For the major theatre companies, the concerns that decide a season have begun to shift from issues of meaning and necessity to those of marketing and style. Is such a work promotable? What corporation would sponsor such a work? Is there a way we can connect with a sponsor’s product? (The Nugent Report gives much praise to a quite literal connection made between the Sorbent company and Circus Oz by employing giant toilet rolls in the ring as the safety buns.) Then the company must consider the Australia Council guidelines. Are we doing enough new work? Employing enough women or Aborigines or non-English-speaking actors? And so on. Making meaning while carrying this burden is a doomed enterprise.

All this is spelt out in the Nugent Report. It’s full of depressing statistics. Let me give you a few. Total federal and state funding today is $86.6 million, of which 57.9% goes to music, 18.7% to opera, 13.1% to theatre and 10.3% to dance. Subsidy per seat ranges from $6.32 for a Bell Shakespeare performance in Sydney to $181.09 for the WA Opera in Perth and $422 for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in Hobart. Most companies are in debt. Opera Australia’s is the largest at $13.9 million; all complain that they fear earning a surplus lest their government grant be cut. This has happened. The report discusses the pros and cons of doing more commercial entertainment, of cutting back on staff, on cast sizes, of changing marketing practices, better governance. None of this is new. But no part of the report raises the question of whether their work is appropriate to Australia in 1999; whether we have invested our money in the wisest way. What to do about these mausoleums we have built for our artists. Most particularly it failed to comment on whether all this globalised ‘art’ has any meaning for Australians and whether our artists have the theatre they deserve.

In 1973 on the last night of the old Theatre Royal in Sydney, before it was demolished, Toby Robertson, then director of the British Prospect Theatre Company said something very wise. He said that until the 20th century all theatre buildings were designed from the perspective of the stage, because they were built by men of the stage. And they burnt down at regular intervals, offering fresh opportunities for change. In the 20th century they have been built of pre-stressed concrete; and by committees of businessmen and councillors whose perspective was the front stalls. Our public buildings and our public policy on the arts have, on the whole, been designed from the point of view of the consumer, not the creator. My paper on Sunday [The Arts and the Pre-emptive Buckle] deals with how in the history of the Australia Council politics have dictated that product, the ‘proven edifices’ of art have always overruled the progress of artistic practice. And so we have today at the top not work which is un-selfconsciously an expression of our character; but work that is struggling to be like the rest of the world.

The story is not all bad. There is a tremendous groundswell of energy coming from the young people who are interested not in globalisation but in internationalism: that is, not making work identical to the rest of the world; but absorbing and reflecting the world while living and working at home. They are using all kinds of new forms, for which there are as yet no definitions; and new ways must be found to appreciate them. Bruce Elder, the pop music critic, has written about this:

The key to understanding popular culture ... is a recognition, and an acceptance, that like can only be measured against like... I call this genre-based criticism. It is the only useful kind of popular culture criticism. But the process of evaluation is complex because the genres are constantly changing and evolving, The challenge is to define the qualitative values which are the measure by which a genre evaluates itself.

So there’s the dilemma. If we are constantly turning back to what we know in public policy, how can we be anything but reactionary? How can the new generation bridge the gulf that now exists between the energetic groups working in the back streets and the corporations imprisoned in our cultural monuments? It can, and will be, done, by what I call the ‘trickle-up effect’.

One of the big opportunities still awaiting the major organisations depends on a recognition of the distinction between globalisation and internationalism. Phantom of the Opera is globalisation; Cloudstreet is internationalism. It is not the work that needs to be standardised but the industrial structure; the network by which the success of a work can be maximised. We have seen how our Aboriginal artists have found their way to the major art galleries of the world; we’ve seen how movies like Strictly Ballroom and Shine have defied their lack of genre. But none of these works have yet made a proper financial return to their creators. That is where we need to corporatise and globalise.

All the innovation in this country has come, not from government, or big business or the legislature or the Church. Such authorities respond only when they have to: to electoral pressure and to practical results. Innovation comes from the individual and the small community interests. And it comes out of crisis. When we can’t go further in one direction we are forced to seek another. The arts have reached that crisis. It’s time to look around at what other interests are doing; to take lessons from the methods of the country communities in crisis; or the reconciliation movement. To forget the divisions between artistic genres and build again from the bottom. Divisions only remain as long as does the status quo.

Now I want to talk about football for a minute. I have been fascinated by the politics, particularly in NSW, between Rugby League and Union. For 91 years there has been a status quo. League, the workers’ game with an intense community loyalty, has been the majority code north of the Victorian border and its clubs have been major contributors to community life, health and education. Union, the gentleman-amateur game, played by private schools and universities, has a much smaller following but is also played in Britain, New Zealand and other parts of the world. In other words the potential is global. Enter pay TV. Union turned professional about four years ago and in the style of the big end of town now has a business plan to take over League. And both are moving in on AFL. Clubs are being bribed or forced into amalgamation, country clubs are no longer supported by their associations and are closing down. The community unity created by generations of Saturday afternoons is being broken.

It’s exactly same problem faced by the arts. Community participation and loyalty is being destroyed in favour of a giant but anonymous new global congregation of reactionary forces preaching uniformity. And what holds that congregation together? Fashion. Fashions come and go and are no help in ‘Securing the Future’. My money is on the community clubs. That’s where the trickle-up effect will come from.

Since the arts were politicised in 1968 by the establishment of the Council for the Arts, we have increasingly allowed the big end of town to control the resources; and already we have seen, like the country football clubs, the erosion of the regions and increasing conservatism. We need to get back to an artistic climate in which our artists can speak up for what they believe; can reflect the problems and celebrate the character and diversity of our country; and earn with that diversity and ingenuity a respected place in the international community. We can only do that by starting again, once more with meaning, and together making the trickle up-effect.