The Perth Festival and Fringe World Festival (said to be the third largest fringe festival globally) will commence their 2024 seasons with a major difference: they have both divested themselves of funding from the fossil fuel corporations Woodside and Chevron.

It is a victory of people’s power organised by a combative group of Perth artists not just against obnoxious branding of arts events but against the whole apparatus of deep penetration of WA political and social life by Woodside and Chevron.

As Perth artist and environmental activist, Anthony Collins explained to the Community Radio Network current affairs program, The Wire the success over the funding issue came after five years of pressure from artists and creatives. As Collins has separately demonstrated, Chevron and woodside are guilty of worse than ‘arts-washing’ their public image, they have extended their tentacles as far up WA’s power structure as they can.

Collins told The Wire that the original group of “ragtag artists” met and took action because they were “sick of seeing Woodside plastered over everything in Perth.” The activist alliance was a loose coalition of 350.org led by Collins, Fossil Free Arts led by Viv Glance, Fringe World performer-activists led by Noemie Huttner-Koros, Extinction Rebellion WA and independent performing artist Adam Bennett.

The artists first targeted Fringe World organising group, ARTRAGE, with protest actions, petitions and interventions at its annual general meeting. In September 2023 Fringe World cut free of fossil fuel funding.

Adam Bennett has produced a chronology of the creative brand jamming at the Counteract site.

The artists did everything from gate-crashing into the private Fringe World Festival launch event to organising a ten-hour long public recital of the IPCC report outside the Woodside building in Perth’s CBD.

Fringe World responded by slapping a gag order on artists preventing them from saying anything critical of Festival sponsors. Bennett and two other performers “entertained and accosted revellers queuing for the [Woodside Pleasure Garden Festival venue] entrance posing as ‘Woodside Enforcers’ ensuring that all knew about the gag clause.”

The artists went on to organise their own ‘ethically alternative’ festive, called BRINK.

The protest group used the momentum of the Fringe World campaign to similarly target the Perth Festival. Collins related to The Wire that a Perth Festival board member told him that they chose to divest after seeing the pressure that Fringe World had come under.

The artists’ campaign is particularly significant in Western Australia because of the state control by the fossil fuel corporations. Collins was the author of the 2020 350.org Captured State report,which shone a light on the murky relationship between the WA Government and fossil fuel lobbyists.

The report stated that “oil and gas corporations have continued to increase production in WA, at great cost to both Aboriginal heritage and the habitability of the planet for future generations” by “interweaving the mindset of fossil gas production at all costs into political parties and government agencies.”

That “interweaving” was demonstrated by the close coincidence between ministerial meetings with fossil fuel corporate representatives and political donations. The report tracked the correlation between such discussions and money flowing within days into the party coffers.

Those donations by Woodside and Chevron corresponded with key political moments leading to WA’s LNG carbon project emissions and carbon offset conditions being weak and often simply not being met.

The report also has a revealing map of the “revolving door” linking WA’s fossil fuel industry, political offices, lobby groups and the state bureaucracy. Western Australia is a “quarry state” in which government ministers happily retire one day and become corporate advisors the next.

The rebel artists who have confronted Woodside and Chevron’s social licence have opened a significant democratic breach.