Australia Yearbook - 2001

Chapter 12—Culture and recreation 549
principal means of conveying the visual arts to
the public. However, we do not include libraries;
even though they are an important means by
which literature is made available for public
consumption, libraries also have an equally or
more significant role as information service
providers and, in terms of public funding of the
core arts, it would lead to overstatement of
funding levels if support for libraries were
included. Also, we exclude education and training
in the arts even though some institutions such as
the National Institute of Dramatic Art do produce
some primary creative work; museums (other
than art museums) even though some
multi-purpose museums do display artworks; and
broadcasting and publishing even though, for
example, the television services do produce
original drama.
It is apparent that in any definitional exercise
involving the arts, there are going to be difficult
decisions as to inclusion or exclusion, and that no
boundary line around the arts is ever going to be
watertight, especially when it comes to allocating
activities to classifications for statistical purposes.
Nevertheless the conventions adopted here do
provide a reasonable coverage of the core arts
activities in Australia which have been the focus
of public funding over the period studied.
The paper is organised more or less
chronologically, covering three broad periods.
The first extends from Federation to the end of
the 1960s, a period over which support for the
arts was virtually nonexistent. The second stage
covers the rapid expansion of arts funding
during the 1970s and 1980s, during which time
the economic importance of the arts became
more widely advocated. Finally, the decade of
the 1990s was one in which only moderate
expansion occurred, despite some significant
advances in the articulation of cultural policy.
This last period also corresponds with the time
when a framework for the classification of
cultural statistics was gradually put in place,
providing more detailed data about the arts than
had ever been available before. The paper
concludes with an overview and review of some
of the motivations for arts support that have
been expressed, and policy developments that
have occurred, over the period studied.
The early years: 1900–1968 2
It is sometimes supposed that public funding of
the arts in Australia is an entirely modern
phenomenon. In fact, the very first recorded
example of government patronage of the arts
in this country dates back to 1818–19 when
the poet Michael Massey Robinson
(1744–1826) was granted two cows from the
government herd “for his services as Poet
Laureate”. Posterity has not been kind to Mr
Robinson’s verse, which is now largely
forgotten, but he can claim a place in history
as the first recipient of an arts grant in
Australia. 3
At the time of Federation, when the present
story starts, governments in the various
States had already entered the field of
support for culture through their
contributions to funding of public galleries,
museums and libraries in the capital cities
and in the rural areas. The major public art
galleries in Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart, for
example, had been founded in 1871, 1880
and 1887 respectively. By the end of the first
decade after Federation, the six capital-city
art galleries were all well established, and
were drawing significant numbers of visitors.
The National Art Gallery of New South Wales
in Sydney reported about 250,000
attendances in 1908, the Art Gallery at
Adelaide recorded about 130,000 visitors in
that year, and the Queensland National Art
Gallery about 40,000. Given the urban
populations at the time, these were
impressive figures, and were achieved with
only modest amounts of public funds; for
example, the annual government grant to the
Sydney gallery at that time was about
£4,000, 4 while that to the gallery in Perth,
whose foundation stone had been laid in
1901 in a building shared with the Library
and the Museum, was only £1,000.
Most of the galleries had also benefited from
private patronage through the donation of
funds and the bequest of collections of
artworks. The Adelaide Gallery, for example,
had financed its new building, opened in
1900, by means of a bequest of £25,000 from
Sir Thomas Elder (equivalent to about $2.5m
today). The National Gallery in
Melbourne—incidentally, the only one of the
State art galleries to retain its appellation of
‘national’ to the present day—received a
substantial bequest in 1904 from Alfred
Felton, which by 1915 was yielding the
handsome sum of £8,000 per annum.
Nevertheless, despite the generosity of many
benefactors, the State budgets remained the
primary source of funding for the public art