This weekend, I spent two days at the Malthouse Theatre talking about the climate crisis. It was part of an event called Tipping Point Australia, a series of three forums in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. As it says on the website, the forums are "for invited international and Australian artists, scientists and others to explore ways in which we can adapt to and mitigate functionally, culturally and socially the effects of climate change.” Melbourne was the first.

The nexus between artistic practice and social or political commitment represents a vexed and often anguished question. I've been wrestling with the questions around artistic practice and social conscience for years, always discovering different means of failure. In a lecture for the International Federation for the Teaching of English in 2003, I speculated on the politics of representation, and the refusal of commodification versus the entrapments of ideological utilitarianism; at other times, I've wondered how an expression of hope might be about clear-sightedness rather than self-delusion or denial. Again and again, I've concluded that art itself is an act, an awakening of larger and enabling possibilities that in turn generate forms of agency.

This is not a particularly comforting conclusion, since it suggests that art achieves nothing in itself. In the face of climate change, is art anything more than more hot air, more toxic emissions? Given the systemic nature of the environmental crisis, its mind-numbing scale and complexity, what can be done? Is it actually possible to combat the processes now in motion - the grinding self-perpetuating machine of corporate global capitalism - in order to make any difference to those disastrously multiplying predictors?

I went to Tipping Point with two major questions. One is purely personal: it haunts my practice, and recently has silenced my poetry. Is the only act that honestly remains for art, given the scale of the catastrophe we face, a lament? What use is that? I’ve been writing elegies for the natural world since I was ten years old: and if that is all I can do, then it’s difficult to see the point. The second is: given that it’s quite clear that we can’t trust even a democratic system to deliver a government that will resist the corporate drive towards destruction, are there other ways of taking action, of changing social habits and ideas and fears before the planet is irrevocably wrecked, to the point where it no longer supports mammals like us?

They are complex questions, and I came away with the beginnings of complex responses. I talked to systems designers who said effecting change is all about being able to see the levers. I talked to a man who, using the best scientific advice he could access, took two years to design a zero-emissions blueprint for Australian industry, and I talked about reclaiming public language. I heard about Julia's Bicycle, the British collective of scientists and artists who are working tirelessly - and are succeeding - in reducing the footprints of the arts industry: replacing plastic CD covers, for instance, with cardboard, which reduces emissions by a staggering 97 per cent, or mapping the environmental impacts of theatre and concerts in order to find out how to reduce them. I heard Tim Jarvis speak about the work he is doing to create change in corporate and government practices. I heard a lot about how adapting our behaviour to a waste-free, carbon-free future is an opportunity, and how that is much more than a slogan.

There's no way I can summarise every aspect of this weekend: it was fascinating, inspiring, absorbing, exciting and, most of all, encouraging. Perhaps typically, none of the bad news – the scientific evidence of irreversible and disastrous crisis, or the legislative or corporate failures and blindnesses – came as a surprise. What was surprising was the sense of hopefulness I encountered. It’s not uninformed hopefulness, it’s not blind optimism. There is no single solution to an environmental catastrophe like the one now unfolding before us: but that doesn’t mean that we can do nothing, or that we can make no difference.

When I came home, I found myself thinking about Vaclav Havel’s book Living In Truth, written when there was still a Soviet Union. In an essay called Politics and Conscience, he speaks about a childhood memory of seeing smokestacks pouring their filth into the sky on his way to school, and of how this image, even without any adult understanding, seemed to him expressive of a terrible wrongness.

"The chimney 'soiling the heavens' is not just a technologically corrigible flaw of design, or a tax paid for a better consumerist tomorrow, but a symbol of a civilisation that has renounced the absolute, which ignores the natural world and disdains its imperatives. So, too, the totalitarian systems [of the Soviet Union] warn of something far more serious than Western rationalism is willing to admit. They are, most of all, a convex mirror of the evitable consequences of rationalism, a grotesquely magnified image of its own deep tendencies....

"These regimes are the avant garde of a global crisis of this civilisation.... They are one of the possible futurological studies of the Western world, not in the sense that one day they will attack and conquer it, but in a far deeper sense - that they illustrate graphically to what the 'eschatology of the impersonal', as Bělohradský calls it, can lead. It is the total rule of a bloated, anonymously bureaucratic power, a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalise anything without ever having to brush against the truth."

