Public art is a good idea, but the proposed new SAM is a bad idea

W

hen is a good thing a bad idea?

The idea of building a new art museum in Shepparton ticks all bar one of the boxes and interestingly that last box is the biggest of all and the one that really matters.



An artist's impression of what is proposed for 
Shepparton - a new SAM at Victoria Park Lake.

Yes, a new art museum for the city is a wonderful idea for art is at the heart of everything we do and so to celebrate and recognise its importance through the creation of the beautiful lake-side proposed complex suggests a coming of age for the city.

Everything about the idea appears to be as it should, except for its timing.

A collision of world events suggest the city’s interest and emphasis should be about building resilience, entrenching what exists and underscoring the strengths of our culture to ensure we can arrive as unscathed as possible through the unfolding challenges.

Like many others, I endorse the importance of emphasizing art, but rather than committing our resources to create something new, we should be exploring every avenue to use what exists, even if that demands some changes to our behaviour.

Much of what presently happens at the city’s offices in Welsford St could be, thanks to modern technology, undertaken and completed almost anywhere in the city. It is not essential to have all administrative staff at Eastbank.

Yes, keep the customer/ratepayer contact people, the Mayor’s office, the council chambers, and any other pieces of the operation vital to the daily public operation of the city.

The Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) already has space in the building and so the area cleared of relocated administrative staff could easily be incorporated into a restructured art museum.

With costs far below that of what is proposed near Victoria Park Lake, SAM and the existing library building could connected to create a beautiful centre of the city-community facility that would answer our civic needs.

Yes, the new SAM is a good idea, but its timing is bad for rather than such wonderful physical city enhancements, the city should be acknowledging the changes that are settling upon because of global warming and along with that playing its part in cutting the world’s carbon dioxide emissions by at least 80 per cent with a decade or two.

Building a new, stand-alone art museum that oozes embedded energy is contrary to an efficient and sustainable city future.

Yes, let us use what we have, modifying what exists, provide the services we want and need and yet do it thoughtfully in terms of our carbon dioxide emissions.

Yes, despite the opinions of the doubters, skeptics and others, we have changed our climate system, subsequently the benign weather that once was is gone and we are quickly moving into an era in which we will need every resource we can gather.

Emulating the complexity of nature

“What we failed to appreciate is how quickly the ‘scaffolding’ of civilisation became so elaborate and so energy intensive and so unknowable”.

So said Wes Jackson in his 2011 book “Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture”.

Jackson, a Kansas-born biologist who founded "The Land Institute" where he has attempted to emulate nature on a farm, studying environmental ethics, exploring appropriate technology and educating others, is alarmed at the amount of fossil fuel energy consumed in getting food from the paddock to the plate.

He says the fossil fuel epoch is ending, the world’s arable soils have been irreparably degraded or lost, and hovering above that fragile superstructure is the unfolding dilemma of a damaged climate.

Those thoughts or similar concerns will be on the minds of those Goulburn Valley people who gather on Sunday at Shepparton’s Victoria Park Lake to illustrate their concern about society’s disregard for matters discussed by Jackson, particularly climate change.

Sunday’s gathering at the lake is a part of the Australia-wide Get-Up National Day of Climate Action in which people from cities, towns and villages throughout the country will illustrate their concern for climate change.

The Tony Abbott-led Coalition has dismembered government bodies and through that has effectively ended any possibility of Australia, or Australians, helping the world ease what is becoming, or is, a catastrophic reality.

Where we are at, and how and why we arrived, is something easily understood.

Our predecessors saw their first sunrise about 200 000 years ago and we muddled along keeping everything pretty much in balance until the agricultural revolution about 10 000 years ago and with food being reliable and more widely available, our numbers grew exponentially.

Some 200 years ago came the industrial revolution and that coupled with our natural inquisitiveness, innovation, experimentation and application saw us access the billions of years of energy locked in fossil fuels, described by some as “ancient sunlight”.

All that was fine until it became apparent we had broken the pact with nature that assured balance and the earth’s biosphere was in desperate trouble as we considered nature’s sinks, the atmosphere and oceans, as bottomless pits for our refuse.

Humans have many laudable qualities, but an equal number of less than honourable traits, among them, recklessness and even though it is obvious we depend entirely upon finite and depleting fossil fuels that have given us exponential growth in every sense and with that a desperately damaged climate, we still allow ourselves to be governed by climate change skeptics who idolize growth.

Sunday’s National Day of Climate Action is about solidarity of thought and illustration to government that the people are restless about their apparent disinterest in climate change.