Big Story Country
great arts stories from regional Australia

Contents

Imprint page
Forewords and Authors' Note
Drum Atweme - a rhythm that's theirs
Snow circus at Possum Flat
Traces of memory - stories of a garden
Southern forest sculpture walk
Directing the hero within
Ngarakuruwala (we sing songs)
Fling physical theatre
Bringing the music home
No2Stones
Football stories from country Victoria
Aphrodite and the mixed grill
Possum Skin Cloak - you're wrapped in your Country
Lightsite - turning the landscape into pure light
Slices of nature
Red Tape by Terra Art
Nurturing artists in Wilcannia
Stories of belonging
Mubali, a sea of bellies
Arts for healthy communities
Ikara - the meeting place
Milpirri
Water is the new gold
Embers - capturing the story
Arid - a sculptural collaboration
Fresh and salty - it's all about water
Salt of the earth
Isle of plenty
Marshartability
RMB2329 - the mailboxes are talking
Ailan Currents - artwork from the Torres Strait
SpeedDating-4-Artists
Tamworth Textile Fibre Biennial
A child's life on the station
Desert Mob Marketplace
Something fantastical - Wearable Arts Festival
RAA members and directors

© Regional Arts Australia 2008

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from Regional Arts Australia. Requests and inquiries concerning production and rights should be addressed to Regional Arts Australia, 2 McLaren Parade, Port Adelaide SA 5015 or info@regionalarts.com.au

This publication is available online at www.regionalarts.com.au and www.australiacouncil.gov.au. Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright owners of materials reproduced in this publication. The publishers welcome communication from any copyright owner from whom permission was inadvertently not obtained.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Big Story Country: great arts stories from regional Australia

ISBN 0 975784 49 8

© for story text in the book Moya Sayer-Jones

Published by: Regional Arts Australia 2 McLaren Parade Port Adelaide SA 5015
t: +61 8 8444 0400
f: +61 8 8447 8496
info@regionalarts.com.au www.regionalarts.com.au

Written from conversations with Moya Sayer-Jones, Only Human Communication
Edited by Vivienne Skinner
Project coordination by Jo McDonald, Regional Arts Australia
Design by Clive Jones, Only Human Communication
Cover image: Boab nut sculpture by Joyce Tasma (photo by Maya Haviland)

Development and production of this publication has been assisted by the Regional Arts Fund, an Australian Government initiative supporting the arts in regional, remote and very remote/isolated Australia, and the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body.

Advisory support has been provided by project reference group comprising Lindy Allen (Regional Arts Victoria), Jo McDonald (Regional Arts Australia), Lynda Newton (Australia Council for the Arts), Elizabeth Rogers (Regional Arts NSW), Vivienne Skinner (Regional Arts Australia), Ruth Smiles (Regional Arts Australia).

Special thanks are extended to all of the groups, organisations and individuals who provided information, interviews and images relating to the projects covered in the publication.

This book follows two earlier publications: Heartwork: great arts stories from regional Australia (2004) The Great Yarn Event and other arts stories from regional Australia (1998)

Return to contents

Forewords

Suzie Haslehurst

This third publication of great arts stories from rural, regional and remote Australia is a testament to the vibrancy that characterises the arts in regional communities.

Since the first book of stories Great Yarn Event was released a decade ago, recognition of the importance of the arts in country Australia has grown greatly, as has the number of people who now get involved and have a go. Research shows a clear link between an active arts scene and healthy regional communities. The economic impact of the arts is also better known, as is the potential of the arts to attract and retain workers in regional and remote towns.

As a resident of remote Australia, I have seen firsthand how the arts engender cultural tolerance, social engagement, local pride and community cohesion. Water, the environment, mining – these are all issues at the forefront of life in regional Australia. These stories show how the arts are a great way of helping people interpret these and other big issues and at the same time pay homage to the unique characteristics of their communities.

Regional Arts Australia champions the arts for the one in three of us who live in regional, rural and remote Australia. It is my privilege to commend Big Story Country for your enjoyment and inspiration.

Suzie Haslehurst
President Regional Arts Australia

Artists tell our stories. Our visual artists, theatremakers, writers, dancers and musicians all explore what it means to be Australian and confront the challenging issues of our time. They create narratives that examine who we are, how we live and what matters in our world.

But behind their work are very different stories. These are inspiring tales about the works themselves – how they come about and what they mean to the individuals and communities who create them. They are stories about place, community and creativity.

Right across Australia, there are thousands of arts stories being created every year. Big Story Country is a selection of 35 of these stories, told in their own words by the artists. They speak of the creative process and about the communities that spawn them – from the Tiwi Islands to Tennant Creek and Tamworth.

The Australia Council for the Arts – the Australian Government’s principal arts funding and advisory body – is pleased to have supported Big Story Country – not only this publication, but also many of the arts projects that are featured on its pages.

These arts stories underscore the vital role that the arts can, and do play in enriching our communities and our lives as individuals.

Kathy Keele
Chief Executive Officer Australia Council for the Arts

Author's Note

Moya Sayer-Jones

Often the vitality of art and how we make it is obscured by art-speak, the language of submissions and art criticism. For this book, we wanted to bring the humans back and produce real stories that all people could read, connect with and be moved by. These stories explain where an idea comes from, why we absolutely have to do it, the importance of the people who help us and the triumphs and difficulties we encounter along the way.

Intellectually, I’ve always understood how important the arts are to the health and well being of communities. I’ve rabbited on at dinner parties and yabbered at conferences but it’s only since working on this book that I’ve truly understood the role of art: its power to change lives and change people.

Thanks to all the storytellers for their candour and trust. And for hanging in for the rain to stop.

Moya Sayer-Jones

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Drum Atweme - a rhythm that's theirs

Peter Lowson, teacher, coordinator

‘Atweme’ means to hit the drum. It was never supposed to be a performance group. It was supposed to be just a learning thing about rhythm – a program to get the attendance up. The idea was that if the kids came to school every day, then on Friday they could have the drum program. But it sort of grew.

I remember the first gig we ever did. It was the Steiner fête. Well, we got to this fête and the kids took one look and they wouldn’t get out of the back of the troopie for two hours. They were too shy. I said, ‘It’s just a fête, what’s wrong?’ And they went ‘No, no, no there’s too many people.’ And I said, ‘Look there’s about 300 whitefellas there, that’s all.’ And eventually they got out and they got on stage and drummed and they got this huge applause. You don’t see Indigenous young kids performing in town anywhere normally, there are no opportunities. But now they do. It started off with that and then six months later we got a gig at a conference. And now they’re totally self-funded. These kids, they’ll turn over $15,000 or $20,000 dollars a year. Last year, they did about 60 shows.

We put all the money into a trust account which we set up through Tangentyere Council Inc and we say to the kids, ‘We’ll save it for the greater good.’ They fund their own clothing, equipment repairs, travel and if it’s someone’s birthday, we’ll celebrate.

We’ve had 80 kids actually play with the group over the four years and now 64 of those are still in education, right up to the 15 and 16 year olds who have left to go to school in Darwin and Adelaide. These were kids who the teachers couldn’t get to school and they couldn’t read or write or get their heads out of the desk. Shy. Within a month of starting to drum, the attendance at the school was increasing.

You very rarely see young girls doing any musical activity. They don’t get access to music in the communities. It’s usually dominated by the fellas. But it was the girls who really took the drumming on and one girl, who’s been with the group almost since the beginning, she’s the leader now. She’s still a really shy girl but she’ll get up in front of 8,000 people and perform.

Our drumming is based on Afro-Cuban-Brazilian rhythms. You learn to sing a rhythm. So in the beginning we might have sung Leaves falling on the ground, boom-kadaka-doombaka but now these kids, they change it. They adapt it. It was the shy girl who started it. She came up to me one day and said ‘We should sing it kwatye apetyeme uterne alheye.’ This means the rain is coming, the sun is going in their language. So all of a sudden we’ve got a rhythm that’s theirs.

These are kids who are socially marginalised, you know. They come from really hard backgrounds as in there’s a lot of alcohol and violence around them. People in Alice Springs would judge those kids and go, ‘They’re some of those kids from the town camp,’ because all they hear about is trouble. But now in Alice Springs if they go out and perform everyone from the people at K-Mart to the police go, ’Oh the drummers, they’re fantastic.’ So we’ve made this giant bridge in the community. People come and talk to these Aboriginal kids who never would have before. And this means the kids’ confidence goes up. They know they can go out and perform in the community and they feel like they’re part of the community, the whole community.

The families are so supportive of it. They love it to the point that some of the grandmothers, the Elders who do the traditional dance things with some of the girls, they’ve come up to us one day and one of the senior Elders, she’s said, ‘You know what? We should paint the girls with white under their eyes.’ And I’ve gone, ‘But that’s for traditional dancing.’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, but Drum Atweme is something really special. The drum is like hitting the earth.’ And so the girls went out to perform with white headbands on and painted faces and that is a very big thing.

Last year, we did a big workshop with some executives from National Australia Bank. We got 50 executives in a big circle and the kids taught them drumming and dancing too and these executives loved it and they emailed and said, ‘What do you need?’ And we said,’ Well, we need a bus because we borrow buses all the time.’ So now they’ve turned around and started to raise the money. And for every dollar they raise, the bank will match it.

But we’re standing on our own feet. We’re making our own money so we’re self-reliant and that’s wonderful. There are a lot of great arts programs but they might only last a week or two weeks or a month and there’s no continuum. We want Drum Atweme to have a long, long, long life. I want those girls who are 12 and 13 to have something in the future to build on. They can make their choices now and pass on their knowledge. The older ones teach the younger ones just as they would traditionally in their culture.

The drumming is one thing but it’s what comes out of the drumming that will make the difference.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Alice Springs, Northern Territory

Artforms
Hand drumming, percussion, dance

Initiated by
Peter Lowson while working as coordinator of Tangentyere Council Youth Services

Organised by
Tangentyere Council Incorporated

Financial support
Initially unfunded except for some small donations. In July 2007, the Australian Government Attorney General Department, Indigenous Justice and Legal Assistance Division funded Peter Lowson to work full-time on the program

Non financial support
Tangentyere Council executive, staff and town campers

Artists
Peter Lowson drumming, percussion, recording, arrangements; Vincent Lamberti drumming, filmmaker; Charlie Lowson filmmaker, media artist; Paulene Thomas Taiko drumming; Marcus Tattern log drum making; Simon Faulkner, drumbeat

Dates
2003, ongoing

Contact
Peter Lowson, PO Box 8070, Alice Springs NT 0871
08 8952 2999, peter.lowson@tangentyere.org.au, www.tangentyere.org.au

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Snow circus at Possum Flat

Catherine Larkins, initiator, artistic director

I’d never worked in the snow and I’m not a snow person but I wanted to start playing with neon and I thought, ‘How amazing would it look in the snow?’ Snow is such a pristine, extraordinary surface to reflect light. But it was a long journey to find the right site. Possum Flat is on Mount Hotham in the National Park: it’s rugged, it’s in the middle of nowhere and there’s no power... but what a beautiful landscape!

The irony of this part of East Gippsland is that there’s this tiny space at the top of the mountain where people ski and there’s a lot of wealth, developers, all of that. But down the mountain there are remote communities primarily sheep farmers and they are very poor people. None of them really have much to do with the top of the mountain. They don’t go skiing. They can’t afford to go up there. They have drought, fire, locust plagues and travel large distances but they’re tough people and they’re passionate about where they live. This was the community I wanted to engage.

I knew there were some really wonderful artists in the Alpine country and I designed things within Snow Circus to showcase their skills. We had a bogong moth that was made wirewalker ready to go and then we heard the thunder and saw lightning. And it started raining. Not showers. It was like gale force winds and freezing, pelting rain.

If you’d had an audience from the city, they would’ve been scattering for their cars and gone. But the high country farmers had come in their Drizabones and hats and they just leaned into the weather. They said, ‘We’re not going. We’re going to stay here and we’re going to see this show.’ This mob hung in there. No one left.

After half an hour of torrential rain my production person called on the walkie-talkie. ‘Catherine, do you want to go ahead?’ It was a risky situation. The rain had stopped but the tight wire was wet. The snow was melting. The fireworks guy said if we set off the first firework, then the whole lot could go off. I had to make this split-second decision knowing that if I didn’t go ahead, this would never happen again. There was no way we could do a re-run. Do I go ahead, or don’t I?

‘Let’s do it, let’s go for it.’

And so off we went. It was only a 17 minute show and in that time, some things didn’t happen because of the wetness. The huge rhinoceros beetle skied down the slope that we built and got bogged at the bottom of the hill. All the fireworks started going off in its horns and its wings and then it blew the neons out because the sparks flew over into the ring. Only half the catherine wheels in the snow gums went off and other things. But people didn’t know any of that. They didn’t know what was planned to happen, so it didn’t matter. They just stood and took it in. And the whole thing was so extraordinarily magical.

You never know until it’s over how the vision will be. Some things don’t work out exactly as you’ve composed them but others are more amazing by the element of chance. And I think the element of chance in any art form is one of the most profound things. You sometimes get a bonus you never dreamt of.

Around 500 people contributed in some way to Snow Circus through music, costumes, performance or visual arts.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Possum Flat, Wire Plain, Mount Hotham, Victoria

Artforms
Installation including neon light, fireworks, sound, sculpture and performance art

Initiated by
Catherine Larkins

Organised by
Catherine Larkins with Swifts Creek Community Centre

Financial support
Arts Development for Communities (Arts Victoria), Australia Council for the Arts, Regional Arts Fund, an Australian Government initiative, Small Grants (Shire of East Gippsland), Dinner Plain Management Committee

Non financial support
Around 500 people contributed in some way to Snow Circus through music, costumes, performance or visual arts, also Mt Hotham Resort Management especially snow groomer Greg O’Donohue, Swifts Creek Community Centre staff and helpers, Di Pendergast, Deidre Jack, Daniel Troy, David Knaggs, Anne Bingham, Caroline Taylor, Eileen Douglas, Bev Cook aom and the High Country Singers

Artists
Catherine Larkins multidisciplinary installations, Vincent Lamberti composer and filmmaker, Annie Marshall costume design, Susan Purdy photographer, Daniel Catlow tightwire performer, Delta Neon and Southern Cross Fireworks, Maurice Burns site manager, Tora La Rosa production manager

Dates
July to September 2006

Contact
Catherine Larkins, 1 Larkins Place, Lake Tyers Beach Vic 3909
03 5156 5995, catherine.bob@nex.net.au

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Traces of memory - stories of a garden

Julie Millowick, photographer

I had my own photographic business in Melbourne for years. I was doing corporate industrial and I loved going out and lighting big semitrailers and big tankers and things like that. I was going into all kinds of interesting factories and places that people don’t normally go and then in 1994 I had a really bad, a very bad back injury. I was either in bed or in hospital for two years and even when I could be vertical I couldn’t dress myself or open the fridge door and I couldn’t hold a camera.

One day, at the two year mark, I went into the dark room which I hadn’t been in since I got ill and I took with me some scarves and some underwear and I made photograms. It was just so wonderful and empowering and exciting because I could do something by myself. I could create images again.

I live in Fryerstown in central Victoria which was the epicentre of the gold rush. My house is a four-room miner’s cottage built in 1862 and a Mrs King lived here with her 13 children. I actually have a photograph of her with two of her children and I often wonder what her life was like and I wonder whether some of these plants that I now walk past, whether she actually planted them. There are so many plants still here in this area that were grown to remind people of ‘Home’.

Every day I get up and go across to the paddock to feed my horse who’s retired now and I walk past the briar roses and the jonquils and the irises and the Peruvian lilies and I can’t help but think about the women who planted them. You go into the town cemetery here and there are so many graves of young women who obviously died in childbirth and little babies who died, little children. This was a tragic, hostile environment for those women and you can just imagine the absolute joy that a briar rose or a bridal creeper or a quince tree would’ve brought them.

We have fiercely active Landcare groups here and I have to say they’re just fantastic. They’ve done a great deal of good work but when I see them running around chopping down all the trees like hawthorn and so on, I feel caught right in the middle. I know they’re doing really great things but what my work is about is the emotional reasons for these plants being introduced here in the first place. And how these plants are entwined in the complexity of human lives.

There’s a quote that started my exhibition:

‘Pioneer women persisted in cultivating familiar plants, in part because they were remedies against that most disheartening of ills of the new world, homesickness.’

These plants brought solace and I think it’s really important to acknowledge that. That’s what I am doing in Traces of Memory. It was a major exhibition at Monash Gallery of Art and then it came up here to Bendigo.

It took me about 18 months in a fairly concentrated way to prepare the exhibition and there was about six months before that where I was really just buggerising around trying to work out how to do it. It was when I realised that I could combine the photograms with images stitched together to form a panorama, that’s when I was on my way. I also wanted quotes from diaries and letters to go with the images but of course most of these things were chucked in the incinerator when somebody like Mrs King died. Nobody would have kept Mrs King’s bits and pieces.

In the end I had to make a decision to include quotes about gardening from beyond central Victoria. They are quotes from pioneer gardeners and I wasn’t happy about it but at least it is sharing the experiences.

I don’t know what it is about a photogram that is so poignant but many people have been very moved. I think it’s because they are so pure. And beautiful. When you’re standing in the dark room you never know what you’re going to get. I go in there and I start cutting up bits of paper to make what we call test strips and then I get my time right and my exposure right and then I get out the big sheet and put the object on. That’s when you first get the idea of what the potential is. You really have to take yourself in hand at some stage though because you realise you’ve just been standing in there, going through packets and packets of paper, saying to yourself, ‘I’ll just try one more’ – again and again and again.

Those years when I was so ill made me understand that things happen in your life that you’re powerless to prevent and even though it’s very hard, you have to go with it and do the best with it that you can. Traces of Memory is about ordinary everyday people who are no longer here, but their traces are. I’m certain Mrs King planted the Peruvian lilies. I’m absolutely positive about that.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Fryerstown, central Victoria

Artforms
Photogram, digital images stitched together to form panorama, quotations from diaries and letters

Initiated by
Julie Millowick

Organised by
Julie Millowick

Artists
Julie Millowick, photograms and digital panoramas
Garry Brannan, digital panorama stitching

Dates
2002 to 2006

Contact
Julie Millowick, 30 Taradale Road, Fryerstown Vic 3451
03 5473 4481, jmillowick@netcon.net.au

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Southern forest sculpture walk

Fiona Sinclair, project coordinator

Northcliffe is a very small town in the south west of Western Australia. It’s at the end of the line. No-one knows where it is. I always have to explain it in relation to somewhere else. It’s hard to put my finger on why I love Northcliffe so much but it’s a strange, wonderful place with this amazing 750 acres of pristine forest right in the centre of town.

I snuck the idea for a sculpture walk over the table at our visitors’ centre committee meeting. Our town was in crisis then. It was hard, hard times. The state government had just deregulated the dairy industry and that’s a major industry for us. And also the timber industry was going through a major restructure. There were protests of all kinds, you know, about the logging of old growth forests. The town was split and the social fabric was just being torn apart and the way everyone was relating to each other was just spiralling down. I got good interest in the project right from the start but then I pulled back because I thought, ‘This is going to be huge and I don’t have the time.’ Hah, the irony! That was when I had no children. I didn’t realise that that’s actually when I had all the time in the world.

It was three or four years later when I had a toddler and was pregnant with another baby that we launched the attack. A particular grant came up and it was like, ‘Okay. Let’s go!’ The slow germination over the years was good though. We had a long time for the roots to sink in and I think that was really important because it did grow pretty darn big. Once the momentum had started you just couldn’t stop. No matter how exhausted you got. You just had to keep going. We had a core of about eight people, all volunteers. It was an amazingly strong team of very, very courageous people. And nutty. But mainly prepared to have a go. The walk was never conceived as a ‘healing project’ but as it turns out, we’ve made some good ground there.

I wrote 35 funding applications in that first establishment phase and we had to be really creative about how we got the big dollars. It was such a huge project for a small town and there were no boxes we fitted into. Arts funding is actually really small so I delivered the walk as an economic development project. I had to have a frontal lobotomy and learn how to speak economic rationalist jargon first but that’s when we suddenly hit real money – about three quarters of a million was in the budget all together.

It’s a very bold project. A 1.2 kilometre walking trail with just under 20 permanent works and an ever-changing series of ephemeral pieces. They’re predominantly Western Australian artists but we have a mix, nationally and internationally. And it’s not just visual arts, it’s multi arts. Writers and musicians as well. There are five tours and visitors listen on MP3 players to music and to stories for kids and youth. And there are funny, personal anecdotes from all the artists saying why they chose to make this and why they put it there, and so on. It’s very site specific. Everyone had to come here, spend time and meet people before we’d even let them develop a project for us. It was like the stories were written for a particular stump or cluster of trees. And the sculptures, you couldn’t just make something in a workshop and then bung it in the middle of the forest.

The scale is certainly not what most people think should be in a small town. People are surprised to find such quality of works and such breadth of vision. There seems to be this sense that you’re only allowed to have a project or a dream that’s related to the size of your population, which is ridiculous. I’ve never felt that living in a small town was an impediment to a big idea. In fact I think when you live in a smaller place you’re less restricted than you are in a more urban context. We’ve been able to do something far bigger because of our lack of experience and our naivety. And also because everyone went, ‘Yeah alright, we’ll support you.’

