A PROMINENT Noongar and Kungarakan artist says the Aboriginal community has been left shocked and angry after discovering the City of Perth had quietly cancelled its Indigenous-focussed Birak Concert.

Previously known as the Survival Day Concert, it ran as a grassroots counter to Australia Day celebrations on Supreme Court Gardens from 2001 and was added to the City of Perth’s festival roster in 2007.

• The Indigenous community has just discovered the Birak Concert has been cancelled.

“The major issue since my post this morning is lots of people have been messaging me and flooding my inbox saying, ‘what?’,” Ms McGuire said. 

“This is our community; these are people in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community so they’re not even aware of it either, but apparently the council decided about this last year in March.”

Council minutes from March 25, 2025 state: “Based on the decline in attendance, increase of anti-social behaviour and hostility, the proposed [Events Plan] does not include the Birak Concert delivered on Australia Day. This is following feedback from key stakeholders and contractors and in consultation with the City’s Elders Advisory Group.”

Ms McGuire said the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community was being held to a double standard.

While there had been a disturbance at last year’s concert which had been quickly resolved, she said the City’s broader Australia Day celebrations were in the news for years because of anti-social behaviour, but instead of cancelling the day, the City beefed up security and refocused the fireworks.

Clarity

She said there was little clarity about who was consulted before making the decision to cancel, saying “stakeholders” was a vague term that lacked accountability.

Ms McGuire, who has attended the concert since childhood, rejected claims antisocial behaviour justified cancelling it.

“This is a childhood memory for me,” she said. 

“It means a lot to our community to have space and time to gather and celebrate what we’ve actually achieved as a community and the fact that we’ve survived such atrocities.”

She said the decision felt targeted. “It just feels like a really targeted approach to something that means a lot to us.”

Alarm bells rang when the name changed from Survival Day to Birak Concert. “The name is Survival; is that too provocative for the City?” she said.

Ms McGuire also criticised comments by acting Lord Mayor Bruce Reynolds, who said on Facebook that the event had been replaced by a multicultural festival and that creative director Phil Wally Stack wanted to “try something different”.

“It’s a multicultural festival with hardly any focus on the Indigenous community,” Ms McGuire said. “It’s no way of substitute for something specific as a January 26 Survival Day celebration.”

Mr Reynolds said: “It was actually replaced with the multicultural event weekend that literally broke all [Elizabeth Quay] event expectations… It had an amazing Indigenous component to it.”

Ms McGuire said the cancellation reinforced a long history of dismissive treatment. “The relationship between the community and the city is already tainted,” she said.

She described the concert as a peaceful gathering place for families and mob, and a space for reconciliation. “This feels to me as anti-reconciliation,” she said.

She disputed claims of falling attendance. While she’d been unable to attend last year, the previous year’s “felt like the biggest one I’ve seen in a long time.”

Poignant moment

“I actually got to dance at the festival and share my culture and we had a moment of silence where we just brought people into a moment of reflection and it stands in my mind as a really poignant moment for our communities. 

“It’s a dual meaning; it’s the time to carry mourning and hold each other in that, but also time for celebration for all the things we’ve been able to achieve to date.”

Looking ahead, Ms McGuire said the solution was straightforward. “For starters, I think we just need the festival put back on, or at least a new date,” she said.

“All we want is our rights,” she said. “We just want spaces and days to be able to gather peacefully and celebrate who we are together — and even that is apparently an inconvenience. Ridiculous.”

by STEVE GRANT