“The truth”, says Havel, meaning a human truth. “We must not be ashamed that we are capable of love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy and tolerance, ” he says later. “Just the opposite: we must set these fundamental dimensions of our humanity free from their ‘private’ exile and accept them as the only genuine starting point of meaningful human community.”

There is always hope. If sometimes we feel that hope is delusory, it is not simply because the graphs tracking "business as usual" all point to doom. It is because hope implies agency, and agency is what is refused in so many aspects of contemporary life, and is lost in the splintering of our disenfranchised communities. Fear and grief can be paralysing: we shovel our anxiety into the back of our minds, so we don’t have to look at them. It's hardly surprising that our biggest health issue world wide is mental illness.

Which brings me to another thing that surprised me this weekend: the grief I feel for the natural world. When I came home, I remembered the first time I felt it: on a visit to England in the early '70s, when I was ten years old. There were some woods which, when we had lived nearby as even smaller children, we had often visited. We picked primroses in the spring or gathered pine-cones and chestnut cases in winter, to be painted silver and gold for our Christmas tree. But when we went back to see them, the woods were being chopped down. I remember watching the men in the tractors looping chains about the corpses of those beautiful trees, and dragging them away through the mud, and I remember that the sight was like a knife in my heart.

At around that time, I read a poem which was in a book that was on a shelf in the room where I was staying in my grandmother's house. It's irrevocably linked to that experience of loss, of grievously wrecked beauty. I never forgot its quick, painful music, although it must have been a decade before I read it again and gave it a name - Gerard Manley Hopkins's Binsey Poplars.

I guess that was a formative experience. Although environmental destruction has formed the dominant imagery in my poems for two decades now, although I am perfectly aware of how deeply worried I am by what we are doing to the planet, destroying entire eco-systems, species, environments, and with them entire constellations of cultural knowledge and language, I had pushed that grief to the back of my mind. My question about lament didn’t take into account that there is, in fact, little space for lamenting in our world.

Perhaps seeing that grief reflected in the eyes of others permitted me to know it as more than a background shadow to everything I do. And that is a liberating thing: background shadow manifests as paralysing depression, the helplessness we all feel as citizens. I remembered that there is a place for lament: and I also remembered that it is not the only thing that art can do. It is sometimes important to be reminded of things you already know. I am comforted by those thoughts, even as I'm daunted by what needs to be done and by the uncertainty that attends it.

My last book, Theatre, contains a poem called Beasts, which was first published in Pretext, the literary magazine that comes out of the University of East Anglia, in about 2005. For Tipping Point, we were asked to bring an object along that expressed our feeling about climate crisis, and I brought that poem. It is, of course, a lament, but I principally brought it with me because it says my sense of individual helplessness in the face of the systemic nature of the crisis. It's a poem which emerges from that "eschatology of the impersonal" which, as Havel presciently pointed out in the 1980s, is as powerfully expressed in the rationalism of western corporate economies as it was in Soviet ideology. It is the reality I experience and resist in that expression: but I want to write towards other possibilities, other actions.

I can begin to see a map. Many maps, made by many people, which imagine other kinds of futures than the destruction we're creating. In order to change anything, you have to be able to imagine a future first.

Beasts

The beasts are retreating. They are sliding
into the dusk, into the supple light of vanishing trees,
into the glue of dreams. All their strangeness
wavers behind wire, between the four sides of a screen,
odourless and deathless. The beasts stare out of
bleached pages, enclosed at last, and the zoos
are silent, except when parrots and keepers
conduct their weird orchestrations.
Panic flicks in those slotted eyes but the sadness
is only ours. Police hunt corpses in rubbish dumps,
a pregnant mother and child. Beneath the surface,
submarine cries burst the ears of whales.
Coral is leached to stone by the stripped sunlight
and houses crouch by the shore, awaiting the wave
prophets see in the distance. In forests
that glow at night, there are boars and wolves
whose futures mutate daily. There is much that is unknown
as always and even more that now will never
be understood. The cedar forests of Lebanon
are tinder dry and bears starve on the wet tundra.
In the depths of night there may be a phone call
we dare not answer or a cry in the street
which makes the hair rise on the back of our necks.
They will not come back, something is happening
at the edge of our eyes, behind the reflections,
and billboards shout in the silence, delivering words
that in a more innocent age we thought were ours.

