AustLit

Meyrick examines the performing arts in Australia. He looks at 'the past, accuses the theatre of being stuck in the 1970s and calls for an overhaul. His closely-observed argument reveals how the theatre has become hierarchical and competitive, that the once-thriving centre has been eaten away, leaving only the major institutions and the fringe. Meyrick proposes a more democratic structure, abandoning the funding wars and developing a genuinely national strategy. He demonstrates why the old ways are paralysing new thought and outlines the first steps towards change.'

(Source: Currency Press website, http://www.currency.com.au/)

In a passionate personal/political statement, Australia's most celebrated festival director and cabaret artist accuses Australia and its political leaders of selling out its arts to populism. 'A prejudice against the intellectual, a preference for pure entertainment, the adherence to 'in or out', 'black or white' -- these are some of the consequences of falling for the myth of the mainstream.' Archer urges her readers to be curious, to question and debate. 'If the myth goes unchallenged, the spirit of art will continue to be marginalised. Those who believe we can afford that loss in the morass of mistakes and short-term thinking that make life on this earth increasingly pleasurable for the few and tortured for the many, those people need the power of art far more than they know.'

(Source: Currency House website, http://www.currencyhouse.org.au/pages/pp_issue_04.html)

'Culture, writes David Throsby, refers to beliefs and values that bind us together. And if we know what our culture is, why would we need a cultural policy? ... A cultural policy would be a powerful tool with which to show what we really value about being Australian. A national debate, to define and assert our common values could well alleviate the fears at present dividing us.' (Publisher's blurb.)

'Mainstream theatre in Australia is very white. Too white. Why are we falling behind the rest of the theatrical world in seeing complex diverse casts onstage in our major theatre companies? When you ask this question of theatre practitioners, an awful discourse of blame begins: agents blame casting directors, drama schools blame 'the industry', everyone blames artistic directors. Talking about racism in Australia is difficult in the climate of indignant denial. Our vocabulary and strategies for discussing it publicly have become inadequate. ' (Publisher's blurb)

'David Unaipon had a commitment to sharing his stories with non-Aboriginal people. What can we make of this? Did he mean they have the freedom to adopt Aboriginal myths and stories without qualm, without recourse, without responsibility? Or did he merely hope that they would be valued as part of our country's cultural expression?' (Source: Back cover)

'Lauren Carroll Harris' treatise on the state of distribution in Australia for locally produced feature films is a timely and provocative analysis of the existing structures and a powerful argument for adjustment and change in this post digital world.

'Her reflections on a distribution led industry potentially replacing a production development led industry need to be seriously debated given our recent change of government and new management and key personnel at Screen Australia.' (Anthony I. Ginnane, Producer)

'A rising controversy has arisen regarding the repertoire of our national stages: a debate around a mainstage vogue for resetting familiar international classics in an Australian context and the playwrights who believe their work is being depreciated. Julian Meyrick believes the cause goes much deeper than the present quarrels. The adaptations issue, he writes, is a symbol of loss within the Australian dramatic consciousness. It is not about defending Tennessee Williams over David Williamson; but about the value of our national drama. Audiences no longer understand the difference between making a new play and buying an old one.

'Something crucial has been lost, about our ability and need to nurture and produce original drama; and public policy has been a contributor. To remedy this, he concludes, we need a national theatre. Not a building or a company but a co-commissioning, co-production house that will address, seriously, the growth of our own classic repertoire.' (Publication summary)

'To celebrate ten years of Platform Papers, tracking the cultural thinking of the nation, we have invited Wesley Enoch, a theate artist and Nunuccal Nuugi man from Stradbroke Island, to define what we mean by cultural leadership; and to ruminate on where to find it. With the growth of governmentled cultural patronage, have we obscured the core reasons why the arts exist? Have the voices of the mob, the dissenters and the rambunctious opposition been corralled into an official culture? ‘I am sick of hearing we’re not good enough, we don’t do enough for artists, we need more money. Where are the visionaries? Artists are amongst the best qualified people to imagine a future, the ones who can carry the creative dreams of a nation. But where are you? Government champions the arts more than artists do, he says.

