Two years ago, Tim Winton walked on stage at the Perth festival and delivered a blistering closing address that was, as he puts it now, “a bit like dropping a turd in the pool”. Perhaps some in the room had expected the Australian literary giant, Western Australia’s homegrown hero, to say something pretty and benign about the arts. Instead, Winton tore into fossil fuel giants Woodside and Chevron – both at that time long-term sponsors of Perth festival – with his plain-speaking, moral directness that comes through so clearly on the page.
That fossil fuel companies would – and could – sponsor cultural festivals even as they staged works about the climate crisis, was “really embarrassing. He told the room: “For, who else in the corporate world, sailing so close to reputational oblivion, could feel that safe and so confident? You reckon a brewery would put itself forward for a show about foetal alcohol syndrome? How about tobacco sponsoring ventilators for lung patients?” As he pointed out, even banks and superfunds were divesting from fossil fuels: “So how is it that the arts community should show less creativity and moral imagination than bankers?”