Happy Invasion Day 2010 from Fear of a Brown Planet on Vimeo.

At what point does politics move beyond parody? Maybe when you have a Prime Minister who looks as if he belongs in a Lego set, and who ought to be reported to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to English.

Kevin Rudd can shift mid-sentence from warning of "incremental bifurcation" in the Asia-Pacific region (while, of course, needing to "work within the extant political vocabulary with China's national discourse") to his notorious manglings of outdated Australian slang ("fair shake of the sauce bottle").


Weld these together with cliches ("working families", "decisive action", "at the end of the day"), acronyms and buzz words ("synergies", "outcomes", "reverse engineering") and mixed metaphors ("preglacial position"), and you have a Teflon-coated PR machine that evades satire by overtaking it.

Its effectiveness can be seen in Godzone, Guy Rundle and Max Gillies's political satire now playing at the Melbourne Theatre Company. "Let's go for gold!" says Gillies's Rudd. "Let's optimise programmativity!" And it sounds just as boring and incomprehensible as Rudd himself.

It's a measure of the hyperreality of contemporary politics that satire in the noughties moved to featuring the politicians themselves. American comedians Steve Colbert and Jon Stewart invite politicians to be interviewed on their shows. The Chasers were regulars at Canberra press conferences.

The show that most successfully captures the white noise of the political machine - the brilliant ABC series The Hollow Men - doesn't feature politicians at all.

It's a dilemma for a satirist who, like Gillies, has made his name by impersonating politicians. The humour of his mimicry of Bob Hawke, Andrew Peacock and John Howard depended on both the startle of recognition and a recognisable gap between the reality and the portrayal.

The absurd exaggerations reflected back on their originals, prompting us to see them in a different light. But when impersonation can't prompt this frisson, it loses its bite.

It's why The 7.30 Report satirists John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, who don't rely at all on mimicry, still hit their targets: there's a cognitive dissonance at play that spikes their wit with the necessary unreality.

Godzone, on the other hand, seems like an 1980s television skit expanded to the stage. It is as if theatre is where television goes to die.

The set-up is a feel-good public conference, rather like Rudd's 2020 Summit but with added religiosity, where the PM introduces a brace of contemporary political figures to address the audience.

In between perorations from the lectern from Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and various commentators such as Andrew Bolt and Christopher Hitchens, Gillies rushes offstage to apply a new false nose and funny wig. We are then treated to a series of video sketches, "live" interviews with Malcolm Turnbull or Noel Pearson, or ads from the "sponsors".

The best of these was a vision of hell, or Liberal Party HQ, complete with shadowy Ku Klux Klan figures and swinging light bulbs. There was a YouTube aesthetic here - perhaps stemming from budgetry limitations - that rather undermined the effectiveness of others. Corporate PR gloss doesn't come cheap.

The blandness of the New Left - impregnably smug, impeccably coiffed and upholstered in incomprehensible jargon - creates a smooth, all-reflecting surface that simply doesn't give the purchase for this kind of satire. It's telling that the most successful sketches - Barnaby Joyce as a used car salesman, Gerard Henderson arguing with his local video store - are of the rough-hewn conservatives.

Gillies's impersonations don't always hit the mark either. Rudd is reduced to a pout, Abbott to a pair of Billy McMahon ears, and Julia Gillard - the least successful of all - is a spinsterish school teacher with "man hands" brazening out her secondary role as Rudd's henchwoman.

The portrayal of Bolt made me reflect that parody always includes a modicum of homage. Rundle's script made Bolt seem the most intelligent of the lot: its scathing caricature of left-wing inner-city suburbanites possessed a wit Bolt's columns signally lack.

