2024 will go down in history with Archie Moore’s prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale for kith & kin being an Australian first. Turning his artistically impoverished regional origin-story into gold is a stratospheric achievement, and is timely for our Regional issue.
Moore was ‘grown up’ in the proverbial backwater of Tara in rural Queensland, a shrinking town of under 2000 people. The Western Downs tourist guide promotes Tara’s cultural attractions of camel and yabby races, vintage cars and the Hugh Sawrey murals in the local pub. Largely unknown in Australia’s metropolitan centres, the art of this former drover and founder of the Stockman’s Hall of Fame epitomised the regional view of what regional art was. Wikipedia praises Sawrey’s nostalgic outback imagery for memorialising a twentieth century ‘Australian history in danger of being lost to posterity’. So does Moore’s family tree at the heart of kith & kin, but it’s a chronology of colonial inhumanity, racism, theft and poverty—much of it played out across pastoral leases in western NSW and Queensland.
That these artistic narratives co-exist is an apt allegory for the far-flung settings that make up that imaginary colossus, ‘regional Australia’. But how do we avoid this co-existence being reduced to a binary of the art world’s idea of the ‘great regional artist’ (Archie) vs. the regions’ idea of ‘the great regional artist’ (Hugh), which simply rehash the cliches and prejudices that feed the nation’s political culture? (Ironically, neither Archie nor Hugh embodies the typical regional artist–statistically, this honour belongs to women over 50.) The 2023 National Cultural Policy Revive offers an anodyne aphorism to cloak the barren centre/periphery divide, ‘a place for every story, a story for every place’. Artlink prefers to reflect on the nation’s plurality: places for every story, stories for every place.
When it comes to the crunch for regional artists (26% of Australian artists), its dollars not branding that counts. Revive is backed by a $286 million budget for arts, entertainment and culture over five years. The lion’s share goes to Creative Australia, with an increased budget of which a small percentage trickles down to regional arts bodies such as Regional Arts Australia (RAA, est.1943). As the commonwealth peak body, RAA’s Regional Arts Fund (RAF) distributes $6 million annually through state-based organisations. A quick interaction with the RAF’s ‘impact and reach data’ graph shows that in 2022, a total investment of just over $2.34 million was spent across all art forms, so about a third of RAA’s annual budget hits the ground. Filter to visual arts, and it’s a modest $506,000.
Beyond RAF’s expenditure, there are state government initiatives for regional arts professionals and institutions, who also compete with their peers in national funding rounds. The National Exhibition Touring Scheme (NETS Australia) and Visions of Australia invest in getting art to the regions and Revive has boosted the NGA’s long-term loans to regional and suburban cultural institutions by $11.8 million. Artlink, with its commitment to publishing on regional and remote visual arts, has secured operational funds through Creative Australia in 2025–28. Arts South Australia remains our most consistent financial supporter.
The essays in this issue are curated to be read clockwise across all six states and the Northern Territory, beginning in SA, with exhibition reviews from opposite sides of the continent by Stephanie Britton and Jessyca Hutchens. We’ve found common threads across diverse terrains, but always different modes of storytelling. One certainty is that social media and the post-pandemic ‘zoom-boom’ has helped dispel a sense of isolation and foster connection for artists in the regions. Two examples across Australia and the Asia-Pacific are profiled here: Regional Assembly (2021–24), documented by Alana Hunt, and of similar intent, Asialink’s ongoing Regional // Regional which supports and connects creative producers and directors across vast distances. Susie Anderson joined R // R’s second gathering in lutruwita / Tasmania, and found a gently paced, First-Nations-led model for building sustainable inter-regional partnerships. Local shire councils contribute to the visual arts ecosystem, particularly by supporting regional art galleries. An example is Faye Neilson’s piece on the Upper Hunter Arts Network and their partnership with AGL—Australia’s biggest carbon polluter—to realise LiddellWORKS at Muswellbrook and Singleton’s regional galleries. Climate activist and artist Fiona Lee’s Artefacts of an Uncertain Future (LD359-623) (2024), generated from this unlikely industry collaboration, is our cover image: it memorialises ecological devastation in a region built on coal power, where bipartisan community action is the only way forward.
Regionally distinct cultural conditions shift and spike over time. In late 2022, national media reported the resignation of Broken Hill City Art Gallery curator Hester Lyon, who shares her story—and her remedy—here. In Mildura, the town’s art historical inheritance is laden with possibilities and loaded with expectations, as Erica Tarquinio learned in launching NAP Contemporary, the newest art gallery in the small Victorian town.
In Mparntwe / Alice Springs, Kim Mahood set up camp at Araluen Arts Centre in the lead up to its 40th anniversary exhibition, Ground Swell, developing plein air paintings and literary metaphors to describe a centre which is so often a test- site for black/white relations. In western NSW, as the community gears up for Cementa24, Vanessa Berry uses her Kandos residency to reflect on the changes that have occurred due to the social and cultural mixing the festival has generated.
Tarnanthi Regional Curator Marika Davies writes about her recent experience working alongside First Nations artists in South Australia developing Saltbush Country, and what resourcing for Aboriginal artists means in rural communities and small towns: it’s very different to the dedicated community art centre models that service so much of the Indigenous art industry. My own curiosity about SA’s Limestone Coast inspired a closer look at three regional galleries seeking to improve critical coverage of art in the regions.
Cuts to art schools across the higher education sector over the past decade have also impacted regional arts. The vibrant Far North Queensland art scene that Hamish Sawyer describes is one region facing tertiary sector withdrawal, but as a counterpoint, Jack Wilkie-Jans writes on Thanakupi’s legacy as mentor and teacher in the Tropical North—though the grand dame from Western Cape York had to travel to Sydney in the 1970s to earn her degree in ceramics.
Metropolitan centre Boorloo / Perth, which wins the prize for most isolated capital city in the world, can’t properly claim regional status, however critic Sam Beard argues otherwise, seeking to think/ unthink hyper-localism and post-nationalism from a global perspective.
Over the past half century, from central Australia to the nation’s edges, Indigenous artists have been initiating another kind of placemaking, reorienting what and where the centres are. We all inhabit a regional style: it's what we do with it that counts.