1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Cultural Identity in the Arts
Ms Hilary McPhee
Chair, Australia Council
One of the great pleasures, it seems to me, of a post-post colonial reading of our cultural identity,especially as it is revealed through the arts,is watching ourselves being engaged in a constant process of re-invention of the very idea of Australia.
This is a rather self determining act, of course. It is a reading,indeed a celebration,of what happens to one person's cultural baggage when it encounters another's. It is, at last, a recognition of the multiplicity of what might be called our psychological geographies that go to make up a highly imaginative notion of nation.
And the arts,whether we're barracking for high, low, popular, mass, community or individual,the arts are at the heart of the celebration. This was, of course, not always the case.
Not so long ago it was mandatory to yawn at the notion of Australian cultural identity whether you thought we had one or you didn't. The question was a joke,whether it took the form of the search for The Great Australian Novel, or the Defining Event of Our Times or just quietly awaiting the birth of our Very Own Beethoven.
Even today grumpy expatriates, who are probably feeling a bit left out, mock us for spending too much time on questions of identity at festivals or conferences as if we were still a nation that hadn't grown up enough yet to appreciate them.
Nowadays the accusation seems irrelevant and not a little envious. What we have contained within the ragged coastline of this country is a multiplicity of Australias and a huge range of artists interpreting them for us.
In this country we seem to have always been about defining ourselves in opposition to others.
This opposition revealed itself right from the start of the colony when a rigidly defined imperial culture (or a remnant of one that probably saw itself at some level as banished) attempted to impose itself on one of the most flexible and ancient cultures on earth. And throughout the nineteenth century and well beyond the first half of this century, the tension between the centre and the periphery played itself out.
The Australian experience was to find oneself at the ends of the earth. The world's cultures were transmitted by sea and by black and white photographs and wind up gramophones and occasional performances in town halls. In the imperial discourse, the very notion of an Australian culture seemed like an oxymoron.
Dr Judith Brett calls this, in her Robert Menzies' Forgotten People, "the narcissistic wound of colonial birth". The place could be easily dismissed as second rate and underdone. Yet there were undertones of something else right from the start and much recent work has revealed them.
Artists, almost by definition, tend to be at the forefront of the challenge to the status quo. European artists and writers, rather less constrained than their British counterparts, gave us some of the most memorable images of Aboriginal peoples and their land.
The Australian landscape has an effect on its inhabitants. Aboriginal peoples had an effect on their dispossessors.
Language and image, humour and irony, story and song within a few years of the end of the eighteenth century had developed their own, dare we say, Australian cadences, rhythms and meanings.
The fact that this country has been culturally diverse for 200 years might have something to do with it. The majority of settlers have always been born somewhere else or been the children of parents or grandparents born somewhere else with stories in their heads of other lands.
The majority knew about what David Malouf in Johnno calls the accident of immigration, "the entirely unnecessary fate" of waking up one day in another place, having become an Australian.
What has changed, it seems to me, is the range of voices now heard in the discourse of diversity,and the gradual dawning of the recognition we all have that this diversity places us at the centre, not at the periphery any more.
Until about 1970, the arts in Australia used to be embattled but were, quite possibly, strengthened by their distance from the centre, while that centre, whether London, Paris, New York or Tokyo was given the power to dictate local taste and programming.
International success was therefore, and understandably, an important measure of the value of the artwork. Authors wanted to be published first in London. Painters left for lofts in San Francisco and Paris. Singers headed for Berlin, dancers for New York and Australian film-makers barely existed.
Many more talented artists kept arriving here of course,Martin, Waten, Bergner, Vassilieff, Fairweather, Gruner, Ostoja-Katkowski, Senbergs, Jorgensen, Tillers, Sievers, Werder, Dreyfus to name just a few. And people like Andrew Fabinyi and Rudi Komon promoted them vigorously.
Australian arts seem to me to have only occasionally been about participating in that international art club of cultural elites despite the yearning for recognition. Much more often they've been about subverting the status quo, challenging the establishment, speaking in the voice of the working man or woman, trying to make sense of the Australian experience.
