Tiny Revolutions

At more than 200 years since European settlement, Newcastle is an old city in Australian terms. It’s a fading but to my eyes beautiful seaside city of a bit under half a million people. Like many industrial cities in the developed world it has been battered by the loss of once formidable heavy industry. In a global economy that demands specialisation and scale, its steelworks—once the defining symbol of the town—has been a casualty. The BHP operation once dwarfed much of the city around it. A decade after its closure, the site is little more than a hole in the skyline, some rusting ruins and unfulfilled promises of new industries and opportunities. Where blast furnaces once stood nature slowly reasserts itself. Here the mighty works of the industrial era and its toxic legacies lie idle.

When the BHP Steelworks towered over the economy and geography of Newcastle—as it did when I was growing up there few would have suspected it would ever be too small to survive. Now there are newer, larger cities of steel thousands of kilometres to the north. They’re fuelled by global not national demand, by billions not millions of people, by cheap labour and economies of scale once impossible to imagine.

Today Newcastle digs up its exports. It is the largest coal port in the world. Coal is both a boom and a portent: a precious, finite and poisonous resource. Each ship sets sail on an ever-rising sea. Though the community is fiercely divided about whether the end should come by caution, consumption or calamity, few in Newcastle would argue that coal can last forever.

The riches being mined nearby are not reflected in the cityscape. Newcastle is no shining resource-rich boom town. The old city declines and decays. Well over a hundred empty buildings line the two main streets and the once vital commercial heart of the city has become an anachronism of forgotten trams and consumption patterns long past: designed for a local economy before the rise of suburban shopping centres, global brands and car culture made such things obsolete.

There are at least six billion perspectives on globalisation. There are stories of great opportunity (development, economic liberation and transformation) and of great destruction—social, environmental and personal—in every community, in every culture. Both sides of the globalisation story are reduced to simplifications, yet really they are stories of complexity and contradiction.

For this story of Newcastle it is necessary to reduce this complexity to a problem of scale. It is a story is about accepting contradiction and the opportunities offered by cultural globalisation to repair some of the damage wrought by economic change. It is tale of looking for the small solutions to giant problems: of rebirth and renewal through a series of tiny revolutions.

Read the rest at the Meanjin web site.

If you want to find out what happened next check the Renew Newcastle web site or see what the good folks at Lonely Planet have been saying.

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. I’ve somehow managed to work it into pretty much everything I’ve done since actually leaving there in search of work that paid me a decade and a half ago. I’ve found many excuses to return through starting projects such as the This Is Not Art festival and most recently Renew Newcastle.

I’ve also managed to work the state and plight of Newcastle into pretty much every platform i’ve been given from the first episode of Not Quite Art, through to essays i’ve written, and most recently even worked it in at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

I love Newcastle. I love its culture. I love its creativity. I love its natural environment. I love it’s old buildings. I love its fading beauty. I love its creative community. I love its unpretentious awesomeness.

I’ve always thought and often argued that it is underrated. That it gets a raw deal from governments, the media, and everywhere else who rates and evaluates the quality of places.

Even so, when Lonely Planet rang me and tipped me off that Newcastle had made a top ten destination list for 2011 I was still a little taken aback. As they pointed out it was likely to surprise a few people. Yes, i thought, i know it’s underrated but it shouldn’t be too hard to justify giving it a place among the top 10 places  to visit in Australia.  As i’ve been telling anyone who will listen Newcastle is a really interesting place right now.

Fast forward to last weekend and i managed to sneak a glimpse at the book they were talking about — It hadn’t actually clicked which list they were referring to until i finally found it via Amazon. But  Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2011 ranks “the top 10 countries, regions and cities to visit in 2011″ in the world.

Hang on. Back track. Double take.

Cities? In THE WORLD?

There it was, right there in black and white [actually they print in colour and i was actually only able to read it using the preview function on Amazon.com as I haven't got my hands on the book yet] Newcastle, Australia is right there listed as the number 9 ranked city in the world to visit in 2011.  Number one was New York City and number nine is Newcastle.

It’s an eclectic list New York, Tangier, Tel Aviv, Wellington, Valencia, Iquitos, Ghent, Delhi, Newcastle and Chiang Mai. Particular props to Wellington – which is a bit like Newcastle and a place i’m pretty partial to.

As someone who has long sung the unfashionable praises of a deeply unfashionable place it is beyond words to describe how pleasing it is to see Newcastle make such a list. But in an odd kind of way that wasn’t the most satisfying thing about it. The most satisfying thing was not just a number on the list but that someone else, someone “authoritative” has described the Newcastle that i see, that i know and i love. According to author Catherine Le Nevez (who has actually written Lonely Planet guides to Paris and much of France for the most part) “Today’s new Newcastle is a unique blend of imagination, sophistication and laid-back surf culture.”

