Friday 15 November, 1.30-3.00pm
Culture has long been integral to national community, and this relationship was being reshaped and reinvigorated at the time Donald Horne wrote The Lucky Country. Horne celebrated the culture and lifestyle of ordinary Australians while bemoaning the quality of Australia’s elite, and the 1970s and 1980s witnessed greater investment in the cultural domains, seeing the rise of commercial sport as spectacle and the lavish, colourful and contested Bicentenary of 1988. The present century, however, has arguably seen a faltering of the idea of culture as a basis of national identity, as well as less willingness on the part of government to fund it. How did culture lose some of this purchase as a public good, and how has the idea that it is an elite project been so easily politicised to fight culture wars? The session will explore whether the project of a national culture is still either possible or desirable, and what role a renovated and inclusive concept of culture might play in Australia’s future.
Chaired by Honorary Associate Professor Esther Anatolitis
Editor of Meanjin Esther Anatolitis is one of Australia’s leading advocates for arts and culture and a respected champion of artists’ voices. She is Honorary Associate Professor at RMIT School of Art, a member of the National Gallery of Australia Governing Council, and Co-Chair of the Australian Republic Movement. Across two decades, Esther’s work in arts and media leadership has created transformative change, introducing new artistic frameworks to well-established companies that generate new thinking and new work. She has led galleries, festivals, publishers, broadcasters, regional organisations, national peak bodies and advocacy consortia, and has been a bipartisan appointee to policy committees at all government levels. Her strategic consultancy Test Pattern works with arts and government bodies across Australia on creative precincts and cultural policy. A prolific writer and commentator, Esther is the author of Place, Practice, Politics, and her anthology Essays that Changed Australia: Meanjin 1940 to today is published just days before our Symposium. Her work is collected at estheranatolitis.net.
Speakers
Mr Kim Williams AM
Abstract pending.
Kim Williams has had a long involvement in the arts, entertainment and media industries here and overseas and has held various executive leadership positions since the late 1970s including as Chief Executive at each of News Corp Australia, FOXTEL, Fox Studios Australia, the Australian Film Commission, Southern Star Entertainment and Music Viva Australia and also as a senior executive at the ABC.
Kim has also held numerous Board positions (and Chairmanships) in commercial and public life over more than three decades including as Chairman of the Australian Film Finance Corporation (which he founded in 1988); Chairman of each of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; Musica Viva Australia; and the Sydney Opera House Trust from 2005 until 2013.
He was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia in June 2006 for his services to the arts and public policy formulation in the film and television industries. In October 2009 he received a Doctorate of Letters (Honoris Causa) by Macquarie University for his contribution to the arts and entertainment industry.
He was appointed in January 2024 by the Honourable Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister of Australia, as the twentieth Chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, with effect from 7 March for a five year term.
Professor Jacqueline Lo
Paper title: New Grammar for an Old Country
Discussions about what constitutes a national culture inevitably get caught up in culture wars. I want to focus instead on how we make culture for an inclusive future. As Australia becomes increasingly multicultural, how do we create meaningful cultural experiences that speak to our diversity? Does attention to diversity come at the cost of national unity? In performance and theatre studies, intercultural practice is generally understood as the broad field of exchange, negotiation and engagement between cultural traditions and communities. Focusing on two recent intercultural productions (The Nightingale and Other Fables, Adelaide Festival 2024 and Jurrungu Ngan-ga, Marrugeku 2023), I explore the practice and ethics creating intercultural performances. Can interculturalism, and especially Marrugeku’s Indigenous governed interculturalism, provide a grammar for us to speak/listen/dance across different histories, subjectivities and socialities towards Makarrata?
Professor Jacqueline Lo is Director of the new Indo-Pacific Research Centre at Murdoch University. She is also Honorary Professor at the ANU. An internationally recognised Humanities scholar and pioneer of Asian Australian Studies, her work on multiculturalism, diaspora and cross-cultural studies has influenced academic and policy sectors in Europe, Asia and the USA. Jacqueline is a ministerial appointment to the Higher Education Standards Panel and non-executive director of several not-for-profit boards. She is the Founding Chair of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN) and was awarded the Knight of the Academic Palms in 2014 by the French Government.
