marcus westbury

I’ve been meaning to write a long essay about this for a while but stumbled at figuring out exactly who would publish it. So brain dump follows… One of the things that my friend, collaborator, enabler, and founding Renew Newcastle board member Craig Allchin has pointed out to me many times is that is that i used [...]

WHERE does culture actually come from? It’s a question that we don’t usually ask but it’s one with some major implications. We should ask it more often. Conversations with audiences, artists, creators and administrators have convinced me that our basic assumptions about culture are wrong. We mistake the major arts centres, theatres, festivals, galleries and [...]

I’ve been using the word “initiativist” recently to define my philosophical approach to culture. I used the term in my lecture in Newcastle the other night and attempted to sneak it into my column in The Age this week but it was removed by an overzealous sub-editor probably on account of it not being a [...]

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

A FRIEND of mine visited Melbourne for the first time in more than a decade last week. The last time he was here was in the early ’90s, in the middle of the last great recession to hit this city. The Melbourne he remembered was the one that was broke and broken. He’d heard about [...]