In her words “Australia’s most underrated city” has transformed itself “from ‘steel city’ to creative hub.” She describes how post BHP Newcastle has seen “an explosion of artists” — the most artists and galleries per capita in Australia — “from acclaimed regional centres to independent, artist run spaces and dozens of disused city-centre buildings occupied by photographers, fashion designers, digital artists and more as part of the inner-city regeneration scheme, Renew Newcastle.” [Don't mind me if i just draw a little attention to the explicit props for Renew Newcastle there.]

She recognised too Newcastle’s great natural environment, it’s dynamic live music scene, it’s great cafes and restaurants and the great series of unique and interesting events that take place there during the year including, i’m pleased to point out, This Is Not Art. She recommended going to a Knight’s game [Go the Knights!], checking out the beaches, and strolling along Darby Street.

Obviously there are a lot of lists out there and they should probably be taken for the most part with a grain of salt. But I have to say that after a long hard slog on projects like Renew (and TINA), it feels a lot like a significant corner has been turned. There has been a sudden wave of recognition of late for projects like Renew Newcastle and the cultural life of Newcastle more generally recently that i have found deeply emotional and satisfying.

I will be fascinated with how – and if – people react to the suggestion that Newcastle is one of the ten most interesting places in the world right now. Apparently that makes it better than Sydney. Or Melbourne. Or Brisbane. I looked back over the corresponding lists for the last years and i can’t actually find the last time an Australian city made the LP global top 10 cities of the year list. I suspect that those in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne – particularly those that have spent little if any time in Newcastle of late will be confused and confounded.

It will be interesting too to see how Newcastle locals react. I suspect the view will split somewhere between “you’ve got to be f**king kidding me?” to “it’s about time someone noticed” to “trust lonely planet to go and ruin our secret.” Either way, i’m looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, I’m off to New York city to take notes on how to bridge the gap to number one early in the new year. If you haven’t thought about heading to Newcastle before now might just be the time to consider it. You might want to get in quick before the tourists spoil it. Don’t forget to check out some of the “dozens of disused city-centre buildings occupied by photographers, fashion designers, digital artists” while you’re there.

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 him in a pub, or stand behind him in a line at the supermarket i ask you to do one small thing. Buy him a beer. Seriously, you owe him one.

October 26th in NSW is buy John Wardle a beer day.

I have no idea who has the power to officially declare a public holiday in NSW but as far as i’m concerned  i’m just calling it.

I am a cynical prick. Very little impresses me. Yet every now and then something happens that truly inspires me. Occasionally someone pulls off something that i had every reason to dismiss as truly impossible. John Wardle’s  immense efforts (and by that i mean years, and years of relentless research, lobbying cajoling, organising and generally just fucking persisting when most sane folks would have thrown in the towel) he put into reforming NSW’s dreaded Place of Public Entertainment (PoPE) laws falls into that category.

Put simply, until the stupid laws were finally done away with on 26th of October last year you could do pretty much everything in a NSW pub, cafe or gallery without tonnes of red tape except play live music or perform anything live.

As John himself put it:

PoPEs really said a lot about us – that if you told a story or sang a song you were regulated out of existence but if you watched sport or gambled you were exempt.

On October 26th last year the NSW Government finally changed the laws after much effort from John and no doubt much assistance from his friends and colleagues. You can read about the changes here but in practical terms it means that performing live music in NSW is relatively simple where it was once impossibly hard. Already in NSW a lot more venues have a lot more live music because the rules changed so they were suddenly legally allowed to.

John himself has compiled a list of about 50 new places that have become live venues since the laws the have changed – no doubt there are plenty more. It’s a small crack of light that has turned back the forces of darkness and poker machines and a reminder that the stupid and unjustifiable is always untenable in the long run.

Mostly these kinds of efforts, these kinds of changes go unnoticed. Many people, many, many people benefit from them but few realise what effort it took to make it happen. Even i only have the slightest inkling for how far and how hard they needed to push. Indeed the only person in the NSW parliament’s public gallery that night was John:

Its funny – the night the amendments passed to the Planning Act was just like the night the associated changes to the Liquor Act went through.. I was the only person in the gallery, and was called upon to assist… there was no-one around. I walked out later into the Sydney night ..by myself..

Frankly, there should have been a bloody parade.

John Wardle, Sir, i doff my metaphorical hat to you, and this coming tuesday i will raise my actual glass.  On account of the fact i will be in another state on the actual day you can take a raincheck on that beer from me any time you like. The rest of you, you all owe him big time.

You can follow John on twitter or message him on Facebook if you need to try and work out the logistics of delivering that beer.

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 if you need a closer look.

Apparently news.com.au (of Herald Sun/ Daily Telegraph/ News Ltd fame) have bought the search term and are using it promote their online gallery of “Banksy’s Masterpieces: View some of artists Banksy’s most loved works online here.“

As i wrote mid last year of Melbourne’s complex relationship with it’s own street art scene:

The reality is that Melbourne’s graffiti is both highly popular and widely vilified. Tabloid frenzies, media beat-ups and scare campaigns push politicians towards draconian policy responses and self-evidently stupid statements. Few politicians are brave enough to acknowledge that much of anti-graffiti rhetoric comes from the same media outlets that regularly use street art in their photographs, feature it in their lifestyle lift-outs, or promote it on their travel shows.