The most mystifying - nay, bizarre - was Hitchens, who tells a meandering Boys Own story of meeting Osama Bin Laden in the Hindu Kush (didn't I read something like that in Robert Fisk's book The Great War for Civilisation?) and finishes with an account of being raped by Arabs. Which is why, he declaims, it was right to invade Iraq.

Hitchens as Lawrence of Arabia? Well, maybe - at a stretch - there's something in that, but here it's just a cheap punchline. And those allusions - if that's what they are - have no force at all in the format of sketch satire.

None of this is helped by Aidan Fennessy's static direction. Rundle and Gillies's last collaboration, The Big Con, featured Eddie Perfect crooning a series of cabaret numbers ("Don't be so damn September 10!") and was a lot more dynamic. Here the switching from lectern to screen gets monotonous and most of the set is simply flashy decor.

For those who have enjoyed the Gillies-Rundle combo before, this is a disappointing outing. It's a bad sign when the program is funnier than the show.

This review is in today's Australian.

Godzone, by Guy Rundle, directed by Aidan Fennessy. Set and costumes Shaun Gurton, lighting design by Matt Scott, sound design by Darrin Verhagen. With Max Gillies, Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Sumner Theatre, MTC Theatre, until January 17.

Ms TN is back in Melbourne listening to the gentle patter of the rain, after a packed couple of days in sun-drenched Sydney. The major event was, of course, the hotly anticipated forum on women in theatre at Belvoir St, where I was part of a panel of "powerful women" (thank you, SMH, my family is now making Dragonball Z noises again) ably conducted by journalist Monica Attard. The panel - see holiday snap below - consisted of me, Gil Appleton, a Belvoir St pioneer and integral to many feminist arts initiatives of the 1970s and 80s, emerging director Shannon Murphy, Bell Shakespeare's associate director Marion Potts and the Sydney Opera House director of performing arts, Rachel Healy.


As everybody knows, the issue is to do with main stage seasons. It's not endemic through the theatre culture - independent theatre, the crucible of Australian theatre culture, has nothing like the same issue. As in every profession, the problem exists in the high-end, well-paid, high-profile jobs.

Everyone on that panel was nervous about the event. Partly it was a desire to do justice to some of the complexity of the question; partly it was because of the heat that has been around much of the discussion. This was naturally exacerbated by Caleb Lewis's withdrawal from the Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award in protest against the "radical politicisation" of the prize, which is announced simultaneously with the Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture and which that afternoon was announced first, due to the controversy. I am still struggling with Caleb's stand. Does he mean that theatre ought not to be politicised? Is he suggesting that the male-dominated status quo is apolitical? Does the mere discussion of the marginalisation of women really "taint" everything around it? (I get sudden flashes of menstruating women banned from churches).

Ironically enough, Caleb was a co-winner with Tahli Corin, prompting some cynicism around the traps, and not unincidentally, putting Tahli in an uncomfortable spotlight. Which, I may say, she negotiated with considerable grace. But this very response illustrates some horns of this hydra-headed dilemma. The mass reaction to the Belvoir St debate has been a restless and impatient demand for concrete "solutions": among others, Crikey's Steve Dow was scathing that the "ethereal seemed ascendant over the practical". (Although, unlike Dow, I do recall an insistence on mentoring.)

I guess it's possible that the Parsons prize committee was in part influenced by the on-going debate - by a consciousness that women ought to be encouraged as much as men, and that this ought to be pro-active - although this was hotly denied by Neil Armfield, who said the plays were chosen entirely on their merits (and went so far to explain what those merits were). Yet is it such a bad thing if the committee was forced to think about the issue of gender and act on those thoughts? Isn't such action precisely what the unsatisfied are calling for, when they demand "practical" solutions, even quotas? But as soon as it's even perceived to have happened, all hell breaks loose: the prize is "compromised", notions of artistic integrity are in shreds, and women are back in their familiar roles of second-rate wannabes, merely riding the coat-tails of male genius.

Which is to say, there are different issues in the arts to other professions. Theatre is not only an "industry": it is a culture. Artistic merit is a central and thorny question. It's often used by artistic directors and others to evade the knotty questions - all candidates, we are routinely told by main stage companies, are chosen on merit, which given the figures can leave us to reflect on the general mediocrity of womankind. On the other hand, artistic merit is, in the arts, a real issue. That's why it can be so successfully used as a smokescreen: if artistic merit isn't the first aim of our striving, what are we there for?

