The birth of the Olympic Arts Festival

Comprising two sections (visual arts and literature, and music and drama), the festival set out to showcase Australia’s national character and the best that the country had to offer in terms of the arts. 

The festival provided the designers, architects and artists of Victoria with a global platform and included five major exhibitions: architecture and sculpture at the University of Melbourne’s Wilson Hall; painting and drawing at the National Gallery of Victoria; Aboriginal art at the National Museum of Victoria; literature displays at the Melbourne Public Library; and graphic arts, industrial design and ceramics at the Royal Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT University).

This last event was one of Australia’s first major design shows, while the festival inspired further design exhibitions and shows in Melbourne. Similar exhibitions featured on the programme when the Museum of Modern Art Australia opened in the city two years after the Olympic Games.

Such festivals replaced the Olympic art competition, which was a feature of the Olympic Games from Stockholm 1912 through to London 1948, and saw medals awarded in five categories: architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. The competition was discontinued on the grounds that, in its later years, almost all the participants were professional, a fact at odds with the amateur status of the Olympic Games.