In this melee quiet artistic practice had no chance.

The Council's major problem has always been that of being accountable to government. The freedom of the late 60s with its emphasis on the quality of life created a climate out of which idealistic initiatives like the Australia Council could be born; but it was a short-lived flowering. Mutual incomprehension confronted the arts community the moment the first Arts Minister was appointed by Prime Minister McMahon, a last-minute act which led to the ill-fated Peter Howson being dubbed the Minister for Odds and Sods and a Pain in the Arts

Explaining the funding of artistic practice to the unsympathetic ears of government became the unhappy task of the executive officer, Dr Jean Battersby, and as Justin Macdonnell has vividly outlined in his book Arts, Minister? there were ministers who took no interest, those who took too much interest; and those who just wanted to meet the actresses.² But they all had the same problem, that Cabinet was not concerned with artistic practice; if public money was to be invested, then they wanted results. ARTISTS ON THE GRAVY TRAIN became the tabloid response to the inevitable disputes between the Council and its constituency.

The 1980s saw the word 'industry' promoted in response to the criticism and began to present a case for the arts based on its contribution to employment, the quality of Australian life, the film industry, tourism and export,supported by appropriate data. It was an effective move in the short term but finally only confirmed the values of the 'economic fundamentalists', as Donald Horne called them, and left the arts open to be judged by those values. That was the dilemma: we now had Coombs' 'persons of known...interest in the arts' and the 'capacity to persuade government' but they found themselves attempting to find concrete terms in which to defend the abstract, forced into talking about civilised life in the language of performance indicators and asset management.

This idea of material product has dogged the Council from the outset. All the public statements, inquiries, reports, that I can remember - even the 'visionary' Creative Nation document released by Paul Keating in 1994 - have been studies in the tangible, such as income and popularity. They are partial views from the consumer's viewpoint: policies to achieve 'excellent' product; money provided in pockets, according to current need. It is no wonder that in every debate over funding and innovation the 'proven edifices' of orthodoxy, as Arts Action called them in 1974, have become more and more entrenched. For all his achievement, Dr Coombs' weakness was that he was not in the business. He was neither an artist nor an entrepreneur; he was a consumer; and he wanted the arts to make him happy. Not long before he died, he was at a celebration in the garden of the Myer family home in Toorak, surrounded by musicians and dancers. Someone asked him why he had done so much for the arts. 'When you look like me', he said humbly, 'you need to have beauty about you.'

In 1986 a genuine attempt was made to increase accessibility, downsize the Council, and reduce the drain on the public purse by encouraging better administration. This was a parliamentary inquiry into Commonwealth assistance to the arts chaired by Leo McLeay. It had virtues, the chief of which was that for the first time it took into account the whole of government's involvement. 'The Council', he wrote in a book on the report 'is by no means the only form of government involvement in the arts. Council funding represents about 6% of government cultural funding in Australia; perhaps 20% of government arts spending.'³

The report, quaintly titled 'Patronage, Power and the Muse' - perhaps a kindly attempt by Parliament to adopt the other side's language - made many resolutions, some of which (like triennial funding for major organisations) were implemented; but the argument fell apart on interpretation. While its motives were very much in line with the Arts Action paper of 1974, its resolutions were industry-based, urging means for developing potentially profitable sectors, like the recording industry. The Committee argued 'that the Council's proper field of responsibility is the subsidised arts. With limited exceptions, other, much larger, areas of cultural development are the province of other agencies.' The implication was that, in the scheme of things, the 'subsidised arts' weren't doing much for the economy. Without recognition of due process we can arrive no other conclusion.

Nevertheless, I wish at the time I had paid more attention to that figure of 6 per cent. There is worth in the idea that the Council stop viewing its constituency as the 'subsidised arts' and take account, as the McLeay report did, of all levels of creativity; and to see the artist's development as the most important component in building a pyramid, of which participation is the base and excellence is the peak. For a start we need to recognise and respect the contribution made to the quality of audiences by wide participation at the grass roots - in school drama, music and dance; in the amateur festivals; and in the many pro-am co-operatives that survive as long as their energies last; in the daily practice for pleasure; in creation and conversation on the web; in the purchase of CDs, in the enjoyment of radio, TV, concerts and film. All this is not about excellence but about a hundred other things, of which participation in the common element. Then for the improvement of skills we need training and we do have fine schools in every state

At the next level in our pyramid we need a good look at the sources of employment at the end of the '90s. We need small ensembles of every kind: avant-garde, popular and classical to give our performers steady practice. We need major production houses for legitimate theatre, classical and popular music; and a circuit of commercial entertainment; and we need distribution mechanisms both nationally and globally. And finally we need national and international stars. Ancillary to these we need a healthy film, recording and television industry; and academic practitioners to undertake research and development and provide the background for history and criticism.

But more than that, at this level we need to see how each can advantage the other, how the new digital technologies might overcome our isolation; how training in the arts might assist industry in changing its thinking in the conduct of industrial relations, to see the consequences of short-term planning, the advantages of a better environment. And most of all we need proper recognition of how the huge cultural changes, nationally and globally, have changed the way people think about the arts. And about 'excellence'.

