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.

The 1st-5th of October is the time to be in Newcastle. Renew Newcastle is working up a series of events that will take place over the This Is Not Art Festival weekend. We’ll be running tours, talking about and showing off the project for the hordes who converge in Newcastle over the weekend.

I’m really looking forward to it. It will be a convergence of two of the best things i’ve ever been associated with: Renew Newcastle and TINA and a chance to show the results of the Renew efforts to many of my friends who only tend to make it to Newcastle once a year.

If you’re making plans for TINA trying and make sure you get there in time for friday night.The friday night is shaping up to be quite a celebration of all that we’ve managed to achieve with Renew thus far. The Renew shops will be open, many of the galleries will be launching, and many special TINA, Electrofringe and NYWF events will be taking place in many of our venues and empty spaces we’ve managed to broker acces to. Sound Summit has organised for Seattle’s Tiny Vipers to play at our daggy 70s church headquarters – softly christening it as what may turn into a semi regular performace venue.

It’s funny to think that at TINA this time last year Marni Jackson (now Renew Newcastle’s General Manager but then the manager of TINA) did me the huge favour of squeezing a session about my highly specualtive plans to reinvigourate the city well after the program deadline had closed. It was a pivotal event in hindsight. I also managed to pin down while she was far too distracted to realise what she was getting in for somewhere in the heat of all the TINA work and get her to agree to “help out” when her commitments with TINA were over. I doubt either of us knew what we were getting in for. 12 months, 36 projects and 24 no longer empty buildings later it looks like it just might work.

I’ve just booked my accomodation for This Is Not Art in Newcastle and my advice to others who are thinking of doing the same is to get in early! TINA is Newcastle’s largest annual tourism event. By last week it had become tricky to find accomodation by the end of September it threatens to become impossible.

Also, if any of you journo, blogger, media maker types converging on Newcastle for TINA are interested in writing or making something about Renew don’t hesitate to drop Marni or myself a line.

A video looking back on the Creative Sydney fesitval that i did some of the programming work on. The festival took place in May and June and this is a nice wrap up. I’m glad that it acknowledges some of the tensions that were clearly apparent.

This apparently the last video from Jonathon Rogers’ excellent Make:Do series. An earlier one featured Renew Newcastle.  I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next.

Just a quick heads up that i am speaking at the Brisbane Ideas Festival on Friday of this week.

New Operating Systems for Creativity

New York arts worker Liz Slagus, arts commentator Marcus Westbury and Urban Informatics consultant Dan Hill discuss how technology and new media are rearranging our creative lives.

Liz, Dan and I are working together on setting up a major project called The Edge for the State Library of Queensland. I haven’t seen Liz speak before a crowd before but Dan (who is the man behind the awesome City of Sound blog) will inevitably have an awesome visual presentation while I will stumble through some barely prepared notes that will probably suck.

Anyhow, it’s on at: 6-7pm, Fri 27 March 2009 at the State Library of Queensland should you want to come along.

In 2006 I directed my second and last Next Wave Festival.

The festival was themed Empire Games and coincided with the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. In parallel Next Wave presented a major Program of Festival Melbourne2006, the cultural program of the Commonwealth Games.

Empire Games, as theme, was both an ironic nod to the Commonwealth Games’ own history and a way to position the festival at the cutting edge of both art form development and contemporary cultural issues. Work for this festival embraced the detail of the city – alleyways, outdoor spaces, bars and more conventional arts settings, as well as new and innovative presentation in regional centres.

For more information about how Next Wave has kicked on without me visit the Next Wave web site.

In 2004 I took on the gig of Artistic Director and of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival.

Next Wave is Australia’s leading festival whose brief is to develop the works of young emerging artists and one of Victoria’s handful of major festivals. Next Wave involved coordinating projects involving Australia’s best young artists and most of Victoria’s leading arts institutions.

Theme for the 2004 Festival was Unpopular Culture. The festival consciously moved away from Melbourne’s flashy arts infrastructure and embraced Melbourne’s inner-city laneways, old Dojos and empty buildings. 600 artists participated in 90 projects that attracted massive audiences and showed off the talent of a new generation of Next Wave participants.

For more information about what Next Wave is up to now visit the Next Wave web site.

Free Play is Australia’s largest independent computer game developer’s event. It took place for the first time in 2004 in a low fi converted former Karate dojo in inner city Melbourne before growing up and moving into the Australian Centre for the Moving Image where it took place again in 2005 and 2007. Free Play caters for independent and DIY game developers, creatively frustrated professionals, game development students, digital artists and new media academics.

Free Play is the game equivalent of hand-held, no budget, lo-fi, 4-track DIY and it’s probably one of the best and most vibrant areas of Australian culture. Free Play began as the result of a shared frustration with Katharine Neil about the inability of independent voices to be taken seriously and gain traction in both the games industry and Australian culture more generally. We put our heads together and came up with the concept of an event that continues to this day.