On the day I wrote our first application, I found a quote by Goethe. It went, ‘Whatever you can do, or think you can do, just do it. Boldness has genius and power in it. Begin it now.’ And that’s it for me about this project. It’s bold and that’s where the strength came from. People felt compelled to help us. We had so many artists give so much more than was ever financially rewarded because the idea was captivating. They thought it was something they could believe in. And all our consultants, they just kept on giving and I truly believe it was because the idea was just SO bold. If it had been a sort of a mediocre-something, we would never have got the money or the calibre of artists. It’s that whole leap of faith thing. We went, ‘Holy cow, let’s jump off the edge!’

You can’t be certain you’ll land safely. And that’s why everyone wants to watch.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Northcliffe, Western Australia

Artforms
Sculpture, writing, music, photography

Initiated by
Fiona Sinclair

Organised by
Southern Forest Arts

Financial support
Arts Development (Arts WA), Contemporary Music Panel (Arts WA), Grants for Forest Communities (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry), Regional Development Scheme (South West Development Commission), Trailswest and Interpretation of Cultural Heritage (Lotterywest), Healthway (WA Government), Regional Arts Fund, an Australian Government initiative, Community Arts Network WA, Country Arts WA, Regional Partnerships (Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government), Regional Infrastructure Fund (Department of Local Government and Regional Development), Shire of Manjimup, Myer Foundation, WA Department of Environment and Conservation, Festivals Australia, an Australian Government initiative, Northcliffe Arts Association, Northcliffe Visitor Centre, Northcliffe Interpretive and Cultural Centre, private donations

Non financial support
Work for the Dole program, Ministry of Justice’s Walpole Prison Work Crew, Wildflower Group, Department of Environment and Conservation, Country Arts WA, Artsource, Arts WA, Tourism WA, Shire of Manjimuip, Maggie Baxter (Public Art Coordinator), Robyn Johnston (music mentor), Keith Sinclair (literary mentor), Lee Duddle (sound engineer), Suzanne Kelly (Indigenous advisor), Northcliffe Telecentre, Northcliffe Youth Voice and Family Centre, Northcliffe Arts Association, Pemberton Arts Group, Warren Arts Council, Quinninup Community Association, Northcliffe Forest Park Management Committee, Northcliffe Visitor Centre

Artists
Sculpture
Kevin Draper, Joanna Box, Duke Albada, Kati Thamo, Gemma Dodd, Olga Cironis, Warwick Backhouse, Susan Flavelle, Cecile Williams, Alex Mickle, Nic Mickle, Arif Satar, Audrey Satar, François Davin, Ritchie Kuhaupt, Lorenna Grant, Tony Pankiw, Nalda Searles, Norma MacDonald, Peter Hill, Elaine Clocherty

Writing
Kim Scott, Anna Jacobs, Louise Schofield, Andrew Taylor, Dianne Wolfer, Lucy Dougan, Kevin Gillam, Jan Teagle Kapetas

Music
Anne Rice, Bernard Carney, David Hyams, Libby Hammer, Djiva, Pete Jeavons, Tomas Ford, Cathie Travers, Mel Robinson, David Pye, Joel Barker, Kill Devil Hills

Photography
John Austin

Dates
Original idea 2001, planning and development 2003, official opening November 2006, operational phase ongoing

Contact
Southern Forest Arts, PO Box 395, Northcliffe WA 6262
08 9776 6439, info@southernforestarts.com.au, www.southernforestarts.com.au

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Directing the hero within

Carl Kuddell, managing director, producer

It started back in 2004 when my partner Jennifer Lyons-Reid and I had success with a couple of documentaries. We had never made a film before and we were going like, ‘Okay, if we can do this and it’s so much fun and we can tell important stories, then how about we share this skill?’ My background is in theatre and multimedia and I also happen to be a human rights activist. For years I worked with camera crews, mainly as security in demonstration rallies and I came to see cameras as a very powerful tool. A magic pass.

We wanted to help kids in remote communities make films about their lives and share them. What we didn’t want to do was to go into a community, wave digital equipment around and disappear again. We wanted something that was sustainable and could grow even without us being there and we realised we needed to start at ground level because making films isn’t just about how you hold a camera. It’s about coming up with an idea and having the power, the teamwork, and the spirit to actually see it through. The kids need to learn how to visualise the story and then be able to share it, in a powerful way. We thought that ideally, it would grow into a national network.

We work the three-pronged approach with local councils, youth art workers and the local schools. The outcomes depend on finding people with vision in the community, entrepreneurs, who will run with it after we’ve gone and so that it’s not seen as just a bunch of kids doing a holiday program but more as a way of working together with young people at an early stage, to involve them in the decision-making.

We need to have youth workers and health workers on board who understand it’s an investment in the future and will say, ‘Okay, we’ll invest time and also a bit of money.’ Then we come on board with local and federal or state funding to add to it and create a plan that has short term outcomes (a film is made in each workshop) and a long term commitment to invest into a youth media centre to carry the skills on. Communities who find the will to do that suddenly have a youth media team that can document their own events. Suddenly they have a bunch of young people who can create a platform for the community to have a voice and share with other communities.

Each group that goes through the workshops learns skills that they can pass on to others. So we very much encourage adults to take part in the workshop. We have normally two to three youth workers who are adults, sometimes parents, depending what the relationship is to the teenagers, to learn the skills so there is more longevity built in. It’s a fascinating fast ride. We start off the first day and there’s no idea and they’ve never touched a camera and then at the end of the third day they have a finished film.

We now have seven youth media centres across South Australia working in different regional centres. And we’ve developed a DVD package to build the skill set. It’s a teachers’ manual for a term’s worth of filmmaking. And there are lots of examples of films made by young people and behind the scenes footage to show that they actually did it themselves. We’ve found this can be one of the biggest things: that people think often it’s not really the young people making films but the adults. We needed to prove to our funders and to the kids and their adult supporters that kids really are able to do it for themselves.

We’re now producing updates on the DVD. Pretty much each time we do a workshop, we produce a film or sometimes a couple of films. And they grow into an archive. If we can, we put them on online. And the ABC has commissioned us to produce a miniseries together with a couple of young people in the Riverlands and Pinaroo.

We just recently sold the Directing the Hero Within training DVD to a network in America and it has really taken off there. The Americans love it. It’s the different voice, the exoticness and also there’s a certain Australian humour and Australian integrity that they really love. We were really surprised it happened. Now we have Australian kids from the desert and from the bushland teaching the US students how to make films!

Living in interesting and also rather difficult times, one of my big hopes is that we will find support for identity, belonging and storytelling. If we have a strong sense of belonging and a strong sense of identity then we can be much more tolerant. Telling our stories is an integral part of this.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Regional South Australia and metropolitan Australia including Ceduna, Whyalla, Quorn, Murray Bridge, Mount Gambier, Pinnarroo, Karoonda, Murrayville, Coober Pedy, Bordertown, Warooka, Moonta, Clare, Port Lincoln, Port Augusta, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, North Queensland

Artforms
Film making, digital photography, creative writing, sound recording and music creation

Initiated by
Jennifer Lyons-Reid, Carl Kuddell from Tallstoreez Productionz

Organised by
Tallstoreez Productionz

Financial support
Regional Arts Fund, an Australian Government initiative, Australia Council for the Arts, Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts through its Indigenous Cultural Support Grant, Attorney General’s Department, Country Arts SA, Arts SA, SA Film Corporation, the Office for Youth, Department of Education and Children’s Services, ABCjtv, Mallee Health Inc, South Australian Youth Arts Board (SAYAB) and Tallstoreez Productionz

Non financial support
Come Out Festival for Young People, Australian Research Council Linkage Grant recipient together with the Inspire Foundation and the Queensland University of Technology, Indigenous Coordination Centre SA, Australian International Documentary Conference, MyHero USA, American Film Institute, Media Resource Centre, City of Mt Gambier, Clare and Gilbert Valleys Council, Rural City of Murray Bridge, Port Augusta City Council, Southern Mallee District Council, District Council of Karoonda East Murray, District Council of Coober Pedy and community groups, D’Faces of Youth Arts Whyalla, Coober Pedy Youth Media Centre, Port Lincoln Community House Youth Media Centre, Koonnibba Aboriginal Council, Mallee Health Inc, Southern Flinders Health Inc, Cooroong Cultural Centre, Men in Black, Centacare Port Pirie

Artists
Carl Kuddell producer
Jennifer Lyons-Reid director
Carl Kuddell, Bryan Mason, Rachael Thompson photography
Jennifer Lyons-Reid, Carl Kuddell, Beth Neate, Rachael Thompson trainers
Felix Weber, David Banbury editing

Dates
November 2004, ongoing

Contact
Carl Kuddell, PO Box 832, Mary Street, Unley SA 5061
0407 811 733, carl@tallstoreez.com, www.directingthehero.com

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Ngarakuruwala (we sing songs)

Genevieve Campbell, artistic director, musician

A relative of mine was telling me about an event he had been to on the Tiwi Islands and this fantastic singing he’d heard from a bunch of ladies. He was saying that their response to a community event is to get into a group and create a song on the spot for it. The more he talked about the Tiwi Island ladies, the more excited I got. I really don’t know whether it was a kind of artistic midlife crisis or something that made me suddenly need to go. I just really, really wanted to hear them.

I contacted Teresita who was the boss woman of the group and asked if I could come up. I spent a few days sitting around with them, listening and recording some songs just on a dodgy little mini disc and I decided that this was what I wanted to do. Work with the Tiwi Island songs. I had the idea of maybe taking a small group of musicians up from Sydney to play with the women. I’d been working with a jazz band (not in a French horn players’ natural comfort zone!) and the correlation between improvisational jazz and the living breathing Tiwi songs struck me straight away. There were five of us: bass, drums, two saxophones and French horn.

The Tiwi songs are not set in stone. They might change a bit each time. I thought jazz musos would be quite good at coping with this and yet when we went up for a development workshop week in May, I found us musos were not quite as confident as I thought we would be. Because even though you improvise with jazz, you’ve still got charts in front of you. You still know how many bars there’s going to be in a phrase, for example. With Tiwi songs, it’s always different. One time they might sing, ‘and he jumped into the river and when he came up he was a crocodile,’ and that could take eight bars to sing. Then literally the next time, maybe two hours later, they’ll sing ‘he jumped under and came up and instead he looked like a crocodile,’ and that will only take five bars. To them it’s the same song but to us suddenly we’re three bars out. We’re completely thrown.

And what made it trickier was that there was no conducting, of anyone! Conducting is the same as pointing for the Tiwis and a lot of Indigenous communities. It’s quite rude, you would never point at someone. I tried to copy some of their signs: there’s an open hand raised up that is used like ‘follow me’ or ‘we’re going to sing now’. And there’s a great kind of nodding where they point their lips – it’s very hard to describe. There’s a lot of eye contact, the group is very zoned into each other. Basically they’re all shadowing the person who ‘owns’ the song or we might say, created it. This made for some fairly chaotic rehearsals, but fun.

The starting point was always the Tiwi songs. The women sang and the band responded and sometimes the women loved the ideas and sometimes they hated them. When I contacted the artistic director of the Darwin Festival about the possibility of a performance he was really keen and helpful and took us on board for August 2007.

I’d got all the budgeting done for 12 women, booked the hotel rooms and everything and then literally the day before we were flying out Teresita said, ‘Here’s a list of the extra women who are coming.’ I just about had a heart attack. There were eight extra women and we had to find the money to get them across. But Teresita took the reins. She said, ‘I’ll get the money. We need this money. It’s a really important thing for the strong women and we need it today!’ And that’s pretty much what happened. She asked around and the boss of the club came on board with the cash to get the extra ladies on the ferry.

Darwin was terrific. We had an over sell-out crowd. And then we played the following night at the Indigenous Music Awards. The women really loved it even though performing is not what they’re about. They’re more interested in having fun and singing for themselves and us as a group. We had to persuade them in fact to open up their circle and sing for the audience. The jazz musos on the other hand are the opposite. They’re always aware of the audience and wanting to make it right. The collaboration was fantastic. Plus the experience has given the women a lot of kudos back on the island.

The younger women are interested now. We’ve been invited to play at the Opera House this year and that’s what I’m working on, getting the money to bring the ladies down to Sydney. I’m getting better and better at writing applications… and staring the money down!

Additional information and contact details

Location
Bathurst Island, Tiwi Islands, Darwin

Artforms
Song, instrumental music, dance

Initiated by
Genevieve Campbell and the Wangatunga Strong Women’s group

Organised by
Genevieve Campbell and Teresita Puruntatameri

Financial support
Sidney Myer Foundation, Arts NT, Darwin Festival, Matilda Minerals, Tiwi Island Local Government, Nguiu Ulintjinni Association, Nguiu Club, Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA), Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners’ Society (AMCOS), Community Benefit Fund

Non financial support
Charles Darwin University, ABC TV, Darwin Festival

Artists
Singers and dancers (Bathurst Island locals): Teresita Puruntatameri, Anthea Kerinaua, Leonie Tipiloura, Noella Babui, Sue Portamini, Cynthia Portamini, Molly Munkara, Marie-Carmel Kantilla, Karen Tipiloura, Calista Kantilla, Monica Tipiloura, Gloria Pilakui, Mel Fernando, Rosemary Tipungwuti, Casmira Munkara, Judith Puruntatameri, Jacinta Tipungwuti, Eugenie Tipungwuti-Rice, Connie Pauatjimi, Gabriella Alimankini, Regina Kantilla, Clementine Puruntatameria

Instrumentalists (visitors to Bathurst Island): Jamie Cameron, Michael Hohnen, Daniel Rorke, Genevieve Campbell, Gai Bryant, Brendan Clark, Dan Dinnen, Jason Noble

Dates
February 2007, ongoing. First performance 24 August 2007, Sydney Opera House 13 July 2008

Contact
Genevieve Campbell, 12 Richmond Street, Croydon NSW 2132
02 9715 2975, genrog@bigpond.net.au

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Fling physical theatre

Lee Pemberton, artistic director

This might sound a bit egotistical but Fling really started out of my need to have a professional choreographic life, even though I was living in a little country region. I came up from Melbourne to Bega for a holiday and then I just couldn’t get myself back to the city. So I started applying for projects and made a bit of a place here and then I met a partner. So then that was that. Here I am.

I started Fling, a youth dance company, about seven years ago. We have up to 20 young people each year who are company members and together with other choreographers and musicians we create original performances. We meet three times a week and basically have one main season a year with a season of ten performances. Last season, we had 1,500 people come to see the show which is just enormous, particularly for contemporary dance. We don’t have a performing arts centre in this area. Nothing like it. When we perform we more or less have to build the theatre which is no mean feat.

The kids come with different backgrounds, sometimes in soccer or gymnastics or martial arts. The boys who’ve played soccer, they’re very successful at Fling. We’ve had three boys from Bega enrolling in the School of Dance at the VCA this year. This is one of the most prestigious dance schools in the country. There are eight ex-flingers studying circus and dance at tertiary level now and from a little area like this, that’s fantastic. I’m a bit of a gold digger where dancers are concerned. I mean, I haven’t created these dancers but Fling has definitely given them an opportunity.

We’ve been lucky enough to have had funding from the Regional Arts Fund to run a residency program and we have visiting artists come in for anything from a weekend to a couple of weeks and bring their skills and help create the show. For the last two years, we’ve been able to tour. Last year we toured the 2006 show to the Parramatta Riverside Theatres and Wollongong’s Merrigong Theatre and we’ve been asked back again.

If I had a wish it would be for a permanent home for us. We train and rehearse at the Bega Town Hall which can get very cold and has floors that are a bit more slippery than I’d really like. It’s a beautiful space but it’s a community space and that makes a difference. You come in and there’s that feeling of other people having been there, people who might not be as respectful of a space as artists are. Dancers are naturally so clean. We really like a clean, open space. Just being able to walk in and have your own images on the walls and being able to leave your equipment out and so on, that would be such a luxury. When I remember the spaces that I used to dance in: heated tarkett flooring, a sound system or a live pianist, all those things. I just think these kids are working so well under what are really difficult conditions.

Fling is incorporated now. I didn’t really want to do it at first because I was fearful of the whole administration thing

– there’s just one of me and I don’t stretch far enough. But Jen Hunt who’s our Regional Arts Officer, she assured me that it was the right way to go and that I would get support. And with Jen’s guidance, it has all fallen in place. Now we’ve got a board and a bank account and we have some fantastic board members. One is a lawyer, a fabulous lawyer whose son was at Fling. And there’s another bloke who originally rang and gave an anonymous donation and we found out who he was (so much for anonymity!) and approached him and now he’s the treasurer. And we have Gordon Beattie as our chairperson. He taught Performing Arts at Nepean University and he’s got such knowledge of the industry and the contacts and the funding bodies.

For a while I’ve been running a junior program for kids not old enough to be in the main company and I’ve had trainee tutors (senior members of Fling) come in to help me. And now this year for the first time, one of our flingers who is 22 now and has been in the company since our first show, she’s joining us part-time. It’s a big step for her and for us but we’re all excited about it.

There’s something about working with youth in terms of their enthusiasm and sheer energy levels. It’s very satisfying. At times, like anybody, I do sometimes wish I could go off and do this and do that. And I do miss adult company creatively at times but what you get back from young people is a totally different thing. Young people are more openly affectionate about what they’re receiving – you can feel what they think.

Just today, I’ve been ringing around the schools in the area asking if I could come in and give workshop information about our next project. And the schools are really jumping at the opportunity. When I first came here I would have been lucky to talk to anybody who knew about me or Fling. Yes, the attitude has changed hugely. No one was jumping then!

Additional information and contact details

Location
Bega, New South Wales

Artforms
Contemporary dance, physical theatre

Initiated by
Lee Pemberton

Organised by
South East Arts Region (SEAR) of Regional Arts NSW

Financial support
Regional Arts Fund, an Australian Government initiative, Arts NSW, Australia Council for the Arts

Non financial support
Volunteer workers, local businesses

Artists
Lee Pemberton (artistic director), Alex Harrison, Kirk Page, Jodie Farrugia, Rowan Marchingo, Don Asker, Jane Mortiss, Colleen Meessmann, Anton and the young people of the Bega Valley who are current and ex-artists of the company
Candy McVeity and Geoffrey Badger, composers

Dates
Annual programs and projects since 2004

Contact
Jennifer Hunt, Business Manager, Fling Physical Theatre, PO Box 30, Tathra NSW 2550
0429 909 433, admin@flingphysicaltheatre.com.au, www.flingphysicaltheatre.com.au

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Bringing the music home

Michelle Leonard, artistic director

I grew up in Coonamble and my parents are still there. Coonamble used to be a really extraordinary place. There was a Brigidine convent, the first in Australia and those nuns literally ran it like an annex to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. In the height of the dance period there was something like 20 jazz bands. Can you imagine that? A country town with this enormous number of people who sang and played instruments and knew about music? (My grandparents met playing in an orchestra for the black and white movies.) Now two or three generations on, there’s nothing. Not even a town band.

In 2006, I was working with the National Children’s Choir, Gondwana Voices, and I got this bee in my bonnet about starting a regional children’s choir. I left my daughter at home in Sydney and took off in the car with the regional arts development officer from Outback Arts. We were on the road for the best part of ten days: Walgett, Brewarrina, Lightning Ridge, all the way out.

I got into the schools and ran 40 minute workshops with all the children. And then I extrapolated those that had the capacity, often to the complete amazement of the teachers. They were like, ‘Oh no, you don’t want that one!’ And I’m like, ‘Oh yes I do!’ Because often the naughty ones are the ones who shine on stage or are the ones with a capacity but no way to express it. Then I worked with the communities and the schools to get these 45 young boys to come into Camp Cyprus in Baradine. Baradine is this fabulous little town about 40 kilometres from Coonamble. We got a composer, Dan Walker, funded through Festivals Australia and I asked him to write a song cycle that the kids and adults would perform for our first Moorambilla Festival in Coonamble. I wanted the music to reflect the kids’ real lives and experiences.

After the first rehearsal all the boys, the lot of them, bolted out of the hall and took off down this cliff and into the dry creek bed below. I just stood there and thought, ‘Hmm, it’s good we have public liability insurance! Now how do we get them back?’ Of course we did. They brought stones and creatures and things in their pockets and they were so excited. And that’s where the lyrics came from. The first song was called Out There and it’s all about that sense of freedom that you have as a kid to just take off until the sun goes down and you’re called home. Different themes were taken up in the different movements.

That first camp was in August and then in September, the men’s choir that I’d formed for Coonamble’s sesquicentenary joined the kids for another week. These men have huge voices. They’re tractor tenors. They get out there in the paddocks and they put on the radio and open their mouths and just belt it out. Initially, they were playing shy, (‘Nah, I’m not doing that!’) but after they heard the boys sing, they were so impressed there was no stopping them. The men and boys formed the Songs in the Key of Bloke and Moorambilla Regional Boys’ Choirs. By festival time we had over 120 men and boys – grandfathers, fathers and sons, all on stage together. They sang to their women and brought the house down.