A talk by an American educationist called Harold Taylor years ago has remained in my mind. 'Anyone can learn the technology', said. 'Anyone can find out how to build a highway. But it is the artist who will ask the questions: Where will the highway take us? Who will be displaced by the highway? And what will the ability to reach its end in half the time contribute to the sum of human happiness?' In the present age, when we are drowned in choice and information overload, when values are seen as relative and territories are jealously guarded, we need the humane, discriminating voice, the one that upholds moral, ethical, spiritual and aesthetic values as basic to human happiness, to speak out loudly on our behalf.

When we look at the structure of the performing arts this way, like a pyramid, the gap in the framework becomes obvious, as do the divisions that have come to exist between one section and another. We can see how artists are caught in the gulf between training school and the elite heights. The structure is simply not there. Art is divided from commerce; innovation is frustrated by bureaucratic constraints. We make big investments in first performances that are thereafter confined to history. We have recordings that cannot find distribution; we have writers and researchers languishing because they not fit the guidelines; we have companies and institutions trapped on a path not of their own making because they are loaded with debt and not their own masters. We need to find means outside the 6-per-cent Australia Council to overcome the barriers of status and build a structure within which we all can participate. We need a national cultural industrial policy.

Julian Meyrick, in the June issue of The Australian's Review of Books, documented the demoralised state of fringe theatre and called for urgent attention to 'the position of pro-am theatres, that intermediate layer of ongoing alternative companies that combine a thin, sometimes nonexistent resource base with a high skills level and an innovative artistic thrust.' He compared this with the sense of mission which drove the alternative theatre in the 1970s:

Directors, actors, designers and production personnel, once rigidly marked off from one another, now washed together in a swell of social relations: actors talked back to directors, directors turned their hands to writing; writers became critics: and critics became practitioners. An industry that had been as stratified as a geological formation began to flow. The notion of what it meant to be an actor changed.

This has begun to happen in popular music; but the theatre today is as stratified as it was in the 1960s. Radical change is needed. For a start it is imperative to begin to recognise the profit motive where it patently exists; and to initiate an inquiry into the career patterns of performers and how to improve them. To the Australia Council the creative artist has been central and in recent years it has become more and more prescriptive in its efforts to prevent the snowballing needs of organisations eroding the investment in individuals. (The Performing Arts Board's 1991 policy of affirmative action for women and migrant works is an example.) With writers this has been remarkably successful: a grant usually results in a book. A book is a tangible asset. But with the performer more long-term measures are needed. The downfall of Communism has shown that the most productive people are those who own their means of production. But our artistic directors, who spend years building up a non-profit organisation, take away at the end only their experience and termination pay. Actors are still only as good as their last performance; they still lead a mendicant life dependent upon the kindness of strangers.

Twenty-seven years ago my husband and I started a publishing company and, like so many small ventures, we worked for seven years without salary. Today we have a financial, as well as a cultural asset. The Literature Unit is permitted to have such clients with commercial motives; why not the others? The recent Nugent Report on major organisations goes some way to address this. The idea that 'excellence' and commerce are incompatible is so entrenched in our culture that we no longer question it; but it derived, I remind you again, from the amateur arts. When I look around Perth and see how devastated the theatre has become in recent years as a result of government interference and artistic despondency I wonder what the years of struggle have been about.

As yet there is no standard history of the Australia Council that traces its extraordinary cultural influence. Nor any published study which seeks common cause in the demise of so many arts companies. With the exception of David Throsby and Glen Withers at Macquarie University I know of no involvement by university researchers in the many reports and papers which the Australia Council has issued over the years. These are omissions the universities must try to remedy. There has been some individual research and published argument; but much research remains to be done to help us understand the causes of our mistakes; and to try to rebuild a sense of community and mutual obligation. For we, the arts community, have made the Australia Council what it is today, by maintaining the principle of peer assessment; and by taking responsibility for its governance. But the disillusionment presently being expressed suggests it is time for a reassessment.

Given the rapid turnover both of the Council's boards (or 'units' as they are now called) and of staff; and the many restructurings they have undergone, any possibility of supporting what I have called 'the quiet steady progress of artistic practice' has long ago been abandoned. Overwhelmed by increasing demands for support on a budget which each year falls further behind the expressed need, the Council and its members have, I believe, begun to seek bureaucratic reasons to reject applications. It's a counsel of despair. Where once they were actively exercising the spirit of the law to support the needy, now they take refuge in the letter. For the Council's own sake as well as their clients, we need a moratorium.

'Growth', writes Julian Meyrick, 'is often presented as the inevitable corollary of Gough Whitlam's 1973 funding increases. More money led to more theatre. But it is at least possible it happened the other way round: more theatre led to more funding; that it was the internal values of the new drama that demanded increased public support.'

He's right. I was there. There have been other creative flowerings, in other generations. This one was fortunate in having the will and means provided to nurture it. Another way, for another very different and much more divided culture, now has to be found.

Katharine Brisbane
 
 
References
Click on the note number to return to the text

1.  The Empty Space. London: McGibbon and Kee, nd, c. 1968.
2.  Justin Macdonnell, Arts Minister? Government Policy and the Arts, Sydney: Currency Press 1992.
3.  Philip Parsons, ed. Shooting the Pianist, Government and the Arts in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press 1987.