This page is a record of a scholarly article relating to Fremantle.
- Part of: Fremantle Studies Volume 11
- Title: Fremantle Arts Centre: Contemporary Programming in a Historical Site
- Authors: Sheridan Hart
- Published: 2017 Fremantle History Society (Fremantle)
- Reference URL: https://freopedia.org/Fremantle_Arts_Centre:_Contemporary_Programming_in_a_Historical_Site
- Tags: Fremantle Studies
- Authority control:
Presented at Fremantle Studies Day 2017.
Full Text
The Fremantle Arts Centre (FAC) is the home of a diverse arts program, spanning music, theatre, dance, comedy, contemporary visual art exhibitions and arts learning. As an institution it champions the development of new practices, innovative and original artforms, and intones with the character of the local community’s long-established devotion to creativity and inclusiveness.
The cultural program that unfolds at Fremantle Arts Centre has become inextricable from the architecture and history of its grounds and buildings. A concert or art class held therein is wholly shaped and enriched by the presence of towering limestone walls, wrought iron gates that sing when they open and close, verdant plane trees turning amber in autumn, rich red jarrah floorboards scuffed by countless former occupants, Gothic finials and the stately, cloistered facade. The history of the place is undeniable and pervasive to all who visit.
In this paper, I will give a portrait of the way that Fremantle Arts Centre’s substantial and varied arts program brings contemporary artistic voices to bear on the nature and history of the site. I will move through some examples of projects that have responded to or been inspired by architectural heritage, the building’s labyrinthine floorplan or the narratives embedded therein. These examples will demonstrate how contemporary cultural practitioners have critiqued, celebrated or commented on the history of the site in a meaningful way, supplementing and opening up that history for a local and international audience.
A summary of FAC’s site history
The original building was constructed by the Bunnings Brothers using convict labour and opened as an asylum for male and female psychiatric patients in 1864. Treatment took the form of Moral Management, a widespread regime at the time, which involved a rigid routine of domestic tasks, a controlled diet and supervised social activities. A dividing wall separated men and women and a block of cells was used to isolate patients during acute episodes. Diagnoses varied widely, and included melancholy, religious mania, chronic idiocy and epileptic dementia. Despite an expansion under lauded Western Australian, architect George Temple- Poole, the building became so overcrowded that by 1900, it was no longer able to function as a place of effective treatment.
By 1900, all patients had been relocated to more modern institutions and the building became a home for women, mostly elderly, who were without family and in need of health care. A school was set up in the south wing, where student midwives delivered the babies of local women, and part of the building was used to house ‘wayward’ girls; that is, young women who were arrested for prostitution or unmarried pregnant women. With the advent of World War 2, the women were moved to Woodbridge near Guildford and the building was used as a US naval depot. A small bar, brig, laundry, parade ground and radio room were established and the interior walls were painted military grey-green.
By the war’s end, the building was crumbling. Neither the Asylum nor women’s home had attracted sufficient funding to maintain it properly, and the Navy’s extraction had been swift. Detritus scattered the grounds. Rot and infestation went unchecked. Yet, with the advocacy of Sir Frederick Samson, Robin McKellar Campbell, the Earl of Euston and an impassioned local community, the building was marked for restoration. Fremantle Arts Centre opened in 1974 under the leadership of Ian Templeman and custodianship of the City of Fremantle.
Site history and contemporary audiences
The site history of FAC is a complex and sensitive one to articulate. It involves doing away with stereotypes of Bedlam-esque asylum chaos, and thrilling though they might be, ghost stories, to address the actual cultural climate and issues around mental health treatment in Western Australia in the 19th century. It also involves emphasising the less focused-on eras of the building’s history such as the midwifery school, technical college and the nascent, energetic and self-sustaining gallery and publishing house of the mid-1970s. FAC also suffers a unique historical hurdle; the building was handed from one set of occupants to another, being completely overhauled many times, with little regard to the preservation of objects, furniture or other would-be museum artefacts. There is simply no room that remains ‘as-is’, as visitors might expect to find in other preserved, historic sites.
