Source: Powerhouse Museum.
Joanna Mendelssohn, Associate Professor, Art & Design: UNSW Australia. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online at UNSW Australia, The Powerhouse is going west – and arts funding should follow it, The Conversation 2 March 2015
Those angry letter-writers complaining about New South Wales Premier Mike Baird taking the Powerhouse Museum “out west” to Parramatta are in urgent need of a history lesson – but first, geography.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Sydney’s poor lived close to the city, in the world described so well by the novelist Ruth Park. A
In recent years the inner-city has been claimed by the kind of people who used to call the north shore and eastern suburbs home. Terraces are now millionaire’s rows, warehouses and factories are gutted to become “loft” apartments, or ripped down for harbour-view high-rise. Pyrmont-Ultimo, once regarded as the least desirable part of Sydney’s slums, is now a prestige address.
Meanwhile, the descendants of those who once lived cheek-by-jowl in the city have joined the glorious rich mix of immigrants from other countries, descendants of early settlers and surviving Aboriginal people in the geographic section of Sydney known as “the western suburbs”.
See also Michaela Boland, Leo Schofield slams Powerhouse move to Parramatta, The Australian, 3 March 2015