Over the festival weekend, we held lots of workshops including ‘shower singing’ in the shop fronts down the main street. When those sessions finished, everyone would just spill out onto the street and sing whatever they’d learnt. It was way in people’s faces. It was cheeky and naughty and I didn’t care because I wanted people to get the idea that it’s normal to sing and there’s nothing wrong with you if you do.

It has become a massive, absolutely massive commitment. We fundraise, we get the scholarships. We’ve now worked with the Australian Business Arts Foundation to create a vehicle for tax deductible donations. Because my thing is, if I want you to sing in this ensemble it’s because of your skill alone. I’m not interested in anything other than your capacity. And that’s the way I want it to continue. It means we have the most eclectic group of human beings in a choir that under normal circumstances just wouldn’t be together. This year out of 150 children, 45 are Indigenous.

There’s always a bit of scepticism when you’re trying to start anything from scratch but it quickly disappeared. I had this fabulous group of women, the old Rodeo Committee, supporting us and after the 2006 festival they said, ‘Right. That’s the blokes done. The next one is going to be women and girls. Let’s go!’

Additional information and contact details

Location
Coonamble, New South Wales (festival)
Baradine, regional residency and choral camps

Artforms
Choral singing

Initiated by
Michelle Leonard artistic director

Organised by
Jeame Kunnunmont project manager 2008
Justine Lawler coordinator regional children’s choir 2007
Sandra Harrison coordinator Moorimbilla Festival of New Australian Music 2007 and 2008

Financial support
Festivals Australia, an Australian Government initiative, Indigenous Cultural Support (ICC), Coonamble Shire Council, Leichhardt Espresso Chorus, private donors

Non financial support
Paddock bash’n productions, Outback Arts, Baradine community, Coonamble community, Camp Cypress, MTM FM, The Land, Coonamble Times, web maintenance and design Karoa Krew

Artists
Michelle Leonard (conductor, composer, director), Dan Walker (composer), Luke Robinson and Matt Cocking (percussion), Lindsay Gilroy and Luke Byrne (piano), Christina Leonar (saxophone), Clare Miller, Alice Higgins, Jenny Compton, Heather Lindsay (string quartet) plus Nadia Piave, Billie McCarthy, Al Toogood, Dynes Austin, Niel Kirkby, Fay White, Emma Newman, Rebecca Massey, Kate McCarthy, Lisa Murray, Louise Marne

Dates
Songs in the Key of Bloke (2006) was followed by Songs in the Key of She (2007). It is now an annual event. In 2008 the youth multimedia ensemble MAXed OUT was added

Contact
Michelle Leonard, 33 Margaret Street, Stanmore NSW 2048
02 9560 9821, mllec@tpg.com.au, www.moorambilla.com

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No2Stones

Steve Mayer-Miller, coordinator

When the opportunity came up to do the opening for the Regional Arts Australia conference in Mackay in 2006, we discussed the idea of bringing the Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Australian South Sea Islander cultures together in some way. What often happens in festivals or celebrations is you get South Sea Islander dance groups up there, then you get the Torres Strait Islanders up there, then you get the Aboriginal dancers up there. And they each do their three dances and then it’s, ‘see you later’.

We wanted to do something that reflected what was really happening here in Mackay because there are these three separate cultures on a public level but on a more personal level and a family level, they inter-relate.

The actual idea came about when we were looking for the best place to have the opening breakfast for the Regional Arts Australia conference and we were down at Lambert’s Lookout which is an outcrop overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Aesthetically we liked it. It had energy and we thought it was practical to put on a performance there but when we went to the Elders to ask about the area, no-one knew the story of the land. And that became the first hurdle.

How were we going to represent this place? We were walking along the beach which is full of all these small lucky stones and pumice stones as well that I suspect have been washed up from the Pacific Islands over there. And as we were walking along, Mullum Stone pointed down and said, ‘Have a look at that, no two stones are the same.’ And it was this throwaway comment that led to a discussion about identity and co-existence. And I guess how everyone in this project was different to each other, that we’d come from different cultural backgrounds. There were young people, old people, people from Slade Point, the local area, people from up the Valley, people from Brisbane, people from other countries.

And so we had the idea. No2Stones would be an event known where the three cultures performed together. I remember at our first meeting some people said it was impossible, it would never happen and we were asking for trouble. And so then it became a challenge. It became, ‘Well, if that’s the case we’ve just got to do it! We’ve got to create one story.’

The planning went on for months: weaving, song, dance, costuming, fish netting. There were workshops for children and adults. It was huge for everyone and yes, it was a testing ground but there was a great willingness. Jeanette Fabila, the Indigenous choreographer, worked with each of the leaders of the groups. The idea was for them to be able to show their culture, to work as individual groups but for that then to come together in a contemporary piece. It would embrace the traditional and celebrate the traditional but also say that we can move forward.

The day came and we were up at 4 a.m. to launch the boats and set up for all the different art forms that were coming together. And then at 6:30, the rain came down. This meant there were issues for the breakfast. It was dangerous to set up the stoves, dangerous for the delegates. And this was hard for the performers but they said, ‘Hey listen, we perform in the rain all the time.’ Months of work looked like going down the drain.

We made a decision to put it on in the afternoon and spirits were raised. ‘Yeah, we’ll be back, the rain will stop, the sun will come out and everything will be right.’ And then I got a call from Mullum. She said that in the afternoon there was going to be a funeral, the brother of an Elder, and we couldn’t go ahead. It would not have gone down well.

You could see the kids’ faces. We spent all day cleaning up and I went home to bed where I stayed for two weeks, close to pneumonia.

And then a month or two later, I asked Queensland Arts Council if we could try again. We called a rehearsal and probably 75 percent came back. And after three weeks of getting together again, we put on the show. It gives me goose-bumps now. It was almost like everyone together saying, ‘We’ll show you!’ There was a great deal of courage there.

We created a film that was sent out to all the people who missed the cancelled performance. And in the end we have been left with a sense of hope. If we created this one, we can do others.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Mackay, Queensland

Artforms
Dance, song, sculpture, weaving, fishnetting, craft, music, bamboo sailing boats, costuming

Initiated by
Crossroad Arts Inc and Queensland Arts Council

Organised by
Steve Mayer-Miller artistic director Crossroad Arts
Mulum Stone Indigenous community development officer at Mackay City Council
Rhiannan Penola cultural worker at Mackay and District Australian South Sea Islander Association

Financial support
Australia Council, Regional Arts Fund, an Australian Government initiative, Arts Queensland, Queensland Arts Council

Non financial support
Regional Arts Australia, Queensland Arts Council, Mackay City Council

Dates
July to November 2006

Contact
Tracey Fisher, Marketing Manager, Queensland Arts Council, 8 Lochaber Street, Dutton Park Qld 4102
07 3004 7510, tracey.fisher@qac.org.au, www.qac.org.au

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Football stories from country Victoria

Malcolm McKinnon, project artist

I happened to read, by chance really, a report from a parliamentary inquiry into the challenges facing country football in Victoria. One of the recommendations was around the importance of social history and the need to record some of those memories. I thought I could do something around that. I grew up in country Victoria where football is more than just a game. It’s a big part of the vernacular. Football Stories is a series of 21 short films, not just about the stuff that happens on the paddock but the broader community dimension of country football. It was an epic project but right from the start, it was one of those excellent ideas that people instinctively understood.

I started by convening a discussion with the Victorian Country Football League (VCFL) and I suggested they talk to the State Library of Victoria. Then we all got together and talked about getting funds. For the VCFL this process of working with an artist was a whole new idea so it took a while to shape the project. There were things that they were very good at but there were a whole lot of other things that they’d never done before and they were happy to take guidance.

Having a big cultural institution like the State Library on board was invaluable because of all their experience in knowing how to target government, manage materials and connect with other influential organisations. The library worked with the VCFL in all those areas and assisted with other things like the training of regional staff to generate an ongoing collection of stories.

I’ve found from experience that when you’re gathering funds and support, it’s good to have something upfront that will get everyone inspired and give them an idea of what you’re talking about. The best way to do it is to show them something. For this project, I showed a three-minute film I’d made a while back for a regional council about a country football dynasty in the Mallee. And I showed another story I’d done a few years ago with an old jockey about the disappearing racecourses in north west Victoria.

These films gave people a sense of what this thing might look like in terms of memory and storytelling around country football. So for all the initial meetings, I made sure I had a laptop and a projector. And that was really successful.

We also wanted to get investment, not cash investment but emotional investment, from a whole range of peak bodies that in turn had connections with other peak bodies. We had a very good reference group that was convened by the State Library and the VCFL. It included the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, the Public Records Office Victoria and the Public Libraries Board. The group had some excellent ideas and connections. I always like to ask reference groups a lot of questions! Most importantly, the VCFL had a really impressive state-wide structure that made identifying narratives and storytellers much easier than it often is.

The films took about 12 months to make. I had a little team but by and large I did it myself. We covered the whole state. We wanted stories from all different parts of Victoria and from a range of different football clubs as well.

Meeting all the people in these communities was the really enjoyable part of it from my point of view. It probably takes 50 to 100 people to make a football club run successfully. They’re all troopers who’ve been doing this voluntary work for years and years. They have interesting things to say about the places they come from and they understand the connection between the history of that place and what its future might be. So these were really rewarding conversations to have.

One of the stories is about a bloke who had just played his 600th game for a club down in south west Victoria. This is a bloke in his 50s, you know. He should know better but his argument is that they just needed people to make up the numbers, in the reserves especially. He still enjoyed it and he figured that if he paraded his carcass out onto the field every week, it was a good example for everybody else. It’s really just about keeping the club going and giving back what you got when you were young.

Football is the lifeline of communities. In many cases, it’s the difference between a place falling off the map and not falling off. But it’s amazing how long the teams will survive really. They just keep on hanging on.

Additional information and contact details

Location
All parts of country Victoria with a particular focus on small towns

Artforms
Storytelling, digital video, multimedia

Initiated by
Artist and filmmaker Malcolm McKinnon in partnership with the Victorian Country Football League and the State Library of Victoria

Organised by
State Library of Victoria

Financial support
Arts Victoria through the Professionals in Residence program and the Content Development Fund associated with Culture Victoria

Non financial support
State Library of Victoria, Victorian Country Football League

Artist
Malcolm McKinnon

Dates
March 2006 to March 2007

Contact
Malcolm McKinnon, 163 Moor Street, Fitzroy Vic 3065
03 9416 0161, recklessEye@bigpond.com, www.cv.vic.gov.au

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Aphrodite and the mixed grill

Toni Risson, writer and photographer

It was a book that was waiting to be written and I think I was always the person who was going to write it. The catalyst was a lovely lady, Maria, who was working in the only Greek café that we still have left in Ipswich. One day I went in there, it was high summer and it was sweltering. I walked in and she said in this thick Greek accent, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ And I said, ‘Oh, it’s too hot really.’ And then she just dragged me behind the counter and shoved me in the cold room. She had this little stool set up and she said, ‘I come in here if it’s too hot.’ Maria was 75 at that stage and had been working in her café from four in the morning until late at night for so many years.

When I came out of that cold room I was looking out from her side of the counter to the street. And that moment was a turning point for me because suddenly that Greek café went from being just somewhere I ordered a milkshake and I began to get an understanding of all those cafés from the Greek perspective. It was the people and their stories that drew me in. Like Maria and her little stool in the cold room. And the man who had a café across the road from the picture theatre but never got to go to the pictures because he was always at the café.

I started by interviewing people I knew. There was a friend whose parents had a café and she was great to talk to for the kids’ perspectives. And my first boyfriend’s mum who was a waitress and still has a beautiful album with photos of the café she worked in as a girl. After that, it just snowballed. One person would say, ‘Oh, have you talked to so and so? Or, so and so?’ I had more leads than I really had time to follow. The work started as honours research and grew into a book. I went for a Regional Arts Development grant and while it was only small, it was so encouraging. It made me feel like, ‘Yes, someone else thinks this is a good project.’ And it triggered me to go over to Greece to meet with the café proprietors who have gone back. I saw the prosperity that the Greeks are enjoying again after working so hard and I also saw what they’d left behind to come to Australia in the first place.

We probably had 20 cafés in Ipswich over the course of the 20th century and in the city’s heyday there were 10 or 12 of them open. I tried to track down every one and get the stories and the photographs. But then I situated the book into a broader context so that it would have better market appeal than just to the Greek community, and just to Ipswich. I had seen people in their 50s and 60s light up when I told them about the project. They had so many great memories of meeting their mates and girlfriends at the local Greek café. And that idea led me to find some that are still in existence, cafés like the Paragon in Katoomba and the Niagara in Gundagai.

I wasn’t too worried about self-publishing but I did decide to invest money in the actual look of the book so people would see it and say, ‘I want one!’ In theory everything seemed fine and manageable but the day those 1,000 books actually came home in boxes was one of the scariest days of my life. And I’m a woman who has come home with twins! I suppose I was thinking that even though the writing and the research had taken such a big part out of my life and my family’s life, when the book actually went to the printer, it would be over. But that was really when it started. Now I had to sell it!

My business plan was to talk the Ipswich Art Gallery into doing an exhibition of the photographs and memorabilia and having a launch of the book there. They did both. I was also really lucky having a media savvy contact who pushed me and I got a very positive response from Peter McCutcheon’s 7:30 Report and that really started a whole stream of live radio interviews: Darwin, Canberra, even Melbourne and Perth. Every time I’d do an interview, the next week I’d get a wave of phone calls, people ringing up or sending cheques in the mail or knocking on the back door.

If I had my time over, I wouldn’t change very much. Except that I would get a website up and running before the book came out. And I’d be more ambitious in applying for a grant. And I’d put a few casseroles in the freezer!

Location
Ipswich, Queensland

Artforms
Writing, film making, photography

Initiated by
Toni Risson

Organised by
Toni Risson

Financial support
Mostly self-funded with help from Queensland Regional Arts Development Fund, Arts Queensland, Ipswich City Council, the Coffee Club

Non financial support
Alf and Heather Colless, Isobella and Michael Barber, Ipswich Art Gallery, University of Queensland, Logan Library, West End Paniyiri Festival, Kytherian FamilyNet website, George Poulos, James Prineas

Artists
Writer, interviewer, photographer Toni Risson Graphic designer Michelle Poole Film editor Malcolm Patterson

Dates
2004 to 2007

Contact
Toni Risson, 130 Woodend Road, Ipswich Qld 4305
07 3281 1525, t.risson@uq.edu.au

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Possum Skin Cloak - you're wrapped in your Country

Vicki Couzens, visual artist

In 1999 I was down in Melbourne attending a printmaking workshop and as part of that process we were taken to see some collections at the Melbourne Museum. We were out the back and they were showing us different artefacts and things and then they brought out the Lake Condah Possum Skin Cloak. Lake Condah is my grandmother’s country.

You normally only see these cloaks under glass in display cases so when they lifted the lid off the box and it was right there in front of me, I was overcome. The tears started falling. It was like you could feel the old people, the ancestors close by and you could almost reach out and touch them. And this might sound a bit weird but that was when the old people channelled the idea to me that we should make cloaks again and that the knowledge had to come back to the people. That was the original vision.

I talked to Lee Darroch who’s a Yorta Yorta woman and her cousin Treahnna Hamm and we started. The first cloaks were part of a regional project and then we were given the opportunity to work with all the language groups across the state to create cloaks for the opening ceremony of the Melbourne Commonwealth Games. There are about 38 groups and we ended up with 35.

We had four lead artists and we divvied Victoria up into areas. Each community chose a local artist who would then work with their mob to develop their own cloak. We would just help that along and give advice on how to do things but it was all about them taking responsibility and having their own creative processes. The first step was gathering the stories, putting those stories into designs and, of course, getting permission. We had so many layers to negotiate, we had all these bits of bloody paper to sign, but we needed to protect the intellectual property and make sure the Elders had signed off.

Then we would go back to the communities and have a practical day about how to make a cloak and again, we would leave it to the group. We’d say, ‘Here are the skins, here’s the tools, this is how I did it, these are the different stitches. You can cut them up and sew them together and then put the designs on, or you can put the designs on first, whatever.’ We left it entirely up to them. There was no imposition and the innovation and creativity that came with that was quite amazing.

The different way people went about things, you know? One lady Maureen, she did the cloak about Lake Mungo and she burnt these little circles all over it for the grains of sand. The possum skins we used came from New Zealand and they had the heads and the tails and bits still on when we got them. Maureen cut them all off at first but then she felt so sorry for them that she sewed all the heads back on along the seams. That looked incredible.

Some people had a big picture that went across the whole cloak and others had separate stories on each individual panel. Some used acrylic paints with all the colours of the rainbow, others went all traditional. Aesthetically, some people might not go for all of it, but it was amazing!

And all the time, there was all the knowledge coming out of it. Just having to go and ask, ‘Uncle, how do you mix the ochre up to paint it on?’ If they hadn’t been doing the cloaks, they might never have asked. And there’s the healing aspect too. One of the aunties, she did the Wadi Wadi cloak I think, she knew there was a sister girl who hadn’t been well and had problems and she took her cloak round and the sister girl just sat in it for half an hour and felt so healed.

The vision is spreading now. We’ve got lots of contacts in New South Wales and Queensland and South Australia who are using possum skins. Aunty Matilda wore Treahnna’s possum skin cloak at the opening of Parliament when Mr Rudd did his speech. So it’s like the smokings and the welcome to country, it’s all pretty much normal ceremonials now. Accepted. If you don’t use your traditions and your cultural practices, they go. You use it or you lose it.

This was a huge project and it didn’t go through without glitches and a bit of politics and all the rest of it but when you’re doing something like this, it always brings those things out. And we learnt a lot along the way. People, even our mob, are used to working on projects where someone’s the boss. But this time, we put the responsibility fairly and squarely back on the community.

I’ve got my own personal possum skin cloak project where I’m making a cloak for each of the clans in my language group. That’s 21. So my house is still full of possumy stuff in the lounge, on the kitchen table and it stinks when you’re burning. So my kids are going, ‘Aw, can’t you do that outside?’ But I think I’ll be doing it the rest of my life.

The best thing is that every Aboriginal person that tries on a cloak, stands proud and tall. They can’t not. You’re sort of wrapped in your Country. That’s the feeling.

Additional information and contact details

Locations
Across Victoria

Artform
Crafting possum skin cloaks based on traditional Aboriginal methods

Initiated by
Vicki Couzens

Organised by
Regional Arts Victoria Carolyn Saunders project manager Vicki Couzens artistic director

Financial support
2006 Commonwealth Games, Arts Victoria, Community Support Fund Victoria, Regional Arts Fund, Myer Foundation

Non financial support
Melbourne Museum (archival material), Koorie Heritage Trust (keeping place for some cloaks)

Artists
Vicki Couzens, Lee Darroch, Treahna Hamm, Maree Clarke

Dates
April 2005 to April 2006

Contact
Lindy Allen, Director, Regional Arts Victoria, PO Box 600, Port Melbourne Vic 3015
03 9644 1800, lallen@rav.net.au, www.rav.net.au

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Lightsite - turning the landscape into pure light

Ian Weir, artist

I’m an architect and sort of a photographic artist. I’m hesitant to say I’m an artist because I work in a faculty where there are full-time artists and I’m certainly not one of those. I’ve been dedicating my creative energy to the great southern region since about 1996. It’s an area that has been virtually demolished and turned into farms. I grew up there and actually sort of helped de-forest it myself as a child! What’s left is incredibly biodiverse but it’s a particular type of biodiversity that’s really enigmatic. Visually, it’s a homogenous and a fairly harsh sort of place. Casual visitors drive through the landscape heading straight for the coast. (Everything’s become a very scenographic experience...it’s all looking out to the ocean, isn’t it?) They drive through and have absolutely no understanding of how these people who inhabit this land could love it. I decided to see what I could do to represent that type of vegetation and get it into the public consciousness.

It took about six months to come up with the idea and then six months to do it. I hadn’t done a camera obscura before. Originally, I was going to buy an old shed on a friend’s farm, turn it into this giant pinhole camera and move it whole to different locations. But then I got into discussion with this lovely man I’ve never met in New York State. He goes into primary schools and converts their classrooms into cameras and he’s just one of these champs and he was very excited and suggested ‘Why don’t you make your own transportable building?’ And I realised I could do that. I could make it as a sort of flat pack so it just goes on a trailer and it doesn’t have to have a floor. And that really was the revelation in the project.

Not having the floor was the most powerful thing because the actual land where these people had grown up and lived their life is right there in the room with them.

They’ve spent 50 years in that landscape and then I put them inside the room and suddenly their landscape is revealed to them as pure light rather than memory, rather than a bodily kind of relationship, rather than the landform or how many acres there are. It gets turned into pure light and these guys walk in there and after years and years and years of being there, they just see this totally immaterial version of their landscape.

And that was really exciting. Like with the two lads, they’re standing in their barley crop, the same barley crop that they were standing outside a few minutes ago, driving around in their harvester and now they’re inside the room and they see the barley crop all in the ceiling and around them and they were just blown away. It was the same with all the people, whether it was at the beach or in the heath or in the sheep yards.