In the face of this complexity, artistic engagement has proved a valuable way to articulate and interpret history at FAC. Artists have much to offer to the historical legacy of the site: they invigorate timeworn narratives; consolidate the importance of the building to the local community; they fill previously empty rooms with objects that materialise the characters and ideas of history; and they can inspire new projects which weigh site history against contemporary issues around mental health, imprisonment, midwifery, art, Fremantle and other prominent themes in the life of the building. Art practice is of tremendous value as a ‘way in’ to history. Evocative use of digital media, powerful music, theatrical colour, poetic words, unexpected takes on the archive, creative re-enactment and respectful interpretation provide a rich and engaging context for understanding the history of this wonderful site.
Lily Hibberd - Benevolent Asylum: an eclipse of historical fiction – 2011
Benevolent Asylum was an art exhibition created by Lily Hibberd. Hibberd’s particular interest was in the relationship between asylums and water. Historically, this proximity meant that patients might be delivered to an asylum without travelling through a city or townsite, where their presence might disrupt or disturb everyday citizens. It also meant fresh air and natural scenery; both thought to be healthful for the wracked mind of a patient. The Arts Centre’s location beside the Swan River and Indian Ocean is inextricably linked to its role as a place of confinement in a port city that already had a somewhat unusual self-image, having been in large part peopled by convicts and immigrants wanting to chase gold in Kalgoorlie or start afresh in the new continent. Between 1850 and 1868, almost 10,000 convicts had been transported to Fremantle, a figure which represented 50% of the immigration of that period and which inflated the numbers of people admitted as asylum patients.
In one gallery space, Hibberd exhibited documentary videos and creative writing. In the adjoining space she erected scaffolding, ramps and lighting to simulate a ship. Here she performed Take Me In, a drama that explored exile, transportation of convicts by water and the housing of lunatics beside bodies of water. Drawing on historic sources, the play starred two inmates travelling from the Thames to the Swan, on a diet of ship biscuits, to be placed in the sanctuary of a ‘Benevolent Asylum’.
Central to Hibberd’s story was the notion that in many asylums, boundaries were blurred between patient and prisoner as hope for definitive cure of lunacy in the 19th century was meagre, making continued incarceration more likely. Indeed, this is what occurred in Fremantle. The flow of inmates between Fremantle Prison and the Asylum was known to be a revolving door – poor behaviour in prison was chalked up to mental unrest and dealt with by admittance to the Asylum, where the inmate would stay until overcrowding, fighting or thieving sent them back to prison.
This exhibition gave us a glimpse of how the interweaving of newly written stories and artistic interpretation can sit side by side with historical records, in effect answering the same question - How can we understand the past? - in two different and complementary ways. The artist wrote: ‘Imagine history as an active and shared practice that belongs to the whole community. Art can be instrumental in helping Australians to comprehend the past and to engender a collective future for how these histories might unfold.’1
Médée
In 2016, Fremantle Arts Centre partnered with Lost & Found, an opera company whose model is to present rarely performed, or ‘lost’ operas, in ‘found’ spaces that are not usually used for public performance. In response to the asylum history of the building, co-director Chris van Tuinen settled upon a production of Médée, a dramatic tragedy in five acts. Médée first written by Pierre Corneille in 1635 and adapted for opera by Darius and Madeleine Milhaud in the 1940s. The opera is notable for its atonal melodies which are urgent, meandering and a real feat for contemporary vocalists to pull off. A cast of ten sung this opus to life in the Arts Centre’s north wing, making use of the cell and former museum rooms.
The combination of this particular opera with that space was a direct investigation of the history of the status of women receiving mental health treatment. The opera begins as the title character, Médée, a pagan sorceress, gives birth to twins conceived with her lover and Roman official Jason. Jason soon leaves Médée for a highborn Corinthian woman, Creusa, taking the children with him. Médée succumbs to a passionate fury that leads her to murder Creusa and her own two children, in turn driving Jason to suicide. This is a story which evokes the ancient stereotype of the woman scorned, turned mad with rage. Played out within the former cell block area of the Fremantle Asylum, this opera struck a powerful resonance with the particular fortunes of Fremantle women who were considered dangerous due to the strength of their passions, their drive to take action or their desire for power.