I should probably have added something about praising its “masterpieces” to drive traffic to their web sites. And no, the irony is not lost on me that The Simpsons is on Fox which is also a news corp company.

I should point out that News aren’t alone in this. Many newspapers — including some i’ve contributed to —  have too been guilty of demonising street art in the news sections while praising or featuring it in the travel/ lifestyle/ culture sections. It’s just that this is an irresistibly obvious example.

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 note-to-self-ishness. It may also differ slightly from what was said at various points. It was hastily edited and reedited several times in transit. Still, if you want to know what i said this was more or less it…

I’m not yet sure whether I should have accepted the invitation to the Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

Presenting an argument against the privileged position of opera at the home of opera in Australia seems not so much a dangerous idea as simply dangerous.

As i was being led through the rabbit warren out the back and into my concrete dressing room with only one way in and one way out i couldn’t help but think it was all just a little foreboding.

I’ve watched enough TV to know that if you cross the sopranos on the their own turf there’s a fair chance you’ll get whacked.

Looking around this stage I’ve watched enough b-movie mysteries to pay particular attention to the many props and sandbags that could easily and “accidentally” fall from the ceiling.

The other reason I should perhaps have thought twice about accepting the invitation is that – as i hope will become a little clearer – my beef is not really with opera.

Contrary to what you might think my criticisms of opera have actually been reasonably sparing and reasonably specific.

Opera to me is not a problem but a symptom of one.

It is as an example of a wider problem that i have returned to it on a few occasions. Given we are in the opera house i can can see why there might have been the temptation from the FODI to ask me to revisit the topic in this forum at this time.

Still, there is something deeply amusing about the thought of presenting an argument about opera at the opera house. As you would expect in the context of a “Festival of Dangerous Ideas” there was a great desire on the organisers parts to make the argument sound as provocative as possible.

Lest anyone think that my intention was to inflame and outrage as much as humanly possible it might be worth going through some of the proposed titles that were originally proposed for this session…

Ruling Class Welfare: why subsidised opera is a scam

Upper Class Welfare: opera as a rort

Robbing Hoods: how opera robs from the poor and gives to the rich

The Undeserving Rich: how opera steals from the public purse

Opera Bludgers: pulling the plug on a dead artform

Contralto Con Artists: why is opera so special?

The Mezzo Sopranos: why opera subsidies are a criminal waste

While I was genuinely impressed with how many very talented former Daily Telegraph sub editors are on staff here at the opera house i had to reject all these titles because they all genuinely misrepresent my argument.

The Festival course loved all those titles because they were highly provocative and sufficiently dangerous to sell a lot of tickets.

I rejected them on the ground that they were unnecessarily inflammatory and that they would make everyone believe that I was running an unreconstructed class war argument and obsessed with destroying and deligitimising the very existence of opera in Australia.

I’m pleased to say that we have successfully charted a course where we have both managed to not sell a lot of tickets AND everyone is convinced that i am running an unreconstructed class war and obsessed with destroying a deligitimising the very existence of opera in Australia.

Of course I’m not entirely innocent here either…

While i will plead that am not obsessed with their destruction it is certainly true that I have made the odd snarky reference to the “covers bands” that soak up two thirds of our arts funding down the years and the immediate precursor to today’s talk was a piece that i wrote in my column in The Age in response to comments from the incoming director of Opera Australia Lyndon Terracini late last year.

Terracini had questioned the relevance of OA and suggested – quite rightly – that reasserting that would be one of his biggest challenges. I agreed and provocatively went a little further to suggest that given the uniquely privileged position of opera the argument was perhaps more urgent than he even he was acknowledging. Still, I write a different piece each week and have done so for several years. The role and relevance of Opera is a subject that i have seriously touched on half a dozen times and mostly as an example – my larger argument is not about opera.

My larger argument here is two fold.

One is that we seriously undervalue and under-invest in living original artists in this country

And the second, and interrelated one, is that there is a dangerous and growing discrepancy between where arts funding and policy attention being is directed and with the artforms that Australians actually value, attend and appreciate.

We are well overdue for a debate about those jarring discrepancies and i make no apologies for trying to start one.

As i have discovered as soon as i started to open my mouth within the arts community there is a very small constituency for the status quo.

It is hard to find anyone who doesn’t have a direct vested interest in the major performing arts companies – particularly the Opera and the Orchestras – that doesn’t think the system isn’t due for some sort overhaul.

So why am i using opera as an example? The simple reality is that Opera occupies a uniquely privileged position within the Australian arts landscape.

I’d encourage any of you to do as i recently did and take a look at the Australia Council arts grants.

According to the Australia Council web site one single Opera company last year received more funding from the Australia Council than SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY ONE applicants for all 6 of the Australia Council’s major artform boards combined.