It was such a nice thing and that’s what kept me motivated to move the shed to all the different locations and that’s what kept my assistants willing to donate their time because they really loved turning all these landscapes into pure light as well.

It would be easy to say that Lightsite is about a sense of place but I actually think it’s more about a sense of moment because since I took the photographs just over a year ago, one man has died and the two guys in the barley paddock had to sell their farm because they couldn’t run it without their dad. So it’s really about a particular moment and a lot of people with an attachment to the land who have now passed on or moved on. I was in tears a lot of the time because there was so much emotion. A lot of the people had to spend up to half a day in the room for me to make sure I had the right exposure. Some of them stood motionless for like four or five hours without even a drink of water. They said, ‘No, we’re fine,’ and they would talk and tell me their stories.

I’m just sitting here looking at one picture now. It’s Jack’s Bay (the architecturalisation of memory). This is the chap who died about three or four months ago...

An old salmon fisherman’s sitting there on his chair inside the room and he’s looking out to the beach that he looked out at for 40 years and his daughter who used to babysit me when I was a kid, she’s 60, she’s out the front with her husband. Then her kid, her son and his wife and then their kids. There’s four generations in one family and they get successively more and more blurred as they get younger in that image.

A lot of photos didn’t turn out. There were just so many contingencies but you know where there’s risk, there’s the likelihood of something unpredictable happening. And that is generally good. And that’s the last thing I’ll say.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Great Southern Region, Western Australia

Artforms
Photography and architectural installation

Initiated and Organised by
Shaaron du Bignon and Annette Davis from MIX artists

Financial support
Arts WA, Regional Arts Fund, an Australian Government initiative, Art on the Move, Perth International Arts Festival, Regional Development Scheme (WA Government), Integrated Tree Cropping, Watercorp, Roland (Glen) Robinson

Non financial support
MIX Artists, Western Australian Museum, Albany and Perth

Artist
Ian Weir photography

Dates
May 2005 to November 2007

Contact
Shaaron du Bignon, 31 Hill Street, Albany WA 6330
08 9842 9446, shaaron@omninet.net.au

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Slices of nature

Rod Westbrook, photographer

I’ve got an image of me holding a camera, a polaroid type of thing when I was about three and basically I’ve been doing photography off and on for more than 20 years. But I was born with spina bifida and this restricts my mobility and the images I can find. I’m not able to get access to Cradle Mountain and all the beautiful wilderness areas here in Tasmania, for example.

I have travelled a lot around the world with my mother, though. I’ve been to Africa, been to Alaska, Canada, Europe. I’ve been alongside elephants in the wild and I’ve stood on top of glaciers and so I’ve had a lot of experiences, lots of wonderful, exciting places. But I walk with crutches so balance is a big thing and I can’t carry stuff. And because I’ve got curvature as well, my lungs are a bit worn out so I’ve had to find ways around it.

I tried to think outside the square with my photography and when I saw this particular style while I was at TAFE called photograms I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do that!’ Photograms are basically where you put your subject matter onto your paper, directly onto your paper, and exposure to the light leaves a silhouetted image similar to an x-ray. Man Ray is famous for his rayograms: he put his name to the process nd I just kind of put my name to my process as well. I call them Rodergrams!

My disability probably makes me more observant of little things. Because I’m on crutches I’m more aware of things at my feet. (If I don’t watch where I put my stick I could fall down a hole.) So I work with small and intricate patterns, things I can manipulate alone in my dark room. I can’t hold a heavy camera but I can explore the intricate seed patterns and designs that you find within the most common items, fruits and vegetables, in your kitchen or garden.

Tomatoes are amazing. And grapes. When you slice a grape in half, you find the veins and the seeds and it looks like a big, wonderful light globe. It’s these perfect things in nature that people often don’t notice that are the inspirations for my work.

I’m quite short. I’m only about four foot high. I wasn’t able to reach all the equipment in the dark room at TAFE, for example. They had to make a little table for the enlarger for me. Once I grasped the style of photograms I kind of knew that that was going to be my thing. I worked on it for a year and a half while at TAFE, changing the style and the subjects as I went along. And I invested in creating my own dark room in my house. Everything’s at my level there.

A friend adapted the enlarger so I could reach all the knobs and dials that were too high. He’s an engineer so he made some levers and different things so that I can crank it up and down. These things gave me the freedom to be doing what I want to do, when I want to do it. And I can do it at home. I’ve just been given a microscope which will extend the range of images I produce even further. I’ll be able to do water droplets and other minute things. I like experimenting.

I had only been out of TAFE three or four months when I was a feature artist in Living Artists Week. It’s a big festival here in Tasmania every second year. I was part of Living Connections which promotes amateur or up and coming artists. Every large town in Tasmania had a gallery exhibiting people’s work.

I was very surprised at the response. It brought me a lot of media attention and a lot of interest. Nationally and on TV, radio and print. I like the media. I like promoting myself. Most artists I meet are very reclusive. They like to do their own thing and they don’t really like to talk about it. Maybe because of my disability, I want to meet people. I want to have feedback and people around me.

I have invested in my website and products to sell and my brand. It’s trial and error. I’ve produced postcards and calendars and sometimes you produce things and they don’t work and sometimes you get feedback you don’t want. But that just spurs you on to work even harder. I’m getting people to see what I see.

I’ve just been down to Hobart. I visited a gallery in Salamanca and they said, ‘Oh we can’t sell photography.’ And I said, ‘Well you don’t have to sell mine. It sells itself!’

If you are passionate enough, nothing stands in your way.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Devonport, Tasmania

Artforms
Photograms

Project initiated and organised by
Rod Westbrook

Non financial support
Family and friends

Artist
Rod Westbrook

Dates
July 2006 ongoing

Contact
Rod Westbrook, 41 Upper Drew Street, East Devonport Tas 7310
03 6427 8008, rodergrams@bit.net.au, http://users.bit.net.au/ Rodergrams/slicesofnature/

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Red Tape by Terra Arts

Merilyn Cox, founder Terra Art

Terra Art is a safe place for young people and an art and design skills studio. The idea came in response to the suicide crisis in the south-east of the state. I was working in Country Arts SA at the time and they let me do the project alongside principal artist Maria Filippow over nine months as a professional development opportunity. We chose the town of Millicent because it has a lot of inter-generational poverty.

It’s got a large housing trust area and a high drug-using population. It’s 50 kilometres to Mt Gambier and to get there you need a car and a licence and petrol which means there’s this large group of young people feeling quite isolated.

The young people we see are really disenfranchised. Half of them should still be at school but the schools just can’t cope with their issues so they’re left to float. Trying to get help for young people is almost impossible. We had difficulty getting a health worker in the beginning but then when they came and saw us they said, ‘Oh my God! These are the young people we’ve been trying to access for years and we just haven’t ever been able to get them.’

We started off doing lino prints, very basic. And then for a photographic project we gave them disposable cameras for a week and what they came back with… well, you know, funny stuff really. Pictures of bongs and things like that. So then we knew we should take them through the whole thing. Teach them about visual language and what makes a good image and take them on excursions. And the studio developed from there. For a lot of young people it’s been the first thing they could call their own. It’s very much their space and they’re proud of it. The whole idea of teaching these skills is to give the young people a language so they can articulate the way they feel. They can produce images that reflect their lives and they feel heard. Everyone’s a part of the studio process. It’s very collaborative and they’ve been using very complex software programs. I was blown away by the public response to the Red Tape show but the best thing was at the end when one of the girls who’d been a part of it came up to me and said, ‘Great. I’ve got rid of it now. Let’s make something more positive next!’

Caroline Hammatt, project coordinator

When Merilyn first started the studio, I was doing a multimedia course at the TAFE in Mount Gambier and she asked my lecturer if anyone in the class was interested in helping out at Terra Art with computer skills. So I came in and I ended up being mentored by Ian Corcoran, a projection artist from Melbourne. He helped me with editing programs like Final Cut Studio. That’s when I started working on the Red Tape project.

It was basically a slide show that was a combination of text, drawings and photos. Some had been manipulated. And the young people did the soundtrack. The plan was to project the images on this huge water tower in town. And there was going to be another show projected onto an old historic building in Robe which is a small town about 80 kilometres away.

We got this thumping great big projector and a scissor lift to take it up so we could project right on the top of the tower. It was quite an amazing site actually. None of us knew how it was going to go which was pretty scary. It had been a fairly fluid concept to start with but it went off really well. Millicent is renowned for being cold and wet so we’d organised for the local Lioness Club to have free soup on hand. Quite a big crowd turned up, probably 300 people and because we had some mind boggling technical hitches, people had time to mingle and drink the soup and it created a very nice and unusual feeling here.

These kids are normally on the outer in this community. They don’t fit in but a lot of people were really moved by their work. They came up after the show and said how sad it was. Which is interesting because we’d already tried to put quite a positive spin on the work before it went up! People didn’t realise that these kids face the sort of things they do. There were offers of help. So yes, it was a very good response. And the kids, most of them got a real sense of achievement out of it and were proud because their families did come out and support it. One of the young people actually said that it was the first time she had nearly all her family together. I think there was only one auntie who didn’t show up.

At the moment we’re working on A-Lure which ties in with Visionary Images in Melbourne. A-Lure is very much about mobile phone content and trying to engage the public. We’ve got a big question in our window that says, ‘What’s your favourite thing to do with other people?’ There’s a text number and an email address and as we get the answers we’re putting them on post-it notes and sticking them in the window in a big collage. It’s looking good and people stop and look in the window and occasionally we’ll go out and we’ll ask them the question and put their answer in the window.

Most people in the town would know about us now and that wasn’t always the case. Hopefully it will all come together.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Terra Art Studio, Millicent, South Australia

Red Tape project Millicent and Robe

Artforms
Multimedia arts

Initiated by
Merilyn Cox, Country Arts SA
David Kelly, South East Regional Health Service

Organised by
Merilyn Cox, Maria Fillipow and Caroline Hammat

Financial support
Country Arts SA, South East Regional Health Service, Regional Arts Fund, Australia Council for the Arts, Wattle Range Council, South Australian Housing Trust, South Australian Youth Arts Board

Non financial support
SA Water, Wattle Range Council, Millicent High School, Red Cross, South East Community Health Service

Artists
Sally Marsden, Maria Fillipow, Ian Corcoran, Merilyn Cox, Caroline Hammat and the young people of Terra Art

Dates
The project was initiated in 2002 and resulted in the Terra Art studio in 2004. Red Tape commenced in 2005 with public events May 2006

Contact
Merilyn Cox, Country Arts SA, 2 McLaren Parade, Port Adelaide SA 5015
08 8444 0429, merilyn.cox@countryarts.org.au, www.countryarts.org.au

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Nurturing artists in Wilcannia

Paul Brown, community member

I moved to Wilcannia about seven years ago from Sydney. My kids were grown up and the companies I’d worked with were being sold. By chance I saw a business that was for sale and I came out for a look. It was the Wilcannia Motel.

Fairly quickly I had people coming in wanting to sell art. It’s like that with any business here because maybe you’re someone who’s in a position to buy. There’s no outlets in town and other than a couple of the business owners or people who work at the hospital or the police, there’s no-one much in a position to spend money to buy art. It was coming in on bits of fibro and timber. I found out they didn’t have any source of canvas or paint so I started giving some out and it just progressed from there. I’ve never been an artist or involved in anything like that but I just really liked the art. And you could see where it could go.

Soon people were talking about having somewhere to paint. The Uniting Church had an empty building available in town and the flying padre was looking for something to protect it from vandalism. We got permission to lease it as an art centre for a peppercorn rental. We got community people involved and eventually we had it painted out and repaired and about the same time West Darling Arts applied for us to have an artist-in-residence program. So, just as the place was finished and ready to use, the funding came through for nine artists over three years.

The artists are funded to be here for two or three weeks. They stay in a freestanding one-bedroom flat next to the art centre so they’re on site. We’ve found a lot of interest from people just passing by. They’ll drop in and have a look to see what’s going on and we’ve been very lucky that the artists have been interested in showing their craft to others, passing it on and working with community members. So if a schoolteacher brings down a group of kids from the school, they’ve all been happy to stop their work and talk to them and show them what they’re doing and even give them small exercises or get them involved. Whether it’s cutting lino or a bit of painting or woodcarving. The key is the exposure that the local artists wouldn’t otherwise get to different art forms.

The artists-in-residence have been stunned by the level of interest and involvement. Some have done their residency period straight so they’re here every day. Others have done a week here and a week there. Our artist at the moment is a basket weaver who lives in Broken Hill and she’s doing three days a week. It extends the period that someone is here and it’s working really well. Everyone’s entitled to drop in and I guess if you’re going to drop in, you may as well try it. I must admit, I’ve taken an interest in all of the workshops myself and that’s something I never thought I’d do. The residencies have really helped focus interest on the art centre itself and last year TAFE asked if they could use it to run their Indigenous art certificate. The community now accepts it as an art place and feel more comfortable there than in the more regimented TAFE building.

We’ve got a lot of natural ability here, a lot of people with the creative spark who hadn’t been able to develop the skills that go with it. Now the standards are rising and there’s awareness of the talent here. The first time we put out some work for sale by some young artists, the people who were most astonished were the Elders and the older people in the town: they didn’t realise the younger ones had the skills they have.

We have serious housing problems. There are no homes to rent in town, nothing available. So a lot of these people are well and truly socially marginalised. We’re hoping that given the opportunity and the location we’ll see our local art progress both as a form of income for people and a drawcard for the town.

And this might sound funny, but some of the most unlikely people are the most beautiful artists. They are doing extraordinary work. They’ll sit down and do it for relaxation or they sometimes work communally. I’ll often have a painting here that will have been done by an individual and the kids will come and tell you, ‘Oh that’s Uncle So and So. I was there when he painted that. Look… I did that little bit there.’

Additional information and contact details

Location
Wilcannia, far western New South Wales

Artforms
Drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, weaving and textiles

Initiated by
West Darling Arts and the Wilcannia community

Organised by
Sue Reynolds, Wilcannia artistin-residence project officer, Wilcannia Arts Committee, West Darling Arts Inc

Financial support
Regional Arts Fund, Regional Arts NSW Country Arts Support Program, Central Darling Shire Council

Non financial support
Flying Padre John Blair of the Uniting Church, Central Darling Shire Council, Wilcannia Arts Committee, Wilcannia Community Working Party, St Theresa Community School, Wilcannia Central School, Murdi Paaki Corporation Regional Enterprises (CDEP scheme), mentor support from Badger Bates, West Darling Arts Inc

Artists
2006 Badger Bates, Geoff DeMain, Peter McGlinchey
2007 Rick Ball, Pamela Bugmy, Badger Bates
2008 Virginia Kaiser, Julie Barratt, Pamela Houghton Jones
Sue Reynolds and Boris Hlavica (photographic record)

Dates
February 2006 until the end of 2008

Contact
Sue Reynolds, West Darling Arts, PO Box 473, Broken Hill NSW 2880
0429 985 703, 08 8088 4775 sreynolds@loadednet.com.au

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Stories of belonging

Catherine Dinkelmann (nee Conradie), art therapist

I first did a degree in journalism and after studying creative arts therapy, I was working in aged care as a diversional therapist. I loved it but I found the silence in the groups really eerie. The residents would sit in a dining room or in a lounge room next to each other but never talk. It was like they were so incapacitated by being in this institution that they couldn’t actually relate to each other, only to the staff members.

I kept wishing that I was an artist there instead of a therapist because I was thinking of the ways that the arts might get the residents together and foster a sense of community. I have always thought that arts therapy didn’t have to be so intense or deep. I thought a lot of people’s issues could be resolved if they just felt they belonged to a group. It could be just fun and relational. Engaging in the arts could bring people together to enjoy each other’s company.

The Elms is a residential aged care facility in the Macedon Ranges and when I approached them about what I was planning, they were so encouraging. They wanted to support me. They were interested in what I was doing. To be honest, I was absolutely blown away by their eagerness.

I went each week for four months. There was no funding but I was reimbursed for my petrol costs and the supplies.

The first stage involved building relationships. I was going in and chatting to the residents and each week I’d ask if anyone would like me to draw their portrait. They were always keen. And then we’d have lunch and some sort of group session in the afternoon. My ideas didn’t always interest them. I remember once I thought they’d be really keen to talk about old sayings and customs in their families. But no, that didn’t take off at all! But then, another time I said, ‘Let’s talk about what you’ve achieved.’ And I’d brought in some templates of certificates so they had something to start off with and encouraged them to say what they would like to be acknowledged for.

So they made certificates for each other and then had a little ceremony where they presented them. It was just so beautiful. We also made a communal time-line running from before the first one was born until now. And I encouraged them to not just fill in significant times in their lives but to add someone who had a significant impact. Or, to mark turning points. It was lovely to watch them. They would add an event and then they would start chatting, telling each other about it. And it was no longer about me facilitating the activity. They were starting to share with each other.

From the beginning I’d said to them, ‘We’ll see how it goes. We can make an art work and exhibit it at the end if you want.’ And that idea just took off. I used the portraits that we sketched and different bits and pieces from the sessions, the certificates, old photographs, their names in their own handwriting and so on and we made these four massive panels, linked up the top by the time-line. Another artist called Tilla Buden, and I literally stitched the paper like you would fabric. It was a really delicate thing to do.

For the second phase of the project we hung the panels at the facility. Once they were up, we called everyone and they did this mass exodus out of the room they were in to come and see. And they became really excited and proud of their artwork. ‘My word, I’m famous!’ The staff told me how family members would come to visit and the residents would send them straight to the artwork. ‘Go have a look! My portrait’s there.’ And now there are plans to do similar projects in the future.

Another lovely thing is that the project gave me the opportunity to reawaken my own creative side and my artistic practice. Finally I could actually create while working. And I could see the improvement in my work. This was really so exciting.

Stories of Belonging has been exhibited at the Burrinja Community Art Centre in Ferntree Gully but I’ll be returning it to The Elms. There’s space for it as a permanent installation and I’ll hang it again. I’m always happy for an excuse to go back.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Gisborne, Victoria

Artforms
Portraiture, story telling, writing, drawing, collage

Initiated by
Catherine Dinkelmann (nee Conradie)

Organised by
Catherine Dinkelmann, a registered volunteer of the Macedon Ranges Health Services and Masters student at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne

Financial support
Macedon Ranges Health Services

Non financial support
Tilla Buden and the Victorian College of the Arts

Artists
Catherine Dinkelmann portrait sketching, story recording, collage assembly
Tilla Buden occasional portrait sketching and collage assembly

Dates
June to October 2007

Contact
Catherine Dinkelmann, 1/42 Shalbury Avenue, Eltham Vic 3095
03 9431 0582, catherinedinkelmann@gmail.com

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Mubali, a sea of bellies

Kim McConville, executive director

It was 2004. I was living in Moree when the community midwifery team approached Beyond Empathy. They wanted to find a way to engage the young Aboriginal women who weren’t presenting at the hospital for antenatal checks. They were seeing all the low birth-weight babies and the low rates of breast-feeding and they knew their conventional pathways weren’t reaching the girls.

We were sitting around this table and I said, ‘Wow, imagine a sea of bellies.’ And they kind of looked at me and I said, ‘You saw all those hands, the sea of hands, for reconciliation? Imagine if they were all bellies.’ And then I told them about how I’d made belly casts when I was pregnant and what a great memento they were and how it’s wonderful for your kids to look at them later on. And I suggested we could use this art as a soft entry point to engage these young women. The midwives thought we were mad but they trusted us because we’d worked in the community for a long time. So we literally went straight out and talked to the girls and Mubali was born (mubali means swollen belly in Kamilaroi, the local language).

And at first they were shy but it only took one girl to say, ‘Yeah, okay. I’ll do it.’ We literally took her into the hospital and made her a cast and then the word went through the community, as it does, and more girls appeared. We taught the midwives how to make the casts and the girls knew they had to come into the midwifery centre to get one. And so this kind of momentum started. We were forging the sort of relationship that the midwives hadn’t had before.

Then we got a room in the hospital and we brought in the elders who we’d always worked with. They sat with the young women and they painted stories onto the bellies. And they talked about when they were young and pregnant and they walked from the mission up to the hospital to give birth. And this sort of beautiful environment started to grow. We used two exceptional artists, Denni Scott Davis and Jo Davidson, to drive the whole thing. It wasn’t about the midwives intervening or fixing a problem that the girls had. It was about the relationships between these women.

Then the dads turned up and they wanted to be part of it as well and so it kind of extended into the dads doing their own paintings. And it was in this non-threatening space, that the midwives were able to do all their antenatal stuff. We also brought in the dental health nurse and the mental health workers and Centrelink and all of those things that the girls weren’t getting access to. And it was all enabled by the arts!

At the end of 12 months, the first group of 12 babies had higher birth weights and nine of the girls were still breast-feeding. And now, four years later, people in Moree know that you can go to the midwifery service and you can get a cast made and it’s an ongoing thing. Even though the original midwives who were working on the service aren’t there anymore, it’s completely embedded within the culture of what that service delivers. And now, one of those original young mums, Cherilda, she makes the casts. And another young mum is doing the admin. This is a classic example of the Beyond Empathy model – using art to connect those two disengaged groups and then passing on the art skills, so we were able to pull out and it still continues on.

