As May approaches, I have been thinking about the relationship between infrastructure and cultural policy, specifically in context of public funding for cultural infrastructure. It came up as I started planning events for International Museum Day (IMD), a celebration coordinated by the International Council of Museums on or around 18 May every year. IMD2024, we are told, is particularly committed to Goal 9 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which focuses on “Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure”.
Of course, May is also when the Australian government releases the federal budget each year. These events are unrelated. But the federal government’s commitment last year to invest in cultural infrastructure intersects with IMD2024’s interest in building “resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation”.
While I am certainly interested to see what, if any, new funding is announced in Budget 2024-2025 for the cultural sector, what I want to examine here is how language that appears in the new National Cultural Policy, in IMD2024 publicity, and in the Sustainable Development Goals has contributed to nationally changing understandings of cultural infrastructure.
I want to suggest that increased public use of the term “cultural infrastructure” allows us to identify and account for the value of culture in more expansive ways than previously possible. Rather than attaching a market-driven price tag to cultural assets, for example, thinking infrastructurally makes it possible to see what is often taken for granted as an inherent but underfunded public “good”. This shifting understanding reflects an escalation in public understandings of cultural infrastructure and the value of diverse forms of cultural systems, practices, and products.
Reviving Australia’s national cultural policy
But first, some background. On 30 January 2023, the federal government launched a new National Cultural Policy. Revive: A Place for Every Story, a Story for Every Place was Australia’s first national cultural policy since the Gillard government’s release of Creative Australia in 2013. Revive called out a decade of underspending by previous governments on the arts, culture and heritage sectors in Australia, and committed the Australian government to assessing the future funding needs of the national cultural institutions in the forthcoming 2023-24 budget.
The funding injection that accompanied Revive’s launch in January last year was followed by the announcement in April that the federal budget identified “Australia’s most cherished cultural and historical institutions” for specific support. In the end, the 2023-24 budget promised more than $535 million over four years from 2023-24 and more than $117 million per annum ongoing and indexed from 2027-28 to protect nine national collecting institutions — including the National Archives of Australia, National Film and Sound Archive, National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, National Museum of Australia, and the National Portrait Gallery of Australia. While my IMD2024 work means that my own interest lies with these institutions, Revive supported the spectrum of visual and performing arts, heritage and culture, and had at its heart the establishment of Creative Australia, which was designed to restore and modernise the Australia Council for the Arts.
Essential cultural infrastructure
The government’s budget announcements that followed the launch of Revive similarly featured the language of “strong cultural infrastructure”. Public communications flexed the term liberally to describe the physical and digital assets of Australia’s collecting institutions. Capital works (buildings), digital networks and archives (online databases), human capital (workforce), collections (of tangible and intangible heritage), and financial and cyber security instruments and systems were all included in this category.
Trove, the National Library of Australia’s online archive, was singled out for particular attention — a decision that reflected the government’s recognition of extensive public support for the physical and digital infrastructure that preserves, shares, and celebrates Australian stories. Trove provides free online public access to more than 14 billion digital items on any topic from almost 1,000 Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries, and archives.
When threatened with existential funding cuts in 2016 and crises in 2023, Trove users — researchers, individuals and communities, as well as organisations, universities and other institutions across the country — responded swiftly by creating online petitions, using #FundTrove hashtag social media campaigns, a letter writing campaign that targeted local MPs, and even the expansion by “geneabloggers” of the “Trove Tuesday” blog. Users of Trove argued that it is essential government service and often part of their daily lives.
One of the interesting things about Revive is its insistence that culture, arts, and heritage are essential — like roads and hospitals or high-quality, affordable social services — rather than “nice-to-have” optional extras that may improve life but are not fundamental to social and economic wellbeing. It employs an expanded view of infrastructure that reflects a shift away from understanding culture as something that is “consumed” by audiences or researchers, for example, or “held” in a building (or the building itself, if it is iconic).
This shift challenges the accuracy of narrower mechanistic definitions of infrastructure as referring to a platform, scaffolding, tool, or other background support or transmission system such as a railway network that enables the transport of goods, services, and people.
Making cultural infrastructure visible
In shaking apart traditional definitions of infrastructure, the language of Revive connected with recent policy-relevant and critical research work. Academics have been exploring this concept for at least two decades, but it only entered the public lexicon when it became a matter of significant public engagement during 2019 and 2020.