From last years grants lists on the Australia Council web site in the 2009-10 financial year Opera Australia received $18.3 million. By contrast the Australia Council’s entire competitive funds for literature, music, theatre, dance, visual arts and inter-arts or cross artform projects combined gave out just $17.6 million in published grants for projects.

Before any of you jump on me I’m well aware that  published grants aren’t the entirety of arts funding.

But on even the most generous interpretation of the numbers the issue is not whether OA receives more Australia Council funding than all the nation’s writers, or all the nation’s non orchestral musicians, or all the nation’s dancers, or all the nation’s media artists or all the nation’s visual artists only whether they received more money than all those artists combined.

There are lies damned lies and statistics but at issue is not whether Opera Australia received more Australia Council money  than all the nation’s Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander artists and arts organisations – only whether they received closer to 3 times, ten times, or 50 times the amount.

Take a second to think about that. From a policy poking of view the cultural heritage that Australia sees the most urgent need to preserve, invest in and support is not an Indigenous Australian one but an imported European one.

You may disagree but from my point of view even putting aside the compelling social justice arguments, the economic and export value that Indigenous arts generate and the pricelessness of a uniquely Australian culture of Indigenous artists in music, literature and visual arts it is hard not to argue that Indigenous artists are simply a much better cultural investment.

They have achieved much more in provoking, nurturing and promoting a distinctive Australian culture at home and around the world than a dozen Opera Australia’s ever could.

My point is not that Opera is not as some earlier session titles might have proposed either illegitimate or a “criminal waste” but it is a startling benchmark of just how undervalued everything else is.

My apologies to Opera Australia but in the context of a debate about funding priorities it is difficult not to point out that there is a 500lb tenor in the room.

This is not an argument against opera but for everyone else – the thousands of artists who are outside the current system.

It is an argument that in a dynamic cultural world, within a finite arts budget every cent of money, and every minute of policy time, and every resource in kind that is spent cannot be done in ignorance of the harsh realities that are evident elsewhere in the arts.

It is an argument that those harsh realities and lost opportunities require the attention of policy makers if Australia is to truly embrace the many unique opportunities and possibilities that are being created by unique contemporary globally relevant Australian culture that is being presented with unprecedented opportunities and challenges by an  and nurtured by an era of rapid technological and cultural change.

*

At the core of the problem is that Australia has a two-track art world.

On one track are Major Performing Arts companies – the Australia Council’s flagship companies – with their full time salaried employees, marketing, PR and fundraising departments, well connected corporate boards and access to political and bureaucratic power.

Opera Australia is largest and most obvious example but the Symphony Orchestras and to a lesser extent to the comparatively leaner main stage theatre and dance companies are beneficiaries of this system too.

In the last financial year the 28 major performing arts companies received the best part of a hundred million dollars from the Australia Council.

On the other track are virtually all of Australia’s other artists and smaller companies – the many thousands of artists, projects and companies that scrapped it out for the for a fraction of that amount on offer to all the rest of Australia’s practitioners across theatre, music, literature, visual arts, music and dance boards and the thousands of unsuccessful applicants.

That is to say nothing the many more who are thwarted by the archaic definitions and inappropriate processes of a system that assumes that culture trickles down from the big companies and not up from living creative communities and individuals.

The fact that this is a two track world where the assumptions are so ingrained that a singe company’s resources can tower over much of the rest of the creative community in orders of magnitude approaching a thousand to one without being particularly remarked upon.

It is a world that condemns emerging sectors, artforms and communities outside major companies and arts centres to perpetual unsustainability and a parade of lost opportunities.

Most ominously it is also a world where the very legitimacy of arts funding buckles as the art forms that Australians value are marginalised at the expense of the privileged few.

Take music as an example. Australians love music, as the Australia Council’s own comprehensive survey More than bums on seats exclaims. It found that nearly two-thirds of Australians “participated” in music last year and more than half attended a live music event.

Slightly more than one in ten attended classical music, more than two in ten attended music theatre or cabaret, and more than four out of ten attended what the survey lumps together as “other live music” – a category that covers everything from pop to rock to country and dance.

Yet opera according to the same survey was actually the least the popular form of live music in Australia.

What then is the rationale then for the fact that operas and orchestras combined account for 98% of all music funding?

Yes Opera is expensive. Yes much other music is commercial and not in need of public support but the music that Australians appreciate goes a lot deeper than the top 40. It includes many genres and sub cultures like Opera where market failure makes it difficult to create and present high quality work to passionate Australian audiences.

Even at the nascent end of the commercial world it includes market failures from the death of suburban venues, to the viability of regional touring to the poker machines that are killing off live music venues in the inner cities that are of great concern to many and are surely worth more than 2% of arts funding?

My argument here is not that opera is undeserving of support. Only that it is not exclusively or disproportionately deserving of support. In this context opera is simply one of dozens of musical cultures or subcultures where market failure provides a valid claim to policy support and in some cases funding.

Opera may be very well subsidised, very expensive, very influential, very well connected, very Anglo, and very appealing to high incoming earning individuals but by any definition it is still a subculture – the days when it was a central and preeminent cultural form have long passed.

