'The little punk gallery': how Canberra found its artistic heartbeat

A small derelict structure on the edge of what was then St Christopher's Catholic School grounds in Manuka, the Bitumen River Gallery had previously been a milk shed, a school shelter and a bus stop. Finally, in 1981, it became an art gallery, with the initial purpose of exhibiting works from the burgeoning Megalo Print Studio.

With no official funding, support came instead from a federal job creation initiative. An art gallery to keep the unemployed out of trouble!

Jobless Action was initially the gallery's official front, run by volunteers selling arts and crafts by unemployed people.

The do-it-yourself ethos spawned an important arts movement in Canberra - irreverent, politically charged, experimental - and quickly developed a following in the more established community. National Gallery of Australia founding director James Mollison famously referred to it as "that little punk gallery" - a moniker that stuck, sometimes for the wrong reasons.

The story of the arts collective that would eventually become Canberra Contemporary Art Space is either a quintessential Canberra story - making something lasting out of the temporary - or completely out of character for the meticulously planned capital. It all depends on how long you've lived here.

For Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak, the Bitumen River Gallery is the story that best sums up the arts in Canberra - that strange and unique tension between the ideals of the national capital and the realities of local life.

It formed a central case for the PhD she completed last year at the Australian National University's College of Arts and Social Sciences, which has now been published as a book. And it encompasses the spirit of the arts community that greeted her when she first moved here with her husband and daughter in 2000.

"During 20 years in Canberra I have experienced, and seen extended to many others, particularly warm and useful interactions within CCAS and across the broad spectrum of local arts and cultural practices," she writes in her introduction.

"In a city primarily constructed to accommodate the business of federal politics, the arts scene is, by contrast, marked by a distinct lack of political correctness. I determined to find out why this was so."

Later on, a week away from the physical book hitting the shops, we're sitting in her front garden soaking up the early spring sunshine and marvelling at the state of things. How such a vibrant and constantly morphing arts community has emerged from a city designed primarily for the grand, the national, the over-arching, the ideal.

Certainly, for her, it was a revelation from the get-go. She moved here when her husband, Jan Wawrzynczak, took on the role of general manager of the Canberra Youth Theatre. She had travelled widely and worked in the arts, but had never been to university, and it was Jan who suggested she finally give it a go, at the age of 40.

"Go full time. Get a degree. Let's be poor," he said at the time. And so she did, and she loved it, and they never felt poor.

"We were rich, so rich in love and culture and friends," she says.

Her studies eventually led her to embark on a doctorate on contemporary indigenous art.

But in 2008, Jan died tragically after a motorbike accident. She took a long period of time out.

When she made moves to return to her work, she couldn't face the subject matter.

"I could not come back with that topic because it's full of such dark and terrible stories. And at that point, I just couldn't manage any more darkness," she says.

It was, she recalls, Canberra Times art critic Sasha Grishin - then head of Art History at the ANU - who encouraged her to try a different tack, and suggested a history of Canberra Contemporary Art Space.

"I thought that was a really great idea, without realising what I was letting myself in for," she says.

"A few months into it, I realised I could not tell the story of that art space without telling the entire story of the development of arts and culture in Canberra, starting from the beginning, so essentially, starting from 1920.

"About two years in, it felt like I was in an Olympic swimming pool, filled with thousands of pieces of paper. Because it hadn't been pulled together before, it was all leads everywhere."

Grishin himself says Bitumen and CCAS are perfect examples of "a wild spirit becoming a tightly organised institutional contemporary art space".

"The history of the Canberra art scene over the past half century is characterised by its complexity and diversity, a history that has developed within a schizophrenic existence as the nation's capital and as a small but vibrant regional community," he says.

"The story remains to be told and there is some urgency to do this as the generation that played such a critical role in creating the Canberra art scene is starting to leave us. Anni has been an active participant in this art scene and her perspective should make a valuable contribution to this story."

Grishin remembers, with fondness, the "raw excitement" of the shows staged in Bitumen River - anarchic, women-friendly, constantly surprising and unexpected.

He's wistful, also, acknowledging the need for something structured and official, while mourning the loss of that hard-to-define freedom of the early 1980s in the St Christopher's car park.

"We always look at things with rose-coloured glasses in the rear-view mirror - for me it's losing the exciting edge that arts once had here."

While the 1980s is commonly remembered as a kind of golden era of the arts in Canberra, today's local sector, encompassing at least 15 "key arts organisations" including visual arts, literature, music and dance, as well as the ANU School of Art and Design, is a force to be reckoned with.

In coming weeks, the ACT Labor, Liberal and Green parties are set to announce their arts policies as the election draws close. These policies - or whichever one prevails - have a particularly weighty responsibility this time around. The current arts policy is five years old, with promises for a new one, along with a revised organisation funding strategy.

But there's no denying that the arts are not an afterthought when it comes to the social fabric of Canberra. Back in the Bitumen days, the lack of policy, rules, or even the knowledge that such a thing as a funding grant existed, meant that strange and exciting things would happen.

When Bitumen changed from a free-form space into an organised institution, becoming Canberra Contemporary Art Space in 1987 and taking its place in the national mainstream art sector, opportunities opened, while other doors - the ones leading to chaos and excitement - closed. Most of the way, anyway.

Grishin has long observed the local scene, both as a scholar and a critic, and acknowledges that something was lost once artists had to start "ticking boxes" to be given an official forum for their work.

Liberal member Vicki Dunne put it best when, at a recent forum, she spoke of the benefits of removing layers of bureaucracy, rather than enhancing them.

"I do believe that, individually, artists are entrepreneurs, and we need to help them achieve what they can on their own merits and do that in a way which is a light touch," she said.

"[T]he constant churn of grant applications is a drudge and detracts from people's artistic endeavour."

Interestingly, Grishin says that observing the ACT government handing out arts grants to see the community through COVID has brought back a sense of the old spark.

It's like an acknowledgment of the naked and desperate need to get it done, at all costs.

"Some of the projects generated by this funding will fall on stony ground, and a lot will be very important," he says.

"But the key is to keep going. It's circumstance forcing people to break out, like the Bitumen River Gallery."

In those days, Canberra had little on the arts horizon beyond the Australian War Memorial, the National Library and Arts Council shows staged at the Albert Hall. It was, he says, a long time between drinks when it came to arts you could consume and enjoy, and Bitumen was borne out of the need to create, no matter where you landed.

Wawrzynczak finishes her book with a description of the Skywhale, Patricia Piccinini's beautiful and controversial centenary artwork.

"In its colours of sky, limestone plains, treed ridges and escarpments, in its imaginative physical characteristics that combine allusions to the natural and the man-made, and in the passionate conversations that surrounded its commissioning and delivery, Skywhale's artistic complexity echoes Canberra's own," she writes.

In other words, an example of something that began as one thing, and became something else - a whale that drifts in the air, rather than the sea.

A city intended to reflect a nation, with a seam of fiercely independent creativity running through it.

"It's actually a completely unique art scene here," says Wawrzynczak.

"It's not just because we're the national capital, but a lot of it is this tension between the national capital having a job to do. And its job is to display the culture of the country to itself and to the world - this national culture mandate, if you like.

"But the fascinating thing about Canberra is the power of the local arts and culture. So it's these multiple fertile tensions between the national capital and the local, that just completely fascinate me."