Talk to the X Club
University of Western Australia, 5 October 1999

Cultural Policy and the National Debt

Katharine Brisbane

This daily bombardment is the kind of information overload that shakes our whole understanding of the way our world works. In previous generations diplomacy went on quietly behind closed doors, and corruption too. Massacres were heard of only long after the event. The speed of information and the graphic nature of the images we see leaves us appalled and confused; and makes us yearn for leaders who will make sense out of chaos, who will show us how to act decisively and rightly.

Our public figures today, however, are not of that kind. Politics have become too complex, and Parliament has surrendered to global forces the power it once had. Vested interests have pushed the public intellectual out of the limelight. We have become instead a nation of managers. Where are the subversives and the social critics? Why aren’t they helping us to make sense of this turmoil? These are the people we need today. The artist is the only person in society who should have nothing to lose by speaking out.

The responsibility of the artist — and I include within this definition all those people actively engaged in the humanities — the responsibility of the artist is to contemplate and comment upon society; to define, to warn, to document, to criticise without fear or favour; to make us realise with our emotions what we fail to recognise with our heads. To make us exercise our imaginations, singly and collectively; to make us practice putting ourselves in the place of others. To make connections, to reconcile, to show us direction. I’ve recently had a small reminder of this in editing a series of anthologies of plays from the ‘60s to the ‘80s. In absolute terms the works are of no great significance; as a map of the changing public consciousness, of growing confidence in ourselves as a nation, they are remarkably accurate documents which in their time helped to form our understanding of ourselves in a period of change.

It is this critical aspect of the arts in Australia — and most particularly the performing arts — that has been most constructive; and it has failed us in the ‘90s. Since the arts became identified as an industry, in the last decade or so, meaning has been sacrificed to taste. This has in part to do with the climate of the times; but more to do with the rise of the manager and the application of corporate principles to matters of artistic practice. Those plays I mentioned were performed within months — even weeks — of completion; and for early audiences carried the weight of current commentary. Today the average time to reach the public is two or three years. For a film the process can be up to eight years. This has a serious effect on the meaning and necessity of any work that relates to the public mood.

The Australia Council has also become ponderous and prescriptive in its dealings; and so beleaguered by its burgeoning constituency that it has taken refuge in bureaucratic restraints and more and more complex application forms designed to defeat the uninitiated. State governments waver violently according to the preoccupations of the current Minister. Melbourne under Jeff Kennett has become the entertainment capital and the fortunes of the arts are firmly aligned to the Crown Casino. Western Australia seems to have had the most unhappy run with state funding; and from my brief glimpse appears to be no better off than it was 40 years ago when I was living here. So what has gone wrong? And does it matter?

Well, yes, it does matter. Because books, paintings and music at their best tell us who we are and why. The Guy Grey Smith and the Robert Juniper on my walls in Sydney remind me daily of the world I grew up in and why it differs from the East; as do the writings of Tim Winton and Dorothy Hewett and Robert Drewe. But the corporatising of the arts has made steady progress since the introduction of subsidy 30 years ago; to the point that the connection with the community has been lost, for the most part; and with it all meaning. In the case of the major institutions creative thinking has been supplanted by extravagant marketing aimed at manufacturing an audience based not on appreciation but on global fashion and social ambition.

Which brings me to the Nugent Report, ‘Securing the Future’. This is a discussion paper drawn up at the federal government’s request by Helen Nugent, a company director and deputy chair of the Australia Council, and others, on the dilemma of the major organisations. That dilemma is, baldly, that exponential growth has built these huge companies, corporations in all but name; but despite their growth they still rely on the public purse; and are prevented, because of their non-profit structure and the Australia Council guidelines, from becoming profitable. Many are also unwilling or unable to do so because of the narrow ‘high art’ tradition within which they work. I shall confine myself to opera in this instance because its situation is acknowledged as the worst; the Australian Ballet has similar constraints; as does the Bell Shakespeare Company which began as a tent theatre dedicated to touring country towns but quickly retreated behind the proscenium arch into more and more glossy productions for our major cities’ cultural centres.

Opera has never been the people’s theatre, except perhaps in Italy. Elsewhere it has been a creation of the court. I was taken to see such a court theatre recently in Gotha, in northern Germany where Prince Albert came from. It is a beautiful baroque theatre converted so the king and his friends could enjoy musical entertainment. (This is not to denigrate it because it began a theatre tradition important in German theatre history.) But part of my tour took me behind and beneath the stage where some 40 unfortunate stage hands were required to crouch in space a metre and a bit high, to work the stage scenery and effects. That is the tradition out of which opera grew; and it has come to be regarded round the world as the apogee of musical achievement.

But opera as it once was died with the First World War. The generations of monied aristocrats who patronised Covent Garden died — and by degrees opera was subsumed into corporate sponsorship. A new kind of networking culture grew, popularly represented by Sir Humphrey Appleby doing discreet deals in the foyer; or most recently here at home the dreadful Vicky in the ABC series Dog’s Head Bay, plotting for a seat on the Opera Board. Tickets for Covent Garden, before it closed this year, were 200 pounds each.

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