But there is an additional danger here – that is the legitimacy of the very idea of arts funding itself. I believe that one of the reasons why Australians don’t necessarily identify strongly with the idea of the funded arts is that the funded arts less and less identifies with Australians.

If i can offer up “Exhibit A” look no further than the language used routine within the arts sector and particularly within the funding agencies.

While the numbers and survey data unambiguously suggest that Australians cultural routines consist of a diverse smorgasbord of arts and cultural activities large and small, popular and niche, digital and analogue the arts community insists on perpetuating a false and frankly misleading dichotomy.

Routinely, it is the norm for artists and even the media to refer to the expensive and comparatively unpopular major performing arts companies that take up most of our arts budget as “mainstream” and to much of the music theatre, cabaret, and “other live music” that Australians attend and value in much greater numbers as the “fringe.”

The very fact that we are undertaking surveys of Australian culture where the most popular activity is what the organisation undertaking the survey categorises and lumps in together as “other” is as good an example as any the entire funding system has become tone deaf to the nuances and diversity of a dynamic living contemporary culture.

It may once have been enough to divide the music world into categories like orchestras, opera, cabaret and “other” but the reality is that the culture has moved on but the language and logic of the bureaucracy hasn’t moved with it.

*

For fear of opening myself up no another round of suggestions that i’m personally  ”bitter”, “contemptuous” and “disgusted” – all explanations I’ve heard recently for why I write and talk about these issues, i am going to risk providing a little personal context here.

I have been working “professionally” in the arts for about fifteen years. Those inverted commas are deliberate.

Almost all of that time has been on the slow track – often away from the major cities and almost always away from the 19th century and earlier artforms that provide the fixed immutable frame of reference for what does and doesn’t constitute “art”.

In all that time I have never worked on a project where there was a budget to actually pay the artists. The biggest subsidisers and sponsors of the arts in Australia are the artists. Contrary to popular perceptions most work day jobs and many work several to keep up what they do.

Far from the perception that they are pampered in my experience most artists are amongst the hardest working people that i know. They need to be. If they’re not they don’t last and the support systems to nurture them are few and far between.

Personally, ike most artists I have worked most of that time for scrappy if any pay in the arts while making an actual living from a variety of high and low profile full and part time day jobs – recently I’ve found writing provocative articles about the parlous state of arts and cultural priorities seems to fit the bill.

There are countless examples of the two-track art world but I can speak best from my own experience and there is a great example this very weekend.

While the Festival of Dangerous Ideas takes place in Sydney up the road in Newcastle the annual This Is Not Art Festival is on. You may or may not know about it but TINA is Australia’s largest media arts festival and last I looked it was Newcastle’s largest annual tourism event.

I founded the festival and ran for the first five years from 1998 to 2002 – I’m pleased to see that now that it is in it’s twelfth year it still brings together thousands of Australia’s and the worlds most talented young artists, media makers, and DIY creatives. I’m also pleased that most are mostly undeterred by the fact that that they are unfunded and obsessed enough to persevere and do it anyway.

Also in Newcastle this weekend the Renew Newcastle project – another a project that i am proud to have been involved in starting – will be hosting a series of showcase events.

I’m not sure if you know about that one either. There are about 150 empty buildings in the two main streets of Newcastle and over the last few years Renew Newcastle has taken over more than of them 30 of them and made them available to nearly 60 artists, creative businesses, and community groups to incubate their initiatives. It has succeeded not only as an arts project, as a community project but it has been responsible for a significant economic as well as cultural revival in dead parts of Newcastle’s city centre.

Contrary to any suggestion that i am “bitter” both of those projects have given me a satisfaction and passion that i suspect few others have had the privilege to experience. But pursuing them has been incredibly hard. They’ve cost me a fortune.

If you work on the fast track or only follow the art world through the prism of the Major Performing Arts Companies and major arts centres it may surprise you that lovely lovely lovely people at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas are paying me more to speak at the today than I earned in all my five years of running TINA or the first full year of establishing Renew Newcastle.

It will pay me more to write an essay and give a speech than any of those 60 projects that have helped revive Newcastle have received in financial support this year.

It will pay me more than many of the coordinators and critical staff of This Is Not Art will earn in for their work over the course of this full year.

It will pay more than I have paid almost all of the artists in any of the two thousand or so events, sessions, broadcasts, workshops, performances, exhibitions and events that I have organised in the last 15 years.

This is not to say that my hosts at the Sydney Opera House are being excessively generous, they are simply paying a decent rate commensurate with the time it has taken me to prepare and travel.

Very few artists get that and very few arts organisations are in any position to do that.

Of course, if you are from the slow track of the two-track art world, absolutely none of this will surprise you. Australia’s 44,000 professional artists earn a median income of just $7,000 a year from their creative work.

Many simply internalise the idea that there is no support.

Many routinely turn down career opportunities for the lack of a few thousand dollars, a program to apply to and a set of guidelines that fit them.