More often than not the rest of the world chose to ignore Australian artists,who were left speaking to themselves and to the rest of us here,in increasingly large numbers as we got used to the joys of seeing aspects of ourselves reflected back, and the secondary and tertiary syllabus started to let them in.
The breadth and richness of the past and indeed its struggle to assert itself over transplantation, distance and imported culture is sometimes now ignored or diminished, which seems to me to be an impoverishment.
The current discourse is more liberal than the imperial one it displaced, of course, but it can also be constricting and excluding nonetheless. As though the debate, by its very nature, might start to threaten the new status quo.
We do not need to caricature the artists of the past in this process of re-reading as sustaining only "Bush" or ANZAC mythologies, to see them as merely reflecting the old paradigms of male, white English dominant culture in a conflict for scarce resources, for patronage, for prestige, for power.
An Australian cultural identity must be marked by its inclusiveness, not by whom it excludes,and this applies as much to the past as it does to the present, it seems to me.
What the arts have always had to contend with in this country is a small market and a distribution system more attuned, by the fact of its ownership, to making available a steady stream of the cultural products of the English language cultural superpowers.
But there is no denying that by the 1970s, with the demographic changes springing from post-war immigration, the baby-boom, the wave of confidence that swept the Western world during the 1960s and 70s, Australian cultural production was starting to flourish. At the same time, the politics of inclusion rather than exclusion were gaining real ground.
And so the principle of multiculturalism, which saw a shift from individual responsibility to the development of public policy based on equity, justice, individual rights and responsibilities, was adopted by the Australia Council within a few years of its establishment in the mid-seventies.
In 1975 the Australia Council had established an Ethnic Arts Committee which led to the development of an Ethnic Arts Policy, focussing on support for ethnic and traditional arts activities.
By 1982 a Multicultural Policy was adopted, a fund set up and the position Multicultural Arts Officer created. In 1988-90 policies and programs were reviewed and developed into the Australia Council's Arts for a Multicultural Australia policy which set a target across Council of raising expenditures overall on multicultural arts development to 7.5% of the Council Budget. In 1988-9 this overall expenditure was 3.7% of Council Budget across art forms. In 1993-4 it was 11.6% and has all the hallmarks of being one of the most successful policy initiatives implemented by the Australia Council.
The policy has, of course, had its detractors from the outset. There are some who decry it as cultural engineering or special pleading. The majority see it for what it has always been,an explicit recognition that the cultural diversity that makes this country unlike anywhere else on earth given half a chance will produce artworks that are exhilarating and unique.
But they will be produced in abundance only if there are supporting structures in place that allow the work of the indigenous and non-English speaking members of the arts community to flourish alongside and in collaboration with the work of artists seen to be in the mainstream.
I see this as a natural process of generation rather than engineering, with the Australia Council, through its peer assessment procedures, able to encourage the best of the full range of new and culturally diverse work.
The extraordinarily wonderful cultural programme produced for this conference and substantially sponsored and selected by the Australia Council in partnership with the Office of Multicultural Affairs is testament to this. All of these artists, I believe, have received support from the Council along the way and we are incredibly proud of this.
Who can say what would have happened without government funding for the arts in Australia and for multicultural arts in particular. All we can say with great certainty is that we would be much the poorer without the remarkable Doppio Teatro,the Adelaide based bilingual Italian-Australian theatre company that has for the last eight years produced a succession of unique theatre productions exploring intercultural relations from the perspective of migrant experience.
Or Bangarra, Australia's top indigenous dance company which draws on traditional Aboriginal aesthetics but also New York dance forms, Japanese Butoh and contemporary Australian.
Or IHOS opera,which creates Greek language contemporary large-scale opera in Hobart,and what must be some of the most extraordinary spectacles currently staged in Australia.
Or Deck Chair Theatre, Southern Crossings, Flying Fruit Circus, the Brisbane Ethnic Music Arts Co-operative to name only a few. The performing arts in this country are rich with difference.
Also without language barriers, visual arts and craft are effective tools for cultural exchange. Increasingly there are indications that visual arts and craft artists of non- English speaking backgrounds are achieving high profiles in their careers and gaining substantial accolades.
