough Whitlam delivering his policy speech at Bowman Hall, Blacktown Civic Centre, 13th November 1972. Photo courtesy Stephen Kendal.
Back to Blacktown So we went back to Blacktown. The Blacktown Civic Centre, scene of the launching of the It’s Time campaign only 17 months earlier, chose itself, as a symbol of all the hopes and hard work invested in the Labor victory after 23 bitter years, all now suddenly threatened. As I write in A Certain Grandeur: ‘The mood had changed. The joyful exuberance of 1972 had given way to a kind of fierceness.’ ‘Men and women of Australia,’ Whitlam began, repeating the salutation of the It’s Time policy speech, which in turn we had adopted from John Curtin’s broadcast to the people after Pearl Harbor in 1941: Just 17 months ago, I stood here, and from this place and from this city I asked you to choose for Australia a new team, a new program, a new drive for equality
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of opportunities. You gave us a clear mandate to go ahead with our program for the next three years. For 17 months we have driven ourselves to carry out your mandate, to carry out the program I placed before you. Now the government you elected for three years has been interrupted mid-career. Our program has been brought to a halt mid-stream.
For the fi rst time Australia has a government ready to give local government direct access to the national fi nances.
Everything we promised, everything we have achieved, everything you expected of us – your expressed hopes for yourselves, your families, your nation – all of this is suddenly threatened. It is threatened by the actions of the men you rejected a mere 17 months ago. It is threatened by the actions of men elected to the Senate not in 1972; but in 1967 and 1970. It is threatened by men who refused to stand by the umpire’s verdict – your verdict – to give us a chance, to give you a chance, to give Australia a new chance.
For the fi rst time Australia has a national government determined to fulfi l its constitutional obligation towards the Aboriginals.
For the fi rst time Australia has a government determined to promote Australian ownership and control of Australian industries and resources. For the fi rst time for a generation Australia has a government dedicated to equal opportunity for all its citizens. We have more than doubled spending on schools. We have abolished fees at universities, colleges of advanced education and – going one better than our pledge – at technical schools. For the fi rst time Australia has a government determined to make the conditions of life more equal for all Australians, wherever they live in Australia. For the fi rst time Australia has a government seriously concerned to give equal opportunity to women. For the fi rst time Australia has a national government involving itself directly in the affairs of our cities.
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For the fi rst time Australia has a national government prepared to co-operate in renewing our decaying urban transport systems.
For the fi rst time Australia has a government determined to preserve, protect and enhance Australia’s national estate – our natural and historical inheritance, what we keep from our past, what we transmit to the future. For the fi rst time Australia has a national government which recognises the significance of the arts and artists in our society. Our support for the arts has released an unparalleled burst of creativity in this nation.
The Campaign There is no doubt that Whitlam had captured the mood of Labor supporters. The task of the campaign was to transmit that mood to the wider electorate. There was an elephant in the government room: the economic forecasts. How much the inflation of 1974 was the result of the expansionary Whitlam program and how much the world-wide impact of the 1973 oil shock following the October war in the Middle East is still hotly debated by economists, historians and politicians. As world trade collapsed, following the quadrupling of oil prices by the OPEC countries, all Western governments floundered and
those facing elections were defeated. The effects were beginning to unfold in Australia, and on the night he announced the double dissolution, Whitlam confided in his staff at the Lodge that the Treasury outlook was ‘horrendous’. Bill Snedden’s campaign correctly concentrated on the economy but he was unable to get the traction the situation warranted. There were several factors working against him. One was the release of the March quarter figures which showed a fortuitous fall in the inflation rate and generated, somewhat implausibly but effectively, the Labor advertisement: ‘Only Whitlam can get inflation down’. It reminded me of the Menzies promise in 1949 ‘to put value back in the pound’. Snedden had unwisely locked himself into an undertaking to hold twice-daily press conferences. This only had the effect of exposing his lack of policy substance to an unfriendly Canberra press gallery. But that itself only reflected his main handicap – the reaction against the ‘grab for power’. The extent to which Whitlam was able to maintain ‘the spirit of 1972’ against the economic realities of 1974 was demonstrated in the culminating meeting of the campaign – a star-studded rally at the Sydney Opera House, two days before polling day. The line-up of speakers included Manning Clark, the incomparable historian of Australia, and the Nobel Prize winning novelist, Patrick White, who declared: Some of you to whom I am speaking may be in a quandary over how you cast your vote, as I too found myself in a quandary in the post-Menzies era. Brought up in a Liberal tradition, I realised we had reached a stage where a change had to be made if we were to cure ourselves of the mentally constipated attitudes and heave ourselves out of that dreadful stagnation which has driven so many creative Australians to live in other parts of the world.
