Last year, I wrote a series of blog posts about the ABS report: Arts and Culture in Australia – a statistical overview. This report did have museum attendance figures, but focused primarily on the funding mix of museums and other cultural venues.
A recent article on the Perth Now website, lamenting the relatively low levels of cultural participation and funding in Western Australia, alerted me to the release of a more recent report, which looks at museum attendance in more detail and gives a state-by-state breakdown.
The full report is available on the ABS website as always, but I thought I’d again take a look at the numbers and give my thoughts on what they might mean (and, as always, I appreciate your comments and additional perspectives!).
First, the headline figures – attendance numbers at cultural venues state-by-state:
Overall, over 85% of people aged over 15 in Australia attended at least one cultural venue or event for the year 2009-10. For people aged 15-17, participation rates were the highest at 97%. Participation decreased with age, and the lowest participation rate (64%) was that of the over 75s.
Participation rates are also broken down by state and territory:
Based on these figures, ACT residents are among the most active participants in culture, being the most likely to have visited an Art Gallery, Museum, Archive, Library, Performing Arts event or Cinema in the past year. With the high density of National Museums and Galleries in the Capital, the high attendance at these venues is not all that surprising – it’s a matter of availability. However cinemas, hardly unique to Canberra, are well attended as well. (Note that the data records people’s place of residence, not the venue they attended. So these numbers just ACT residents, not people from other states visiting Museums in the Capital. The report gives a breakdown of where people attended venues in relation to where they live on pp 19-20).
As the Perth Now article said, WA residents are the least likely in the country to attend an Art Gallery; Museum attendance is also below average in that state. Having said that, WA is not alone: participation rates are below average in NSW (albeit slightly) across the board.
NT residents were the most likely to attend zoological parks and aquaria, by a significant margin. SA is above the national average for this year too and I wonder if this is a consistent figure or indicative of the ‘Panda effect’ (the Adelaide Zoo’s Panda Enclosure opened in late 2009 and there has reportedly been a jump in visitor numbers since then.)
Overall what these differences between states mean, it’s hard to tell: it’s possible that they are simply due other geographic and demographic differences between states. However, as the Perth Now article suggests, there could be genuine differences between states and their attitudes to culture. I’d be interested in hearing what you think.
One pointer towards a geographic explanation (at least in part) is the difference in participation rates between capital cities and elsewhere. This is possibly skewing the figures for those states which have a higher proportion of their population residing outside the capital:
The report also gives breakdowns of visitation by age and sex, household composition, country of origin, labour force status, educational attainment and household income, but I won’t delve into those here – if you’re interested in these figures, go to the original report (see link to ABS website above).
Later in the report, they have some figures showing attendance trends over the past 10 years, which I’ll look into for a future post.
When attendance figures from different venues are compared, it is important to divide these into paid entry fee and free entry categories. Experience in NSW has shown that when the Australian Museum and the Powerhouse Museum moved into a paid entry fee mode some 20 years ago, published attendance figures halved; there were two main reasons attributed to this massive decline, firstly resistance from the public to paying fees and more importantly, the circumstance that visitations from free entry are invariably highly inflated as a result of inaccurate estimate techniques. Paid entry provides really the only auditable and reliable measure of visitation rates.
As an added insight, during the early 1990s the then Greater Attractions of Sydney grouping of major cultural attractions shared visitation figures and established that overall visitor numbers were declining overall during those recession years, with a large increase in visitor numbers to the growing number of large suburban shopping centres. In other words, at that point of time, particularlyy at weekends, retail shopping was emerging as a significant competitor to other forms of ‘day out’ entertainment.
We also started to realise that time-defined visitations to museums and the galleries (which charged entry fees) were compared by visitors on a ‘value for money’ basis to going to a movie (also time-defined). However, venues like Zoos, which involved a ‘day out’ experience was often compared by visitors to other ‘day out’ attractions eg a major cricket event where a more comprehensive set of compareative criteria seemed to come into play!
Angus M Robinson, Director, Commercial Services, Taronga Zoo (1990 to 1994)
Hi Angus,
Thanks for drawing attention to some things I hadn’t really thought of, and that the ABS statistics do not seem to take into account.
Firstly, about the difference between paid and free entry for museums: you are definitely right. I was living in the UK when the National museums went back to free entry – as expected, visitor numbers shot up. Although, when you took a closer look at the visitor demographics it appeared it was the same kinds of people visiting more frequently, rather than the free museums attracting a broader visitor base. However, that was a few years ago now and it’s possible that things like that change over time. For instance, we cannot assume the message that “National museums are now free” permeates at a uniform rate through the community. I would contend that those who are already in the habit of visiting museums are likely to become aware of policy changes earlier.
I’m not sure if the paid vs. free difference would explain the within-category differences between states though? For instance, does NSW have a proportionally higher number of paid attractions compared to free to explain the lower attendance figures? And this would not explain differences in cinema attendance around the country, which I imagine has a uniform price tag nationwide.
Moreover, free entry museums pose a bit of a conundrum when it comes to estimating visitation anyway – they don’t have an unambiguous measure like ticket sales to calculate visitors, so tend to apply various rules of thumb which, I think it’s fair to say, more often err on on the side of ‘generous’.
You make an interesting comparison between ‘cultural’ attractions and other leisure activities. I’d heard about museums locating themselves in the same marketplace as a trip to Ikea for instance, but I wasn’t aware of zoos being in a whole different ‘day out’ category compared to museums, the movies and so on.
There are surely ABS statistics on general leisure activities as well, but I’m not sure if looking at those compared to the cultural stats would be a case of apples vs oranges (with respect to the way the data were collected, etc). But if I come across any, I’ll have a look and see if I can draw any meaningful comparisons.