The work of some of these artists engages multicultural concepts; the work of others clearly does not. It is exciting to see an increasing number of Australian artists wanting to pursue projects dealing directly with cultural diversity,their own and other cultures including cross-cultural projects in Australia,engaging in projects in their own homeland, seeking new experiences and inspiration in foreign cultures and forging links with other countries.
The Community Cultural Development Board of the Australia Council has a key aim of ensuring that communities directly participate in and manage cultural activities, in recognition that this allows them to build a stronger sense of their individual identities and to acquire skills.
By usually involving professional artists, themselves often from diverse cultural backgrounds, it has been possible to expand and meld the creative boundaries of various art forms and challenge conventional definitions of art and excellence.
There are now mechanisms in place through the Literature Board of the Australia Council to encourage writers in languages other than English to continue to develop their writing skills in their chosen language. And last year, in a move with important long term ramifications for Australia's cultural identity, the Board changed its definition of "primary creative writer" to include literary translators in any direction from any language including Aboriginal languages.
Last year the number of grants which were wholly or partly directed at writers of non- English speaking background or were wholly or partially to do with general multicultural issues was over 17% across all Literature Board programs.
Opportunities for the development of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts have never been better. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Board of the Australia Council is a success story all of its own. International interest in indigenous Australian painters, dancers, musicians, weavers, carvers and writers is at an all time high. The challenge for the Board is now to promote the diversity of indigenous culture,so often categorised, not only by international audiences, as outback art,when it is urban, regional, coastal, desert and of immense variation.
The Council's Arts for a Multicultural Australia policy recognised the need for more effective representation of non-English speaking background artists on Council, its Boards and Committees and within the staff. While there are still some gaps, there is certainly very much better representation (approximately 14.5% across Council) than there was before the policy was implemented.
The Australia Council has been for the last decade at the cutting edge of arts policy development, and the tension between the seeking out of excellence and the encouragement of cultural diversity has been immensely challenging and fruitful. This is what Sneja Gunew and Fazal Rivzi in Culture, Difference and the Arts call "the mutually transforming dialogue between the established and the newly immigrant" in order to have a "positively discriminating excellence without discrimination".
At the end of the twentieth century, the idea of a homogeneous national culture of linear heritage, if we ever really had one in this country, is now utterly superseded by the regional, the local, the cross-cultural and the culturally diverse. It's as if the map of Australia was crisscrossed by songlines that are all our own,and songlines that have the potential to be heard in every corner of the globe.
The government's recent cultural policy, Creative Nation, reinforces this perception and celebrates the reality. It also recommends that the Australia Council turn its attention as a matter of urgency to creating "a higher level of demand from arts consumers."
This is fundamental to the continuing development of our cultural identity. The areas highlighted for action,audience development, linkages with the new broadcasting technologies, the development of private sponsorship and international marketing of our cultural diversity,naturally grow out of twenty years of Council's successful support for the creation and presentation of the arts.
To say that our cultural diversity must be reflected in these priorities is to state the obvious. To say that our cultural diversity in the arts gives us an edge in the search for new markets within Australia and internationally is also obvious.
The development of discrete infrastructures in, for instance, Chinese language media and the rapid growth in the numbers of community broadcasting licences held by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups and their interaction with mainstream media, are some of the most exciting signals of what is to come.
It is no accident of history, it seems to me, that alongside mass communications and globalism has sprung a strong sense of community and a celebration through art of cultural diversity.
The challenge now for us all is to move on to the next stage. To recognise that our cultural diversity gives us something unique. That we are secure in the recognition that our creative diversity is highly prized and advantageous internationally. That the task is not only the whole but the parts that can now engage in the search for audience. That it is not only about direct funding and arguments about the share of the cake and representation, or replacing one kind of status quo with another, but it is also about seeking out a much wider range of ways of making connections with each other and making things happen.
The new media will shortly produce an unprecedented demand for content for niche markets and for mass broadcasting. The last twenty or so years have seen a great leap forward. The next twenty will engage our creative artists even more.
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