Opinion Piece - A time for celebration and reflection - The Sunday Times

As we celebrate WA Day this year, the future is hard to picture. But looming at the end of this decade is an important, but difficult milestone for our city - 2029 is the bicentenary of Perth. 

This bicentenary will be very different to the national bicentenary celebrated in 1988 - the Ken Done, big hair, sun and singlets bicentenary will not work Western Australia on 12 August 2029. 

It will also be different from the 1929 Perth centenary celebrations – where thousands of prison sentences were shortened as a centenary reward. 

The Indigenous Constitutional recognition and Australia Day discussions of recent years means the bicentenary will have a very different feel. 

As a nation, we must continue to confront and acknowledge the appalling treatment of Indigenous people but also to grasp this opportunity for lasting and meaningful reconciliation. 

This is why the opportunity to think a decade into the future allows us to build community consensus around this milestone and think beyond the current political cycle. We do not know which party will be government as state or federal level, nor who might be Prime Minister or which state they may come from. With time and care we should be able to both recognise 40,000 of Indigenous culture and also Perth’s 200 year transformation into a vibrant, innovative city on Australia’s west coast. 

Western Australia needs a big bold vision to mark this occasion. For this reason I started the “200 Years of Perth” survey to begin community consultation in my community on this challenge. 

A major theme for respondents was the need for the milestone to be inclusive, and recognise indigenous culture. 

The idea that has captured my heart and mind and was the most popular with of respondents is a National Indigenous Cultural Museum. The strong desire to recognise our First Nations People was also present in other suggestions including formally renaming the Swan River to Derbal Yerrigan and a more formal process of using local language aboriginal names for all places in Western Australia.

Australia can look to our friends in the United States and can see the success of the National Museum of African-American culture. The US hosted an international design competition for this $500 million project and it is now among the most popular of the Smithsonian museums.

Here in Australia we can copy this model to recognise Australia’s first peoples, increase our understanding and provide a world-class tourism asset for the entire nation. Infrastructure Australia has already recognised this would be an essential piece of cultural infrastructure for Australia. 

It would be entirely reasonable that from the one hundred billion dollar infrastructure fund which the Federal government controls just 0.5% would go towards this Bicentennial project.

In the lead up to 1988, the Federal Government invested $202 million in recognising Sydney’s - and by extension Australia’s - bicentenary, including the construction of 300 commemorative projects across NSW. With a great number of capital and regional cities looking to recognise their bicentenaries over the course of the next two decades, the Federal Government has a role to fund these events, including Perth’s. 

This will be something which every Western Australian would be proud of.

There were others with strong levels support that should stay on the table - more than a third of respondents supported a large-scale artwork across the city, while 30 per cent said we should use this opportunity for Western Australia to bid for the 2030 Commonwealth Games. And while mega parties aren’t possible in the middle of a pandemic, almost half supported 2029 being the biggest ever “Festival of Perth”.

For many respondents, scale was another common theme. What encourages me most whenever I talk about bicentenary is the enthusiasm people have big projects here in WA. We have finally learnt the lessons of the small vision Bell Tower and Elizabeth Quay. People often mention the Statue of Liberty or Eiffel Tower. It took just two years to build the Eiffel Tower and nine years to build Statue of Liberty. Looking to 2029, Western Australia can and should think very big.

As the surveys flowed back into my office, one idea kept popping up - covering the Mitchell Freeway and finally connecting our city with West Perth and our State Parliament. A so-called “Bicentennial Square” - surely, if not the bicentenary, the time is finally coming for this project.

Long considered since discussions were first held about Parliament House, the land bridge would be a large sweeping statement between Western Australia’s house of democracy and the CBD, including gardens and a civic space. 

Whatever your personal view – I hope you share my enthusiasm to use the Perth bicentenary to learn the lessons of our past and to celebrate WA’s bright future.

Right now, we have the time to consider these projects. To put the long-term funding in place and to grasp the opportunity to build a bridge between a past of not just 200 years of Perth, but 40,000 years of continuing culture.

ENDS

This was first published in The Sunday Times on Sunday, 31 May 2020.