marcus westbury

Earlier this year, the Federal Government called for submissions in response to their draft discussion paper on the forthcoming National Cultural Policy. Being quite time-deprived at the time i hastily cobbled together a response – somewhat compiled from other things that i written in the past and probably desperately in need of a good editor. [...]

[I've been incredibly slack at updating the blog of late, i put it down to travel, parenthood, and general need-to-make-a-livingness. However, that does leave me with a bit of a backlog of old scribblings to post here over the coming weeks. The piece below was originally in The Age on the 31st of January and [...]

Hand made Nick Cave, by Lucy of Newcastle. MEMO to anyone tempted to frame a cultural debate as a choice between “high art” and “popular culture”: don’t bother; you are missing the point. It’s not just that the terms are frustratingly polarising or that they frame the world as a simple hierarchy of quality based [...]

Another one of my pre-election pieces for The Age. I really have been slack in updating things here. THE perception at election time is that politicians can get ahead only by rolling out the pork barrel and spending up big. But while we’d all love more money for the arts, there are a lot of [...]

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” [...]

WHAT IS the largest cultural infrastructure project Australia has ever undertaken? If you guessed the Sydney Opera House or Federation Square, I’m afraid to inform you that you’re not even close. The largest piece of cultural infrastructure in Australian history is under construction even as we speak. A clue? It’s not a gallery, a theatre [...]

[Note: I am catching up with posting bits and pieces of writing that have not yet been posted here. This was actually published in The Age last November - preempting the recent events at The Tote and The Arthouse. Umm, told you so?] MELBOURNE does the small scale better than any other Australian city – [...]

LYNDON Terracini has been outspoken and surprisingly frank about the limitations of Australia’s major performing arts companies in recent weeks. The incoming Opera Australia artistic director has slammed Australia’s orchestras and opera companies as “conservative and predictable,” admitted that Melbourne has been poorly served by Opera Australia from Sydney and, most notably, has drawn attention [...]

In response to some recent posts and articles of mine about arts funding and cultural policy,  Nick Herd from the Australia Council pointed me to this comprehensive history of arts policy in Australia prepared by the Parliamentary Library. It’s very useful background reading for anyone thinking of putting in a submission to the National Cultural [...]

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 [...]