'Enoch finds the arts community ridden with mistrust, and fearful of those who speak out. Australia, he concludes, is in great need of cultural leadership; of a fresh force to challenge thinking and gather confidence, to speak out as citizens in the national interest. But where to look? He finds the answer close to home.' (Publication summary)

'As the National Curriculum gears up to offer fresh opportunities to teachers and students, our arts institutions are considering what a national arts curriculum will mean for them. Arts and education strategists Naomi Edwards and Meg Upton have been studying the new landscape and urge a radical rethink of arts companiesa education programs and their purpose. At present they are largely aimed at performing required works and increasing audiences. The opportunity is there to reposition their company at the centre of innovation and social value by placing the participation of young people at the core of their business.' (Publication summary)

'Australian audiences have an unquenchable thirst to musical theatre. It is big show business. But as another revival of Les Mis or Wicked flows back to the originators and investors abroad, the local, indigenous musical is virtually extinct. Here we have no shortage of start-ups, and composers and performers of world calibre; but rarely are they given the opportunity to develop a large-scale work. What we need is a proactive, sustainable national funding and development program that will support that talent right through to a commercial market readiness . With that backing, writes John Senczuk, we could conquer the world.' (Publication summary)

'What is art? What is culture? And what value do we place upon it today? Katharine Brisbane looks back on our changing culture and the way public subsidy since 1968 has built massive opportunities for our artists, performers and those who have built an industry around them. She also traces the divisions that have grown between the community and the arts sector, and the moral divide between art and commerce. She concludes that the promised pursuit of excellence has been fulfilled and exhausted; and proposes a way to salvage its achievements by throwing open our major institutions to public investment and private enterprise, releasing creativity into new directions and reconsidering how we might together build an inclusive cultural environment.' (Publication summary)

'An estimated $250 billion will be spent worldwide in the current decade on creating ‘cultural precincts’, collections of buildings with some arts-related function. Today, both capital and regional cities are building precincts which make grand claims for artistic collaboration, urban renewal, tourism and ‘liveable’ residential development while bringing substantial economic benefits. But is any of this true? Are they creative and profitable? Justin Macdonnell surveys the literature to uncover who really benefits. Once precincts grew where the people gathered, now they rise in neglected places, in the hope of attracting growth. There’s evidence they sell more tickets, but not that they produce better art. Property values rise, but are artists better rewarded? Does the public have a richer experience or even a more convenient one? Are cultural precincts really just another commodifying of the arts? Is there a better way?' (Publication summary)

'The stage designer’s role is both within and without a performance company, a unique observer of the work in creation and a welcome problem solver, multi-tasker, the possessor of the ‘design solution’ when things don’t go as planned, writes Stephen Curtis. The designer’s collaborative role could be a model to others.

'He chooses three stage productions to give a picture of his work methods including the much acclaimed The Secret River (play by Andrew Bovell based on the novel by Kate Grenville), and concludes that today’s designers are redefining their role and reshaping their careers through specialisation and focus on form over content as a way of exploring and understanding the work they interpret.' (Publication summary)

'In the 1990s, the ‘creative industries’ was a new concept aimed at mobilising the energies of culture in support of a new kind of economy: entrepreneurial, multicultural, youthful and digitally savvy ‘Culture’ moved to the top table of policy-making, and a revolution in Higher Education was proclaimed, with ‘creativity’ a central resource. Yet, only twenty years later the Australian Government has launched an innovation program in which culture and the cultural industries are nowhere to be seen.

'This Platform Paper charts the rise and fall of the concept in Australia, and argues that while undoubtedly a victim of its own hubristic rhetoric, its rapid disappearance leaves a hole in policy-making that those in the cultural sector ignore at their peril. Justin O’Connor outlines what a new agenda for the cultural economy might look like, ‘after’ the Creative Industries.' (Publication summary)

'On Friday 13 May 2016, the Australia Council for the Arts released the results of that agency's 'Four Year Organisations' grants. The result was a bloodbath: 65 organisations were defunded, and more than a hundred that applied were also unsuccessful. The arts sector dubbed it 'Black Friday'.1

'Some of the most famous arts companies in the country missed out. The Australian Design Centre has a 50-year history supporting Australian design and craft.2 The literary magazine Meanjin was the place where A.A. Phillips first coined the phrase 'the cultural cringe' in his seminal essay.3 The cuts punished organisations that support younger artists, in literature, dance and theatre, such as Melbourne's Next Wave festival, the nation's premier event for young and emerging artists, and Express Media, the publisher of Voiceworks magazine. Other casualties included Adelaide's Vitalstatistix and Slingsby, Melbourne's Centre for Contemporary Photography, and north Queensland's Jute Theatre.

