marcus westbury

Late last year the Federal Government announced that it intended to go ahead with one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a long time. The Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy – presumably assuming Australia was distracted by Christmas and Copenhagen to notice – announced that an expensive, ineffective and intrusive filter will be installed [...]

I’ve been tyring to get my head around the results of the Federal Government’s internet filtering trial. Rather than undertake hours of laborious research off my own bat i decided to consult the resource that all people i know turn to when stuck with a technical question: my brother Stuart.
His assesment:
Here is a bit of [...]

The ABC have revamped their online Arts gateway and have asked me to write and/or film a regular weekly blog over there.
According to the author (me):
The aim here is to seek out, talk to, interview and profile some of the many interesting creative people that are doing their own thing or making interesting things happen [...]

I’m basically just posting this here so i can link to it from this discussion over at Larvatus Prodeo. But it’s a reminder though that I’m involved in many debates and discussions about arts funding and policy priorities in Australia at the moment (most recently here and here) and too easily forget that most people [...]

There is something truly weird about getting even peripherally involved in electoral politics. It seemingly makes you fair game for just about any kick or bullshit that a politician might want to throw at you. I somehow ended up on the receiving end of a bizarre if not slightly deranged personal attack from Liberal Senator [...]

Last night i had the honour and the opportunity to deliver one of this year’s Hunter Valley Research Foundation lectures at Newcastle’s City Hall. It’s quite an honour given some of the impressive people who have done it before.
Anyhow, in case you missed it (and although there were a few hundred people there most [...]

I was commissioned by Meanjin late last year to write an essay about the role that funding bodies play in Australian culture.  It appears in the current edition of the magazine and is now available online. Meanjin is one of Australia’s oldest and most esteemed literary journals and one that is currently enjoying a renaissance [...]

photo by Andy Mac
HOW is Melbourne dealing with the fact that one of its biggest tourist attractions and one of its most significant cultural movement since the Heidelberg School is illegal, outlawed and vilified?
I was at a forum in Sydney this week. I listened intently as a panel made up of artists, bureaucrats, and business [...]

As of today, all of the writing on this web site is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Practically that means that i encourage people who read the contents of this site to republish it in other non-commercial contexts, to link to it, to use excerpts of it in their own work or [...]

Those of you in Brisbane may be interested to come and see me  speak on Wednesday night. I’ll be joined by master interviewer Richard Fidler who will undoubtedly force me to reveal some uncomfortable truths about the world or something. It’s a ticketed event  so you need to shell out to come along.
When Wed 6 [...]