POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

'Clean up Australia' and 'Clean up the World' promotional material

Object No. 2008/137/1

This promotional material is significant in the history of the Australian environment movement and community activism. 'Clean Up the Harbour Day' was an Australian innovation started in Sydney in 1989. It was so successful that it was followed by a nation-wide event in 1990. That first 'Clean Up Australia' day involved over 300,000 Australians. These events were the idea of Ian Kiernan, a yachtsman and property developer, and have become a highly successful model of community activism. From 1990 to 2006, Australians devoted more than eight million hours of their time towards caring for their local environment through 'Clean Up Australia Day' and collected over 200,000 tonnes of rubbish. This movement became a global phenomenon. The first 'Clean Up the World' campaign, in 1993, involved approximately 30 million people in 80 countries. In 2004 around 35 million people from 115 countries removed rubbish from parks, beaches and waterways on 'Clean Up the World Weekend'. Ian Kiernan later became the full time Chairman of Clean Up Australia Ltd, a national non-profit organisation that co-ordinates events such as Clean Up Australia Day and Clean Up the World. It facilitates local 'Clean Up' and 'Fix Up' projects, provides community education programs such as 'Leave Only Footprints', runs a beach litter prevention program, and lobbies on issues such as plastic bag use. The posters and sign included in this acquisition carry the names and logos of sponsoring organisations, beginning with McDonald's in 1989. The involvement of these sponsors demonstrates Kiernan's pragmatic approach to getting things done, the success of his influencing skills, and the growing awareness by companies that the attitudes of their customers toward the natural environment were changing. The material helps document this shift in attitudes to the environment. The failure of the environmental campaign to stop the damming of the Gordon River in 1972, and the consequent drowning of Lake Pedder, was a turning point in the Australian environment movement and focused community attention on the Tasmanian Wilderness Society's 1976 national campaign to 'Save the Franklin'. The success of this campaign, combined with the emergence of 'green bans' on development around Australia, helped to establish the environmental movement on the political agenda of all three tiers of government and led to the emergence of the Green Party. The significance of the Clean Up material lies in its ability to make explicit the success of this movement, which empowers individuals to participate in making their environment a better place. As Ian Kiernan says: "If you look at Clean Up Australia events, they are in their own way a form of protest. Friendly, non-confrontational, but a very powerful protest, because here is the people saying to the government, saying, will you look after the harbour." [Interview 2000.] The first Earth Hour saw lights across the city of Sydney turned off for an hour on 29 March 2007. Will this event continue to grow from one city into a global movement as the first 'Clean Up the Harbour' event has? References Clean Up Australia website http://www.cleanup.org.au/au/ Clean Up the World http://www.cleanuptheworld.org/en/Membership/learn-more---join-the-campaign.html?gclid=CIjtjJLClZICFRdciAodky5c6Q Anni Turnbull, Curator, April 2008