'The defunding of a slew of Australia's best-known smaller arts companies was due to a decision made by the Abbott Government's arts minister, George Brandis, who had taken $105 million in funding from the Australia Council a year before. Funding cuts bit deep. The decision came in addition to $87 million slashed from the Arts portfolio in 2014. Further cuts of $52.5 million were handed down in December 2015. All told, according to the Australian Labor Party's Mark Dreyfus, approximately $300 million has been cut from federal cultural funding by the Coalition.

'Before the 2013 election, arts funding had been a more-or-less bipartisan policy area, supported by both major parties. The Coalition did not release an arts policy in the 2013 campaign, nor did it commit to specific cuts. Indeed, George Brandis gave an enthusiastic speech at the Casula Powerhouse pledging the Coalition's support for the grand vision of the arts.4 That bipartisanship disappeared in the newly ideological environment of the new Abbott Government. The Coalition didn't just slash the Australia Council's funding. It launched a new attack on arm's length arts funding itself-a principle that has enjoyed four decades of bipartisan support. Why did George Brandis and the Coalition do this? What accounts for this assault on the cultural sphere?

'This essay is an attempt to tell that story, and to question what it means for culture in Australia. I shall start by explaining a little about my method and craft, and then examine the sorry story of arts funding in the most recent parliament. Then I will make some remarks about what this story tells us about power in Australian society. There has been push and pull: action and resistance. Australian culture is being attacked by political actors, beholden to an ideology of privatising the cultural space. But if there are troubling realities, there are also opportunities: a possibility of arguing for the greater cultural good. I will end with a call to arms to defend and expand the cultural sphere of Australia.' (Publication summary)

'Looking back at the conclusions of Lyndon Terracini’s Platform Paper in 2007, A Regional State of Mind, Lindy Hume finds a restless giant. Through towns and communities she traces the rise of a more assertive, even radical ambition. a rebellious counter-urban movement ready to make a profound impact on the national culture.

'As an artist living in regional Australia, she finds it an ideal place to develop new performance work, and argues that more flow and greater integration between the regional and metropolitan arts ecosystems could, over time, reshape Australia’s cultural identity.' (Publication summary)

'Kim Dalton, OAM, is a long-respected broadcast and public policy professional, who as CEO of the Australian Film Commission from 1999 overhauled its development programs and led the policy debate around Australian content on television. As Director of ABCTV (2006–13), he moved the corporation into the digital era, and now looks critically at the present state of the ABC and broadcasting. Over the last sixty years, he writes, Australia had developed an effective public policy framework that strategically connected Australian broadcasters, screen content and an independent creative and production sector to produce it. 

'Yet today the ABC operates outside this framework. Using its status as a statutory authority to eschew transparency, accountability and engagement with public policy objectives, the ABC now pursues an internal agenda and its own priorities. Governance is lacking; new measures are needed to return the ABC to its chartered place as a contributor to Australia’s screen culture.' (Publication summary)

"How to define the jobbing actor? Not the handful who find fame and fortune and power. The ones that audiences pay to see […] the vast majority of actors, the ones that struggle to stay employed. The ones for whom acting is, variously, a hobby, a job, a career, a vocation. It calls to you and you’re compelled to follow."

In this, another of Platform Papers’ The Professionals, actor Lex Marinos shares the excitement of his initiation into the arts boom of the 1970s, the extraordinary demands his work has made on his body, mind and family; and his reflections on a life well lived. Marinos is a graduate of the University of NSW and from 1972 was one of the actors that established Sydney’s New Wave. He quickly became a regular in TV comedy on ABC and SBS, As an Australian-born Greek he played undefined ‘ethnic’ stereotypes until in 1980 he was cast as Bruno, an Italian-Australian, in the TV comedy Kingswood Country (1980-84) and won the fight to use his Australian accent. He was director of the multicultural festival Carnivale 1996- 99; and executive producer of the Yeperenye Festival in Alice Springs for the Centenary of Federation. Between 2006–14 he worked as an actor with Big hArt touring regional festivals.