I have seen many phenomenally talented artists down the years who simply have given up or emigrated because from there is no funding, little recognition and – probably most galling of all – no policy support based on the 21st century reality of their work lives.

In 2010 the overwhelming majority of artists are simply out of sync with an archaic, top-heavy trickle down funding system based on the fundamental misunderstanding that culture comes not from the bottom up activities of the many but from privileged and well resourced position of the few.

*

As I said at the beginning this is not an argument against Opera.

It is not a question about the talent, dedication, commitment or quality of Australia’s opera performers, directors, the craftspeople and the people who work behind the scenes.

Defenders of the status quo take every opportunity to remind me that this shouldn’t be an either or argument and they’re right.

We don’t need to throw out our history, our major companies and our current support systems in order to support the work of living artists.

We don’t need to destroy our orchestras and opera companies. But neither can we improve it without a frank acknowledgement that the status quo is – as best as I can sum it up – shithouse, misguided and confused.

At the most basic level we are operating from assumptions about what culture is, where it comes from and who makes it that are hopelessly broken and out of date.

Let’s take it then as a starting premise that it isn’t an either or proposition, That isn’t opera and orchestras v. the rest of the creativity community. We can get there from here when the policy makers, administrators and leaders of the major companies begin seriously acknowledging the problems and limitations of the current system.

If we are going to have both we need to stop pretending that there isn’t a problem here or that some artists are incredibly worthy while the overwhelming majority aren’t worth a jot.

We need to commit to the idea of some kind of parity between the major companies and the many living, breathing original Australian artists across all forms that feed from the scraps from the table.

If we can commit ourselves to supporting Australia’s living artists in the same way that we honour the fine works of the great dead ones it need not be oppositional.

I will gladly begin by recognising that Opera has just as much claim to public support as everyone else and recognising that people working in Australia’s major performing arts companies have the same right to support as do artists in other fields.

I would ask that they in turn follow that argument through to its logical conclusion.

From there i would hope that would allow us to begin to make a genuine case to the whole of the Australian public for a well resourced policy and funding system that reflects all their values and not just a subset of them.

I believe that if we can reflect back to the public a system that embraces and supports the best of all of all their cultures and subcultures both old and new it will help not hinder the long term legitimacy of ALL arts funding and allow us to grow the resources both cash and in kind that we put into the pool to foster Australian creativity.

That is not an argument against opera but one for the very legitimacy of arts funding and cultural policy in Australia.

In the long term that may be crucial not just to the artists that are currently excluded but to keep the fat ladies to singing a little longer.

I appreciate the Australia Council have taken the time to provide some numbers of their own and I have asked the Australia Council for an actual breakdown of what goes into their numbers. They haven’t responded to that – I assume we may need to wait for their annual report before we see that. In the interim I’m going to have to do my best to explain why the two are different without access to that and they can correct me (i’m sure that they will!) if this explanation is wrong.

The main and most obvious difference is simply that we are looking at two different things. My original graph was entitled “Australia Council Grants 2009-10 financial year” and grants – as published on their web site – were literally what I have graphed. My original was a straight up graph of the published list of grants, how much they were  and where they went to. If you  do that yourself here you will get the numbers I have used and I don’t think the Australia Council are questioning that they are an accurate representation of those numbers.

The Australia Council graph above is titled “Australia Council Funding 2009 -10 Financial Year” and in the Australia Council’s words it “focuses on separate artform expenditure rather than just of artform boards, so the data also includes investments related to those artforms but from other Australia Council programs and initiatives beyond the boards.” In other words it includes a lot of stuff that isn’t on a “grants” list and that isn’t published in their “who we gave grants do” database. It also includes grants that weren’t divided by artform that i excluded. They, unlike me, have access to the resources and information to categorise them.

Without a breakdown its hard to tell what The Australia Council has included here. My guess is that they have included many things that are eminently reasonable to include but aren’t in the published grants on their web site because they weren’t approved in the last financial year. For example, funding to triennially funded organisations may have been approved last year and paid out this year would be a legitimate inclusion. Equally though it may include some more debatable figures such as funding that didn’t go to organisations that make art, administrative costs, marketing programs, conferences or any number of other things where a debate might be had about how to categorise them or whether to include them at all. I genuinely don’t know and wont  judge that without the raw numbers.

Unfortunately, and slightly frustratingly, a quick comparison between the two graphs is a little tricky. The Australia Council has straight out removed two key categories that i have singled out for discussion. The “Inter-Arts” and “Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Arts” boards were both examples i gave of where forms that don’t fit into our classical Euro centric arts priorities are severely under-resourced. While those are both published grant categories on the Australia Council web site they have been subsumed into other categories here. The Australia Council explain on their site (in response to a query from me) is that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Board last financial year invested $1.9 million across all artforms and the total expenditure by Council in Indigenous arts (including ATSIA) was $7.8 million. I assume that they get to this number by double counting figures that are elsewhere in this graph and i look forward to a chance to actually examine that.