The performance itself made use of the last remaining cell room on site as an off-stage area, from which characters would appear and disappear, and within which, the performers implied acts of violence or incoherence that were all the more intense for not being played in full view, but only through the sounds of voices soaring through the old iron bars of the heavy door. Fiona McAndrew, playing Médée, wore a costume that echoed the design of a straitjacket. Leather restraints and gloves were sometimes used at Fremantle Asylum, but were for the most part avoided in favour of patient isolation.
That the production was designed in concert with the north wing space encouraged audience members to ruminate on the way in which women who did not fit the mould in 19th century Australia were often sent away, as much for the comfort of their local community as for their own treatment. The character of Médée breaks free from this, challenging authority by being neither silent nor invisible, and the play (accordingly for attitudes of the time) ends in chaos and tragedy, at her own hand. The contemporary audience was left to decide whether her revenge and subsequent sorrow were catalysed by Médée’s unreasonable jealousy, or in fact by Jason’s betrayal; was this ending an inevitable mess caused by a woman out of control, or a cautionary tale about the perils of a society where women are denied power, voice and respect?
The story of Médée chimes in with that of many known patients who spent time in the Fremantle Asylum. Rachel Smyth was committed at age 32 for ‘melancholia due to death of a baby’. What today we would call acute grief, menopause, postal-natal depression or adolescent moodiness were seen in the 19th century as due cause to drop a wife or daughter off for an indefinite incarceration, cut off from the family and community which we now know play a vital role in supporting anyone’s mental health.
Similarly, local wife and mother Sarah Salter, the Asylum’s first admission, was delivered to the institution by her husband, without official permission and on the grounds of his dissatisfaction with her behaviour. Despite being deemed sane and twice returned to her family, Sarah was readmitted a further two times. She spent most of her life as a patient, and died as a patient, 22 years after her original admission. Like Médée, Salter had transgressed, failed in her expected role in her family and community, and been abandoned.
Jazmina Cininas
The City of Fremantle’s diverse and extensive art collection is a rich repository of artworks that trace, echo and interpret the history of the building and Fremantle’s social and artistic history more widely. It includes many images of the building, which one can date by the presence, or absence, of finials that were added during its restoration in the mid-1970s.
One notable artwork is Jazmina Cininas’ multi-layered linocut print titled The asylum is no place for a werewolf from 2005. This work is a remarkable example of unique state printmaking. The artist carved a linoleum plate, applied one colour, printed it onto paper, and then carved again into the lino, building up the print in gradual layers. This artwork continues Cininas’ research into the cultural relationship between women’s psychological states, and lupinism (wolves and werewolves). The artist draws on a wide range of sources such as records of witch-hunts and werewolf trials, psychiatric and medical literature, fiction, folklore, cinema and the internet. The capacity for lactation, pregnancy, childbirth and menstruation and their implied relationship to the lunar cycle gave rise in early psychiatric literature to the understanding that lunacy was somehow a natively female condition.
The façade of the building looms Gothic in the background. The figure, caught between humanity and wildness, wears a straitjacket marked with convict stripes. Female patients at Fremantle Asylum were routinely dressed in second-hand uniforms from Fremantle Prison. The use of this pattern, in conjunction with the locked harness on the front, puts forward the artist’s argument that asylums of this period offered little in the way of serious medical treatment, its patients being barely more than prisoners, considered dangerous and beastly, rather than in need of help. The figure’s literal marginalisation in the print’s composition analogises historic asylum theory, which recommended segregation from community life and segregation of the sexes within the asylum.
This work is a critique, but more urgently, it is an evocative lamentation on the harm that was caused to the lives of those individual Asylum patients who, had they lived today, might not have been confined. We might read it as an interpretation of the past, as well as a depiction of the gulf in understanding around mental health between then and now.