The art created was significant. The girls made these absolutely beautiful bellies and the dads painted paintings and the aunts painted paintings and it ended up as a regional exhibition at the Moree Plains Gallery. The girls ran the exhibition and launched it. We were out the back in the kitchen cutting up fruit while the girls were in the gallery introducing everybody. Talking about it. One of the dads talked about his experiences and a big wig from Health came up from Sydney. I’ve been going to the gallery for years and years and it was the first time I’d seen a really even mix of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people at an exhibition.

We never dreamed Mubali would be as successful as it was. Not in a million years. Last year we started it at Nambucca and in 2006 we went out to Narromine. This year it moves into Bowraville and we’re looking at Kempsey and Tamworth and it goes to Derby in Western Australia.

A health worker came in from one of the outlying communities and said the best thing. She said that in her 16 or 17 years of working in Health, that she’d never seen this sort of outcome. And she’d never seen young Aboriginal girls so proud to be pregnant.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Moree, New South Wales

Artforms
Visual art and digital media

Initiated by
Kim McConville and Denni Scott Davis, founders of Beyond Empathy

Organised by
Kim McConville and Denni Scott Davis in partnership with Hunter New England Health via the Gamilaroi Midwifery Strategy, Meg Binks and Denise Raveneau

Financial support
NSW Health Infant Maternal Health Strategy

Non financial support
Local health services Centrelink, Moree Plains Shire Gallery, Moree Plains Shire Council, Moree TAFE, Moree Granniators, Moree Base Hospital

Artists
Denni Scott Davis digital media
Jo Davidson, Marg Adams, Pauline Briggs, Lyla Carr visual artists

Dates
2004 to 2006

Contact
Kim McConville, Executive Director, Beyond Empathy, PO Box 844 Armidale NSW 2350
02 6772 0101, kim.mcconville@beyondempathy.org.au, www.beyondempathy.org.au

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Arts for healthy communities

Lee-Ann Buckskin, project director

It was my first day on the job, managing the Indigenous arts and culture programs here at Carclew Youth Arts. I got a call from a person working out of the APY [Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara] Lands Council. Petrol sniffing had really hit the news. It was in all the papers. This person was another blackfella and he had a very frank conversation with me.

Basically he said… and I hope you don’t mind me swearing… but he said, ‘What the f*** are you going to do for the young people out here?’

The APY Lands are 1,600 kilometres from Adelaide and cover over 103,000 kilometres of country. It’s a harsh and really challenging environment and when the opportunity came up for some funding through the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, I pushed and gunned for some real money. My experience over the years told me that it was going to be a very expensive place to work. Mainly because of the remoteness. The costs are unbelievable. And I knew we had to be fully resourced, absolutely resourced because one thing I’ve maintained is that we are not going to go into a community, sucking up resources when that community is stretched out already. It’s so poor there. We didn’t want Carclew to be seen as burdening it in any way, including placing more time demands on Anangu and non-Anangu people. Many of them sit on so many committees already and travel incredible distances to do it.

Our project Working Towards Celebrating Healthy Communities was essentially about capacity building through the arts. We wanted to improve the possibilities for young Anangu people who are especially vulnerable to substance abuse.

Everyone had an idea of how that should be done and as an Indigenous person and an arts worker, one of the greatest struggles I have is about people not listening and making assumptions about what people need. Understanding doesn’t have to be a battle. It shouldn’t be a battle. Just opening up to another way of thinking is a good start! And I tell you what; if we do that someone might actually teach us how to do something different. We might finally learn something bloody new!

So our first step with APY Lands was to listen. We spent over a year sitting down with people, young people, community members and stakeholders and then a draft program was developed and approved by the community. It’s a mentoring program with workshops in contemporary dance, music, film and digital camera. After each stage we evaluate and make the changes we need. There are so many issues out there that challenge a project like this: hunger, illiteracy, overcrowded housing and so much more.

We’ve broken the project into phases and each phase is marked with participation in an event because to keep young people engaged, we have to have tangibles along the way – little key milestones. So, for example, contemporary dance. It’s not really a strength but there’s a lot of interest there. So we say, ‘We’ll bring people up and do the workshops and then you can come down to Blak Nite and perform.’ But then, when we get to Blak Nite they hadn’t been rehearsing. I had someone living up in the community who was a contemporary dancer doing rehearsals but the kids wouldn’t show up to the rehearsals. All of that stuff.

Other groups are rehearsing for 12 months. Anyway, the kids get onto the stage and they think, ‘Oh my God!’ They knew. Back in the dressing room they’re saying, ‘We did that really badly’. And I said to them, ‘Why do you think it was like that?’ And they say, ‘Because we didn’t rehearse’. And the next thing they say is, ‘We’re not going to do that next time. Next time, we’ll rehearse’. Now I call that a learning curve. That’s fantastic. That’s learning.

I think what people don’t understand is that if we’re doing songwriting, then we’re doing literacy. If we’re doing film, we’re learning visual literacy. Schools are designed for children but what about all these young teenagers out there and the young adults? How do we engage them? How do we empower them to be equipped?

We’re hoping when this project ends that we have a group of young healthy leaders with skills and confidence to help the community forward. Last week I saw this young 19 year-old just hanging around and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and she said, ‘Nothing’. And I said, ‘Why don’t you come with me to some meetings and hang with me for a while?’ I was going to meet someone from the Department of Family and Communities about a TAFE idea for developing rock bands and then to the arts centre and then to see the head nurse. I wasn’t thinking this girl had to contribute to these meetings. The purpose of me taking her was so that she could hear a working dialogue. And that’s the start. If we’re to survive in this world as Indigenous people, we have to be equipped with the tools to converse with non-Indigenous people. That’s what the mentoring and the cultural experience is all about.

When I’m up there I’m always blown away when young women come up to me and say, ‘Are you the boss?’ They see I am leading non-Indigenous people and they can’t believe it. They say, ‘But you’re black!’ And I say, ‘Yes I am’.

How do you write that in a government report? How do you write the need for Indigenous people to be in leadership? That’s where it starts.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Amata and Ernabella, remote north west region of South Australia

Artforms
Contemporary dance, music, filmmaking, digital photography

Initiated by
Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands Council and Carclew Youth Arts

Organised by
Lee-Ann Buckskin, manager Indigenous Arts and Culture Program, Carclew Youth Arts

Financial support
Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation (AERF), Arts SA through the social inclusion unit of the Department of Premier and Cabinet South Australia

Non financial support
Relationships Australia, Department of Families and Communities, Drug and Alcohol Services South Australia, Ernabella Anangu School, Anangu Tertiary Education Program University of South Australia, Amata Anangu School, Anangu Ku Arts Corporation, NPY Women’s Council, Umoona Aged Care Coober Pedy, PY Media and APY Lands Council

Artists
Project manager Marg Crompton
Music producer and songwriter Morgan Lewis aka Morganics
Oratory and body percussion Seini Taumoepeau aka SistaNative
Video artist Finton Mahony
Musician Will Jarrettaka Wire MC
Contemporary dance Angela McMillan
Elder and cultural instructors Mantatjara Wilson and Tapaya Edwards

Dates
June 2006 to June 2008

Contact
Fiona McCaul, Marketing Manager, Carclew Youth Arts, 11 Jeffcott Street, North Adelaide SA 5006
08 8267 5111, fmccaul@carclew.org.au, www.carclew.org.au

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Ikara - the meeting place

Judi Francis, interpretive planner

Interpretive planning is all about connecting people with places and helping them to understand the spirit of it. You need to find the real stories to do that, the gutsy stories. And find a way to tell them. Flinders Ranges National Park is a stunning, high-energy landscape. It has some of the oldest fossils in the world. It’s a semi-arid area but it’s got the most beautiful creek lines and gorgeous, enormous trees and escarpments. It’s just one of those key, iconic spaces. We have a lot of tours going through, a lot of the grey nomads and a lot of people from Europe who love the isolation of this place. Wilpena Station was an old pastoral station that was settled for about 125 years. When the pastoralists walked off the land and the national parks took over the site, there were a lot of old pug and pine and colonial buildings left behind. We decided that we needed to interpret the pastoral heritage of the area.

At first we were just going to do a walking trail with some sculptural pieces but it soon became evident that the Indigenous community who are so very linked to this land wanted a place where they could tell their own stories. And so the project turned into public art, a sculptural meeting place. Four of us worked on it. As well as me there was an artist, another interpretive planner and a landscape engineer. Luckily we all have arts backgrounds.

Ikara is an Indigenous interpretation. It evolved after a lot of sit down and listen time. We had probably about half a dozen long meetings with community members to find out how we could tell their story because we had no idea how we were going to do it. We set aside considerable funding for this – most of us are about 800 kilometres apart. We used to meet at Wilpena and spend half a day at a time talking about their stories. After about the third or fourth meeting, the researcher and I began to understand what the story was about and understand the way in which the Indigenous community passed down their stories and their law and their education. And then we started looking at art as a way of telling the story.

There’s an interpretive sign at the beginning of the spiral walkway. It explains in very, very quick terms that the visitor is now visiting a traditional Adnyamathanha site and invites them to sit down and read some of the stories that are actually embedded in the sculpture itself. They get into the sculpture and they can sit and take in the views and read a few of the pieces. That’s when it happens. That’s when they can get in tune with the specialness of the land and understand the changes that have been imposed on the community since the 1850s.

We laid out a grid of local stone to symbolise the division of land into paddocks. And in each grid, each stone is a quote from one of the people of the community. We’d worked together for over three years, this community group and I, finding the strands of the stories and you know, every time I left a meeting I came away more humbled. I mean, not that I was ever anything but that with them but, you know, you come back thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, I don’t know how they lived with the changes with such good grace and humour.’ I just used to come back to work feeling a bit fragile with what I’d heard.

I picked all the stories that blew me away to go into this grid. Some of stories are soft like, ‘How can we expect whitefellas to understand us if we don’t share our culture?’ and others are shocking, like ‘My Dad couldn’t vote because he was under the Dog Act’. We did want to provoke people. Not arrogantly provoke but I’ve watched people go to this place and they sit there or they stand there and they read and they come away quiet.

Ikara has hit all the buttons. Firstly, the park needed a place where people could sit and think about Indigenous life since settlement and the sculpture is a really elegant place for that to happen. Secondly, we were thrilled that for the first time their story of involvement in the pastoral heritage of the Flinders Ranges has been told and their role acknowledged. And thirdly, the visitors who come leave shaking their heads, amazed.

Everyone’s happy.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Old Wilpena Station, Flinders Ranges National Park South Australia

Artforms
Sculptural installation

Initiated by
SA Department for Environment and Heritage (DEH)

Organised by
Visitor Management Branch SA Department for Environment and Heritage supported by staff from Flinders Ranges National Park
Judi Francis (DEH) developed the interpretive plan, Lorraine Edmunds and John Bedford coordinated site works, Tony Rosella organised sculptural elements

Financial support
SA Department of Environment and Heritage, Australian Tourism Development Program, South Australian Tourism Commission

Non financial support
SA Department for Environment and Heritage, Flinders Ranges National Park, Friends of Flinders Ranges National Park

Artists
Tony Rosella sculpture

Dates
December 2003 to April 2007

Contact
Judi Francis, GPO Box 1047, Adelaide SA 5001
08 8124 4814, francis.judi@saugov.sa.gov.au, www.deh.sa.gov.au

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Milpirri

Steve Tjampitjinpa Patrick, dancer
Tim Newth, dancer

steve: I remember Tim coming here and doing his first performance with a group of young people.

tim: In 1988…

s: …and they’re talking in Warlpiri, my language.

t: I was part of a youth theatre group. I’d never met a Warlpiri person in my whole entire life. And we were doing a short play in Warlpiri language and we didn’t know what we were saying at all. I remember coming to Lajamanu and standing in this park performing it to people who did know the language and I remember people laughing a lot and I know we must have done a terrible job.

s: Yes, they’re laughing but they’re saying it’s a nice way to understand each other and get communication going.

t: I remember an older woman said, ‘We’ll dance for you tomorrow if you stay another night,’ and we did. So straight away, there was some connection. We had some sense of being a part of it here. And that was the beginning. Steve and I became friends. And now we have been working together for 20 years in many different forms. We’ve seen a lot of who each other is and what each other does.

s: I always wanted to find out more about kardiya, you know. Do you know the word kardiya? It means ‘white person.’ I wanted to find out more. I was always thinking things were unbalanced and you know, maybe the two cultures just need to understand each other better.

t: Steve approached me with the Milpirri dance idea. It’s a one night performance involving the whole community. The word milpirri means a particular thundercloud that is formed by two different lots of air, the hot air and the cold air, and when they come together there’s some friction and some tension. But from that, the rain falls and when the rain falls upon the ground there’s nourishment and new growth. Steve’s idea is about two cultures coming together. Milpirri is about understanding that. And being strong about each other’s culture and, if necessary, fighting things out but from that, to grow together.

s: I learned from my own culture and from talking to kardiya friends and what I’ve learned is that I can see some things in common with this other culture. And I knew Tracks from long time. I knew it’s all right for you to ask them for help. So now from there to here… first Milpirri 2005, second 2007. So it’s surprising, hey?

t: Very early on Steve and I made sort of an agreement that it was okay for me to ask him any question about his culture. It didn’t matter how stupid that question might feel like and vice versa. He could ask me anything about my culture and I would try and answer that question truthfully as well.

s: I remember one of our leaders saying how we’re finished as Warlpiri people. There were frustrations from both sides of me. I would wake up to it and go to sleep with it, you know. But I know the way to bring ourselves back to who we are is through memory. That’s been helping us.

I started with the school. I thought school is the learning place, that’s where I should attack this unbalanced thing, you know? But later on, we found out that Milpirri’s good for all the community. That it’s another place to make them understand these things. A fun way. With a dance and being colourful and all that.

t: Through Milpirri Steve has found a way to explain Warlpiri culture in ways that both Warlpiri people and white people can engage with. It’s totally bringing back a whole new life to the community. Everybody has a part in Milpirri and you know, I’d never worked in a community context before where a whole community has completely engaged in a concept. We have six intensive weeks when we’re here creating it but obviously before that there’s 12 months or more of planning for Steve and the older people, of sorting the right songs and the right dances, everyone together.

s: The kids are learning. They’re finding it more easy to know about themselves, especially those youngfellas, through this. They can see the similarities between us. And they can talk about their culture. That’s the sort of thing that draws them together and gives them the confidence to explore more. And it will be a bit scary for some of us, the experience. But now we’re feeling that we can jump on a plane and just go and see an AFL game or something and come back. We understand that it can be easy.

t: We all bring very different things to the creation of the performance. In the future I hope to understand better how Steve and the older men and women make their choices of dance and so on. But in the same way, I’m hoping they’ll understand better why I say, ‘We’ve got to have a dress rehearsal!’

We were just talking yesterday about how long we have worked together. When we first met, people would say about us, ‘Oh there’s those youngfellas…’ Now we’re the oldfellas, mucking around with bits of grey in our hair. I’m Steve’s brother now, people know that.

s: Call that jampijinpa.

t: Yeah we’re both jampijinpa.

s: Ha! Old jampijinpa now!

t: Not so old!!

Additional information and contact details

Location
Lajamanu, North Tanami Desert, Northern Territory

Artforms
Dance with visual and music elements

Initiated by
Steve Jampijinpa Patrick of Lajamanu with Tim Newth and David McMicken, co-artistic directors of Tracks Dance

Organised by
Tracks Inc supported by Lajamanu Community Education Centre

Financial support
Rio Tinto Aboriginal Fund, Newmont, NT Government Regional Festivals Fund, Australia Council for the Arts, Tracks Inc, Lajamanu Progress Association, Kurra Association

Non financial support
Lajamanu Community Education Centre, Lajamanu Community Government Council

Artists
Steve Jampijinpa Patrick, Tim Newth and David McMicken, Nick Power, Jenelle Saunders, Caleb Japanangka Patrick, Mathew Cunliffe, North Tanami Band, Jerry Jangala Patrick, Teddy Jupurrurla Morrison, Myra Nungarrayi Herbert, Gladys Napangardi Tasman, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Steve Jampijinpa Patrick, Maisie (Kajingarra) Napangardi Granities, Myra Nungarrayi

Herbert, Gladys Napangardi Tasman, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, Jerry Jangala Patrick, Teddy Jupurrurla Morrison, Toby Jangala Martin, Henry Jakamarra Cook, Dick Japaljarri Raymond, Norbert Jampijinpa Patrick, Roger Japaljarri Jurrah, Joe Japanangka James, Jerry Jangala Patrick, Teddy Jupurrurla Morrison, Myra Nungarrayi Herbert, Gladys Napangardi Tasman, Tim Jupurrurla Kennedy, Peter Japanangka Dixon, Lindsay Jungarrayi Herbert, Leslie Jampijinpa Robertson, Norman Jampijinpa Kelly, Dick Japaljarri Raymond, Jacko Jakamarra Gordon, Thomas Jangala Sampson, Lance Box and Tim Newth

Dates
May to October 2007

Contact
Fiona Carter, GPO Box 823, Darwin NT 0801
08 8924 4414, info@tracksdance.com.au, www.tracksdance.com.au

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Water is the new gold

Christopher Saunders, creative producer

We’ve often done projects focusing on the issues confronting young people. The shift here was rather than using the young peoples’ issues to create the art, why not let the young people be the facilitators of that art. In Gold we connected kids with farming families and they collected stories about living on the land and the drought. The idea was to see if the farmers and these young people from town could strike common ground.

We took over a shop front in the main street of Griffith. It was next to a takeaway where we knew the kids hung out. It was an empty shop and we set it up to run workshops and have a post-production facility. As we gathered photographs, they’d go up on the wall and it became like a production space, really.

The kids would hang around outside or we’d go next door and say, ‘How’re you going?’ and they’d wander in. Our aim was to get them hands on with digital technology. So we had stills cameras that we weren’t precious about. And we had a couple of video cameras and again we’d allow them to be completely hands on in a disciplined sort of way.

Then we contracted a farmer who found us people in farming communities who were prepared to be involved. He wouldn’t have said too much first up about the young people, probably more about us being an arts organisation. (The bit about the young people we would ease in later!) But funnily, once the two groups met, it was the young people who were the selling point because what the farmers liked was the idea that they weren’t really talking about themselves, but were doing something for the kids.

Each young person established a unique relationship but there was one 16 year old girl who really connected with a farmer. I was surprised she had come with us at all. I thought she was going to drop out because there was another temptation in town, a 21st party. But she stuck to her guns and she came and she was the only girl with that particular group on that particular visit. And I thought, ‘What’s this going to be like because it’s going to be a fairly male world.’ But she met this 80 year old farmer and she was just completely blown away by him.

She ended up directing a short film which we shot that afternoon about this old man who was on his own, running the farm without family, the end of a line. It was a sort of really lovely surprise what happened because it’s like, what does a 16 year old girl who doesn’t come from a rural family have in common with an 80 year old farmer? She was just struck by the human story, I think.

We had a filmmaker on board as part of the team and she put together a crew. There’d be someone operating camera, someone operating sound, someone logging and someone interviewing. So it’d be three or four young people as part of the crew and she’d be there to make sure things were going okay.

We were building towards an exhibition in the Griffith Regional Gallery. I didn’t know what form it would take or how good the photographic images would be, particularly as a lot of these kids had just been handed a camera. But there were some really evocative shots and film interviews and we decided to move away from a static exhibition in the gallery and do something more dynamic.

It occurred to me that the shop was functioning in a really beautiful way with, you know, the walls covered like a scrapbook of ideas and quotes and images and I said, ‘Well, what we should do is transfer the shop to the gallery.’ And that’s what we did. We put the post-production facility in there and the works that had been more refined up on the walls and the whole thing had this lab quality to it.

It was a place where the work was still evolving, still being generated and it was the young people who were doing it. The kids showed the visitors around and talked about the work and the area and the farmers. And they got online and showed people the website under construction. It was fantastic. It was amazing.

There was a broadcast going through a transistor radio of sound interviews and because we printed all our photographs on newsprint, tabloid size with headlines like, ‘IT’S NOT THE SURVIVAL OF THE FARM, IT’S THE SURVIVAL OF THE FAMILY’, what people saw were the sort of stories you don’t ever hear or see in the real media. The real human stories. People who came to the show could take home copies of the whole exhibition if they wanted.

A while later we went with the kids to visit some of the farmers who couldn’t get to the show. The idea was that we’d take the show to them. We took those huge newsprint photographs and pasted up their stories on farmhouse walls and local pubs. We’ve got one more to do. A farmer who hasn’t been well and we’re going to put the exhibition up on his shearing shed. That’s the plan. It will be absolutely magic.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Griffith, New South Wales

Artforms
Photography, video

Initiated by
Scott Rankin creative director Big hART

Organised by
Big hART Inc

Financial support
Westpac Foundation, National Community Crime Prevention Programme, Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA), Arts New South Wales, Australia Council for the Arts

Non financial support
Big hART, Griffith City Council, Personnel Employment, Langunyah House, Outback Theatre for Young People

Artists
Sara Davies, Kate Montague, Bronwyn Purvis, Briony Dunn filmmakers
Christopher Saunders, Heiko Meins photographers
Shakthi Sivanatham, Scott Howie, Brian Cohen and Tara Prouse artists Karl Logge, Tessa Rapaport designers
Holly Rankin Smith, Michelle Kotevski producers
Frank Kelly farming liaison
Christopher Saunders creative producer

Dates
March 2006 to November 2007

Contact
Christopher Saunders, 251 Rainbow Street, Coogee NSW 2034
0418 477 156, chrissaunders@iprimus.com.au, www.au.org.au, www.bighart.org.au

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Embers - capturing the story

Campion Decent, playwright

The big bushfires went through this area of north east Victoria and Gippsland in January 2003. They were the worst bushfires since 1939. It was virtually on the front page of The Age every day for a month. It was a huge event in everyone’s lives and Embers is a play created out of the stories of the people who suffered through the fires and after it.

