Image via Slingsby
When the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm went searching for traditional folk tales to publish in their book Children’s and Household Tales they weren’t just seeking to entertain children. They were engaged in something much grander. They were contributing to Project Germany. At the time the Germany we know did not exist – it was just a concept, as the collection of 200 German principalities were yet to come together to form the economic powerhouse that we know today. What was needed to bring these communities together was a sense of shared culture, and by reaching back to tales of the people (Volkspoesie) the Grimm Brothers offered something that the new ‘Germans’ could call their own.
Australia is both an ancient and a young nation, a place populated by people from across the globe. How do we come together, find strength in our diversity and begin to see ourselves as united? Taking the example of the Brothers Grimm, surely our arts and culture are key to this continual transformation.
We need to reflect our unprecedented 60,000 year history by giving our Aboriginal artists the space and resources to explore their cultural heritage, whilst at the same time finding contemporary expression for their current place in the world. We need to resource our artists and innovators to allow them to express who we are and how we can live together in these times. The stories, images and experiences that our Australian artists create may turn out to be fanciful, serious, heartbreaking, uplifting, surprising, unsettling, hilarious and cathartic. Or, like many of the Grimm Brothers tales, batshit crazy and terrifying. Most importantly they will be stories, images, and experiences that come from us and belong to us.
We definitely won’t like all of them. In fact many of the works created will fail to connect or may connect deeply but only with a niche audience. However, every now and then a great work will be flung up out of this furnace of creative ambition. A story, image or experience so surprisingly, nonchalantly and compelling Australian that we are drawn to it in huge numbers and bound together through experiencing it.
It sounds like a utopian ideal. Yet this is exactly what we have been engaged in for 48 years, since the establishment of the Australia Council for the Arts in 1967. This independent statutory authority, operating at arm’s length from Government, has invested in the creative visions of Australians since that time. And as our nation grew and became more diverse, the vision of the Australia Council has evolved to reflect a more challenging and complex contemporary environment. Late last year the Australia Council for the Arts launched its new strategic plan. Titled A Culturally Ambitious Nation, the plan committed to investing in brave and innovative art making in Australia, touring that work internationally, encouraging all Australians to get in touch with our own art and art makers, and celebrating our incredible Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and cultures.
All in all, a pretty bloody good, simple ambition. It took two years to create and, though it did not come with significant levels of new funding, it suggested a new way ahead for Australian artists.
When the 2015 Federal Budget was announced in May of this year it became clear that this simple ambition with its strategy for delivery was pretty much headed for the scrap heap. Just over $100 million has been ripped out of the Australia Council over the next four years. This is effectively a reduction by one third of the available funding for the small to medium organisations and independent artists in Australia. These are the companies, ensembles and brave individuals who create the vast majority of Australia’s original artistic output – our writers, composers, choreographers, directors, sculptors, dancers, actors, singers, painters and digital artists. Our storytellers, image-makers and experience savants.
One sector of the arts has been quarantined from these cuts. Our 28 Major Performing Arts organisations comprise opera and ballet companies, orchestras, State theatre companies, Circus Oz, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Belvoir and Bell Shakespeare. By and large, these are outstanding arts companies presenting extremely good work. Still, the vast majority of new Australian work does not come from these companies – it comes from the struggling smaller companies and individual artists. Much of the work performed by many of our major companies was not conceived, written or composed on our soil. Much of their repertoire does not have at its heart an Australian voice.
The money taken from the Australia Council will now fund the National Program for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA), established within the federal Arts Ministry. While details are still sketchy, one funding category is international touring and it would appear that as well as keeping their present funding, Major Performing Arts companies would be able to apply for even more funding under the various categories. Another NPEA category includes additional funding to bring international artists to our festivals…
So is one goal of the NPEA to provide greater support for our Major Performing Arts companies to tour further around Australia and internationally? And is the idea behind this to convince us and the world that Australia has great artists and a rich culture by performing great works of the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th centuries?
Has anyone asked whether the great audiences of the great cities of the world actually want Australian artists performing the very same repertoire as their North American and European counterparts?
Why not perform original Australian work that comes genuinely from the place in which we live? By sharing this work with our own people we might also see how this work can bring us together, and create a new vision of ourselves as a confident, brave, ambitious nation.
This too might all sound like an imagined utopia, but it is already underway. Australia creates some of the world’s best contemporary dance, circus and theatre for young audiences. Indeed, Australia has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to a form that I love, theatre for children and families, and our companies are touring across North America, Asia, Europe and the United Kingdom, winning the hearts of children and adults and influencing the work made by artists in the countries that they visit.
The decision to establish the National Program for Excellence in the Arts at the expense of the Australia Council for the Arts puts our recent successes in great jeopardy. It erodes investment in the small companies and independents artists of Australia. It also negates a highly successful strategic investment of the Australia Council during the Howard government, where a three year strategy to develop theatre for young audiences from 2005-2008 resulted in an outpouring of original Australian work of proven excellence, work that could and did tour to Broadway in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC one month, then a regional Australian country town the next.
If we see art and culture as one way to build a cohesive, innovative, resilient nation (and we should as this has always been culture’s role) perhaps our best bet is to follow in the footsteps of The Grimm Brothers and reach deep within ourselves for our own stories. Yes, let’s have great Australian artists performing the world’s great canonical works too and let’s proudly share that capacity with the world. But do this knowing that the real ace up our sleeve – the advantage that distinguishes us from our counterparts in other continents – is our repertoire of new great Australian stories that we can share with our fellow Australians and the world.