Throughout COVID-19 lockdowns, people became aware of what was once hidden or ignored, taken for granted, and mundane. Suddenly they talked about daily journaling as essential for improving wellbeing. They “saw” the people who delivered essential services — like food or postal deliveries — perhaps for the first time. Public campaigns were established to thank frontline workers by name. People in isolation stood on balconies at the same time each day for community sing-alongs.
During this period, public health services and notifications became a focal part of our everyday life and a cause for social interactions. We tuned in to daily reporting of COVID-19 case numbers on the television and became involved in online debates about bureaucratic procedures for isolation of individuals and communities. We stood in lines for hours to be tested and vaccinated. Individuals used public health information and announcements as a source of connection with others, debating when and why regulations had changed, for example. Communities were created. The political implications and social opportunities of infrastructure rapidly became a charged topic of everyday conversation.
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COVID-19 generated public support for cultural infrastructure largely by making it visible. Popular creative practices like resident-curated window exhibitions or daily journals encouraged recognition that cultural infrastructure is more than national galleries, libraries, museums, archives and that it should be funded because it affects society at large — even people who do not visit cultural institutions, research family histories, or attend writers’ festivals. It led to the development of a growing body of evidence that has subsequently shown the benefit that activating spaces, services, and structures – the stuff of social and cultural infrastructure – can have on social services and cohesive communities.
This work has influenced policymaking, including Revive, which presented the cultural sector as a critical element of recovery from the pandemic. Similarly, the federal government’s launch of Revive called it a “comprehensive roadmap” for arts and culture that would “contribute to all parts of Australian life, to social unity and wellbeing, to our national economy and identity, and to whole-of-government outcomes”.
Without the transformations in public interest in infrastructure that occurred throughout the COVID-19 pandemic it is unlikely Revive could have leaned so heavily into the idea of “social infrastructure” — which recognises as “infrastructure” the services and networks as well as the everyday spaces in which diverse, multicultural populations exercise their own creative practices and create common cultural identities. Indeed, Revive refers to this change in direction as a “new trajectory” for cultural policy and the cultural sector in this country.
This approach, and the contextual public knowledge it builds on, allowed Revive to acknowledge that culture is produced both with and within formally constituted assets — including the nine collecting institutions it names — as well as in the spaces in between these places and collections.
Platforms for cultural exchange and mutual understanding
It is tempting to interpret the language used in Revive as a cynical political response to the likely impossibility that the federal government will ever adequately fund national collecting institutions.
Rhetoric around the 2023-24 budget similarly celebrated perceived changes in Australian political preferences toward more human-centred value systems after a decade of leadership by the Liberal-National coalition government. However, allocations from Budget 2023-2024 were modest. The funding was certainly welcomed by cultural institutions that had for years suffered deteriorating buildings and increasingly at-risk collections. But nine institutions (seven based in Canberra) were tasked with representing the population of 26,821,557 Australians — meaning that each one effectively became responsible for three million discrete Australians alive today. This is obviously a false economy, not least because a person’s stories might be told in different ways by different institutions and there are more institutions than these nine. But the magnitude of the task remains. It can be put into perspective by noting that across 2022-2023, the National Portrait Gallery employed just 47 staff members.
These points are important because, despite its ubiquity, increasing public support, and the potential for social value, infrastructure is not a neutral platform on which action takes place. It is part of the balance of action, tools, contexts, and actors that simultaneously records and enacts power and authority — and which can, therefore, reproduce systemic inequalities.
A more generous reading can also be made. This one recognises that expanded understandings about infrastructure play an important role in fostering processes such as truth-telling for First Nations people as well as international cultural diplomacy opportunities, both of which are fundamentally based in human-to-human exchange. This approach is shared by IMD2024, which positions museums as “platforms” for “cultural exchange, enrichment of cultures and development of mutual understanding, cooperation and peace among peoples”.
Although cultural policy, infrastructure, and federal budgets may not seem the most exciting topics to think about as the weather turns chilly, they are critical to keep front of mind if the federal government is to deliver on Revive’s objective to provide “a place for every story”. After all, the government’s recognition of the value of cultural infrastructure has emerged in significant part from public actions and beliefs, and must be adequately and sustainably funded as a continuing long-term investment.
Kylie Message is Professor of Public Humanities and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. She is the author of books including Museums and Social Activism: Engaged Protest, Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street, and Museums and Racism.