The life of this work has continued beyond the City of Fremantle Collection. In 2013, students from Hamilton Hill Senior High School, John Curtin College of the Arts and Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts (DADAA) were invited to select and respond to artworks in the collection for an exhibition called Take 12 at Fremantle Arts Centre. Each student wrote and filmed a short video clip, using a green screen background to superimpose imagery behind them. Jazmina Cininas’ linocut print was selected and responded to by a student called Monica. Monica reinterpreted this print as an image not of isolation but of escape, a female patient’s return to a natural state of freedom and expressiveness. Her video is cryptic, moody and melodramatic, and appears almost like a moving version of the original print.
This is a fine example of how the practice of responding to history through art can create anchor points by which others may engage with that history; both other audiences and other artists. When Monica found this print, she was able to enter back into the site’s history and into Cininas’ artwork and research, before applying her own flair, to produce a new, compounded reflection on the FAC site.
Mad About You: FAC 40th anniversary
In 2013, Fremantle Arts Centre celebrated its 40th anniversary. This was an occasion to reflect on the cultural contributions of the centre and also to consider how the building’s earlier history had infused those cultural events over decades. The exhibition was public-led and celebratory. Artists, students, tutors and members of the public who had helped shape the life of FAC contributed their memories, memorabilia and artwork to the exhibition. Well-known sculptures and paintings that had hung in the galleries returned once more and the public were invited to respond, reminisce and extend the exhibition with their own stories. These contributions were collected on memory walls and on a blog. Mad About You was an opportunity to acknowledge how central the Arts Centre had become in many people’s lives, not just artists or musicians, but community members from all kinds of backgrounds who had a very real and personal connection to the building through taking classes, visiting the craft shop or café, living nearby, walking past, sneaking into the grounds as a child or taking tech college classes therein.
Though the story of the lunatic asylum is well-known, FAC’s history as a place for families, art, learning and community has also become as iconic and important a part of the building’s character and history.
Gosia Wlodarcza
The architecture of FAC, with its many rooms, municipal grandeur and internal chambers, exemplifies 19th century asylum theory and the designers’ belief in the benefits of isolation, lack of distraction and simplicity on the minds of asylum patients.
In 2016, Gosia Wlodarczak, an internationally esteemed artist and the winner of the 2014 Fremantle Print Award, undertook a project called A Room without a View in the Kathleen O’Connor gallery. For twenty-one days in a row, the artist spent eight hours by herself, door shut, in the empty gallery, with only a ladder, a chair, her jacket, an apple, water and her drawing supplies. Throughout this endurance performance, the artist slowly and arduously set about covering the walls with line drawings, black on white, every inch of which reflected the items and architecture around her. Despite being confined to modest immediate surroundings, with no windows, Gosia’s drawings were able to reflect a rich and microscopic observational response to the building: the shape of the door, the reflection of light on floorboards, the rivets in the ladder, the bruise on her apple, the lines in her hand, paint flaking from the wall.
This work was an experiment. The artist wanted to see what would flow from her extended isolation and her regime of constant drawing. This was no morbid curiosity however, but a challenge to the artist’s stamina and discipline, as well as a genuine research exercise which would put Gosia in touch with the former occupants of the building in a manifestly tactile way. The project was a way of understanding isolation in its purest and simplest sense, and it led onlookers who watched her via a live video stream, from the outside, to meditate on terms of isolation associated with asylum history: cloistered, committed, admitted, closeted, sectioned, segregated and deprivation, both sensory and in liberty.
Absence of Evidence
Absence of Evidence was a major exhibition project mounted in 1994. It brought together a group of Western Australian women artists to give a response to two sites of female confinement in Fremantle: The Fremantle Lunatic Asylum and the Female Division of the Fremantle Prison. The exhibition was a purposeful proclamation by the artists on the difference in value placed on the lives, histories and material record of female prisoners and Asylum patients compared with males. Their work was not only a response to a dearth of historical material reflecting the voices of each site’s former female occupants, but pointed to more than a century of structural causes for this absence of historical evidence: the underfunding of the women’s home, the overcrowding of the Asylum, the disposal of items which may have been of historical value later and the paintings- over, building conversions and cleanings up which have rid both sites of a possible wealth of the signs of past occupants. We can assume this material existed from the presence of graffiti, murals and muster boards still present in the male quarters of the prison.
