Sydney festival has received what it calls an “unprecedented” $5m philanthropic donation, that it hopes will contribute to the arts sector’s recovery in the wake of Covid-19.
Swedish-born Australian philanthropist Peter Freedman, 62, said he was making the donation as a way of giving back to the artists and behind-the-scenes workers who have supported his career.
The terms of the donation are uncommon for its size, as it is untethered from any projects, outcomes, or capital works: Freedman has told the festival it should decide which shows or artists the donation should be directed towards.
The $5m was “just the beginning,” he told Guardian Australia.
Freedman is the owner and founder of Røde microphones. His London-born father, Henry, started the sound installation company Freedman Electronics in 1967 with his Swedish-born mother, Astrid. Freedman established Røde in 1992 as part of the family company, taking it from near-bankruptcy to international success.
Sydney festival has hailed the donation as “unequivocally the biggest in the festival’s history”.
The festival’s incoming director Olivia Ansell said Freedman’s gift will “do much to rescue the state of our arts industry after the immense disruption Covid has caused”.
Ansell will have discretionary power over where the money is spent, and said it will go towards “new commissions, major presentations and the livelihoods of so many talented Australian and international artists”.
Australia’s arts festivals have faced tough programming choices with the closure of international borders during the pandemic, although Sydney festival benefited from its decision nine months ago to present an all-Australian program this summer. Festival director Wesley Enoch, presenting his final festival in 2021, said the early call “was not a huge pivot for us, because we’ve already been the largest commissioner of Australian work, [including] our First Nations programming”.
Freedman emphasised his donation to the Sydney festival was cash, not payment in kind. “They need money; they need hard cash,” he said.
“I’ve been lucky. There’s a lot of good people in Australia who give a lot of money, but they don’t talk about it. I’m talking about it because I want to get others to do it.”
Freedman said it was his own call to make the donation because he considered the Sydney festival the most important in the country, though he had also been listening to his daughter, London-based arts producer Lauren, who is now studying an MBA at the London School of Economics. Lauren had kept her father abreast of the devastating effects the Covid-19 pandemic had on artists in the United Kingdom.
“Sydney has given me everything, it’s my home,” he said. “I’m supporting the home team.”
Freedman’s first arts love is music – in 2020 he bought Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s guitar for $9m – and while he also likes theatre, he said, “I don’t understand opera as much or the ballet”.
The lounge room of Freedman’s penthouse apartment in Sydney’s Potts Point is adorned by large figurative paintings by male Australian artists such as Brett Whiteley, Norman Lindsay, Garry Shead and Sidney Nolan. His favourite is The Suitor, by Charles Blackman, showing a man waiting with a bunch of flowers.
Like the solitary man in the painting, Freedman said he had often been the outsider: when he sailed with his family from Sweden to Australia at the age of eight in 1966, he could not speak English, and had learning difficulties including dyslexia in school. His father thought he was not trying with his studies. “In the end I thought: I’ll show them,” he said.
A Creative Partnerships Australia spokesperson said the Freedman donation is “amazing and of great value”, although the impact of philanthropic giving on the arts is already “significant”.
Exceptional examples in recent decades include the Ian Potter Foundation’s $20m donation to the National Gallery of Victoria Contemporary project, Simon and Catriona Mordant’s $15m donation to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s new wing, and John Kaldor’s gift of his art collection valued at $35m to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