The way it came about was a moment of synchronicity really. I was talking with Charlie Parkinson (he was the artistic manager of Hothouse Theatre) about wanting to do something using verbatim as a technique. And pretty much the same week, he got a phone call from Upper Hume Community Health Service saying, ‘We’d like the arts to be involved in some way in helping support people’s recovery after the fires.’ So it was really those two ideas coming together. There was a lot of interest in the project from the get-go.

We started out on the road collecting stories towards the end of that year. The health service was instrumental. They assigned a rural recovery support worker to go around with me. Les Hume was his name and he was my foot in the door, I guess. He had his local contacts and it was the bush telegraph after that. There were many people who wanted to tell their story and a few who didn’t want to re-live it.

They were very humble on the whole. You know most of them would say, ‘I haven’t got much to tell,’ and then two hours later, they’d finish telling you this extraordinary story. What I found really interesting was the way these people were experiencing something out of the ordinary but they didn’t really understand that. Or even how they’d actually managed to get through it. There seemed to be this super heroic stuff and everyday stuff going on at the same time. People were drawing on reserves they didn’t know they had.

The production was first staged in 2006 which felt like a long time for some of the storytellers but we wanted to make sure that we’d raised enough money so that the stories were given the respect and the production values they were due. Verbatim isn’t cheap. It’s much more expensive to be going out collecting real stories than to have a writer in a garret typing away by himself. As part of the play’s development we established a reference group from the community to make sure the play was reflecting the complexities of the experience. Representatives from the community, government, and fire agencies heard drafts read by professional actors. That gave me a chance to hear their ideas about balance and mood and so on. Considering the scale of the project, the numbers involved and the consultation things fell into place relatively easily.

So it struck a lot of chords that were attractive from a funding point of view which makes things easier. I suspect it was seen as a unique project in that it was trying to respond to a very particular event. It ticked certain boxes, you know? It had a partnership between arts and health and people love those kinds of things. It was regional and so it was reaching people that are not always reached. It has a very personal, emotional strand and it dealt with our relationship to the landscape. And also the fact that we were quite adamant about taking it back out on the road, not just doing it here in Wodonga or Sydney or wherever we could get a metropolitan season but actually getting it out to some of those fire affected townships. I think that was important.

Going back to the towns turned out, in a way, to be the most satisfying aspect of the whole project. We took a show with state theatre company production values to 15 small towns. It required a road crew of six and there were nightly bump-ins and bump-outs and it was ambitious and exhausting. But these people needed to hear back their own stories.

And there were profound experiences dotted throughout the tour. When the people who participated came to see the play, as I think most of them did, they got to see more than their one layer. They saw all those experiences contextualised side-by-side. They took away a sense of, ‘Yes, we actually survived and conquered and have now gone forward.’

People talk about life-changing experiences and I guess in a very practical sense Embers has changed mine because I’ve moved from Sydney and I’m now living in this region and working for the theatre company full-time. I’m now artistic manager and there’s a clear link between the experiences of that project and the fact that I decided to take the job.

I was at the Sydney Theatre Company when I decided to chuck that in and come and do this. It was much to the horror of some people but there’s resilience and honesty and a no-nonsense approach in regional areas that I find really attractive. And admire. When I was hearing these stories for Embers I couldn’t help but sometimes put myself in their shoes and think, ‘How would I have responded in that situation?’

And I’m sure, I’m honestly sure, not as well.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Regional Victoria

Artform
Theatre

Initiated by
HotHouse Theatre and Upper Hume Community Health Service

Organised by
HotHouse Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company (production)

Financial support
Border Express, Upper Hume Community Health Service, Helen Macpherson Smith Trust, Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR), Hugh Williamson Foundation, Fosters Community Grants, Towong Shire, Indigo Shire

Non financial support
Upper Hume Community Health Service, Steven Taylor & Associates, Meramie Best Western Motor Inn, Professional Audio Services

Artists
Campion Decent, Melissa Stafford, Gordon Burns, Marin Kinnane, Steve Francis, Wiggy Brennan, Les Hume researcher

Cast
Annie Byron, Tracy Mann, Mark Pegler, Tim Richards, Amber Todd, John Walker and Matthew Zeremes

Community Reference Group
Miranda Mouat, Eileen Mackie, Paul King, Rhonda Kirkland, the Hon. Tony Plowman, Denise Joy, Cathy McGowan, and Les Hume

Dates
October 2003 to September 2006

Contact
Campion Decent, Artistic Director, HotHouse Theatre, PO Box 479, Wodonga Vic 3689
02 6021 7433, campion@hothousetheatre.com.au, www.hothousetheatre.com.au, www.sydneytheatre.com.au

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Arid - a sculptural collaboration

Sam Yates, project coordinator

Arid started in 2004 as an audience development project, a sculpture joint venture between Fountain Gallery and the Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden. Both places are owned by the council and the idea was to try and capture the audience that already exists at the garden and introduce them to the gallery. Nothing like that had been done before. When I came on board, I also wanted to use it to do something about acknowledging local sculptors and provide an opportunity for them to show their work.

Port Augusta is a very creative town. There are lots of Aboriginal artists and heaps of artists generally. And not just visual artists but musicians and so on. We launched the first show on the same weekend as the Eremophila Festival and so basically we had an audience straight away. (Eremophila is an arid plant!) We had buses running for free from the gallery to the Arid Lands and that was another good initiative to get people inside. In that first year, artists were invited from all over Australia to take part but they mainly came from Port Augusta and the immediate region. They made the works off-site and were paid a nominal fee. The works were spread around these magnificent gardens and the outcome was so good and so positive that we said straight away, ‘We need to do this again.’ In 2004 the show went for four weeks but so much work goes into it that I said, ‘Next time, let’s do six weeks.’ And that’s what we did in 2006. In 2008, we’ve extended it yet again.

I have a committee which works hard. I always create a committee! This one is mainly made up of people from the Friends of Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden, volunteers, the tourism development officer and council staff, mainly from Parks and Gardens. You need those council boys to move heavy things around. We’ve had a curator, Harry Koch, and as the local arts officer, I do bits and pieces of everything.

I’m really happy about how the event is growing and who is represented. We obviously wanted a strong Indigenous component but sculpture was not really the thing for these Indigenous artists. I mean, it was one of the original forms of art for Aboriginal people but it sort of dropped away into a 2D thing, painting. So we ran some Indigenous sculptural workshops funded by Arts SA to try and inspire people back into thinking about 3D. And that was really successful. In that first year we had three Aboriginal artists take part but two years later, we had eight.

In the lead up to the 2006 event, we also had an artist-inresidence in Port Augusta Secondary School and at the youth centre for disadvantaged kids. And we had a program at Baxter Detention Centre as well. We wanted to give the refugees a voice in the community and the sculpture they produced was a beautiful mosaic, which went back to Baxter until it closed down and now it’s in the Fountain Gallery.

The theme for 2006 was ‘Water – save and conserve’ and of the 27 works, 12 came from regional areas or interstate and 15 were from Port Augusta. There was a beautiful sculptural piece from Roxby Downs called Dance with the Brolgas by Rachel and Mark Young and it was all metal and welding and it was just a beautiful interpretation.

And then there was On Tenterhooks by a Northern Territory artist called Julie Milton. She was an installation artist and she spent five days before the exhibition opening creating her work. People got to watch her make it. It was hundreds of half eggshells in a pathway up to a tree and we wanted to keep that sculpture in the garden so we could watch it. It lasted about three months, the birds would come down and peck little holes and slowly it disintegrated. We loved watching that.

We have been able to acquire a couple of pieces including a wonderful sculpture from 2004 called Birthplace. It’s made of white Hebel block, basically a giant pregnant woman and it’s such a significant story for us. Port Augusta is the birthing place for women all around the region. Women from everywhere used to come here to have their babies because the water’s here. The women still come and the place where the hospital is built was actually where the birthing centre was for Aboriginal people. That idea… oh, it sends shivers up me. It was an Aboriginal man, Donny McKenzie, who created it and he had to get approval from his aunties to be able to sculpt a female and a pregnant one. And it’s wonderful.

We don’t have a sculpture art prize in South Australia and we would love to make Arid an acquisitive competition. That takes a lot of money, of course, but I’ve been talking to two big mining companies and we’ll keep our fingers crossed. In the 2008 show, we’ll auction the works and have a gala night for the sponsors and hopefully have them sign up again.

Now that we’ve begun we’ve gone past our original goals and it will only get bigger and better.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden, Port Augusta, South Australia
Fountain Gallery, Port Augusta

Artform
Sculpture

Initiated by
Country Arts SA in conjunction with Port Augusta City Council’s Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden and Fountain Gallery

Organised by
Kylie Kerrigan, audience development officer, Country Arts SA

Sam Yates, arts officer, Country Arts SA

Financial support
Regional Arts Fund, an Australian Government initiative, Port Augusta City Council, Country Arts SA, Arts SA, Housing SA, Families SA, South Australian Tourism Commission, SA Water, Gordon Darling Foundation, Standpipe Motel, Flinders Hotel/Motel, Northern Regional Development Board, Spear Creek T & T, Mitre 10 Better Home Supplies, Augusta Garden Centre, Business Port Augusta, Elders, Wesfarmers Landmark, PW & MK Solomon, Footner Plumbing, EDI RAIL, Transfield Operations and Maintenance SA Rail, Morrison’s Hardware Thrifty Link, Sparrow Pharmacies, Milhinch Jewellers, Hotel Augusta, Ian’s Western Hotel, Cecelia Woodford, Hannahville Hotel

Non financial support
National Hire, Northern Joinery and Timber Supplies, Home Hardware, ETSA Utilities, Crossroad Concepts, Topline Trophies

Artists
Adele Booth, Deb Byron, Daniel Campers, Joy Campers, Helen Cox, Craig Ellis, Elizabeth Fotiadis, Valerie Fuschtei, Silva Golubivic, Sarah S Hill, Tony Jordan, Alan Lagnado, Megan Lownsborough, Joan McDonald, Don McKenzie, Regina McKenzie, Julie Milton, Tamara Molloy, Brenda Naylon, Munyaradzi Nyandoro, Philip Rees, Nancy Reid, Ben Resch, John Saunders, Charmaine Silson, Jacky Spencer, Gerhard Steiniger, Bud Stephenson, Heather Stuart, Ivo Tadic, Dannie Taylor, Bill Temby, Dianne Turner, Vic Waclawik, Margaret Walsh, Keryn Wiseman, Margaret Worth, Mark Young, Rachel Young

Dates
September 2004, September to October 2006, 5 September to 18 October 2008

Contact
Sam Yates, Country Arts SA, 43 Flinders Terrace, Port Augusta SA 5700
08 8641 9175, sam.yates@countryarts.org.au, www.countryarts.org.au, www.australian-aridlandsbotanic-garden.org, www.portaugusta.sa.gov.au

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Fresh and salty - it's all about water

Liz Duthie, project coordinator

Fresh and Salty comprises five major new artworks in different parts of regional Victoria. And yes, as the name implies, the theme is water. The idea first came about because we wanted something that would bring together our regional arts development officers (RADOs) and provide some training along the way. This is the first time we’ve had this team. For quite a long while there were only two or three RADOs and now there are seven.

For each of the five projects, the RADO sourced the local artists and community partners and worked with them on the design of the project and how they might want to express that theme. In some cases they’re very experienced artists, in others they’re people who might not have been involved in a big project like this. So there’s a lot of diversity in the approaches. For example in Horsham, there was an animation project to educate people, particularly young people, about salinity. Three artists (an animator and two puppet-makers) worked with the Wimmera Catchment Management Authority. In south west Victoria, two established artists collaborated on a large-scale stone sculpture that refers to traditional Indigenous and European farming methods. They led a small team of Indigenous young people who were trained in creating some of the stone walls.

We started Fresh and Salty at the end of 2006 but we didn’t find out about our funding until July or August. It was really hard, that starting part of it, because there was so much that was uncertain and the RADOs still had to get out there and try to generate interest and encourage involvement.

This network of linked projects was a very new working model and the most interesting part for me was how to get that balance of encouraging individual responses while still ending up with something that’s cohesive enough to manage and promote. How to allow the individual projects to take up local opportunities and do what is logical for a local place, but maintain the things that connect all the projects to the whole?

You have to learn to trust people and trust their way of doing things. I learnt that. I’m a RADO too, so I’m used to doing things very hands on and having all those conversations with artists and stakeholders that give you first-hand knowledge of what’s happening. It was quite tricky for me to sort of leave all that to the people on the ground and trust their decisions. It wasn’t that I didn’t think they’d do a great job – it’s more that when you’re not connected directly to it, you don’t have your usual internal gauge. You don’t have your gut working for you… your intuition.

Our hoped for outcomes were not just about making art and raising the profiles of local artists but also about making useful connections in the community and capitalising on the resources each community has. Developing trust between the players is a big part of that, especially in exploring relationships with non-arts organisations. The RADOs are employed through partnerships with local government so I guess we had a bit to prove there. We wanted to show that it’s a really valuable thing to have a RADO in your area and we wanted to leave no doubt about all the wonderful stuff they can generate.

The main aim of a big project like this is to show that artists aren’t just people who paint pictures and put them on a wall in a gallery. But that art can be used in different ways to assist communities with understanding and responding to local issues. And artists can be employed in all sorts of organisations – you can have an artist engaged with anything from spreading a message to do with water, to working in a school, to producing something totally ephemeral.

The DVD project is an eight-minute animation about the rising salinity of the Wimmera River and it was a dynamic collaboration between some local artists and what we might think of as a boring old catchment authority. It worked so well that some of the characters have been adapted to use on television advertisements. There’s a river gum and little water bugs and fish and they’re beautiful.

Fresh and Salty demonstrates that art isn’t just a rarefied thing but can and should be integrated into everyday life. And projects can involve people who have never thought of themselves as ‘arty’ before. It might take a little while for them to get warmed up, especially when you’re just at the talking stage but as soon as you start getting some stuff on paper, people can suddenly see and understand what you’re trying for and what the results will be and then it’s like everyone comes on board with a rush. And it’s on its way.

Additional information and contact details

The five Fresh and Salty projects were a permanent sculptural garden in the Golden Plains Shire, an ephemeral sculpture on Lake Wendouree, a large permanent sculpture in Wellington Shire, a DVD animation for Wimmera Catchment Management Authority and a large stone sculpture on land managed by the Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporation

Location
City of Ballarat, Horsham Rural City Council (animation being used throughout the Wimmera), Glenelg Shire Council, Golden Plains Council, Wellington Shire Council

Artforms
Public art, sculpture, animation

Initiated by
Regional Arts Victoria through its network of regional arts development officers

Organised by
Each project was managed locally by a regional arts development officer supported by Liz Duthie, project coordinator, and Donna Jackson, artistic adviser

Financial support
Regional Arts Fund, an Australian Government initiative, VicHealth, Helen Macpherson Smith Trust, Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR), Melbourne Community Foundation, Wellington Shire Council, Moyne and Glenelg Shire Councils, Golden Plains Shire Council, Ballarat City Council, Wimmera Catchment Management Authority, Glenelg Hopkins Catchment Management Authority, Southern Rural Water, Gippsland Water, Heyfield and District Community Bank

Non financial support
Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporation, Haddon Primary School, Ballarat and District Aboriginal Cooperative, Kirrit Bareet Cultural Centre, Heyfields Wetlands Information Centre, Gippsland Art Gallery – Sale, and Art House Gippsland Inc

Artists
Gillian Swanson, Carmel Wallace, Vicki Couzens, Michael Shiell, Billy Blackall, Julie Collins, Dave Jones, Mary French, Hannah French

Dates
March 2007 to May 2008

Contact
Sue Strano, Regional Arts Victoria, PO Box 600, Port Melbourne Vic 3207
03 9644 1800, sstrano@rav.net.au, www.rav.net.au

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Salt of the earth

Vivienne Robertson, director

It was dreamed up on a bus between Horsham in rural Victoria and Melbourne. I’d been at the 2004 Regional Arts Australia conference in Horsham and I had gone along to a talk by the sculptor, François Davin, and there was something about his approach to art that I had felt myself but had not been able to articulate. So when I hopped on this bus and there was a seat next to him, I sat down and we dreamed up this thing Salt of the Earth.

Noosa Regional Gallery was organising projects in Queensland with François that involved ten international artists from the Artists in Nature International Network and I said, ‘Can we hijack half your artists and bring them to Western Australia on the way?’

It was actually a very short lead-up time. We thought it up in late October and the artists arrived in May and there was a lot to do. I was trying to introduce the concept of site-specific art to the community here. I needed to find five host farming families and I wanted them from different areas. They needed to be people who were ready for something like this: ready to invite an artist into their home and cook for them and share their bathroom with them and have them as part of the family, knowing that the artist would then create something on their land.

The way Francois envisages site-specific art is that the artwork looks at the physicality of the site and also at the memory, or the history of the place. In Australia of course, that’s particularly important. All but one of the sites were working farms. In Goomalling we chose not to do it on the farm but to do it on a salt lake, which was a bit of a tourist attraction. The last element in projects like this is the community who ‘own’ the site. In Goomalling, the people who really own that salt lake are those who go and look after it. The community are involved in the upkeep of it in one way or another.

Each artist worked differently. One artist’s work (Davin) was directly related to the story of the farmer who had been on that property for five generation and it addressed this whole dilemma we have in Australia about what does it take for us to feel that we can belong on the land? The result was a collection of beautiful, massive stones, almost ancient burial mounds on a hill all facing the homestead. They were the four previous generations laid to rest somehow. It was offering some sense of belonging to the current farmer while also acknowledging that prior to her family a whole different people used it as well. Another artist from France, Anne Mangeot, used sticks to build a shelter with two distinct halves: the past and the present. It was humorous with Anne because she did nothing but panic for two days because the sticks in Australia are so different to anything she encountered in Europe. Not flexible, so brittle. She didn’t know how she would do it. But in the end she managed and it was beautiful.

The small town near the salt lake has about 500 people. And every day at the garage they’d put up a big board saying what was on the schedule that day at the lake. People would drop by with food or they’d come and sit and chat with Ludy Feyen, the Dutch artist, who was building this amazing crystal serpent you could walk through.

There’s a really gorgeous story: Ludy was talking with this very Aussie farmer and she said, ‘Oh, I need lots of wire.’ And so this farmer and his son, they straightaway took down 600 metres of this old fence and spent the night chopping it up and twisting it. And when he went down to the pub on the Friday night everyone asked ‘So, what have you been up to, Digs?’ he said, ‘I’ve been wrapping wheat stubble and wool around my old fence to make this crystal serpent.’ And all the farmers are saying, ‘Oh yeah, get out of here!’ But he got them involved. He got them down and then they were doing it as well.

In the end with Salt of the Earth, we were looking at living acts of art: not looking at art as product but art as sharing and a different way of involving communities. Normally with community artists, the artist goes out and does a workshop and all the community participates – they might paint a panel for example. But in this project we were saying, ‘Let’s say that the artist is the artist and they’re here and they’re serving the community by doing their artwork. And the way that the community will be involved is as witnesses.’

So yes, the community may lift some stones or twist some wire but through witnessing the artist at work the hope is that something, a seed within their own artistic hearts which is private to them and which will take its own unique shape and form, will be kindled. It’s not measurable but it’s been absolutely fabulous and for two of our farmers in particular that I know about, it’s really made an enormous change.

Somehow having visiting artists from overseas who are totally innocent to our area actually drew out the stories that needed to be spoken. And this story between the first Australians and the later Australians was very much there in the artwork. It was a real encounter.

Additional information and contact details

Location
West and central wheatbelt in WA

Artforms
Site-specific art and writing

Initiated by
Vivienne Robertson, Avon Valley Arts Society with guidance from François Davin, site-specific artist

Organised by
Vivienne Robertson and community steering committee

Financial support
Avon Valley Arts Society, Community Arts Network WA, Town of Northam, Wheatbelt Development Commission, Northam Visitors’ Centre, WA State Literature Centre, Country Arts WA, Healthway

Non financial support
Waters and Rivers Commission Northam, Moondyne Design, Nuich Transport, Winward Ballooning, Midalia Steel

Artists
François Davin, Cornelia Konrads, Anne Mangeot, Ludy Feyen, Carlotta Brunetti, Pat Rose-Smith, Kevin Gillam, mentored artists, photographers, other artists and writers

Dates
May to June 2005

Contact
Vivienne Robertson, PO Box 361, Toodyay WA 6566
08 9574 5041, vivishoe@iinet.net.au

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Isle of plenty

Angela Barrington, project manager

It was one of those times when you can actually feel how the arts can have an impact on a community, an ordinary rural community. In this case, it came down to how the community sees itself. I saw such beautiful outcomes.

