Yesterday evening, I was graced to listen to a talk by former Western Australian premier, Colin Barnett AC, moderated by Australian business leader, Mark Barnaba. It was a little surreal to be back in my old MBA lecture hall at the UWA Business School, even only three years since graduating. But it was that air of intellectual curiosity that made it feel so heartwarming. I remember so fondly being around entire halls of people who, like me, have an intense love of learning.
It was from that spirit that everyone listened to Mr Barnett speak. And, interestingly for me as a person who grew up in Perth, it raised an interesting curiosity that I don’t often have: listening to someone describe how Perth’s identity has been shaped over time. It’s an unusual thing to admit, but even Perthians don’t typically know how to describe Perth’s personality, let alone much about how Perth’s culture developed. I’d always attributed that gap to the city’s youth (it will be aged 200 in 2029), but that still doesn’t explain how an entire population absorbs its cultural meaning from elsewhere by default, simply because that’s what’s available and ambient.
Borrowed, not absent
Australians at large tend to source cultural value from outside themselves, and this is especially true in Western Australia. Our films are usually American. Our parks and street names are typically borrowed from the UK (both Perth and Sydney have a Hyde Park, for example). Asian food dominates our takeaway culture, and most millennials and Gen Zs were raised watching Japanese cartoons (Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z, Yu-Gi-Oh!). Yes, a lot of it is globalism doing what globalism does. But what remains is a city that consumes meaning — imported narratives of what ‘cool’ or ‘significant’ looks like — faster than it generates its own.
Ask a Perthian what makes Perth distinct, and you might hear about our white sandy beaches, the Mediterranean-style climate, its nature and nearby wineries. There will be a nod to its run as a Australia’s mining, oil and gas powerhouse. All true. But what feels sticky, listening back on it, is this: Perth’s problem has sort of just borrowed its core meaning-making cultural artefacts. Its identity is almost a borrowed one.
Listening to Mr Barnett, though, I felt a different angle emerging.
The Barnett government delivered three of Perth’s most recognisable pieces of infrastructure: Elizabeth Quay, Optus Stadium, and the Perth Children’s Hospital. Three cultural landmarks in their own right, which is an impressive footprint for one premier to have shaped.
Infrastructure is not identity
Infrastructure and cultural identity are not the same asset, even when built from the same materials. Optus Stadium holds up to 70,000 people. Perth Children’s Hospital treats tens of thousands of young patients a year. That value is immediate, countable, and begins depreciating the moment the doors open.
A landmark is different. Not in how it’s built but in what it’s designed to do. It’s value isn’t fixed upon completion. Rather, it grows the more people layer their own stories onto it — much like a good song or piece of art. Elizabeth Quay increasingly gets photographed as part of Perth’s picturesque skyline. Optus Stadium is the most dominant personality when you visit East Perth. The structures stay fixed. What compounds is everything people bring to them afterwards, almost entirely beyond the architect’s or the government’s control.
Mr Barnett didn’t really allude to this explicitly, but this is what I was prompted to think of. That is, the quieter skill behind what he was storytelling around: not just building things but designing vessels that shape how we live, interact with, and make meaning from the world. Elizabeth Quay, for example, has quickly become a major central hub and features in most skyline photography of the city.
Listening to his intentional, home-grown process, in the same hall where I later studied the formal architecture of value and strategy, felt full-circle for me. At the time of commencing my MBA, I had recently left a creative, design-led career to go and formally study how value gets built. And there I was, in a room, listening to one influential person detail the origins of some of the few landmarks Perth has sourced its own cultural meaning from.
Not youth, habit
Perth is a young city, yes, but I suspect its cultural thinness isn’t totally due to its tender 200-year age. Rather, a dependency on sourcing cultural value from elsewhere. The reason I say it is that, until I see a Perthian speak with confidence about what they believe to be Perth’s personality (beyond beaches and the mining sector), I’ll remain convinced that this is a population still finding who they are amidst the global landscape. It’s currently still running on an outgrown identity of sleepy-mining town. (Ironically, Mr Barnett’s new book is called “Out West: Big State, Small Town”. Small town? I’d challenge that. And, at the same time, we see the GaWC calls Perth a major Beta-level global hub.) It’s tempting to explain away the thin cultural self-image as simply a function of a fast-growing, young city. But I don’t think that’s quite right. Shanghai talked me out of that explanation.
