marcus westbury

I am about to head off for 3 and a bit  weeks in the USA so updates may be sporadic for a while. In the meantime if you want to read something longer and chunkier of mine, the good folks at Meanjin have just put my essay Tiny Revolutions from the last issue online. It’s [...]

Sometimes something so amazing happens that you pinch yourself. As regular readers — and irregular ones, anyone who has known me or met me or had the misfortune to be stuck next to me in transit for an hour  – will know if i have one obsession in life it’s with my home town of Newcastle. [...]

Buy this man a beer. Musicians, live music lovers, people of NSW, and general folks who think small scale culture should be given a chance to survive and thrive: on October 26th this year and every year i need you to do me a small favour. Should you see this man in the street, pass [...]

File this under the “random things that amuse me” category. I just googled Banksy to have a look at the opening sequence for The Simpsons he has apparently just directed. I was more than a little amused to discover who had bought the Google ad in the right column when i googled Banksy. Click on the image [...]

What follows is the text of the speech i gave at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. This is pretty much a straight cut and paste of my speech notes so it may not read all that well on the screen to others and is inevitably full of typos, poor punctuation and general [...]

Regular readers or those following the arts policy priority debates that have been happening around the traps will have noticed that the Australia Council has responded to my graph of their 09/10 grants by art form with one of their own that you can see above or read about on their site. As you would [...]

I have been absolutely useless with keeping things up to date around here. I put it down to a combination of events at Renew Newcastle (where events in the city have forced us to bring forward a few medium term plans), the embryonic development of a Renew Australia (a national scheme to seed local “renew” [...]

This graph is a breakdown of Australia Council arts funding last year by artform. Despite recent scare campaigns that have suggested that Australia was somehow in the throes of doing away with the “heritage arts” in favour of “new media” there doesn’t appear to be much evidence of it in the numbers!  Right click “view [...]

Last month in Melbourne i joined a panel at the State Library of Victoria speaking out about the current internet filter proposal. Also on the panel was the parliament’s best and most consistent filter opponent Scott Ludlam, Greens Senator for Western Australia, professional provocateur Catherine Deveny, and Colin Jacobs who is the Chair of Electronic [...]

I don’t usually do guest posts around here but regular commenter and correspondent John Walker asked me to  post his response to the proposed Cooper report into superannuation. The report recommends amongst some other things that Self Managed Super Funds be forced to divest themselves of their art collections – something that would have profound consequences for [...]