Public Silo Trail

With an awe-inspiring canvas of silos and country towns, Western Australia is where the mega murals began.

This permanent, open-air, truly PUBLIC ‘gallery’ celebrates Western Australia’s southern agricultural regions through a self-drive trail of evocative mural artworks on silos, transformer boxes and walls. The project grew out of FORM’s award winning and highly successful festival of urban art, PUBLIC (2014-2016), which changed the face of Perth―literally―by commissioning 100 national and international urban artists to paint over 170 walls in the CBD and surrounding neighbourhoods. It was in the regions, however, that FORM saw the greatest potential to transform communities through cultural tourism.

The momentum moved inland, giving rise to the PUBLIC Silo Trail, 1,000 kilometres of permanent regional infrastructure connecting massive silo murals and hidden street art across the Wheatbelt and Great Southern. Spanning a thousand kilometres across Wheatbelt farmlands from Perth to the southern coastline, the trail links seven rural communities―Northam, Merredin, Katanning, Newdegate, Pingrup, Ravensthorpe and Albany―with a self-drive trail of silo art, wall murals and painted electrical transformer boxes. The incredibly diverse artworks celebrate the scale and story of agriculture in Western Australia’s southern regions.

Turning a vast trail into a unified story required intensive collaboration with local governments, community groups, and artists from 21 countries. Communities participated through open studios, public surveys, and youth workshops. International practitioners were paired with Western Australian towns, bridging local identity with global significance. In 2015 alone, 63 murals were painted across the state.

In the Wheatbelt region, where the majority of silos are found, year-on-year reports for December 2018/19 showed visitor increases of 15.1% according to Australia’s Golden Outback.

Before the PUBLIC Silo Trail, there was no large-scale self-drive artwork trail providing an incentive to travel through the South West and appreciate the wide open spaces of the agricultural hinterland. Nor was there a coordinated effort to use arts and culture to create an innovative cultural tourism experience, establishing links between specific destinations and drawing visitor attention towards satellite attractions.

Stories from the Silo Towns was a smash hit success: a beautifully photographed companion book and short film compiled and published by FORM, documenting the individual stories of ordinary individuals from all walks of life who live in the towns on the PUBLIC Silo Trail.

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www.publicsilotrail.com

“PUBLIC has widened awareness and accessibility of art… recognising the calibre of our local artists within international standards.”

The impact reaches far beyond aesthetics. Towns reported a heightened sense of safety, a deeper connection to cultural expression, and renewed pride of place. The project elevated Western Australian artists to international platforms and influenced how we design our cities and towns. PUBLIC proved that when art is accessible and locally grounded, it becomes a powerful engine for social cohesion and long-lasting civic transformation - turning agricultural icons into beacons of cultural tourism that continue to draw visitors today.