The scant material specimens of the lives of the women inside each institution were like rare treasures to the artists. While consulting the Fremantle Prison collection, local author, and Miles Franklin winner, Josephine Wilson, noted its lonely contents: four bells, two letters, one postcard and one prisoner sketchbook2. Artefacts from the men’s division numbered in the hundreds. This scarcity of evidence is also reflected in the Asylum register in which two whole years in the life of a patient called Johanna were summed up in four words, ‘no change’. Then a year later; ‘no alteration’. Indeed, it was the very space between these objects and words which the artists approached in their work for this exhibition. They aimed not to fill the gaps with fiction or conjecture but to explore the shape of what was missing, to map out the attitudes, cultures and practices that formed the historical absences and silences that distanced them from the women they were studying.
Out of the Asylum
The shadow cast by the history of the building has been meditated on, written about and called upon for inspiration by OOTA, the Out of the Asylum writers’ group. For over two decades OOTA has met each Friday for lunch in the gardens followed by alternating prose and poetry sessions, run by tutors including Helen Hagemann and Shane McCauley. The group provides a supportive crucible for local writers, including less experienced or unpublished writers, and continues the legacy set by former literary occupants of the site: the State Literature Office, Fremantle Press (formerly Fremantle Arts Centre Press), and the art journal Fremantle Arts Centre Review.
Conclusions
The exhibitions and cultural programs mentioned above took as their foundation historical archives, architecture, artefacts and stories, then expanded upon them artistically. Each artist’s existing interests and style are brought together with contemporary social and cultural debate, not to rewrite the past, but to find new reasons to keep coming back to it, to learn from it, consider it from new perspectives, in different colours, materials and methods. These artists retold history with paint and clay, with their bodies, their voices and poetry, with wood, photographs, limestone, embroidered cloth, motion sensors and royal icing.
Apt closing words are provided by June Moorhouse, former director of Fremantle Arts Centre, taken from her lyrical memoir written for the organisation’s 40th Anniversary:
She writes:
{{quotation| Surely a little flight of fancy is acceptable on the occasion of a 40th? From a formidable past, which should never be forgotten or diminished, we now have a creative cultural powerhouse in our midst. For years people have been telling me how much they love the place and all for their own, personal reasons. It’s not so surprising that we are affected by our surroundings but this place is definitely more than the sum of its parts - the architecture, art, music, food, learning, gardens and heritage come together in a welcoming spirit that encourages each of us to lose ourselves in the moment. It has become a place that not only provides a program of activities but also, for many, meets that profound human need for a sense of place. So what a rare and precious thing we have to celebrate. 40 years of creativity, connections, ups and downs, brainwaves, fiascos, first steps... all this and more in a setting that, rather than playing on our imaginations, now calls our imaginations to play with it.3]]
Fremantle Studies Day, 2017
References
1 Lily Hibberd, 2011, Benevolent Asylum, exhibition catalogue, p 7, published by Fremantle Arts Centre, URL: https://www.lilyhibberd.com/images/1_2011/ Benevolent_Asylum/Hibberd_Benevolent_Asylum_program_2011_e.pdf
2 Josephine Wilson, 1994, Absence of Evidence, exhibition catalogue, published by Fremantle Arts Centre
3 3 June Moorhouse, 2013, Mad About You, exhibition catalogue, p 7, published by Fremantle Arts Centre, URL: fac.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Mad- About-You-Catalogue.pdf
More information
Mad About You: www.fac.org.au/whats-on/post/mad-40-yeras-fremantle-arts-centre/
Benevolent Asylum: https://www.fac.org.au/whats-on/post/lily-hibberd-benevolent- asylum/
Médée: https://www.lostandfoundopera.com/fullscreen-page/comp- jnwia45q/383ad201-5ada-4fc3-a0cb-e68c57abe2b4/3/%3Fi%3D3%26p%3Dr9ekk%26s %3Dstyle-jnwia45s
Jazmina Cininas: https://www.jazminacininas.com/
Gosia Wlodarczak: https://www.fac.org.au/whats-on/post/gosia-wlodarczak-room- without-view-extended/
Out of the Asylum: https://www.ootawriters.com