But to return to those early days. In considering the Australian theatre as it was then, we on the Drama Committee were allowed by Dr Coombs to include neither the amateur theatre nor the commercial theatre. The consequence was that a strong culture of Little Theatres, as they were called, actor-managers' theatres using amateur actors, was lost.

I'd like to take a moment to tell you something of the honourable history of these theatres, of which there were many in our major cities. In the late '20s when the Depression struck, together with talkies and entertainment tax, most forms of live entertainment went out of business. In Sydney, of 16 commercial theatres only two remained by 1935. All over the country actors thrown out of work began to set up speech and drama studios with ancillary small theatres. By that time wider travel and the arrival of radio in the 1920s, had begun to make correct speech something of an issue for the upwardly mobile, an idea encouraged by this enterprising new crop of elocution teachers.

More importantly, these studios provided not only training in rounded vowels but opportunities for playwrights, scene designers and above all directors. The position of the director as we know it today derives from these studios. The director was the professional; his or hers (there were many hers) was the vision; and many directors were both skilled and learned in their craft. They were there to tutor their cast, to teach them every step and every inflection. From being a life of entertainment, acting became a serious investigation; and the actors very much dependent upon the theories promulgated by the directors. It was really not until the late 1970s that actors in the new subsidised theatre began to achieve a level of independence in the interpretation of their role. Now in the '90s the wheel has turned: directors have again reasserted their status as custodians of the personal vision.

These early theatres were Australia's training ground. And because they were held together not by commercial imperatives but by a common belief in the civilising influence of good theatre, they were also quick to adapt the avant-garde social theories of Europe and America to the Australian stage. From Europe in the '30s came the works of Chekhov, Stanislavski and Meyerhold; and from the United States the socialist Federal Theatre and the Living Newspaper. This was still the picture when I left Perth in 1965. Furthermore it was those principles, held by the public servants who joined the Canberra Repertory Society, that made their mark on Coombs and his associates when they conspired to create first the Trust and then the Australia Council.

And, of course, it is those same principles that have driven the Australia Council: given it in Prime Minister Whitlam's terms 'a twofold objective - the pursuit of excellence and the spread of interest and participation'. This would seem to be an uncomplicated aim; one we all believe we would know how to achieve. All along the way, however, self-censorship, ideologies and the shifting guidelines covering what is 'excellence'; and what is 'innovation' have conspired to prevent the quiet, steady progress of artistic practice.

The first thing the guidelines did was kill the culture that created the Australia Council. All those actor-managers who so much believed in best practice and disdained the commercial, found themselves ineligible for subsidy. To qualify, a company had to have a board of worthy citizens and pay actors at least the minimum wage laid down by Actors' Equity. Rehearsal pay was also required. Many theatres attempted this but failed in competition with the more handsomely resourced companies; and so we lost our avant-garde. At the other extreme the commercial theatre also died. J.C. Williamson's Ltd, a century old in 1976, unsuccessfully sought support through an Industries Assistance Inquiry and went into liquidation. As it stood JCW deserved its end because it had lost touch with its patrons; but a more enlightened government agency would have seen that as owner of the largest theatre chain in the world JCW was providing a valued facility to a new band of entrepreneurs just starting out. Instead it took another fifteen years and the assets of Cameron Mackintosh to return the commercial theatre to its former strength.

Neither of these forms, neither the Little Theatres nor JCW, was primarily about excellence; but they were about active participation and accessibility. They provided the audience base upon which to build. People have a hundred reasons for choosing to go to a play or a concert and these reasons are more to do with sustaining a social life than about sustaining artistic standards.

The Nugent report on the major arts organisations makes a reflection on this in admitting they have lost the audience base; that today's audiences are more worldly, better informed, have more diverse interests and much more choice in entertainment than 30 years ago. It does not, however, show any recognition of the huge cultural changes that have taken place and their influence upon social behaviour and musical taste.

A third element that lost out was the university campuses. In my day the universities were the leaders of cultural progress. In Perth it was the University which built theatres, encouraged performance and became the home of the Festival of Perth. Similarly the Sydney University Dramatic Society, now over 100 years old, contributed many of the great names in our theatre. In Melbourne what was the Secondary Teachers College in Carlton spawned not only the Australian Performing Group and the Victorian College of the Arts but a new kind of actor-based performance which has changed our expectations of theatre. The University of Queensland was famous for the political satire of the Popular Theatre Troupe and for exploring touring in that expansive state. In 1968 the universities and their offshoots were demonstrably the leaders of artistic thought.

