Before I started my residency, I explored the public archives of the Western Australian Museum, and the State Library of Western Australia located nearby in the surrounding Perth Cultural Centre (PCC). Most of the relevant materials in these library and museum collections focus on the building from its time of foundation in 1896 as Perth Boys’ and Girls’ School. The remnants of its past life are still visible across the interior and exterior walls, with previous students initials and dates inscribed into the bricks. A nineteenth century school shoe was even found in a wall cavity in 2003.

In 1988 the building as a place of education came to an end and PICA took over the premises opening in 1991. At the time, PICA’s first Director Noel Sheridan stated that PICA ‘will not collect things, although what it presents may be collected or refined by others.’¹ In this report Sheridan stressed the importance of artists defining the institution through risk and disclosure, rather than reinforcing the hierarchal structures that have required artists to create artwork that fit the imperatives of the institution. While Sheridan was against the idea of collecting as a practice of containment, my perspective is that without the practice of collecting, PICA would not have accrued over 40 years of Perth's contemporary art history.

In October I received the key to my studio and adjacent storerooms. After an investigation, I ascertained that PICA did in fact house an organisational archive. It became clear that I was one of the people who could refine what PICA had collected as Sheridan had alluded. The archive, accumulated and stacked in boxes behind closed doors, contained periodicals, personal letters, film slides, VHS tapes, photographs, artist reports and exhibition posters. I even found a first edition framed screenprint by PICA’s Chairman, Brian McKay, titled The Bishop’s Journey (1985) hanging above a doorway. The archive’s disarray and containment led me to question the publics ability to access these documents, even though they contain integral information about the city’s cultural history.

Trust me

It was during this period of archival research that I came across the Artists Regional Exchange (ARX) after reading about Adam Boyd’s Trust Me (1989) in newspaper articles about ARX Metro Mania. Occurring from 1987 to 1999, ARX encouraged social and political exchanges among emerging and established artists from Australia, New Zealand and South-east Asia. My initial archival research subsequently led to a digitisation project in 2022 of the ARX documents housed in the gallery’s archive for researchers Bianca Winataputri and Anca Rujoiu.

ARX had been a PICA exhibition program, so most of the archive was stored, contained and reasonably inaccessible on site as it accumulated over the years. While Rujoiu’s research was focussed on cross-cultural artist collaborations at ARX and Winataputri engaged with contemporary curatorial projects such as ARX and the Asia Pacific Triennale (APT), I became interested in the political and social histories that surrounded the program and how they continue to resonate in Perth today.

When Rujoiu travelled to Perth from Singapore to view some ARX film slides at PICA I lined up Adam Boyd’s Trust me (1989) in the carousel.

Trust me was a large-scale mural painted on PICA’s roof which served as a political statement against businessman Alan Bond when he was facing criminal charges of fraud. Boyd’s use of the red dingo emblem was a direct reference to the local legend that Bond re-painted the Dingo Flour silo, a historic landmark in North Fremantle, when he was an apprentice signwriter.² Referencing this urban myth, Boyd included the words ‘Trust me’ in response to Bond's dishonesty between December 1988 and December 1989, as he mislead the directors of Bond Corporation Holdings Ltd.³ I was compelled by the work’s criticism against corporate enterprise and it’s specific placement in the PCC, seeming to implicate the surrounding area in Bond’s corporate misconduct. Today, the tin roof Boyd’s mural was painted on bares no trace of its existence despite its commanding presence in the precinct for many years.

Early in the digitisation project, it became apparent that the administrative and financial resourcing of ARX was extremely limited in comparison to its grand ambitions. Curator and writer, Julie Ewington, described ARX as a ‘Biennale-sized champagne event on a beer budget.’⁴ I remember reading this quote to Anca and Bianca over Zoom as we shared a knowing laugh. Over 24 years later, has anything changed in the arts?

Truth and Exchange

As I scanned hundreds of ARX documents—from artist reports, newspaper articles to committee meeting minutes—I noticed a recurring thread, where were the Aboriginal artists? Much of the criticism I read about ARX centred the ‘organizational shortfalls and the lack of Aboriginal representation’.⁵ As a result of unclear curatorial strategies, ARX struggled to acknowledge Aboriginal art as significant part of contemporary Australian society.⁶ At the official ARX opening address Menang Bibbulmun woman and artist Alma Toomath argued that Aboriginal art in the late 1980s was categorised as ‘community arts’ instead of a valid form of contemporary art practice in 'high culture.’⁷ I discussed this with Anca and Bianca during our regular Zoom calls, as every iteration of ARX seemed marred by a repeat lack of Aboriginal consultation and inclusion. Inaugural ARX coordinator Adrian Jones was very aware of this but felt that upon reflection, key moments of peri-colonial discourse were missed. He writes,

