Perspex and profanity: Inside a media storm
Joana Partyka on the WA Museum’s acquisition of her anti-gas protest art.
If you’ve never found yourself at the centre of a national media storm, let me assure you: the experience is much stranger than you might think.
It kicked off again last week when I visited the Western Australian Museum to view its recent acquisition: a piece of perspex I’d spray-painted with the Woodside Energy logo as part of a Disrupt Burrup Hub protest back in 2023.
This experience alone – of visiting a public institution to view an acquisition of my own creation – had been a deeply strange one. Even stranger, I’d created the piece while committing a high-profile crime in and of itself a deeply strange experience.
I’d known the wheels of acquisition had been in motion for some time, and in February the museum contacted me to confirm the deed was done. WA Museum CEO Alec Coles has since detailed the highly sophisticated operation: someone walked the perspex the 30-odd metres over from the Art Gallery of WA where the protest action happened. For a full eight months, the perspex has officially been part of the state museum collection, a quiet interstice between its frenzied genesis next door and what would become a similarly theatrical return to the public eye.
News of the acquisition breaks on Thursday, bang in the middle of the front page of The Australian. Accompanying it are two photographs of me and the perspex at different points in time, the larger image taken just a couple of days earlier during my visit to the museum. If you look closely enough – which you can probably assume at least one sub-editor at the Australian did not – you can see the words ‘Fuck Woodside’ printed on the t-shirt I’m wearing.
While The Guardian is perhaps flippant in its assessment the following day that Disrupt Burrup Hub’s “wildest dreams came true”, the campaign indeed delights in this overlooked detail. In just two words, our undiluted anti-gas message is broadcast to the nation – through an entity doing everything in its power to protect fossil capital, no less. It’s a beautiful symbolism, a small victory and, I would posit, likely the first time ‘fuck’ has appeared uncensored on the front page of the national broadsheet.
The article – like others that follow across various outlets – proceeds to catalogue the predictable pearl-clutching we come to expect from a political class hijacked by the resources industry, alongside the bare-faced politicking that heralds a looming election. This rewards criminals! We must review the museum’s procurement processes! This could only happen on Roger Cook’s watch! Scurvy!
For his part, Cook cosplays a man of sound judgement when he later says he will not act as a “censor in chief” nor “condone or condemn the actions of the museum” on the government’s behalf. The WA Museum aside, it’s one of the few responses I’ve seen that contains any modicum of reason. That it mirrors Woodside’s own measured position of support is not lost on me.
Well before I deployed the trigger on that can of yellow spray-paint in January last year, I knew doing so would simultaneously trigger a media storm. It wasn’t just a gut feeling based on the likely visibility of the crime I was about to carry out, but because visibility is built into the campaign’s strategy. I thus expected a cloud or two might gather once news of the museum’s acquisition broke.
Knowing a storm is on its way is one thing. Being prepared for what might rain down on you when it arrives is something else altogether.
Since Disrupt Burrup Hub began, across hit pieces and op-eds, I’ve been referred to personally as despicable, a thug, a spoiled brat, an idiot. More than anything, I find such characterisations oddly buoying. Smug attempts at pwning me are often a satisfying study in logical fallacies: won’t the acquisition of the perspex embolden others to commit more crimes? Isn’t it hypocritical that you decry mining while participating in a society that relies on it to function?
And I catch myself thinking I might have finally acclimated to it all.
A couple of days after news of the perspex acquisition breaks, I happen upon a Sky News clip openly mocking me. Watching journalist professional pest Joe Hildebrand giggle as he impersonates my speaking manner – a foray into ableism that’s far from his first – is among the stranger experiences of this warped matryoshka of a week. For a moment I feel as small as the centremost doll – fitting, given Hildebrand’s hilarious characterisation of me as wooden.
Thursday’s West Australian coverage of the acquisition, meanwhile, includes an unrelated photo of me looking confused and dishevelled last year after I was thrown out of Perth Magistrates Court following a night in police custody. It’s an editorial decision I have no doubt is entirely intentional, just like the one to place the article directly below a grovelling love letter to Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill and other ‘inspirational leaders’.
The West Australian in particular has faithfully ground its axe against Disrupt Burrup Hub at seemingly every opportunity. Not satisfied with publishing unflattering photos and vicious diatribes – one 2023 opinion piece refers to us as “dills”, “moronic”, “absolute morons”, “idiot protestors” and “dullards” before the 100-word mark – The West repeatedly pushes the boundaries of journalism to hint at mistruths designed to smear the campaign.
Compare this to the experience of former premier Mark McGowan who, on the same day news of the perspex acquisition breaks, is quoted extolling the “kinder, sweeter and gentler” media landscape of WA. “We’re less ugly than the eastern states,” he gushes to a business audience in Perth.
What McGowan in fact reveals here is just how powerful an apparatus of state capture the media is in Western Australia, where its ownership is so grossly concentrated and the news agenda so centralised that the government must simply fall into line. Of course, the paper is sweet and lovely and kind when you’re obedient. Punishment is swift and uncompromising for those like me who dissent.
In an interview, a journalist asks me if I have any regrets. Knowing what I know now, would I do anything differently?
It’s a question I’ve been asked many times, and my answer is fundamentally the same: this is what it takes to dismantle the social licence of a company that trades in the destruction of our planet and the desecration of sacred culture. This is the cost of a crystal clear conviction that I’m on the right side of history.
Fuck Woodside. Oh, and fuck Joe Hildebrand.
Joana Partyka (she/her) is an artist, writer and activist based in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia. She has exhibited her work around Australia, including at the Perth Institute of Contemporary of Arts (PICA), Flinders Lane Gallery, Modern Times and Kolbusz Space, where in 2021 her first-ever solo exhibition sold out before it opened.
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