LinkedIn Jacqueline Lo / Linkedin IPRC
Professor Justin O’Connor
What do we mean by ‘a public good’? A technical definition, derived from welfare economics, is a good which is non-excludable and non-rivalrous, and as a “market failure” argument it has dominated discussion on culture since the 1980s. It is a negative approach and one based on a narrow econometric definition of individual welfare. Another definition, which we might call Aristotelian (or even Confucian), uses a more collective and ethics-based notion of the public good. The first definition has led to a model of public goods based on monetary value, or proxies for such, and a tendency to position culture as a quasi-industrial sector. Public funded cultural institutions have been asked to justify themselves in relation to these terms. I want to rethink culture as a public good, explicitly against the “market failure” quasi-industrial vision, and re-assert culture as an essential element of public policy alongside health, education, social services and basic infrastructure. Yet what might that mean for such a complex, multifaceted, even amorphous thing called “culture”. How can we position culture as a collective public good in an age in which individual choice and the dissolution of all “canons” seem to be the dominant settings. I’ll end by pointing to the current debates in the United Nations, about culture as a “global public good”.
Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of South Australia and Visiting Professor at the School of Cultural Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University. Between 2012-18 he was a member of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity. Previously he helped set up Manchester’s Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS) and has advised cities in Europe, Russia, Korea, Vietnam and China. Under the UNESCO/EU Technical Assistance Programme he has worked with the Ministries of Culture in both Mauritius and Samoa. He is currently working with the Reset Collective.
Justin is co-editor of the 2015 Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries; Cultural Industries in Shanghai: Policy and Planning inside a Global City, (2018); Re-Imagining Creative Cities in Asia (2020); and Different Histories, Shared Futures: Dialogues on China and Australia (2022).
He recently co-authored Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (2020), Reset: A new Start for Art and Culture (in Dutch, Starfish books); and Culture is Not an Industry, Manchester University Press.
Dr Mathew Trinca AM FAHA
Paper title: Building cultural capital in the 21st century
Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country now looms as a revered cultural artefact of its age. As a critique of all that should be changed in Sixties Australia, The Lucky Country impelled later efforts to build a distinctive national identity through arts and cultural institutions. In subsequent decades the nation saw major investments in performing arts, film, literature, museums, galleries and more. But from the 1990s on, first the culture wars and then social media devastated the idea of a unifying national culture that might join us all. Moreover, it has become impossible to believe that the sort of purchase a public intellectual like Horne had in his day could be repeated in this age of anti-intellectualism and the echo-chamber online.
I want to argue that we should turn today to our arts and cultural practitioners and organisations to act in the service of building shared, sustaining cultural visions for the nation. Not because they offer singular or authorised views of who we are but rather because they have the capacity to broker discussion and debate across economic, social and political divides. Performing arts companies like Bangara, festivals such as OzAsia and the Asia Pacific Triennial, and cultural institutions such as the National Museum of Australia, among others, have transcended fracturing debates and culture wars to create opportunities for fruitful exchange and dialogue. Rather than offering any kind of glib, unifying national identity or arch claims of social or moral ascendancy, these and other arts and cultural organisations can bring people of different views, backgrounds and identities together, safely and respectfully, and express the plural truths of our lives. They also stimulate us to reflect on fundamental human qualities of creativity and ingenuity – never more needed than now as we confront the technological challenges of this century, which threaten to overwhelm our senses of what it means to be human and how we might live equitably and justly on this continent.
Dr Mathew Trinca AM FAHA is Professor of Museum Practice at the Australian National University and a cultural heritage consultant. He was formerly the Director of the National Museum of Australia (2014-24) and is presently the Chair of Blue Shield Australia, a Commissioner for Culture and Olympic Heritage advising the International Olympic Committee, and Deputy Chair of the Australiana Fund. He also serves on the boards of the UKARIA Cultural Centre and the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, and is a member of the Reference Group of A New Approach, an independent arts research and advocacy organisation. Mathew was elected an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2021.