Cygnet was one of the sites for Isle of Plenty in the 2007 Ten Days on the Island festival. It’s a lovely small town about 45 minutes south of Hobart. It’s actually on the water but it’s rural and historically it’s got a strong apple picking culture. In the 1960s a lot of people moved into the area and there was a division or split. It was the old timers versus the newcomers. Over the last few years, many more people have moved to Tasmania and now this town which used to be thought of as isolated, is seen as commuting distance from the city. As the identity of the town is changing, we thought that this would be a great time to acknowledge the old traditions of the area and incorporate a celebration of the newcomers.

The brief for Isle of Plenty was to produce three site-specific landscape installations across Tasmania that would reflect and celebrate the regional areas. It was a huge new initiative and I was the project manager. My job was to try and keep all the partners and the players communicating, working together, so we had a common theme. And to make sure that everyone felt supported at a local community level.

Nicolas Goodwolf was the artist chosen for the Cygnet site. He lives in the area and had driven around over the years seeing the little old apple pickers’ huts falling down around the hillsides. The huts were where the seasonal workers stayed and they were often clustered together like little villages around the orchards. They were such an integral part of the culture of the town and so it was like this moment in time, this tradition was coming to an end. Nicolas wanted to comment on that and celebrate it, so he built a contemporary version of the apple pickers’ huts. He played with the perspective of them so that when you were viewing them, you couldn’t actually tell until you got up close whether they were small or large. And he clad them in white lycra and scattered them around the local park. Some were actually in a little creek that ran through the park. It’s a tidal creek so you could see the water rising and falling. At night they were lit up and gave a beautiful glow.

It’s a big leap having this incredible contemporary artwork plonked in a little rural town and there was some fear for a while that people might think we were actually making fun of the apple picking culture. The community coordinator worked hard in the lead up with a lot of beautiful media work to explain straight up that this was a contemporary interpretation.

It was decided to have an apple festival at the same time and build in elements of the old apple picking traditions. Cygnet had a long tradition of apple queen festivals to draw from. There’s this old hall next door to the art installation and that’s where they did a display of old apple-picking boxes and paraphernalia and they had an apple pie bake-off. There were oral histories and old film footage. The Apple Queen Festival was always a huge community get together. All the young girls used to dress up in their finery and parade around the sports ground and the school children would do little routines. That was until the apple picking industry went into decline and the festival died off and people were still working hard but not having that lovely celebration at the end of the harvest.

In some small way, our apple festival revisited those times. There was a parade with the iconic apple queen float and a concert and an apple queen crowning. Local performers were given great exposure and there was so much enthusiasm for making it an annual event and bringing the festival back. The newcomers loved it. They were taken back to that community’s past and had the chance to feel the history of that place, too.

I loved seeing all the old apple queens from the past festivals who were invited to be a part of this one. When those old apple queens got together, they had tears in their eyes and it was really moving. They were remembering what it used to be.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Cygnet, Huon Valley, Tasmania

Artforms
Community cultural development, contemporary visual arts, site specific landscape installations

Initiated by
Elizabeth Walsh artistic director Ten Days on the Island Festival
Lucy Kenneth, then executive director Tasmanian Regional Arts

Organised by
Elizabeth Walsh, Lucy Kenneth, Angela Barrington, Donna Jackson, Artistic Director

Financial support
Ten Days on the Island, Tasmanian Regional Arts, Regional Arts Fund, an Australian Government initiative, Australia Council for the Arts, Huon Valley Council

Non financial support
Huon Valley Council, Richard Harvey and Glenburn Orchards, Mark Hansen and Hansen’s Orchard, Peter Bishop and the Cygnet Scouts, Huon Valley Concert Band, State Archives of Tasmania, Cygnet Community Arts Council, St John’s Ambulance, Cerebral Palsy Tasmania – Tip Shop, Tasmanian Fruit Growers’ Association, Tasmanian Fruit Processing Company, the Roofing Company, David Perez and Wide Screen Tasmania, Fiona Richardson, Karen Dedenczuk, Mandy McGarrigal, Liz Murphy-Forrester, Shiraz Visinko, community volunteers

Artists
Nicholas Goodwolf printmaker, sculptor
Lucinda Wilson, Gai Anderson community arts workers

Dates
November 2005 to July 2007

Contact
Paul Jenkins, Tasmanian Regional Arts, PO Box 172, Latrobe Tas 7307
03 6426 2344, paul@tasregionalarts.org.au, www.tasregionalarts.org.au, www.tendaysontheisland.com

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Marshartability

Nic Mickle, artist

I work a lot in public art works, particularly large scale works. I’m used to carting around 250 kilo bronzes and using cranes and heavy lifting gear. Everything’s heavy. So to go up into an environment like Derby on the marsh where we were dealing with the delicacies and the intricacies of the environment, well, that was beautiful and intimate.

There were five guest artists who were invited to do a residency. Our brief was to come up with some ephemeral art works that the community would interact with on the last night of the Derby Boab Festival. The pressure was on to produce something beautiful.

The marsh was ginormous. As far as your eye could see was a circular sweep of flat, horizontal nothing, like a big blank canvas. But it’s extremely healthy. It thrives off the tidal movements of the water. So the tides just sweep in and then hang around for a bit and then sweep back out. When we were there, there was no tidal movement. So we just had an expanse of dry mud to work with.

We felt like outsiders at first, like we were sort of tampering with something that wasn’t ours. So we went with Wendy Robertson who’s the art coordinator with DADAA [Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts, Australia] to speak with Lena who was one of the Elder Indigenous women in the community. We felt we needed permission, I suppose. Afterwards I went off and wandered the marsh. I was taking in the colours and the way the light works but I still felt awkward, so I thought, ‘I’m going to go and get a shovel.’

So I went down to the local op shop and bought a shovel and went back out onto the dry clay and the first turn was actually in the shape of Australia. And as soon as I put the shovel in this Indigenous song, a chant, started behind me. There was a little hut, just a shade shelter really, on the outskirts of the marsh and there were a couple of guys just sitting in the shelter and they were singing this beautiful song and chanting and humming. And I don’t know how to describe it but it was then that I actually felt like I had acceptance and could explore. From then on it was a matter of playing with the clay and finding that under the dry crust it was wet as anything. Beautiful, rich, sticky mud.

I started looking at circles straight away. Concentric circles. I find circles are a universal symbol of wholeness and they seem to resonate on the horizontal landscape up there. So I was getting huge big trailer loads of pindan and bringing that out onto the marsh and just watching the colours glow within the sun.

It was quite an insular project because we were individual artists going to the marsh to interpret in ephemeral art works. We spent big, long days working. We’d get out there around 6:00 in the morning and then we’d still be there at night, watching the sun go down. The sunsets were unbelievable. It was gorgeous.

There’s a quote I read years ago, ‘Art is not what it looks like, it’s what it does to you.’ And I suppose for me, art is about capturing a feeling or an essence of a thing. In that landscape I was using found objects, just whatever happened to be around. We had only basic tools like secateurs and spades and some string. And to be able to draw on the natural environment without having to go to great lengths in a workshop, that was the big challenge for me – to still try and capture a feeling. It’s something that I’d love to do more of.

It was a wonderful project. There was one work which was a huge barramundi that had been drawn on the mud with the lines run in by motorbikes. And it was huge. There were some shots taken up in the air because there are big floatplanes that go over the marsh every day. They took photos also of the big concentric circles and a lot of the other art works that we’d done and it was just beautiful to see that, to see art works from above. Since we’ve left, there’s actually been another big competition for art on the marsh that will be photographed aerially. It’s just amazing how one project can grow and lead to another so rapidly. To me it shows that the community were really blown away to respond that fast. Everyone seemed to be wrapt.

Each morning when I was still working on my piece, I would go for walks and try and chat with people who didn’t understand what we were doing. And they were always just going, ‘Why are you working out there? Gosh, it’s just a marsh.’ People become blind to what is theirs and don’t really see the beauty in it because they see it every day. So I suppose that’s what’s nice about artists’ residencies and exchanges – artists come into a town and interpret something that’s completely foreign to them and there’s a fresh approach.

At the end of this festival people were coming up to all the artists, saying, ‘I just wanted to thank you so much. It’s just beautiful the way you have interpreted our home.’

Oh god, I’m getting all tongue tied now. I hope you know what I mean…

Additional information and contact details

Location
Derby, West Kimberley, Western Australia

Artforms
Visual arts, digital media production, photography, landscape installations, fire sculptures, dance

Initiated by
Initial project idea, photographer Maya Haviland. The project was a collaboration between local artists, DADAA Inc, Disability Services Commission, West Kimberley College of TAFE, Jalaris Aboriginal Corporation

Organised by
DADAA Inc administered and coordinated the project through the Regional Manager and the Arts and Health Project Officer, in collaboration with a steering committee of artists

Financial support
Department for Culture and the Arts, Lotterywest, Australia Council for the Arts, West Kimberley Development Commission through Derby Revitalisation Plan, DADAA Inc, Disability Services Commission, Jalaris Aboriginal Corporation, West Kimberley TAFE, Mowanjum Art and Culture Centre, local businesses

Non financial support
Local artists, fire brigade, Motor Cross Club, Jalaris Aboriginal Corporation, Kimberley TAFE, Mitre 10 Derby, Rod Johnston, Colin and Kirsty Pigram, Birdwood Downs

Artists
Nicole Mickel, Karen Seaman, Joyce Tasma, Wendy Robertson, Maya Haviland, John Muirhead, Colin and Kirsty Pigram, Beverley Hornibrook, Brad Spring, Leah Umbagia, Peter Croll, Wayne Archer, Megan Butt, Lena Buckle-Fraser, Lucy Marshall, TAFE students from Mowanjun Community

Dates
Six month project 2007

Contact
Jeremy Smith, Regional Manager, DADAA, PO Box 1080, Fremantle WA 6160
08 9430 6616, regional@dadaawa.asn.au, www.dadaawa.org.au

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RMB2329, the mailboxes are talking

Tricia Flanagan, artist

I’ve always been interested in the question of what role an artist can play if that role isn’t in designing and making more stuff for us to consume. I’d returned from studying public art at the Bauhaus University in Germany and I wanted to take the very conceptual stuff that I’d been doing there and see what happened with it here in Australia.

The ultimate romantic notion for a sculptor is that you just go into an area and work with what you’re interested in. But of course, projects have stakeholders with a range of desired outcomes and you find yourself sitting around with all of their criteria on the table. You’re trying to deliver something that not only meets your desires and expectations of a creative product, but also answers their needs which are a bit more real in the market. My project partners in Merriwa were keen to promote its produce and the area itself as a great place to live, particularly for young families.

I’d always thought that as an artist focusing on public art that the cities are the places that you need to go because it’s where the money is. It’s where you’re making artworks for architectural spaces and big buildings. But actually, it’s more interesting working in regional and remote areas because they have character and such Australianness about them. You can really work with the whole community and artists can put it all into process. And every newspaper wants to write the story.

I presented a proposal to make a series of talking letterboxes based on 12 families using waste materials found on their properties. The boxes contained audio gear with recorded interviews from one member of each family. Letterboxes seemed like a good symbol to grab onto: it’s the periphery of everyone’s boundary. It’s where their milk is delivered and where all their communication with the outside world is left.

First step in finding the participants was to set up a kind of interface place at the Tourist Welcoming Centre. I started by working on some wire-text sculptures. I was wanting to create a presence within the community, to get them talking and to get people coming and talking to me. The wire work was something I could do because while I couldn’t start welding or bashing in the centre, I could use a soldering iron. Word of mouth is important in small communities. Cold-canvassing doesn’t really work. To get participants, you almost need to be introduced. I talked to the Rotary Club and the schools and other groups and I was billeted with the local families.

When I’d found the chosen families, I had them pose for postcard photographs, a kind of proud portraiture in front of their properties. I drove from Newcastle to Dubbo hand delivering these postcards to general stores in little towns along the way. I’d give the shop owners a little stand to put on their counter and I’d have a little yarn to tell them what was going on. On the back was information about the post boxes and where they would be in Merriwa and the opening hours and so on. Some of the project partners found it hard to understand why I needed to do those wire works and the postcards first. Some were keen to just move straight into creating the post boxes. But I needed to get to know the artists first. I think artists need to follow their instincts even if things get difficult. In fact, often the things that evolve by putting yourself in these sorts of volatile positions I find make for stronger work. You’ve got to develop trust. They’ve got to trust that you have an artistic instinct to develop something that will work.

Sometimes people are tied to traditional ideas of what public sculpture should be but in this project we all went along in leaps and bounds in our thinking. The boxes are a long way from a traditional monument and all the people who participated travelled that journey with me.

The design of the boxes was reflective of the character of the participant. One family had a long, long history in the area and the box we made for them is your typical dunny-style little cabin with numberplates from an old truck used as the door. The box typified the lifestyle. Whereas another family were young, university educated, new house, on the internet every day, stock market, business, business, business. Their materials were leftovers from their new house so it ended up like a modern piece of architecture and it suited the voice coming out of it.

The Merriwa project was about getting the people to reflect on their own situation and gain a self awareness about their own opinions. I don’t think it’s an artist’s role to have all the answers. In fact I think it’s very demeaning to stand there and say, ‘This is the answer. Look at my work and be enlightened.’ I can’t imagine what I’d do if I was given a white box studio and told, ‘Make your magic!’

Additional information and contact details

Location
Merriwa, Upper Hunter, New South Wales

Artforms
Public art including sculpture, aural history and photography

Initiated by
Arts Upper Hunter which engaged Tricia Flanagan to produce public art in Merriwa

Organised by
Ruth Neave, Tricia Flanagan

Financial support
Regional Arts Fund
Tricia Flanagan was also supported by an Australian Post Graduate Research Scholarship

Non financial support
Arts Upper Hunter, Crops for Hunter, Merriwa Economic Development Officer, Merriwa Tourist Welcoming Centre

Artist
Tricia Flanagan

Dates
December 2005 to March 2006

Contact
Tricia Flanagan, 3 Grey Street, Wickham NSW 2293
0405 613 662, tricia_flanagan@hotmail.com

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Ailan Currents, artwork from the Torres Strait

Rae O'Connell, curator

A catalogue definitely extends the life and the effect of a show. This one that we produced for Ailan Currents has helped so much with ongoing promotion, not only of these artists and works but of Torres Strait artwork generally. Not a lot of people have seen artwork from the Torres Strait or know anything about it. It’s got a whole different style and voice to Aboriginal art. KickArts is a visual arts organisation based in Cairns and we’re all about promoting art and these artists.

Our Ailan Currents exhibition came about because we were seeing all these wonderful paper works being printed in the crate storeroom of our building. It was a pretty amazing thing watching them come out. We had Theo Tremblay’s printing press in there (Theo’s a master printer) and they just kept producing these really significant works from these contemporary artists and we just knew that the collection had to be showcased. This was actually before Dennis Nona and Alick Tipoti went on to win the 2007 Telstra Art Awards. At this stage, we were just watching these pieces emerging from a storeroom and we all felt the fever to support the young artists.

The energy around Torres Strait artists has been building here for about the last ten years, ever since the Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Art Department was first initiated at the TAFE in Cairns. There was a purpose-built building and Ann Eglitis was encouraging the artists to go back and look at their cultural history and storytelling. Each artist has really developed his or her own style. When they were at TAFE it was hard to tell them apart but now, when you see different works you can tell who they’ve been carved by. For example, Dennis and Alick tell very traditional stories about warriors and the things that happen between different islands and groups. Billy Missi tells traditional and contemporary stories and Brian Robinson has a much more contemporary interpretation. I know Billy is very conscious of how he tells his stories. They’re from his own mouth really. For example a new piece we’re showing now is all about kinship across the Torres Strait and how they manage inter-marrying and things like that. And it’s told in the most beautiful way.

The Torres Strait artists are using lino and printmaking techniques and the guys’ work with all the patterning from the original carvings is just so masculine. Every image you see will be about the place and it will have a story behind it. It’s real story telling passed down through the generations. Traditional or contemporary, the artists are telling their stories of what it’s like living in the Torres Strait.

There are different ways that we support the artists but showcasing their work in a professional gallery is always useful, particularly here in the tropics because it’s really difficult to show works on paper unless you have good air-conditioning. They just react instantly to the humidity. We always wanted to produce a catalogue but we don’t have buckets of funding so we did it ourselves in-house and we were so happy that people would be able to appreciate the intricacies of the carvings with our fold-out pages. You can’t see or understand the detail so much with A4 and the decision to go with the fold-out has been really significant.

We’ve sent out 1,000 copies across Australia and internationally and each week we’re sending more and more out. Schools and art departments can buy them at a reduced price. And it’s being requested by different departments of universities who are wanting it for their own library. It’s being seen as an important publication and resource about Torres Strait art.

At the moment we have limited resources so we have to be clever with how we market what we’re doing and how we raise awareness of our artists. A catalogue can obviously travel easier than four or five metre prints and it provides an opportunity to open up markets. We’re hoping that people will see the catalogue and then want to have the exhibition or they might want to invite the artists to participate in another activity.

We’re currently lobbying for a new print studio and there we’ll have a dedicated business development officer who will be looking for opportunities to promote the work nationally and internationally. And there’s the website where you can look at the work and buy online, which is the way we do sell quite a few prints at the moment.

All of this is aimed towards spreading recognition and building our market. We’re trying to generate ways that we can become more independent from government funding because funding isn’t increasing. It isn’t allowing us to do what we want to do. You don’t want to depend on funding to keep going and growing – it can stop at any time. I see the catalogue and the new printmaking facility that we’re currently lobbying for as a way to free us from the tyranny of funding dependence.

One step at a time.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Cairns, Far North Queensland

Artforms
Printmaking, lino cuts

Initiated by
Rae O’Connell, Russell Milledge KickArts Contemporary Arts

Organised by
KickArts Contemporary Arts

Financial support
KickArts Contemporary Arts, Arts Queensland through the Cultural Infrastructure Program, Australia Council for the Arts through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency, Torres Strait Regional Authority, Qantaslink, Cavanagh Knight, JNP (Pawsays and Prose)

Non financial support
Saibai Dancers

Artists
Joey Laifoo, Billy Missi, Dennis Nona, Brian Robinson, Joel Sam, Leroy Savage, Alick Tipoti

Dates
September to November 2007

Contact
Rae O’Connell or Samantha Creton
KickArts, 96 Abbott Street, Cairns Qld 4870
07 4050 9494, Samantha@kickarts.org.au, www.kickarts.org.au

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SpeedDating-4-Artists

Melitta Firth, coordinator

Arts Northern Rivers was one of the last regional arts boards to be established in NSW. It was set up in 2003 for everybody working in the arts but immediately it was just inundated with requests for assistance from visual artists. They were crying out for it. We have the highest regional concentration of artists in Australia – 1,500 professional practising artists. Lois Randall, our CEO, applied for funding to set up Visual Arts Network to support artists in developing their careers. The speed-dating idea came about to help the artists meet gallery directors.

One of the major difficulties of living here is how to create relationships with big galleries. The local galleries are saturated and there’s not really much opportunity to sell your work locally. There are no buyers. It can be really hard to connect with galleries in the cities where the buyers actually are, because the directors are always really busy and they obviously get submissions from artists all the time. Most of them have a full stable, so it’s not like they’re having trouble finding artists. We’ve found though that if we can manage to get them here, in this format, often they’ll find someone they like. It works.

We put people together for just four minutes. Normally we have 12 gallery directors and 36 artists and each artist who comes along gets to meet with six of the gallery directors. They’ll bring a portfolio and it’s good to have some kind of physical object, like a small work if possible. Some of them will bring laptops but that can add to the stress of the situation when they don’t work. That’s why I always advise people to bring a portfolio instead. I mean it’s pretty full on having to sell yourself in four minutes (I don’t know whether I’d like it) and obviously it is stressful. The directors get nervous, too, but I don’t think the artists realise that!

Four minutes doesn’t seem a long time but it’s long enough for the directors to know whether they have any interest at all in following up, and short enough not to feel trapped! A lot of the time, it’s just not the right fit for that particular gallery. If there’s a spark, the artist will leave their card and say, ‘Can I pop in sometime and see you?’ Or the gallery director might say, ‘Keep me up to date with what you’re doing.’ And even though it is quick, there’s time for a bit of feedback for the artist. Like ‘You’re not right for me, but maybe you could try this gallery? Or maybe you should enter this prize.’

The artists mainly love it. They think it’s great. An excellent opportunity. Some find it difficult. And now that I’ve organised a few of them, I can at least let people know what they’re in for. I mean, obviously there have been some cases where that quick show-and-tell hasn’t suited their personality type at all. We have a sort of informal networking afterwards and in the end, everyone feels fine.

The gallery owners have really loved it as well. For the regional gallery directors, it introduces them to a whole heap of artists who they haven’t necessarily had time to meet and who they might include in later shows. And for the commercial gallery directors? Well, they just never get to meet that quantity of artists.