So where does that leave us? Well, I’m not retreating from my argument. It remains the case that Opera Australia last year did receive more funding than all the grants given out by the 6 major artform boards. Go to the web site and you can also confirm that. It is also true that the combined funding of the 781 separate projects, organisations and individuals funded by all of those boards and published on the Australia Council web site add up to less than one grant to Opera Australia.

But yes, as the Australia Council points out they do support organisations, artists, and key sector bodies in ways that are over and above just grants and ways that aren’t through the boards. I’ve never disputed that. I’ll save the discussion about the relative shift away from grants to artists to programs for organisations and major companies for another day although it is a contentious issue that is often raised.

Back to the core issue though: Even taking these Australia Council’s “official” numbers as a starting point, does this actually look like a reasonable mix in the 21st century? The point remains that this is a two track arts system that is heavily, heavily biased towards a small number of companies and forms. In purple are a very small number of companies who share in a budget that is much, much, much larger than all the other artists in Australia combined. Opera Australia alone still received more than either all the Visual Artists and artsworkers, all the dancers and dance people, all the writers and literature organisations, all the cross art form projects, or all the other music. As far as i can tell no one disputes that.

For the last few months Ben Eltham and I have been rather gently pressing the case for a 21st century approach to cultural policy in Australia. It may have seen to some like a concerted campaign but has actually been a series of responses to commissions from others and some engagement with the resulting discussion. I thought i should probably try and summarise the various contributions in one post here.

Mid year we were commissioned by The Centre for Policy Development to write an essay for their pre election policy book (and e-book) More than Luck: Ideas Australia needs now. We wrote a chapter on Cultural Policy in Australia was very widely talked about. I’d encourage all of you to read it if you haven’t but the conclusions we came to were relative straight forward.

Specifically, we suggested that we need to:

1. Recognise that “cultural policy” is about more than funding for the arts.

2. Abandon the false divide between high art and popular culture.

3. Create a new cultural agency for contemporary Australian culture.

4. Cut the red-tape that affects culture.

5. Fund artists and production, not institutions.

Following on from that Ben and I wrote various other pieces of commentary and opinion summarising our arguments and attempting to further a debate. I wrote this piece, Has the Australia Council had its day, in my regular gig at The Age [observant readers will note the slight discrepancy between what the subs wrote at the top and the content of the piece], Ben wrote additional pieces at The Drum and Inside Story and most recently he has gone a step further and provocatively called for the abolition of the Australia Council over in Overland. I don’t actually go that far but i’ll save my thoughts on the future role of the Australia Council for a future post.

In response to our essays there has been something of a debate generated with contributions of varying levels of quality and insight. The most “official” came in the form of an essay by Richard Mills (the Director of West Australian Opera) that was commissioned and published by the Australia Council and also summarised in The Age that offer up a bizarre and gratuitous denunciation of new media as “”meretricious, self-serving claptrap” and went as far as to suggest that theatres and concert halls were full of the extraordinary while other artforms “can be done by any reasonably intelligent person with a modicum of application and training.” Well at least he suggested some are reasonably intelligent i guess. Still, why the Australia Council is commissioning essays that boast about defunding Australian art forms and go out of their way to insult Australian artists is slightly beyond me.

The Australian published something of a summary of the debate but didn’t talk to either Ben or I. They subsequently ran a correction from me pointing out that i wasn’t calling for the abolition of the Australia Council. A minor but fairly significant point i would have thought.

Meanwhile, apparently responding to a rumour that one article by two Melbourne writers and bloggers somehow constituted a major shift in government policy the heads of the MSO and the Australian Chamber Orchestra somehow managed to convince the ABC to run a prime time TV news report about an entirely fictional threat to their very existence.

Still, it hasn’t all been slightly insane. Fortunately Opera Victoria’s Richard Gill writing in The Age provided a sane and nuanced counterpoint to some of the noises coming from the classical music community.  There was also a critical but quality response from Christopher Madden at his artspolicies.org blog. Most recently Fee Plumley who runs the Australia Council’s excellent Arts in the Digital Era program chimed in with an excellent contribution on that program’s blog.

I could respond point by point to every comment and criticism but i think it’s best to let a lot of it pass. I do want to pick up on one thing though. It’s the mentality that it is Orchestras, Opera and Classical music under siege in Australia right now. Frankly, that’s either ignorant, disingenuous or a bare faced lie. As a simple look at the numbers reveals even after years of gently raising these issues opera and orchestras are by far the biggest recipients of Australia Council funds, they get 98% of all music funding, and they receive several times more Australia Council funding than every other artist in every other artform in Australia combined. If the directors of those companies can not respond to the idea that other artists in Australia are being shut out of a system that is stacked absurdly in their favour with a response other than insults, scare campaigns and offensive diatribes their position will become increasingly untenable.

There is a false argument being pedaled here,  that people like Ben and I are somehow suggesting that arts funding needs to be either/or and that we need to destroy the old to usher in the new. If as Kathy Keele, the CEO of the Australia Council suggests “It’s not either-or… it’s about doing it all” i wholeheartedly agree. I have never suggested anything more than we should resource living artists at least as well as we resource major companies and bring our artform definitions out of the 19th century.

