When I was young and living in Perth there was a great deal of lively amateur theatre. There were a great many private art galleries and a lively musical life. We were proud to be the most isolated capital city in the world; and while we accepted without question that London was the hub of the universe, in the meantime we made our own world. We were self-reliant and I believe reasonably content. We had our own visual artists; but in other fields taste was determined by others. We did not have our own playwrights. Our composers' work was only patronisingly received. Our writers were barely acknowledged by the literary world. We did not know what it was to see ourselves interpreted on the page and on the stage.

Nevertheless, those memories of amateur music and theatre have stayed with me over the 30 years in which I observed the advances in the arts under the tutelage of the Australia Council. The pursuit of excellence, of creating something of our own and yet of 'world standards', has been the aim from the start and without question subsidy has wrought a transformation. We have theatres, orchestras and ensembles of outstanding quality; remarkable public and private galleries; a healthy book publishing industry; impressive training schools; a film and television industry; internationally-acclaimed dancers, rock groups, novelists and film stars. So what more do we want?

Two things: I believe in the tumult of change we have lost sight of community, of the reasons we once believed making the arts was important: that the pursuit of excellence, by its nature, has divided the arts from everyday life - and, incidentally, from the universities as part of that life; and I believe that in the pursuit of quality product the orthodox artforms have incrementally gained the high ground at the expense of innovation and investment in the future. The growth and career of the artist has been left out of the equation. Worse, in some quarters their working conditions suggest they are seen as no more than pabulum for production values.

I believe that after 30 years of subsidy only a handful of performing artists in theatre, dance and music, have control over their careers; only a handful can build their careers the way any other professional does - by seeking job opportunities, initiating new ventures, demanding reward for added value. Further, that among those at the top today we have virtually no spokesmen and women, no revered figures who engage actively with public issues and speak for their profession. No noted non-Aboriginal artists are publicly engaged in the reconciliation movement; and only a handful have gone public on the Republic. The press do not ask their views about the effects of the GST on the self-employed; on the ethics of radio hosts or the aesthetics of a new city development. The press and the artists themselves have colluded in this: this assumption that artists have no reality - indeed no worth - beyond celebrity.

Again I except from this my Aboriginal colleagues. Prominence has imposed upon them the responsibility to speak for their wider community; and few have remained in the profession at the expense of that community. Those I remember from the '70s became public servants, land council leaders, health and cultural workers. The confidence which speaking other's words in public taught them, also showed them how to express their own. And that such expression is possible, even for the underprivileged. Our best orators in Australia today are largely Aboriginal.

Aboriginal artists have demanded their rights from government; but for white artists the existence of the Australia Council has created a climate of dependence, bounded by guidelines which conspire against individual artists entering public controversy; or revealing the reality of their lives. The guidelines themselves, which have continued to set at a premium the young, the new and the correct, have discounted the contribution of the mature artist and left those in the middle-age without recourse.

The ABC's John Cleary has coined a phrase to describe this condition. He calls it the Pre-emptive Buckle. The occasion was a discussion with Rev. Tim Costello about the rise of gambling addiction in Victoria and his perception that the charities now dealing with the problem had earlier failed to oppose government-supported gambling for fear of losing their subsidies. It was, said Cleary, a pre-emptive buckle. I believe that 30 years of subsidy has brought about a similar genuflexion in the arts' way of thinking: I think it is time for a moratorium.

Nobody but I, it seems, thinks this situation is odd, though most agree it is debilitating. But nobody under 40, as I keep reminding people, remembers life before the Australia Council. Or, as it was called in the first instance, the Australian Council for the Arts.

No one at the outset wanted this dependency. The aims were creative freedom for the artist, innovation, excellence and public accessibility. It was to be our Australia Council, to stand beside us, not above us. I don't think for a moment that the founders imagined that the companies being funded would accrue larger and larger debts; or that in 30 years morale and risk-taking would be at such a low level. So I have been retracing these beginnings to try to see what went wrong. The answer is surprisingly simple, in retrospect. Too narrow a track was set.

• In pursuit of 'professionalism' that healthy amateur culture which I remember, was discarded;
• the provision of subsidy to new competitors drove the commercial theatre to bankruptcy;
• the early support for research and development sought by the founders from universities was eroded by ill-run residencies and mutual distrust;
• the politics of subsidy inevitably ensured that the product became the measure of progress, not the arduous process of artistic development
• no national cultural policy was drawn up which took account of all the aspects of cultural life;
• no industrial infrastructure was built to support the artist from youth to age.