Dr Coombs, however, was keen to involve the universities in development programs and proposed residencies and other fellowships. But the early attempts were not successful on either side and the proliferation of creative arts courses since the '60s has done little to break down the barriers of suspicion between the profession and the theatre. Despite this, and in part because of the amalgamation of universities with training schools, theatre studies have proliferated. The older ones have turned inward into performance theory; the younger ones have become training academies. But the uneasiness about where their graduates stand in making a career, remains. Music has done better: our conservatoria range from the conservative to the avant-garde but they are all centrally connected to the practice of music today.

Meanwhile in the '70s, a new kind of alternative theatre, the young lions, as they were called, and almost all university-educated, quickly replaced the old-fashioned little theatres. So we did not miss the old guard too much. They were set in their ways and this was revolution. It was a time of the first moon landing; of anti-Vietnam moratoria; the arrival of the Pill; of anti-censorship street battles, of new beginnings of a film industry. As Wordsworth said of another revolution:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
And to be young was very heaven.

Nevertheless, revolutions have their consequences. In 1973-74 the artist Clifton Pugh with the Victorian Labor Arts Policy Committee and later Arts Action, railed against the new Labor Government's betrayal of democratic principles and the arts policy drawn up prior to the election. Once more calls for a proper examination of artists' needs was pre-empted by a hasty report to the Prime Minister which set in stone the aims of the Australia Council - though the pain was somewhat assuaged by a tripling of the Council's budget. Furious debate then raged about the composition of the various boards, about peer assessment and the content of the Australia Council Bill. Arts Action produced a discussion paper in 1974 which said of the culture debate:

Conventional definitions have long been with us and are essentially bound up with aspirations towards the 'excellent', the proven edifices which the middle class of this and other countries understand, own and occupy. To that group, the 'excellent' means formalism, historical acceptance and sheer gloss. The ALP should be pursuing not 'excellence' in this sense, since it is there to be found already, but sufficient variety of artistic expression to allow even the most socially and economically disadvantaged of our community access to enjoy and criticise. Within those parts, excellence is to be found, the elite are not its custodians.

This was probably the last attempt to argue about the arts in their own language. By 1975 we were exhausted, by the expansion of enterprise and by the politics of survival. One key figure, Robin Lovejoy, had resigned the previous year as director of the Old Tote. My comments on his departure were prescient:

[Mr Lovejoy's] problem, and that of all the regional theatre companies, has been that of holding to, or even initiating, plans for development and consolidation in the face of the overwhelming day-to-day task of keeping the house in order...expansion in any business dictates its own momentum. The danger point soon comes at which the organisation outgrows the working capacity of its founder and that is the point at which a structure devised by far-seeing policy is most needed.

The Old Tote went into liquidation five years later. That problem of exponential growth, together with the short-term planning enforced by annual funding applications and the pressure not to be 'commercial' has been at the root of most such downfalls.

In July 1975 a Senate Inquiry was established to 'ensure that the Australia Council and the Board properly and effectively carry our their task of overall promotion of the arts in Australia'. And in November the Labor Government was peremptorily dismissed.

There followed a period of financial accountability. By 1979 the publisher Peter Ryan in The Age was inveighing against 'the subsidised scribblers' , quoting A.D. Hope as expressing 'disappointment and surprise at the extraordinary creations being conjured up and served to us as serious writing by the aid of the Literature Board'. In 1981 the major companies were cut by 20 per cent and eight small companies had their funding withdrawn altogether. Part of that funding was later restored but of these theatres only Sydney's Ensemble Theatre survives today. BLEAK FUTURE FOR THE ARTS, headlined The Age. Direct appeal to government was more profitable. The National Film and Television School and the National Institute of Dramatic Art both received the means to build and maintain handsome new complexes; the Australian Opera and Ballet and the two Trust orchestras marched to Canberra and achieved direct-line funding and a rise of 10 per cent.

By now the business men and women were moving in and meeting government on its own terms. The Australian Ballet went on strike over relations with management. In 1982 Timothy Pascoe, arts business adviser and former director of the Liberal Party, became executive chairman and set about 'restructuring' the Council. In 1983 Bob Hawke's Labor Government took office but did not replicate Whitlam's largesse. In 1984 Professor Di Yerbury began her stormy incumbency as peacemaker, with Donald Horne as Chair. Concern at the major organisation's expansion led to the short-lived introduction of ceiling funding. On 11 June the Sydney Morning Herald editorial reported on 'voices of alarm' by the major theatre bodies that

the Australia Council, in line with the arts policy of the Federal Government, will shift its funding away from the traditional areas to 'community arts'. This fear was apparently confirmed recently when the Melbourne Theatre Company ...had its funds reduced by 21 per cent...the awful spectre has arisen of companies like the Australian Ballet or the Australian Opera being forced to the wall, while money is poured into face-painting competitions held in municipal car parks.

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