But the status quo IS either/or. In Australia right now you can either  have a secure income working for a Major Performing Arts company OR you can’t have a secure income as an artist. It’s as simple as that. Any move to introduce more equitable support for living contemporary artists is not introducing an either/or dynamic it is actually remedying one.

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 image” to see the graph at full size.

The lime green figures are the allocations to the various artform boards of the Australia Council. These are the competitive boards that Australian artists can apply to for grants from the Australia Council to make new works. The purple figures are a breakdown of the “Major Performing Arts Board” funding by artform.

As you can see there is still massive discrepancy between the amounts of money that go into the major performing arts and how much goes into everything else combined.

My favourite little factoid: Opera Australia last year received more funding from the Australia Council than all the applicants for all 6 of the Australia Council’s major artform boards combined.  Opera Australia alone received $18.3 million. By contrast the Australia Council’s entire competitive funds for literature ($4.2m), music ($3.6m), theatre ($2.5m), dance ($1.8m) visual arts ($4.8m) and inter-arts or cross artform projects ($0.8m) combined totaled just $17.6 million. That’s one opera company receiving more than seven hundred and eighty one separate projects, organisations and individuals competitively funded across all those forms.

And the new media funding that is apparently all the rage if you believe the scare campaigns? Opera Australia’s budget could power the the “inter-arts” office for the next 23 years — there’s a pretty good chance new media will be heritage itself by then. Even if you add in the $386,000 from the positive but spread rather thinly “Arts in the digital era strategy” that reduces to about 16 years.

Seriously, next time someone suggests [as Richard Mills did in this essay commissioned and published by the Australia Council] that we are flirting with getting rid of the “old” to make way for the “new” laugh in their faces and point them to this graph.

[Some notes for the pedantic: I have used the figures from the Australia Council's online database of funding recipients. You can interrogate the database for yourself here. All the figures above are based on the last financial year (1 July 09 - 30th June 2010) and compare the Australia Council's artform board allocations to that of Major Performing Arts Fund. It does not include Key Organisations funding ($14.2m across all artforms), Arts Development ($5.7m - mostly for marketing across all artforms), or ArtStart ($2.5m - not categorised by artform). It's a usefully indicative breakdown but if you really want to interrogate the numbers look at the database yourself]

This post, including the graph is published under a creative commons license. You are free to reproduce and adapt it on your own site or publication with attribution.

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 Frontiers Australia. Rather belatedly I’m getting around to posting the audio of the event now.

My contribution focused on the some of the sheer stupidities inherent in this current proposal. The audio of my talk is here.

You can also listen to the other speakers at the forum’s web site.

It’s something i may get around to writing about myself in the near future, but in the mean time, here’s an open letter from John:

Open letter to the Government

Re: Cooper Report recommendation and its unintended consequences

I will never forget the day in 1990 when an art collector (then a partner in a leading law firm) dropped by my studio. He cheerfully told me that he had just bought a very good Colin McCahon painting at auction at one of the many forced sales of art collections by failed corporations. He had paid less for this painting by a famous dead artist than the typical asking price for a successful artist under 40 years of age. The next five years were economically disastrous  for living artists and gallerists aged between 30 and 40; many did not survive as practitioners. The legacy of those years is still evident today; there is a gap in the demographic of practising artists and gallerists aged 45 to 55 years of age.

The Cooper Report’s proposed forced sale of numerous art collections from SMSFs is destructive folly. The economic and community benefits that would justify this retrospective and draconian directive are very unclear. Artworks mostly have life spans measured in many decades, if not centuries. If these collections must be sold, why not over twenty or thirty years? What is the hurry? The measure is particularly likely to cause irreparable harm to the next generation of indigenous artists.

The mandated liquidation of existing collections will be at individually born cost, not only in terms of reduced superannuation benefits for those facing retirement but also sellers fees (minimum 10%), commissions paid to agents and so on. Or If the works are transferred to some sort of approved  ‘management’ there will be new, additional management costs. The retrospective nature of the directive makes the payment of these costs a Duty:  a hypothecated tax.

This recommendation flies in the face of the government’s commitment to and investment in the indigenous visual arts sector, particularly the art centres. The loss of confidence in the art market as a result of the uncertainty surrounding the report is already being felt. Artists’ incomes – especially for those artists who depend on the sale of their artworks for their incomes – are already being impacted upon.

Over the past few years government policy affecting the visual arts has, far too often, been shaped by advice and recommendations given by persons whose authority to speak about the realities of the sector are based solely in a lack of curiosity.

As reported in The Australian newspaper, Cooper review panelist Meg Heffron was quoted as saying that “the panel did not take the art sectors concerns into consideration because its task was to review the superannuation industry and not all the industries around it”. On the contrary, it is definitely the task of government to take the concerns of the whole community into consideration. I urge you to reconsider this uninformed and harmful recommendation as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely

John R Walker

Artist