So let me tell you some history. In 1968 I was the national theatre critic of the Australian. I remind you of the word 'national' because when I took the job in 1967 it was a suitable part-time occupation for a journalist with two young children to cover the professional theatre around the whole of Australia. I wrote two columns a week which appeared, I also remind you, on the leader page. There was no arts page at that time. The arts, as much as there was, was accepted as being part of life. I travelled interstate once every three or four weeks and my columns carried news, reviews and debate. Similar commentary appeared regularly on art, music and film.

In 1967-8 the debate was the Gorton Government's decision to establish an Australian Council for the Arts to develop opera, ballet and theatre. Other arts were already supported by the Commonwealth Literary Fund, the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, the Committee for Commonwealth Assistance to Australian Composers. Exhilaration mixed with scepticism characterised the responses; the worst fears were thought to have been realised when Dr H.C. Coombs was appointed chairman and convenor.

Dr Coombs, who retired as Chairman of the Reserve Bank to undertake this venture, is one of the iconic figures in the history of fiscal policy, Aboriginal reconciliation and the arts, and was, of course, a distinguished alumnus of this university. However, at that time he had been badly damaged by the disrepute of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, our first funding body which he had founded in 1954; the fear was that the lessons of history would be repeated. The announcement of the first Council - a conservative group of eight, mainly academics and politicians - only confirmed this. Coombs was, however, a man of goodwill, altruism and determination; and he had the ear of government. Federal subsidy for the arts would never have been achieved without him.

In October 1968 he invited me to join an interim Drama Committee to make a report recommending the direction the Council should take. At that time the staff consisted of the appointed chairman, the newly-appointed executive officer, Dr Jean Battersby, and a couple of seconded public servants. Patricia Rolfe from the Bulletin was also invited and I suspect that Dr Coombs, being a pragmatist, thought he'd rather have us critics inside the tent than outside. In the event we were ineffective both in direction and criticism and I have not been invited onto such a board since.

At our first meeting in October we debated the question of 'raise or spread', i.e. to provide substantial funds to a few privileged groups in order to show visible progress rapidly; or to spread the money among the existing groups for the purpose of upgrading them by degrees. The total sum at that time was $1.4 million. We voted unanimously for the former and considered the stages by which this might by achieved; but were pre-empted by the announcement in December that the bulk of the funding would go to the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Old Tote Theatre Company. A small amount was set aside for 'special projects'. Worse, dispensation of these funds would be undertaken by the MTC, the Old Tote and the Elizabethan Theatre Trust. The 'deadly theatre' we had so hoped to escape from had triumphed again. COLD RAGE IN THE THEATRE stormed the headlines.

The pre-eminent politicians of the theatre at that time were two Englishmen of naval origins and strong links to Dr Coombs and the Elizabethan Theatre Trust: John Sumner of the MTC and Professor Robert Quentin of the Old Tote. My documents show that all the decisions were made and announced long before our report was submitted; and that there was widely dissenting opinion among the individual members of our committee.

To do Dr Coombs justice, it was clearly essential to the survival of his scheming that the first government grant be dispensed and show demonstrable results before 30 June 1969. A further election was looming and in fact occurred in October. The Council had no infrastructure for handling money and he needed the help of people with experience - there were not many to choose from at that time.

'It seems preferable', he had said at the 1968 Adelaide Festival,

that the Council should be formed from persons of known widely-ranging interest in the arts. This does not preclude practitioners but the essential requirements are: first, a wide and discriminating interest in the arts; second, an understanding of the problems associated with the support of the arts; and third, a capacity to persuade government. I take this to be one of the main functions of the Council: to act as an advocate for the arts and an influence on government ways of thinking. I do not think that a practitioner is necessarily the best advocate.

It is interesting that he makes such a point of advocacy; and indeed the arts community were pressing hard for open government; but from the start the Council determined not to enter into correspondence with the press and its constituency or to raise its voice in any other language than that of the public servant; and has continued in that policy to this day.

The Coalition won the election and plans continued reasonably smoothly until Prime Minister Gorton was replaced by William McMahon. But these early decisions set a pattern which has been followed, I believe, to this day. Policy and planning continued to be pre-empted by politics. Gough Whitlam's failure to consult before issuing his magisterial proclamation in January 1973, that all the arts funding bodies would be combined into a statutory body called the Australia Council, caused an even greater storm, particularly from those eminent artists who had been active in the campaign to bring Labor to power.

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