Western Australia

Geraldton

With a diverse and stable economy centred on its working port, mining services, agriculture and rock-lobster fishing, Geraldton is also home to a notable arts and culture ecosystem. There is a depth of community engagement, particularly around locally organised festivals, local theatre groups, youth arts opportunities, and two small but impressively run Aboriginal arts enterprises. Redevelopment of heritage buildings is being led by local start-up business, growing community connections across arts and culture and building new opportunities for arts entrepreneurship.

Geraldton Report

Fremantle & East Fremantle

A port city adjacent to WA’s capital city, Fremantle has a strong creative DNA, with its affordability and lifestyle attracting the migrants and artists that established it as a cultural hotspot. Home to high numbers of visual and performing artists, internationally successful musicians and film production companies, it has also attracted significant clusters of architects, designers, creative digital workers and advertising and marketing specialists. Fremantle’s heritage buildings serve as vital creative infrastructure, providing exhibition and studio spaces, venues for live performance and valuable low-cost spaces for creative start-up companies and community-based arts practices, with experimentation encouraged and supported by the City of Fremantle.

Fremantle Report

Busselton

Located a two-and-a-half hour drive south of Perth, Busselton is one of the largest and fastest growing regional centres in WA, a lifestyle services hub and the gateway to the internationally renowned wine region and popular tourist destination of Margaret River. Promoted by the City of Busselton council as the ‘Events Capital of WA’, Busselton has a strong festival and events economy that fuels local creative and arts production, supported by demographic shifts have had led to more creatives living and working in the city.

Busselton Report

Albany & Denmark

Located a 45-minute drive apart from each other in WA’s Great Southern Region, Albany and Denmark attract creative practitioners who are drawn to the region’s natural beauty and country lifestyle. A regional services hub, Albany has a robust creative services presence with a legacy media sector that functions as a hub for public and commercial media organisations servicing Great Southern and the Wheatbelt. Denmark, while a much smaller town, is renowned nationally as an enclave for locally, nationally, and internationally acclaimed artists and creatives.

Albany – Denmark Report