The Result In the event, however, it was not so much the older generation for whom Patrick White spoke which gave Whitlam the victory, but a younger generation forming the strength of the urban coalition he had built up in the seven years since he became leader of the Labor Party. This coalition held in the cities and urban centres, most strongly in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Canberra. The overall vote for the House of Representatives was about half a percent (49.3%) less than the 1972 result. The Liberal and Country Party increase of 4.2% was almost entirely at the expense of the DLP. The result in terms of seats was much less satisfactory. In a House of 127 members, Labor fi nished with 66 against the LCP coalition’s 61 – nevertheless an adequate working majority. Ironically, in the light of the sequel, Labor polled strongly in the Senate, to come within a whisker of winning a majority. It was Labor’s best Senate result since 1953, before the split. The DLP lost all its Senate seats and disappeared into political history. The Labor government increased its strength in the Senate by three to 29 – the same number as held by the Liberal and Country Party. Of the two independents, one, Senator Steele Hall of South Australia, supported the government to the bitter end. The Senate as elected on 18 May 1974 could never have rejected supply. The founding father of Australian psephology, Malcolm Mackerras attributes Labor’s failure to win an actual majority to ‘the vagaries of the electoral system’ – specifically the huge informal vote in New South Wales and Queensland, because of the large number of candidates on the ballot paper (in NSW, 60 cm long with 80 names, each square to be fi lled for a formal vote). Nevertheless, the Whitlam Government secured 296,000 Senate votes more than the coalition, and 6000 more votes than the coalition and DLP combined. So close and yet so far.
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Whitlam had won a historic victory but we lost the battle of ‘spin’ (though the term had not yet entered the political lexicon). In one of her many superb insights, Jenny Hocking describes what happened after election day: What followed was a struggle over the meaning of the 1974 election. By delaying confi rmation of victory until late the next day, Whitlam aided those who would deny the remarkable historical precedent, the political momentum and the pressure on the opposition to abandon its campaign of destabilisation that this victory represented. In the uncertainty and hesitation, Whitlam ceded the moment and meaning to those who had just been defeated.
The Meaning of 1974 For the opposition, it was as if the election had never been. But it is essential to our understanding of this tumultuous period of Australian history to find the deeper meanings behind the 1974 election. First, it enriched the legislative legacy of the Whitlam government. This went beyond the work of the joint sitting in August. The second truncated term was even more productive than the fi rst and the vast legislative program continued unabated right until the end in November 1975. It is a mistake to see the second Whitlam term as one consumed entirely by a series of crises. However much of it has been repealed, modified or supplanted, not least by the successor Labor governments under Hawke and Keating, it underpinned the modernisation of the health, education, welfare, environmental and urban programs in Australia. This could not have happened without the 1974 double dissolution.
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Second, 1974 remains an indispensable study for the complexity of parliamentary democracy, especially in federations like Australia. We can learn from it how the unwritten rules, the conventions and the willingness to compromise are essential to the healthy working of effective democracy, if it is to flourish in this or any country. For me, there are two deeper meanings about 1974. They relate to the nature of the Australian Labor Party and to the character of the Australian electorate. In 1974, there was a deep sense among Labor supporters that the policies of the Labor government belonged to them, embodied their own hopes and needs. They felt they had been involved in the making; they felt they understood them and had a stake in their success and were prepared to fight for them. This was the result very largely of Whitlam’s leadership style, with its years of consistent development and exposition, and explanation of Labor policies. It was this sense of personal involvement and identification that made the Whitlam years so special. In the wider electorate, the overwhelming factor in Labor’s victory was the feeling that the Whitlam Labor government had not been given a fair go. This overcame the unease at some of the shortcomings already manifest since December 1972. As Labor’s difficulties mounted in the next 18 months, some self-inflicted, both these feelings, in the Party and among the people, diminished sharply, creating the atmosphere in which Whitlam’s adversaries were able to succeed in the grab for power which had failed on 18 May 1974.
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Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan Artist Statement
Common-wealth (Project: Another Country) #130010FFS Common-wealth (Project: Another Country) is a collection of royal crowns made out of recycled tin – signs of wealth created from waste. In replacing precious metals and gemstones with recycled material, leaving only the iconic shapes, these crowns challenge class structures. The works are part of the continuing Project: Another Country that engages community-oriented collaborations and examines place and history within a framework of reconfiguring the gaze towards a home that is now foreign. The crown series continues our practice of using materials local to the context of the works’ production. The series engages the colloquial metal craft of the Philippines, which carries resonances of migration, and examines the metaphors of colonial forms to make sense of our itinerant contemporary identity.
