Perth Voice Interactive

THE divorce has been finalised between Fringe World Festival and their former fossil fuel funder Woodside.

It follows a years-long campaign by artists and climate activists who pressured Fringe organisers to sever the relationship.

In recent years activists have staged impromptu performances, collected petitions, held protests, and even conducted a 50-hour long reading of the entire 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (‘Protesters rock fringe’, Perth Voice, January 25, 2020). 

They accuse Woodside of using the festival to present itself as a responsible corporate citizen while pumping out greenhouse gas emissions from its LNG projects. Woodside describes LNG as a “lower-emissions alternative” to oil. The activists had their first big win in 2021 when Fringe dropped the naming rights deal with Woodside, but the company continued to sponsor the festival through Fringe organiser Artrage instead.

Greenhouse gas

This week campaigners from Fossil Free Arts announced the final ties had been cut, with the statue-felling moment marked by the removal of Woodside as a listed partner on Artrage’s website. It follows Perth Festival likewise cutting ties with its major sponsor Chevron in 2023, making 2024 the first fossil free festival season.

“When we all first sat in a room together five years ago to set this goal of kicking these huge companies out of our biggest festivals, I’m not sure how many of us thought we would actually achieve this,” campaigner Anthony Collins said in the FFA announcement. 

“It is a credit to the WA arts scene that festival season is no longer promoting the destruction being caused by the state’s two biggest polluters.”

While it’s taken a multi-year campaign to get the Perth Festival and Fringe to drop Chevron and Woodside, another major Perth arts festival has long eschewed such funding: Revelation Film Fest has had a longstanding policy against taking cash from fossil fuel companies and “others that pose a threat to the environment, social equity and respect for cultural traditions”, according to its ethical partnership policy.

by DAVID BELL