Marinos kept the jobs going in comedy, as a sports commentator, TV and festival director, ethnic affairs and community advisor, and host of multicultural celebrations. A lasting record of his talent is his acclaimed role as Manolis in the ABC TV series The Slap (2011). In 1994 he received the OAM for services to the performing arts.' (Publication Summary)

'Expectations around theatre for young people are too prescribed today. Adults have long-held views on what works are appropriate and yet among all this concern for young people’s creativity, it is not acknowledged as art. For the young people who work in the sector, the word ‘value’ is clouded by precedent: we struggle to be heard. In a startling expose of a system in serious need of reconstruction, Giles calls for a review of the accepted attitudes, and the embrace of a different paradigm that places young people at the centre of change. We must un-learn the past hierarchies, empower the engagement of children as a legitimate collaboration, and recognise the power of instinctive play and imagination as intelligent modes of exploration.' (Publication summary)

'In 2006 I wrote one of the early Platform Papers (No. 7) under the title Does Australia Need a Cultural Policy? I was prompted to ask this question because it was then twelve years since the appearance of Australia’s first (and only) cultural policy, the document Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy (October 1994) produced by the Keating Government. In the interim, following the Labor Party’s defeat at the 1996 election, we experienced ten years of John Howard’s prime ministership. Howard led a conservative administration that effectively buried Creative Nation when it came into office and subsequently showed no interest in formulating a cultural policy of its own.' (Publication summary)

'In a considered account of composers' pursuit of an Australian sound in contemporary music, from John Antill's Corroboree to the rappers of today, Christopher Sainsbury, composer, academic, activist and member of the Dharug people, uncovers the powerful bond between heritage and musical expression in the members of Ngarra burria: First Peoples Composers program. For non Indigenous Australians the long tail of European tradition continues to burden our music, he says; but the new Indigenous composers draw their inspiration from their own history, their country, stories, politics. Years of separation and misunderstanding have led to the misappropriation of Aboriginal songs and rituals in search of Australianness. Sainsbury calls for a rethinking of this, based on respect, and a new collaboration to begin between First Peoples composers and the new music sector, in which the former can be recognised as creators and performers of a real Australian sound that echoes back to the dawn of history.' (Publication summary)

'In this paper Alison Croggon, one of Australia’s most insightful cultural critics, looks back from the days when the daily broadsheet newspapers were unrivalled in authority, to the collapse of the print media and opening of a free market for digital public opinion. The dramatic downsizing of the Fairfax empire’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age hit arts journalism badly and coincided with the rise of arts-oriented websites across Australia. Croggon sees the demise of the old criticism as a loss of power and received wisdom but also an opportunity to engage artists, critics and audiences in conversations of global collaboration and reference. With this breakdown of institutional criticism, which, she says, had latterly focussed on art as a commodity, came the opportunity rethink our assumptions about what critical responses to art might be. It has offered a chance to open the door to new ways of thinking, a way of enriching both the communities around art and the process of making art itself.' (Publication summary)

'Once, the idea of the arts participating in what are undeniably trade fairs, complete with product booths, giveaways and funny hats, would have been a breach of faith with their sponsors. Today, it is the norm. These events range from the huge and grotesque, such as APAP (American Performing Arts Presenters) to the less daunting, such as CINARS in Montreal or APAM in Australia. From the US the concept spread around the globe and while Europe has largely resisted the trend there are now arts markets throughout Asia, North and South America and the Pacific.

'But the question now is: has the arts market outlived its usefulness? Have the new digital platforms made touring redundant? Has the rapid, borderless exchange of artists, and the worldwide experience of co-productions, residencies and other collaboration, made them superfluous? Isn’t the world simply saturated with dance, physical theatre and new music, not to say festivals and circuits? Veteran marketeer Justin Macdonnell is uncompromising in his advice. APAM is seeking to reinvent itself from an intensive four-day conference every two years to an elongated ‘process’ in Melbourne. So, an awareness of the need is in the air. But change to what and where might it end?

'This paper questions the assumptions underlying the whole notion of a market: the role that government agencies have played in advocating, enabling and even owning such events; and re-evaluates their achievements and shortcomings. It suggests other possibilities, including those now under trial in Australia.' (Publication abstract)