Alexander Forrest Monument - corner St George's Tce and Barrack St, outside Stirling Gardens gate.  Bronze casting on plinth of concrete and carved Donybrook limestone.  Pietro Porcelli, Sculptor.  1902.

Ore Obelisque - Stirling Gardens, inside the wall by St George's Tce.  Lumps of various mineral ores connected by an upright pole. Paul Ritter, Artist.  1971.

Kangaroos - Stirling Gardens, outside the wall by St George's Tce.  Three bronze cast kangaroos with ornamental pool and fountain.  Joan Walsh-Smith and Charles Smith, Artists.  1998.
 

Perth, as a city, has not always valued its public art.  Until recent years very little of it was commissioned.  Pietro Porcelli, the Naples trained sculptor and well known Fremantle identity, eked out a precarious existence between commissions here, between Federation and the Second World War.  At one stage he even moved to Melbourne.

What little work was commissioned after the war tended to be taken away or demolished as the pace of development and re-development picked up.  Very few of Howard Taylor's site-specific works survive this off-hand treatment, a fact that we will one day regret as his contribution to world visual culture gains recognition.

Public art works seem to have greater longevity in the old Government Domain, the original city block that the Founding Fathers set aside for Government House, the Court House and so on.  At the corner of Barrack Street and St George's Terrace you can see several pieces that reflect our changing economic self-image.

The Alexander Forrest Monument was Pietro Porcelli's first major commission here, and arguably, the first significant piece of public sculpture in Western Australia.  Although he grew up in Australia, Porcelli trained for several years in Naples.  Many Italian towns at the turn of the century had prominent new statues of recent national heroes like Garibaldi.  Porcelli would have been well aware of the way that the new nation-state used monumental sculpture as a nation-building tool.

What then did this monument have to do with nation building?  Why am I describing it as an indicator of the colony's economic self-image?  The Forrest brothers were explorers, land agents and politicians.  Singly or together they led most of the then Swan River Colony's important surveying expeditions.  Many saw them as Western Australia's Elder Statesmen.  The impressive bronze of Alexander Forrest was largely an initiative of his brother John, first Premier of the new State, after Alexander's death.  (It was funded by John Forrest and a syndicate of friends.)

One of our few surviving pieces of 1970's public sculpture is Paul Ritter's Ore Obelisque an unpretentious display of mineral ores from various parts of the State, described by one visiting comedian as the 'kebab'.

The sixties' and seventies' resources boom inspired several pieces of public art in Perth.  When 1970's car number plates bore the logo 'State of Excitement', it was excitement about the promised prosperity from mining that they referred to.  The aluminium sections at the base of this sculpture were intended to act as a pie graph, showing the relative economic importance of each type of mineral.  Ritter's idea was to have the graph updated each year with new aluminium plates.

Excitement in wealth from resources gave way in the 1980's to excitement about tourism dollars, now reflected by the photogenic kangas on the pavement.

Years ago, first time visitors from 'overseas' were regularly disillusioned.  Australians rarely travelled to other countries and were therefore unable to dispel the fantastic tales of kangaroos hopping down every main street.  Now that Australia is a nation of international outlook and the rest of the world gains an increasingly accurate picture of life in Australia, our city fathers seem determined to revive the old myth.

Note that all of the 'roos are male.
 

(© Copyright of this commentary remains with the author Geoff Vivian, 1998 and may not be reproduced without his permission)