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan are husband and wife. They operate as collaborators in their practice. In 2006 they moved to Brisbane, Australia, to raise their family. Their work has always been about the liminality that characterises their diasporic experience – home and mobility, belonging, re-rooting and assimilation in the contexts of places they produce work in.
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, Common-wealth: Project Another Country #130010FFS 2014, handcrafted metal (tin), cushion
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Darren Bell Artist Statement
BLACKTOWNECLECTIC In my photographs I have tried to capture the diversity that is Blacktown, shown in its people and places. The photos in style and concept are different from one another as I try to reflect the eclectic nature of Blacktown itself, and if you look closely you may see subtle allusions to concepts and policies initiated by the Whitlam government. In the 40 years since Prime Minister Whitlam’s speeches in Blacktown, much has changed in our city; conversely, a lot has remained the same. There are thousands of new citizens and, of course, people who were born and bred in Blacktown. This mix of the new and the old makes for a very unique and dynamic place to be. Western Sydney is now seen for what it truly is, a diverse, multicultural, thriving community and, importantly… nationally significant. Blacktown and western Sydney are now places people come for work, come to live and come to have fun. I want to show that there is more to living in Blacktown and the west than just being a ‘westie’. I want to show the pride we feel and should feel about our home.
Darren Bell is a Blacktown resident and held his first exhibition in 2010 at Blacktown Arts Centre. The following year he was featured in a Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative show. In 2013 he was included in Cold Eels and Distant Thoughts, curated by Djon Mundine, when it travelled to Kudos Gallery in Paddington, and had his first solo exhibition, Family, at DNA Projects in Chippendale. Darren’s works are held in Australian state government and private collections, and in 2012 and 2013 he was a finalist in the Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize. Darren Bell, BLACKTOWNECLECTIC 2014, digital print on paper
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Anthony Berbari Artist Statement
Now and Then One of the most unequivocal undertakings that Mr Whitlam gave to Australia was in the area of cultural policy, particularly to help establish and express an Australian identity through the arts, and to widen access to and increase the understanding and application of the arts in the community generally. Now and Then is a series of studio photographs featuring men and women who as younger Australians attended one or other of the Whitlam speeches at Blacktown Civic Centre. Alison and Stephen Kendal are two such people. Both attended the Labor Party platform launch in 1972. They are now married and have a family.
Anthony Berbari has a high street photographic business in Blacktown specialising in quality bridal and wedding imagery that ‘touches your heart forever’. Anthony was commissioned to produce a series of such portraits as part of It’s Timely’s desire to engage with creative individuals who are active outside the art world. This is part of a continuing commitment to the inclusion of more average citizens at all levels of society as a way of contesting the elitism of the art world. Inclusion not exclusion is among the most important legacies of the Whitlam years.
Anthony Berbari (with Enrique Urrejola), Now and Then, Portraits of Alison and Stephen Kendal 2014, digital prints on Kodak Endura paper
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Gary Carsley Artist Statement
D.106 The Annunciation (Whitlam in China) ‘Pietre dure’ is an atrophied artisanal inlay technique in which the chromatic properties of an image are replaced with hard stones. It is a labour-intensive process and evidences my respect for those things that are difficult and time consuming. It is often referred to as painting in stone. D.105 appropriates a 16th-century table top in which the figures of the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary are replaced by the eyes, lips, hair and clothes of Gough Whitlam and Deng Xiaoping. For this image stone surfaces were photographed in The Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven (Bejing), Old Parliament House (Canberra) among other sites in order to karaoke the 1974 photograph taken of Whitlam and Deng during the fi rst visit to China by an Australian prime minister. The story of the Annunciation allegorises the unrealistic expectations the fi rst generation of Australia’s leaders brought to the relationship with China. It is an image that dramatically contrasts obsidian and porphyry and that, I hope, articulates my grief at the diminution of the political idealism and focus on greater equality that characterised Mr Whitlam’s term in office. I am mourning for the loss of commitment to a fairer and more equitable world.
Gary Carsley was born in Brisbane. The venality of the ‘art world’ offends him and he prefers to describe himself as a gardener and stonemason. He lectures at the College of Fine Arts, a faculty of the University of New South Wales.