In ARX 1989, Thammasak Booncherd (Thailand) created an archway of city refuse for placement in the Perth Cultural Centre Plaza. He had collected various materials from the streets, which included a small handmade, Aboriginal flag. This innocent use of a piece of cloth was seen by an important Aboriginal woman historian, who demanded of the nearby exhibition venue that it be removed from the other ‘junk’ immediately. No swift action taking place, the woman got on a ladder and removed it herself. On hearing of the incident, the Thai artists were extremely disturbed by their (accidental) ignorance. When numerous discussions between both parties were not enough to dispel the offence caused, one of the artists Chumpon Apisuk conceived of a canny action; he performed a ceremony. The photograph of the ceremony shows the Aboriginal flag being handed to the woman—a symbolic return of cultural property from Aborigines of Thailand to the Aboriginals of Australia. Somehow, I would like to see more of this at the centre of an event than at the periphery.⁸

Jones observation of the deficits of ARX’s management of cultural exchange in 1989 was an issue felt more broadly in the city at the time. While editing this article, I attempted to find out who this ‘Aboriginal woman historian’ was, not only for factual reasons, but to name her and better understand the context of her action. I returned to the archives to see if her activism connected with concurrent protests that took place on the Old Swan Brewery site along Perth’s foreshore.

From 1989-1993 Noongar and non-Aboriginal activists occupied the site by Derbal Yerrigan (Swan River) to protest the Western Australian Government's proposal to redevelop the then derelict brewery.⁹ Coincidentally, Alan Bond had purchased the property in 1981 before it went through several dubious business deals.¹⁰ For five years, Noongar activists campaigned for the protection of the sacred site known as Goonininup, asking for the demolition of the building and for the site to become a public park. Their calls were ignored and they were forcibly removed prior to the redevelopment.¹¹ It was another instance, as Boyd criticised, where wealth had come to pervade and control the civic life of Perth’s public space, in this instance to the detriment of Aboriginal recognition and sovereignty.

For cultural exchange to be successful, whether it occurs within the arts or broader public sphere, we need to be open and willing to discuss the ‘hard truths’ of European invasion of Aboriginal land.¹² The anger felt by the Aboriginal woman who challenged Booncherd and Apisuk is palpable. While I searched documents pertaining to these two important protests around sovereignty, land and representation, I was unable to find any mention of the woman who so ardently protested the artists use of an important symbol for Aboriginal people. But it became apparent that these two events thirty-five years ago, continue to play out in the colony.

In the past four years, national debates around Aboriginal sovereignty have played out in Australian Parliament, with the ‘success’ of the Aboriginal flag being ‘freed’ in 2022 and the failure of the Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum in 2023.¹³ In Western Australia corporate interests continue to pose a threat to sacred sites such as Murujuga, a site on the Burrup Peninsula that contains over a million rock art petroglyphs dating back over 40,000 years, which has been disrupted and altered by the mining industry. These ongoing issues have led many to question, are Australians ready to accept the hard truths of colonialism and make redress? If not now, when?

New pasts

While I wasn’t able to identify the Aboriginal woman who removed the Aboriginal flag from Booncherd’s Gate, she is not alone or lost in these archives, she is one of many who have fought for Indigenous self-determination. These actions of Aboriginal sovereignty found in the archives and made public, are indicative of broader forms of contestations and cultural ignorance that has pervaded the Perth city and its civic life. The importance of interrogating the materials of the past is to seek the history that can inform how we see ourselves in the present especially when reflecting on sustained or contested political and social attitudes.

The digitisation of archives has allowed access to new information, creating a ‘new past’ where ‘new figures’ emerge, giving events like ARX a new life for contemporary audiences.¹⁴ Archives are much like a wall cavity where a nineteenth century shoe can be found. It is a space that as an artist I can navigate and discover details that can teach us about the not-so-neutral spaces we live and work within. Working with the PICA archive and the documents of ARX that previously laid dormant in boxes I have been able to be a conduit between the archive and the public.

Art and its social, spatial, political and cultural histories can tell us about issues we have overcome and those that sit with us today. The process of cataloguing and preserving PICA’s archive has recently enabled artists to develop new works that respond to PICA’s history, specifically, Diana Baker Smith’s, Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void) (2024) and Agatha Gothe-Snape, IT IS A COLOUR OF AN IDEA THAT WILL NOT COMPLETE ITSELF IN OUR LIFETIME’ (2024). Cultural memory is fragile and evanescent. It requires the collective effort of situated archival research to draw out knowledge and stories that can be retold or refined. For a new past to materialise, we need to return to the archives, re-examine them, critique them and question them. Archives serve as a record of our political, economic, environmental, and social history, for the benefit of future analysis, interpretation and research. Through access and discernment of archival content we can reveal the social structures that endure, inside and outside the walls of the art gallery.