Of course, you can’t run them too often. You can’t use up the goodwill because it’s a big call. What you’re doing is ringing someone up and saying, ‘Hi, do want you to drive down from Brisbane for a day?’ It’s amazing though how willing everyone has been. Robyn Sweaney, an artist from Mullumbimby, met the manager of Tim Olsen Gallery speed-dating and has had a successful solo show at the Tim Olsen Gallery in Sydney. That’s been very exciting.

Speed-dating is just one aspect of the Visual Arts Network. We also do curatorial panels. They were more intensive feedback sessions for artists where they get to sit down with, say, three curators and talk about their work and get intensive feedback. And we’ve run a lot of professional development training and seminars too. Things like educating artists about tax, how to approach a gallery, legal issues, dealing with the media. All that type of thing. Because artists don’t really learn that. Even if they’ve been to uni, there just isn’t time for all that business stuff in the course.

The website has been a massive promotional tool. Artists can edit their own pages, put up new images and it provides a single point of contact. For example when the ABC was sourcing ideas for Painting Australia they contacted us and said ‘We’re looking for artists to do this television show and we reckon you’d have some up there, wouldn’t you?’ And I said, ‘Go to the website. Tell us which ones you want to know more about and we’ll recommend a few.’

It really makes the difference.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Northern Rivers, New South Wales

Artforms
Visual arts, fine art, craft

Initiated by
Lois Randall, regional arts development officer for Arts Northern Rivers

Organised by
Melitta Firth, visual arts network coordinator, Arts Northern Rivers

Financial support
Arts Northern Rivers, New South Wales Department of State and Regional Development (DSRD) Developing Regional Resources Program, Arts New South Wales, the Australian Government’s Regional Partnerships Program, Linnaeus Estate

Non financial support
Commercial gallery directors Dr Gene Sherman, Tim Olsen, Lorraine Pilgrim, Jan Manton, Bruce Heiser, Charles Hewitt, Liz Buchmann, Philip Bacon am

Regional gallery staff Steven Alderton, Jude McBean, Susi Muddiman, Virginia Rigney and Sandra Warner

Also, Julie Ewington, David Broker, Nicholas Tsoutas, Djon Mundine, Russell Storer, Jeni Allenbym, Claire Armstrong, local galleries, artists, Ballina Shire Council, Byron Shire Council, Clarence Valley Council, Kyogle Council, Lismore City Council, Richmond Valley Council, Tweed Shire Council, Southern Cross University, Austrade, Australian Tax Office, Viscopy, Arts Law Centre of Australia, Tweed Heads Export Hub, Cabbage Tree Island Art Shed, Gunnawanabe Jambama Aboriginal Art Cooperative, Linnaeus Estate, Byron@Byron Resort, Links Apartments, Artworkers Alliance

Dates
Ongoing since April 2005

Contact
Melitta Firth, 1/5 Bruxner Highway, Alstonville NSW 2477
02 6628 8120, melitta@artsnorthernrivers.com.au, www.artsnorthernrivers.com.au

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Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial

Ruth Blakely and Fran West, original organisers

ruth: Ken Reinhardt was the judge of the 1974 Tamworth Art Society Exhibition. There was a fibre piece from a local person and Ken was toying with giving it the prize, I think. He said, ‘Why don’t you think about doing a fibre exhibition?’

fran: ‘You’re living in a country area and there’s a lot of sheep around!’ he said. So we discussed it at the arts and crafts general meeting.

r: And we all said, ‘Let’s go for it.’

f: I had a potting partner, Geoff Walker, and we headed down to Sydney to see the Craft Council and visit the people who were considered to be the leading craftsmen. We wanted to see if they’d be interested. They were very skilled fibre workers doing large works, but they hadn’t got together as a group. They were so excited by the idea.

r: There was nothing else in any of the fibre mediums in Australia at that time. Nothing for people to actually exhibit their work with others of their calibre. Victoria had the tapestry workshop but I don’t think there was any other collection.

f: And we made sure that it was an acquisitive prize. That was a definite. (I am a great aquisitor!) And there wasn’t much point if Tamworth didn’t get something out of it!

r: It was a $1000 prize that year. We sent out invitations via the Craft Council and we got about 80 entries. Big names: Janet Brereton, Victoria King, Rosemary Draper and Liz Williamson who’s still weaving now. There was Dawn MacIntyre working in macramé which was very fashionable then and Robert Bell who was the curator of craft at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. We got this great big green weaving from him, I remember. It was so exciting when it all arrived. There were all these big, heavy, funny looking parcels. Things wrapped up and around and we thought, ‘Ooohhh, this is going to be interesting!’ There were about ten of us on the committee putting it all into this shed.

f: Council had given us an enormous old fertilizer shed…

r: It had a cement floor and huge cement bays and this soaring ceiling. So it was very exciting to put in these very big fibrous pieces which were so colourful. Like Margaret Grafton’s Jabberwocky which was a large woven piece that hung from about four points on the ceiling. And somebody made what we called an oil slick, a Queensland artist, I think. And a big pair of woven boots.

f: The committee was very keen and everyone worked well together. Geoff and Ruth and I were really the hangers: Geoff decided where they would go.

r: He was highly creative.

f: Yes, he was young and eager and had plenty of oomph! And he had the eye. He was the arts advisor with the Department of Education which gave us a bit of authority. Tamworth was, and still is, a conservative town: a very mild town and I think the Council thought we were just little old ladies. I was in my forties then.

r: The response to that first show was so positive that we decided we’d keep doing it. I remember in 1980 we moved the show to the Tamworth City Gallery and it was quite different because it was parquet floors and walls and I remember going in at night and hanging it and how different it looked with proper lighting. That was very exciting.

f: Ruth was a magnificent secretary/treasurer and she was such a good organiser that she was getting large sums of money from firms, you know, like Coates and the Tamworth Council. But by 1981 I think it was getting too big for us and we just couldn’t cope with the organisation of it. It was a gradual handing over really. There was a gallery director employed by the city council.

r: James Giddy began pre-selecting and then it went on to become a curated exhibition. In our day, there were always works you didn’t want to hang, obviously, but they were sent in and you sort of had to. The first curated exhibition was very different to what we had done. Well of course, it must be: it reflects one person’s taste. And that’s growth, I suppose…but sometimes I think you can lose the traditional work.

At the last exhibition in 2006, the director of the Tamworth Gallery brought out some of the older work and asked me to give a floor talk. And I got so excited because all these acquired pieces from 1975, 1976, 1978 are still as beautiful. And it took me back to hanging them in the old shed.

f: Everything brings back memories in Tamworth! There’s still an active Art and Craft Society with the spinners and the weavers and the potters…the same faces...we’re all still here.

r: The thing I like most is to think about how this came to be. How this fibre show that now travels all over Australia came from that tiny little exhibition… in that funny old shed.

f: Just yesterday I was trying to find the old minutes of the Art and Craft Society and I was laughing, you know, thinking about the tousles we had – as you always have. But thinking too,‘What a powerful team!’ We were a very powerful team.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Tamworth and tours nationally

Artforms
Fibre textile arts

Initiated by
Members of the Art and Craft Society in Tamworth in the 1970s

Organised by
1970-1980s Art and Craft Society in Tamworth
1980s-1996 James Giddey, Director of Tamworth City Gallery
1996 a specialist curator and Tamworth Gallery administrator

Financial support
Australia Council for the Arts, Arts NSW, Visions of Australia, an Australian Government initiative, Tamworth City Council

Dates
1970s to present

Contact
Sandra McMahon, 5 Eura Street, Gilgandra NSW 2827
02 6847 1027, s.mcmahon@tamworth.nsw. gov.au, www.tamworthregionalgallery. com.au

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A child's life on the station

Jennie Bucknell, creative director

When I came out to the bush, I realised there’s this sort of mysterious veil over it for city people. We see the outback in glossy magazines and we hold it as a special place but we don’t really know anything about it. It’s not easy to understand, even though we want to. I grew up in the city and came to live on the station after I was married. We’re in south-west Queensland and we’re fairly isolated. The nearest town is Mitchell, two hours away. Mitchell’s about seven hours west of Brisbane.

I watch all the kids growing up in this amazing lifestyle. They’re very good at so many things and they’re grounded and needed. They have a purpose in life. My own kids are so practical and brave, not like me. I still have the city side in me. Like I can’t ride a horse… well, I can, tentatively. (But I get sore pretty quick!)

But sometimes it seems like rural life as we know it is slipping further and further away so I wanted to invite people in. I wanted to share it. And I thought how can I do that? Then I thought, children! Children are universal and everyone immediately understands and connects with months from whoa to go. The original exhibition included 30 photographs, a series of kids’ drawings and a DVD. Part of my RADF grant was that I had to donate that exhibition to Booringa Shire Council which I was happy to do. They have been wonderful and supportive and we have got the exhibition into Queensland Arts Council’s Ontour byrequest and now it’s been touring for two years around the state. We were originally only going to tour for a year but they extended it and that’s been really satisfying. In 2007, it went to the Brisbane Exhibition (Ekka) where it was apparently seen by nearly 200,000 people.

An idea for the future could be to have an exhibition about women on stations because there’s a lot that isn’t understood about that too. And there’s a lot to come to grips with. I remember before I had children all the women told me that from the time you have your baby, you feel this thing hanging over you that one day they’re going to have to go to boarding school and you have to let them go. My first one goes next year, so I’m not quite there… yet!

For people growing up with the land, it doesn’t take long before it’s running through their veins. It’s such a big part of them. That’s what I wanted people to see and feel. The way the bush is etched into our hearts.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Mitchell, Queensland

Artforms

Multimedia exhibition including photographs and DVD

Initiated by
Jennie Bucknell through Mitchell Arts Council, Booringa Shire Regional Arts Development Fund Committee

Organised by
Jennie Bucknell through Mitchell Arts Council, Queensland Arts Council Ontour byrequest

Financial support
Queensland Regional Arts Development Fund, Epic Energy

Non financial support
Mitchell Arts Council, Queensland Arts Council Ontour byrequest

Artists
Photography by Noela Ward, Sandra Godfrey, Ruth Vicary, Gabrielle Davis, Petra Mason, Michael Allen, Adrienne Taylor, Larissa Jackson, Rosie Bryant, Kerry Wehlburg, the Kingston Family, Janine White, Sally McGilvray

Dates
2004, ongoing

Contact
Tracey Fisher, Marketing Manager, Queensland Arts Council, GPO Box 376, Brisbane Qld 4001
07 3004 7531, tfisher@qac.org.au, www.qac.org.au

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Desert Mob Marketplace

Rhonda Plummer, painter

A lot of people go to this Desert Mob Marketplace. We have heaps of people like waiting there when it opens because that is one time of the year that you get a bargain from the art centres. Everything is sold for under $200.

I work in Tennant Creek at Julalikari Art and we attend Desert Mob Marketplace every year. We take a lot of paintings from our art centre to this marketplace and to sell them to the public. Everybody gets very excited about it and getting our artworks ready. We come in on the Friday and go back to Tennant Creek on the Monday. There are probably 12 coming from our centre. We catch up with other people and look at the artwork and see what other artists are doing around the central region.

We set it out on the tables. Each individual artist has got their own work on the tables and it’s good. Sometimes it can get a bit hard when some artists see that other paintings have been sold. That can make it a bit hard but for most, it’s good.

The buyers, they really like Aboriginal art and we just sit there and look at them you know, and watch them how excited they get. They are just so excited just to look through our paintings and all the artworks around them. It makes me want to do more for next time.

Last year one man came in and pointed for me down the back. He sort of put his thumbs up and asked for my paintings. There was some on the table and he looked through that and then he asked for more and there was more rolled up and he wanted to look at that as well. Finally he said he’d buy it all. Yes, he bought it all. I brought 15 paintings and they all got sold. He must have been a big fan of mine because he bought some others the year before as well. Now he’s coming to visit me soon at Tennant Creek.

When I was young, I painted with my mother. She used to paint when my father used to carve things from wood, handmade, and she would paint those things. I would watch her. But I think I started painting just a couple of years ago when I went to the art centre to start to work again as an artist. The art centres are very important for us, giving the support with all the resources and getting us recognised for our artwork.

I do abstract sort of paintings. I work with all the colours but also the colours of the spinifex, like from the spinifex country, you know? I did some grass paper made of spinifex with the colours of the country and the spinifex grass all over it. And two abstract paintings of a bush fire and after the bush fire. I’m using the greys and the whites and the ashes then, you know, the new green growth coming out of the charcoal. They got sold. I paint the turtles and fish. The short-neck turtles are around the land and that is the sort of thing I do.

I think of myself as a painter now. With the marketplace and when I get people requesting for my artwork, I feel I’m becoming an artist. I am a painter.

Raewyn Kavanagh, Desart office manager

Can I just add a little bit about Rhonda’s role on the executive of Desart? She’s our deputy chair. She doesn’t speak up a lot about herself but she’s done some excellent work in the last 12 months. Desart is a member organisation for 43 art centres and there have been many challenges in the last couple of years, including the government intervention. Rhonda’s work on the executive involved advocating for art centres. She was up in Canberra and I actually have a magazine with a photograph of Rhonda standing next to Peter Garrett. She’s looking very proud with her art centre t-shirt on. It says ‘Art Centres – keeping strong together’. So Rhonda’s done some very good work speaking up for those art centres that are so important for communities.

About desert mob

The Desert Mob Symposium features Indigenous artists leading a day of stories, images and histories.

The Desert Mob Marketplace in 2007 was a feast of 27 stalls. Almost $15,000 was taken in four hours by participating art centres.

Dance Site brought a crowd of more than 1,000 to watch and enjoy dancers from the Central Desert.

Additional information and contact details

Location
Alice Springs, Northern Territory

Artforms
Indigenous visual arts

Initiated by
Araluen Galleries and Desart

Organised by
Desart adminsters and organises the symposium, marketplace and dance site Araluen Galleries organises the exhibition with Desart member art centres

Financial support
Desart, Arts NT and Araluen Galleries

Dates
Desert Mob is held over three days each September

Contact
Tania Beattie, Desart Inc, PO Box 9219, Alice Springs NT 0871
08 8953 4736, rm@desart.com.au, www.desart.com.au, www.nt.gov.au/nreta/arts/ascp/ araluen/

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Something fantastical - Wearable Arts Festival

Marion Braun, coordinator

First of all, wearable arts has nothing to do with fashion. It is recycled materials or natural fibres created into something wonderful or fantastical that represents art and can be worn. My favourite piece last year was called Marie Eggtoinette. It was one of the more headache-causing outfits because the whole thing was made of eggshells! But it had a little throw which was made of feathers and it was so unique and so stunning. The audience loved it. They went crazy.

Then there was another piece called Dry Town Diva. It was an outfit made by Nicky Shonkala who was actually the previous Wearable Arts Festival co-ordinator. She created it from beer cans. There were a few artists who used the beer can theme because Alice Springs, as you probably know, is a very beautiful place but there is a bit of a problem with littering! And these outfits were also a comment on the town’s new drinking laws.

The audience here always loves the Wearable Arts Festival. It attracts a lot of people who don’t ordinarily attend arts events. It brings together artists, models, performers, hairdressers, makeup artists, community groups, businesses and the locals and it’s a lot of fun. Right from 2002, when we had the first Wearables at the Alice Springs Council’s lawns it’s been one of the most anticipated events. It’s held at Araluen at the cultural precinct and the entries are not from people who necessarily specialise in textiles. Wearables attracts about 40 entries from people in all walks of life. All sorts of people who have artistic talent in sculpture, photography, painting and who want to present their work to an enthusiastic audience.

A few days before the show the artists will bring in their outfits. There are six adult categories and the prize money for each is $1,000. The artist chooses a piece of music and creates a little choreography. It’s all up to them how they present their outfit. They organise the models or sometimes do it themselves and part of the judging criteria is the presentation. We have mainly females entering the Wearables. In fact, thinking about it, we didn’t have one male entrant last time. We had some male models but no males putting in a design. Oh I’ve just realised… we’ll have to work on that!

We had an afternoon session where all the adults performed plus we had a children’s category. We had no idea if the children would be interested at all and the lead up time was too short for the schools to incorporate a project into their curriculum. But we received 20 entries from children and we were very pleased with that. This year, we’re involving the schools very early and we’re hoping to entice them to do their own little internal awards and then present the winners. That’s what I would like to see. I’d really like to attract the younger secondary students too because up to now we have never had their participation.

Last year was my first year as coordinator. I’ve lived in Alice Springs for seven years and I’ve always been a keen participator in all the events of the Alice Desert Festival but the Wearable Arts was always one of my favourites. My background originally is a teacher and when I was raising my children I was very much involved in all sorts of committees at the Steiner School. That was really where I gained a lot of background experience to put on events and make everything happen.

There’s a lot involved and many creative people take part. In fact, even though the Wearables is a part of the Alice Desert Festival it’s always taken outside the festival because we just have so many events and we don’t want them competing. Last year there were 100 participants backstage and kids and crew so it was just mammoth. But we see it here as something the whole community can be involved in. It’s got that feeling of a community celebration full of colour and humour and in a sense what is unique about Alice.

There are not many places where people in the audience can call out to a man dressed in an extremely wide, Scarlet O’Hara type hoop dress made of bubble wrap and say, ‘We love you, Henry!’

Additional information and contact details

Location
Alice Springs

Artform
Wearable art

Initiated by
Sonja MacLean De Silva, first coordinator of the Alice Springs Festival

Organised by
Eugene Ragghianti festival director Alice Desert Festival
Marion Brauns coordinator Wearable Arts
Mary Menatti, Robyn van Dok, Jen Standish-White committee members

Financial support
Arts NT, Alice Springs Town Council, Tourism NT, Imparja Television Pty Ltd, Loraine Braham MLA Children’s Awards, Territory Loans Children’s Encouragement Award, Brian Tucker Accounting Fantasia Award, Gallery Gondwana Natural Fibre Award, Springs Plaza Accessorise Award, Alice Springs Airport Desert Impressions Award, Artback NT Touring Recycled or Found Object Award, Jen Standish-White Student Award, Territory Chinese Medicine People’s Choice Award, Gloria Jean’s Coffee, LJ Hooker, Friends of Araluen

Non financial support
Afghan Traders, Buds with Style florist, Mixed Lollies, Casa Nostra Restaurant, Exotiq Homeware, Dymocks Booksellers, Queen Bead, Duprada Dance Company, Araluen Arts Centre, Welcome TV

Dates
Annually since 2002

Contact
Eugene Ragghianti, Festival Director, Alice Desert Festival, PO Box 2103, Alice Springs NT 0871
08 8953 6112, eugene@alicedesertfestival.com.au, www.alicedesertfestival.com.au

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Regional Arts Australia | Members

New South Wales
Regional Arts NSW
Locked Bag 5, Millers Point NSW 2000
02 9247 6373, admin@regionalartsnsw.com.au, www.regionalartsnsw.com.au

Northern Territory
Arts NT Department of Natural Resources, Environment and the Arts
PO Box 496 Palmerston NT, 0831
08 8999 8981, 1800 678 237, arts.office@nt.gov.au, www.arts.nt.gov.au

Queensland
Queensland Arts Council
GPO Box 376 Brisbane Qld 4001
07 3846 7500, info@qac.org.au, www.qac.org.au

South Australia
Country Arts SA
2 McLaren Parade Port Adelaide SA 5015
08 8444 0400, email@countryarts.org.au, www.countryarts.org.au

Tasmania
Tasmanian Regional Arts
PO Box 172 Latrobe Tas 7307
03 6426 2344, info@tasregionalarts.org.au, www.tasregionalarts.org.au

Victoria
Regional Arts Victoria
PO Box 600 Port Melbourne Vic 3207
03 9644 1800, enquiry@rav.net.au, www.rav.net.au

Western Australia
Country Arts WA
PO Box 7012 Cloisters Square Perth WA 6850
08 9481 0077, info@countryartswa.asn.au, www.countryartswa.asn.au

Regional Arts Australia | Board

President
Suzie Haslehurst Chair, Country Arts WA

Vice President
Steve Grieve Chair, Country Arts SA

Secretary
Ken Lloyd Chief Executive Officer, Country Arts SA

Treasurer
Lindy Allen Director, Regional Arts Victoria

Directors
Lee Cole President, Tasmanian Regional Arts Arthur Frame am Artistic Director and Chief Executive Officer, Queensland Arts Council

Jane Frank Vice President, Queensland Arts Council

Paul Jenkins Executive Director, Tasmanian Regional Arts

Lucy Kenneth, Director, RedHOT Arts Marketing, NT

Meg Larkin Chair, Regional Arts NSW

Jessica Machin Chief Executive Officer, Country Arts WA

Elizabeth Rogers Chief Executive Officer, Regional Arts NSW

Michael Wells Director, Heritage and the Arts, Arts and Museums,

Northern Territory Department of Natural Resources, Environment and the Arts

Mike Zafiropoulos Chair, Regional Arts Victoria

Regional Arts Australia | Staff

Ruth Smiles Executive Director, Regional Arts Australia

Jo McDonald Project Officer, Regional Arts Australia

Vivienne Skinner Communications Manager, Regional Arts Australia

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