Gary Carsley, D.106 The Annunciation (Whitlam in China) 2014, C-type mono print
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Simryn Gill Artist Statement
Pearls: Gough Whitlam, Australian Labor Party Policy Speech, delivered Blacktown Civic Centre, 13th November 1972; Gough Whitlam, Australian Labor Party Policy Speech, delivered Blacktown Civic Centre, 29th April 1974 Pearls is an ongoing project which was started in 1999 where I make printed matter into beads that can be worn. Mostly I ask people to give me a book, or a chapter of a book, or a poem, or a magazine, and I return this gift in its entirety, to the giver, in the form of a string of beads. In this instance, I was approached by Blacktown Arts Centre to make Pearls from two speeches Gough Whitlam delivered in Blacktown in the 1970s. In return I have requested that these Pearls be given to a person or institution chosen by the Arts Centre after the exhibition.
Simryn Gill was born in Singapore in 1959. She lives in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and in Sydney. Recent exhibitions include the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2013; Art Unlimited, Basel Art Fair, 2013; and dOCUMENTA 13, 2012.
Simryn Gill, Pearls: Gough Whitlam, Australian Labor Party Policy Speech, delivered Blacktown Civic Centre, 13th November 1972; Gough Whitlam, Australian Labor Party Policy Speech, delivered Blacktown Civic Centre, 29th April 1974 2014, typed speeches, glue, cotton thread
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Deborah Kelly Artist Statement
Night falls in the valley When I was thirteen, a boy on the bus introduced me to the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin and thus turned me into an ardent prepubescent anarchist. A couple of years later, when Whitlam was sacked, I thought HOORAY! NO MORE GOVERNMENT! And coming home from school that day, history was crackling in the air. I thought it was the electric euphoria of a people who would henceforth rule themselves. But when I walked through the door of our house, my father was lying face down in the lounge room, sobbing into the shag pile. Whatever could be wrong?
Deborah Kelly is a Sydney-based artist who has exhibited since the early 1980s. She frequently works collaboratively, including with Tina Fiveash on the Hey, hetero! public art project shown in public sites from Sydney to Glasgow, and as a founding member of boat-people, which has been making work around race, nation, borders and history since 2001. For the past year she has been working on a major artwork with 67 collaborating participants for the 2014 Biennale of Sydney.
Deborah Kelly, Night falls in the valley 2014, silk velvet, silk, pigment inks, wood, thread, diamond
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The Kingpins Artist Statement
Aunty Barry Humphries once described returning to Australia as coming to visit an old sick aunt. Our practice often visits these poor archetypes as they drift timeless in space, unable to hook into any terra fi rma. Like Miranda lost in the wormhole post picnic, there is no fi xed address – ‘a dream within a dream’. It is from this void space that the cultural totems push through. Somewhere between Luna Park’s mouth and Aunty Jack’s anus. We seek to pass between. By returning to these childhood motifs and embodying engorged ghosts, we can flay open our own cultural anxieties, behead the wild colonial beasts and rip your bloody arms off.
The Kingpins have been working together as a collective since 2000. They span gallery-based installation and live performance and work in a variety of mediums. Performance and characterisation are the essence of their practice. They are most commonly recognised for linking drag performance with architecture and public space, and imparting new readings and abstract mythologies to elected environments. Highlights include Rising Tide, MCA, San Diego 09; Art Basel Miami, live with Deitch Projects 08; Shifting Identities, Kunsthaus, Zurich 09; Playback, Musée D’Art Moderne 07; Liverpool Biennale 06; Nuit Blanche, Paris 06; Taipei Biennale 04; Gwangju Biennale 04; Primavera, MCA, Sydney 2003.
The Kingpins, Aunty 2014, Video installation, mixed media
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Grant Stevens Artist Statement
Just Dawn Just Dawn is a response to two speeches that former Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, delivered in Blacktown in 1972 and 1974. Throughout the video, a series of white words and phrases fade in and out as a virtual camera fl ies towards an abstract horizon line. The narrative thread of the text is directed towards an unnamed Whitlam through the repeated appearance of the words ‘you said’. As the video progresses, the colours of the animated background slowly brighten to resemble an emerging dawn, and the sound, text and camera movements build in frequency and intensity. As they do so, the once optimistic outlook becomes increasingly unsteady. In these ways, Just Dawn is equal parts homage to and lament for the ideological acuity and ambition of Whitlam’s agenda. It explores how Whitlam’s words can become markers for the complexities of both his own specific transformative policies, and the character of the socially progressive movement more broadly.