This Is Not Art (or TINA as it affectionately known) was the ultimate evolution of the event that began life as the National Young Writers’ Festival. Between 1998 and 2002 TINA evolved from a small, underfunded regional cultural festival into one of Australia’s most distinctive and most significant cultural events.

This Is Not Art has variously been comprised of the National Young Writers Festival, Electrofringe, Sound Summit, The National Student Media Conference and Critical Animals and has grown over the years to become Newcastle’s largest annual tourism event. This Is Not Art provides workshops, panels, performances, speakers and exhibitions on a wide variety of frivolous and important topics.

According to Wikipedia, people who have appeared at TINA over the years include Kevin Blechdom, Sage Francis, Cold Cut, The Light Surgeons, Caribou, Concord Dawn, Mad Professor, anticon., Fat Cat Records, b(if)tek, The Herd, Hrvatski, Thomas Frank, John Safran, Stephen Mayne, Margo Kingston, Nasenbluten, and many more. Although i am pretty confident i could come up with a better and much more comprehensive list when I get some spare time.

Any suggestions for TINA highlights over the years list are welcome via the comments.

The first National Young Writers Festival was designed to be a writers’ festival with a different dynamic and value set. It aimed to value writing and publishing outside the literary mainstream of the capital city literature festivals. The festival had a strong emphasis of zine makers, self publishers, troublemakers and web publishers (long before anyone coined the term bloggers). It also had a healthy dose of critical non-fiction and literary outsiders.

The festival’s rather conservative and boring name was chosen because it was the most conservative and boring name I could think of for what was always intended to be a very non-conservative events. The festival was organised on about $6,000 scrounged from the NSW Ministry for the Arts for “workshops” and $10,000 from the Australia Council that was technically supposed to be spent on a web site (that never really eventuated).

Some quotes from the time rediscovered in my digging around:

“The National Young Writers Festival is the Dean Martin of Australian literary festivals — savvy, elegant, hip and extremely well lubricated.”
| Catherine Lumby

“when the organisers of the other, more staid festivals finally realise what happened in Newcastle last year, it will change the face of these sorts of events throughout Australia.”
| Linda Jaivin

“fun, challenging, different, unexpected and smart”
| Sophie Cunningham

“I had such a top time at that I started to bleed from the eyeballs. The panels were cool, the audience really clued in and I liked the way so much of it seemed to happen in pubs. Or was that just me?”
| John Birmingham

“if you have a sneaking suspicion that there is actually some interesting creative stuff going on somewhere, then look no further than Newcastle and the young writer’s festival!”
| Matthew Arnison

“Don’t think, just go!”
| Matthew Reilly

“full of collaborative ideas, productive argument and energy. It’s unique in Australia.”
| Bernard Cohen

“at lit fests i usually sit near the door so i can exit as soon as the often excrutiating question time starts, but audience interaction at the NYWF went far beyond the usual “do you work with pencil or pc?” Audiences were fearless in that they weren’t averse to a little confrontation”
| Dallas McMaugh, The Australia Council

“I’ll definitely haul buns there again this year for a couple of days, and bring some more people with me.”
| Susan Burchill, Channel V

“The best little writer’s festival on the continent.”
| McKenzie Wark

“the best writer’s festival held in Australia… There’s just no sign of that syndrome you get at the mainstream festivals, where you get the feeling writers are merely going through the motions, saying the same things they’ve said dozens of times before. At Newcastle the audiences simply won’t put up with it.”
| Mark Davis

A decade later and the National Young Writers Festival is still going strong. It is still plucky, provocative, under-funded and yet it has somehow evolved into what some might actually call an institution. The festival will be celebrating it’s tenth birthday in 2008 and it has spawned the much larger multi headed media monster that it is This Is Not Art. It remains my favourite weekend of the year.

I recently dredged up an old promotional list of participants that included KATHY BAIL, ELISA BERG, MELITA BERNDT, JAMES BRADLEY, BERNARD COHEN, ROSIE CROSS, SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM, JANE CURTIS, HELEN DARVILE, MARK DAVIS, MILISSA DEITZ, CRAIG GARRETT, SEAN HEALY, DEAN KILEY, CATHARINE LUMBY, MARDI McCONNOCHIE, MARK MORDUE, MATTHEW THOMPSON and McKENZIE WARK. You can use google to find out what those people are all doing now or have a look at this old pre-promotional list of participants to find out what they were all doing then.

Also, you can visit The National Young Writers Festival web site for more information about what it became when it grew up.

LOUD was Australia’s first national “Media Festival of Youth Culture and the Arts.” It took place across print, television, radio and online way back in January 1998. I was the person responsible for all the Internet projects including a collaborative online magazine and an online short film festival that brought the big wigs out from Real Media in the United States because, “no one has ever done anything like this before.”

Back in 1998, the LOUD web site was described by The Sydney Morning Herald as “pixel for pixel, the LOUD site is as good as anything that has been achieved on the Web in Australia, and probably better. It crackles with life, showering sparks of creativity in all directions.” Of course, today it just looks incredibly dated..