Renowned Australian artist Ben Quilty has issued a stark warning, labelling the nation a society of "rich cowards" for its chronic underfunding and undervaluing of the arts. In a powerful essay, he contends that this neglect is stripping Australia of the vital social and cultural fabric required to build a healthy, resilient, and successful future.
A Personal Story of Discouragement
Quilty recalls the moment his own artistic ambitions were first dismissed. At sixteen, he confided in a school careers adviser about his desire to attend art school. The adviser's reaction was one of alarm. After their meeting, the adviser contacted Quilty's parents to urge them to re-enrol him in economics instead. This early experience, Quilty suggests, was a symptom of a broader societal timidity and a collective lack of ambition that persists today.
He argues that building a confident, independent national culture is impossible without robustly encouraging the arts in all their forms. "The only way to grow healthy, robust social fibre is through building an independent and confident culture," Quilty writes. This requires creating the conditions for Australians to tell their own stories.
Sport is Sugar, Arts are Fibre
Quilty draws a sharp contrast between the nation's treatment of sport and its approach to the arts. He acknowledges sport's role in generating fleeting national pride, describing a big football win as "a tonic for social issues." However, he likens this feeling to a sugar hit that quickly dissolves.
"If sport is sugar, the arts are fibre," he states. He highlights the immense public investment in sports stadiums and institutes like the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), where athletes receive facilities and stipends. Quilty notes that part of the tax he paid from his 2012 Archibald Prize win went towards training athletes at the AIS, a fact he learned while still repaying his own university HECS debt from working as a builder's labourer.
This disparity is compounded by policy. Quilty points out that the previous federal Liberal government doubled the fees for humanities degrees, making an arts education a "financial stupidity" in the current climate, a situation he says the current government has failed to rectify.
A Call for Courage and Investment
Quilty looks back to the progressive reforms of the Whitlam era in the mid-1960s as a time when Australia began to bravely define its own unique culture. Today, he believes, choosing a career in the arts requires significant bravery in the face of a society often contemptuous of the very idea of art.
"We stand in the 21st century, one of the wealthiest societies in human history, yet diminished and lost," he writes. The path forward, according to Quilty, is a society that once again values its dreamers and visionaries—those who question norms and explore difficult truths to imagine new futures.
He concludes that future artists are the key to building the social fibre needed to sustain Australia, but this is only possible with an unflinching acknowledgment of the past and governments prepared to properly fund the nation's cultural future. The current state of being "unsupported and despised" must end for the country to thrive.
