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From the
Empty Show Website:

“The Empty Show was a swag of Melbourne
stencillers, graffitists and poster artists bombing the Australian Department of
Defence’s only pub. Unused and boarded-up, Williamstown’s Brittania Hotel would
have made for excellent living. The upstairs bedrooms feature sea views and
rustic wallpaper charm. And downstairs offers cosy lounge rooms, a feature front
bar and a huge band room. Considering it was a decade since the hotel’s doors
shut, the building still stands in fine condition. But curse it. The Brittania
sits tucked into the corner of a block occupied by a Department of Defence
logistics office and facility: complete with barbed-wire perimeter walls, large
satellite dishes and hazardous warnings of high radiation levels. A Land Title
search finds the Brittania’s owners to be Tenix Defence Ltd, the largest private
contractors to the Australian military. This considered, Williamstown’s finest
pub is held tight and no longer serving beers for some quite obvious security
reasons.

Discovering Tenix’s work made it even harder to walk away
from the Brittania.

The main business of its Williamstown
shipbuilding yards is the ANZAC Ship Project, the construction of eight guided
missile frigates for the Royal Australian Navy. The company is set to begin
building more border patrol vessels as part of Howard’s Fortress Australia
policy. Tenix is also responsible for the ongoing design, manufacture and
maintenance of all Australian Defence Force military vehicles. And Tenix made
headlines when it signed on the former Minister of Defence, Peter Reith, for a
‘consultancy’ term on his very first day out of Office. A blatant act of
corruption, his consultancy would draw directly on his experience in drafting
the contracts Tenix sought to apply for!

Thus, The Empty Show came
about. Fourteen stencillers, steel-painters, posterers and muralists pulled
together to make a stealthy effort of painting the Brittania’s inside anew. All
those involved shared a history of engaging their work with spaces beyond
galleries, design magazines and legal walls. The politics of squatting unused
spaces to create fresh residential and social environs also inspired. But not to
forget, although such intervention is essentially political (particularly when
considering Tenix!), it’s also about having a muck-about play and a helluva lot
of fun. The first weekend of February was a hushed and frantic affair of
collaborative interior decorating. At 6pm that Sunday arvo, a crowd of almost
150 people had arrived at Williamstown station. With a sense of ‘wha? we got
away with this!’, the doors to the Brittania and its fumes were opened. Being
unable to disguise the crowd’s access to the building - and by now, generally
unconcerned to do so - Tenix’s security were at the doors by 6:30. The guard’s
bewilderment at the action of his Sunday evening shift was pleasing. The arrival
of cops at 7:00 to shut the show down was not.

In this way, The Empty
Show was somewhat temporary. In other ways, it will long persist. Imagining the
Tenix executives’ facial expressions during their Monday morning inspection of
the weekend’s ‘property breach’ proves timeless. The ideas that guided the show
have inspired many projects before and will inspire many in the future: there
will be more Empty Shows.”

Via email from Jean Poole: “i went along
to the show, didnt have any work in it… arrived late and the police had shut
it down… but we jsut climbed in a back window to wander and take some pix…
check it out… my favourite bit was the red clouds coming out of the sink and
over the wall… find it in the gorgeous flash site they made of it if u can…
ciaoski~! ”... Jean Poole
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