Grant Stevens is an Australian artist currently based in Brisbane. His art practice explores how the verbal and non-verbal ‘languages’ of popular screen culture interface with contemporary forms of subjectivity and communication. He has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. He is a lecturer in visual arts at the Queensland University of Technology.
Grant Stevens, Just Dawn 2014, digital video
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List of Works
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan Common-wealth: Project Another Country #130010FFS 2014 Handcrafted metal (tin), cushions, series of seven, each approx. 36 x 32 x 31 cm. Courtesy the artists and The Drawing Room Gallery, Manila.
Darren J Bell BLACKTOWNECLECTIC 2014 Digital prints on paper, series of 30, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
Anthony Berbari (with Enrique Urrejola) Now and Then 2014 Digital prints on Kodak Endura paper, series of ten, each 38 x 25 cm. Courtesy the artists.
Gary Carsley D.106 The Annunciation (Whitlam in China) 2014 C-type mono print, 125 x 176 cm. Courtesy the artist and Thatcher Projects, New York and Torch Gallery, Amsterdam.
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Simryn Gill Pearls: Gough Whitlam, Australian Labor Party Policy Speech, delivered Blacktown Civic Centre, 13th November 1972; Gough Whitlam, Australian Labor Party Policy Speech, delivered Blacktown Civic Centre, 29th April 1974 2014 Typed speeches, glue, cotton thread, 132 x 45 x 0.2 cm. Courtesy the artist. (Photo: Jennifer Leahy.)
Deborah Kelly Night falls in the valley 2014 Silk velvet, silk, pigment inks, wood, thread, diamond, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.
The Kingpins Aunty 2014 Video installation, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists and Neon Parc.
Grant Stevens Just Dawn 2014 Digital video, 3:15 mins. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.
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Exhibition Acknowledgements It’s Timely is a partnership project between Blacktown Arts Centre and the Whitlam Institute within the University of Western Sydney.
Curators: Gary Carsley and Paul Howard Exhibition Assistant: Megan Hillyer Blacktown Arts Centre wishes to thank Enrique Urrejola for photographic assistance to Anthony Berbari; Librarian, Leonie Gendle; Mark Dunn for lending his It’s Time campaign poster; Lorraine Smith for re-typing the original speeches for Simryn Gill and Joyce Swinburne for lending her typewriter. Thank you to the staff of the Whitlam Institute: Eric Sidoti (Director), Sandra Stevenson (Senior Program Manager), Amy Sambrooke (Communications Coordinator), and Lorraine West (Archivist, Whitlam Prime Ministerial Library). Additional thanks to Blacktown Arts Centre and Arts and Cultural Development staff and Blacktown City Council staff from the Library, Community Development; Building Construction and Maintenance; Communication, Events and Industry Liaison; Corporate Finance; Environmental Sustainability; Governance and Property; the Depot and the Information Centre.
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Courtesy and Š the artists and writers 2014.
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan are represented by The Drawing Room Gallery, Manila. Gary Carsley is represented by Thatcher Projects, New York and Torch Gallery, Amsterdam. Deborah Kelly and Grant Stevens are represented by Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney. The Kingpins are represented by Neon Parc.
Cover image Gough Whitlam opens Labour Election campaign, delivering his policy speech, at Bowman Hall, Blacktown Civic Centre, 13th November 1972. Photograph by Rick Stevens, Fairfax Syndication.
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Blacktown Arts Centre/ Blacktown City Council
Jenny Bisset Manager Arts & Cultural Development/ Director Blacktown Arts Centre Monir Rowshan Cultural Planning Coordinator Paul Howard Visual Arts Curator Paschal Berry Performing Arts Curator Miah Wright Aboriginal Arts Development Officer Jodie Polutele Community Engagement and Marketing Miguel Olmo Operations Coordinator Sanki Tennakoon Senior Administration Officer Dayna Coyle Administration Officer Joshua Stojanovic Administration Trainee Jason Abbott, Tim Dale, Justin Henderson, Marius Jastkowiak Exhibition Installers Rebecca Tromp Publicity Kevin Vo Designer Emma Wise Editor Justin Attwater Operations & Building Work
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T F E W A P
9839 6558 9831 8730 artscentre@blacktown.nsw.gov.au artscentre.blacktown.nsw.gov.au 78 Flushcombe Rd Blacktown NSW 2148 PO Box 63, Blacktown NSW 2148
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 5pm (closed public holidays) General admission free BlacktownArtsCentre @BlacktownCC Blacktown Arts Centre is an initiative of Blacktown City Council supported by Arts NSW
Printed by Glenn Warner Printing ISBN: 978-1-921482-43-4