Culture is Infrastructure Too

When people talk about infrastructure, they mean roads, hospitals, schools. The stuff you can point at. But there’s another kind of infrastructure that holds communities together, especially when times are tough, and it doesn’t get nearly enough credit. I’m talking about arts and culture. Libraries. Galleries. Festivals. The things that give people somewhere to go, something to connect over, and a bit of breathing room from the grind.

Moore has a lot to be proud of on this front — and I reckon a lot of residents don’t fully know what’s available to them.

Take our local libraries. We’ve got four of them — Duncraig, Joondalup, Whitford and Woodvale — and they’re doing a lot more than lending books. I signed up for the City of Joondalup’s library membership online this week just to see how easy it was.

Three minutes. Done.

And what you get access to is pretty remarkable:

∙ Libby — ebooks and audiobooks you can borrow from your couch

∙ Kanopy — thousands of films and documentaries, completely free

∙ Hoopla — music, comics, TV shows and movies

∙ Ancestry.com — dig into your family history

All of it free.

At a time when it feels like every service in the world wants a monthly subscription, that’s worth shouting about. And if any of this sounds a bit overwhelming technically, the library teams across Moore will sit down with you and show you how it works — no judgment, no fuss. That’s the kind of service we should be talking about more.

Check out everything that’s available through the library’s online resources page

While I was in Canberra this week I also stopped into the National Library of Australia, which is just around the corner from Parliament House. It’s easy to walk past it and not think much of it, but spend an hour in there and you’re reminded of just how extraordinary it is — millions of items, vast digital archives, oral histories, photographs. A living record of who we are as a country. As a member of the Joint Standing Committee on the Parliamentary Library, it’s something I’m genuinely passionate about.

Closer to home, the cultural scene in Moore has had a big few weeks.

The Joondalup Festival kicked off with an opening exhibition at the Joondalup Contemporary Art Gallery — rare photographs of David Bowie by Christine de Grancy. It was a great night. The kind of exhibition that reminds you art isn’t just decoration; it’s a record of moments that would otherwise be lost. The Festival is shaping up as one of the best things on Perth’s cultural calendar, and a big part of what makes it special is that so much of it is free and open to everyone.

I also had the chance recently to sit down with Susan Templeman, the Special Envoy for the Arts, alongside a cross-section of our local arts community. It was a good conversation — honest about the challenges, but full of the kind of passion and talent that makes you realise how much is happening in this part of the world. One thing came through loud and clear: as Joondalup continues to grow into WA’s second CBD, the cultural infrastructure needs to keep pace. A city isn’t just its commercial centre. It’s its galleries, its festivals, its libraries, its creative community.

That’s the case I’ll keep making — culture is infrastructure too.

If you’re not already a library member, fix that today

— it’s free, it takes three minutes, and you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​