About Marcus
It’s weird writing about yourself and i am very lazy. I thought I’d just comment on my *Wikipedia entry with a bit of totally subjective commentary. According to the wisdom of Wikipedia I am …
Marcus Westbury is an Australian festival director, writer and media maker. [This is true although the reverse order is a bit more accurate at the moment given i haven’t had a festival directing type gig in about two years] He is currently based in Melbourne, Australia where he created the three part TV series Not Quite Art for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation screened during October-November 2007. [Actually it aired in October not October-November, but yep, that is definitely me]
[edit] Biography
[edit] Background
Marcus Westbury was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia on 17th January 1974. [Great. Can someone delete that? I’m an identity fraud candidate for sure] He attended [”barely survived” would be more accurate] Jesmond High School (now Callaghan College Senior Jesmond Campus) and University of Newcastle where he failed to complete [A euphemism for “got kicked out of”] a Communication Studies degree . During this period he was involved in student politics [best forgotten although the wonders of google and the endless internet archive means that nothing is forgotten. Ever.] and was campus activities officer and co-editor with Sean Healy [who did most of the work from memory] of the student newspaper OPUS [Between the two of us we wrote about two thirds of it under about half a dozen different pseudonyms because student newspaper contributors are notoriously hopeless] in 1995. Under their direction, OPUS was one of the first Australian publications to publish regularly on the World Wide Web [we used to like to claim that we were the first student paper in Australia on the web back in the day when it was the most important thing in the world. I believe there is a competing claim out there and we’ve never really resolved it either way AFAIK].
[Fortunately several embarrassing late uni things skipped around here. Good.]
[edit] Arts and Festivals
In 1996 [see above re: “he was kicked out of uni”] Marcus Westbury was a co-founder of the arts and media collective Octapod [along with about half a dozen other people] and the short-lived [Short lived as in “died a slow a painful death”]Newcastle Fringe Festival . This led to [more correctly, my general state of being broke and fleeing things that had fallen apart led to] a position based in Sydney as the Online Manager of the LOUD media festival a landmark festival of media arts that took place across Australia’s radio and television networks in January 1998. [Not sure what the dictionary definition of “landmark” is] Westbury was subsequently the inaugural Creative Manager of the Noise Media Festival - a follow-up festival to LOUD. [A position that I was so successful at, that i didn’t even last until the first noise festvial. Still i did do a bit and it looks good on the CV]
Whilst working in Sydney between 1998 and 2002 [Those dates are a bit muddled, i think i would have been in Sydney working on this stuff from 1997 to early 2001. I think.] Westbury was the founder and manager of the This Is Not Art festival [There was a bit more to it than that - who gets to decide the proportions in these entries?] in his home town [already established above you would think?] of Newcastle, New South Wales.
In 2002 Westbury was appointed as the Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival [1] and was the Director of the 2004 and 2006 Next Wave Festivals under the themes of Unpopular Culture (2004) and Empire Games[Factually correct but i am not sure of the need to use 2004 and 2006 twice each in that sentence.] In 2006, Westbury was also a Director of Festival Melbourne 2006, the cultural program of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games. [It does sound kind of impressive when written like that, as opposed to say “Marcus directed the outsourced and a bit of an afterthought ‘Youth Program’ for what isn’t quite one of the world’s major sporting events”] (2006).
Marcus Westbury also [co-]founded and was one of the directors of Free Play, Australia’s largest [only] independent computer games developers’ conference that took place in Melbourne in 2002 and 2003. [That should be 2004 and 2005 actually]
[edit] Media Projects
Westbury has worked [been mostly unemployed and/or unpaid] across a range of media including as a commentator and producer for ABC Local Radio in Newcastle, Sydney and Melbourne and ABC Radio National and has featured on a range of ABC TV series including Recovery, Critical Mass and Vulture. [All of which were literally axed within weeks of me appearing on them] As an occasionally [i prefer “intermittently”] published writer, Westbury is also a coauthor [along with about 10 other people] of the h2w2 guidebook (published by the Australia Council) and a tongue in cheek tourism guide to Newcastle called Newcastle Navigator [along with Damien Frost].
[Not sure about the prioritisation here - seems to have included the obscure ones and left out the obvious ones but who am I to question the wisdom of crowds???]
Other
Marcus Westbury’s mother Kaye Westbury was the Australian Democrats candidate for the Division of Newcastle in 1998 when she died on the eve of the election, forcing a postponement of the vote in the city. [Not one of the highlights of my life thus far. I’d advise against being stuck between a personal tragedy, grieving, a feral media scrum and 80,000 inconvenienced voters if given a choice.]
Categories: Australian businesspeople [WTF?]
* Retrieved on 25th March 2008, with relatively little editing by me.