But how do we measure merit? It is unarguable that merit is read through gender. And that is heinously complex: women can be as rigorous defenders of the privileges of the status quo as men. Their mere presence won't necessarily guarantee equity: as has been pointed out many times, even though women are meagrely represented in main stage creative roles, they mostly run our theatres in managerial roles. More, as the Brontes well knew, the same writing will generate different responses if it is perceived to be by a man than if it is thought to be by a woman. And I'm afraid that, however we like to congratulate ourselves on being more advanced than the 19th century, that is still the case.

The "ethereal" ("ethereal"?) discussion that Dow was so critical about was precisely what I thought valuable about the debate. As the distinguished feminist Eva Cox said to me afterwards, it was "one of the more vigorous discussions about dominant cultures and the difficulty of even identifying them let alone shifting them". (And added acerbically, "John Huxley missed that bit in today's SMH! Why am I not surprised?")

The discussion around gender (as it is around any sort of endemic bigotry) is conditioned by the fact that we've all been here before. Quotas have been tried: they simply created a lot of resentment, even from those supposed to be the beneficiaries, who justly felt their achievements were demeaned; and they also generated a lot of bad, "ticking the boxes" art. This kind of solution is in fact one of the major complaints about the funding processes of the Arts Council in Britain: the focus moves away from making great art to social engineering. I think the major failure of quotas or any other simplistic "solution" is that they permit people not to think: they provide a simple answer that evades the real work.

The real work is changing the complex of ideologies that situates the white, abled, middle class male subject as the normative consciousness, and which constitutes anyone else as Other. The real problem for women is that we are considered to have a gender, while men can be neutral. Men can speak for all of "mankind", while women (or people with the wrong-coloured skin, sexuality, body) speak only to their own kind. The "human condition" has, for centuries, been considered to be a male state.

And the real issue for theatre is that protecting the privilege of a minority means that its culture stagnates.

Marginalising 53 per cent of the population means limiting access to a huge pool of ideas and energy. As any ecologist knows, a population without diversity loses genetic vigor and eventually dies out. Why, to take one example, is the MTC so worried about its aging subscriber base? Is it because of a blindness towards the realities of a large part of their potential audiences? And it's not as if these energies aren't already present. You just have to get out and about in Melbourne's thriving independent theatre scene. I'd be fascinated to see gender figures for non-mainstage theatre: my bet is that gender inequity there is small to non-existent.

In other words, if theatres don't recognise and deal with this broader issue they won't survive. What is required, as in so many things, is clear-sighted leadership, a recognition of the problem that goes beyond token gestures that don't actually challenge entrenched positions.

No way could a single panel discussion come up with quick-fix solutions. There aren't any, and we're fooling ourselves if we think there are. How, in an hour-long discussion, does one justly address a hugely complex problem that permeates not only the entirety of Australian society (where men still occupy the majority of the top jobs and top pay), but which reaches far beyond our sea-girt shores? Remember that Original Sin happened when Eve tasted of the Fruit of Knowledge. We all know we only scratched the surface.

But that doesn't mean that action can't be taken, or that nothing can be done. Identifying a problem is always the first step to doing something about it. But let's get that right first, or else we'll still be stuck in the same circle of hell decades hence.

Picture: From left: your faithful blogger, Gil Appleton, Shannon Murphy, Marion Potts and Rachel Healy at Belvoir St Theatre yesterday. Photo: Dean Sewell

Gobsmacked to read in the Age this morning that every single former Victorian Arts Minister, Labor and Liberal, has written to University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis to protest the changes at the VCA, and asking for a meeting to express their concerns. The only ones who didn't were dead. That's a stunning and unprecedented show of bipartisanship.

As Mr Kennett said: "'You can't have a modern city without a thriving creative life at its centre. If the State Government saw fit to spend $65 million to get the World Swimming Championships for a one-off event for Melbourne then surely it could give the VCA a secure life for the future.'' Well, yes. The meeting will occur, according to the report, later this week.

Even gale-force winds couldn't stop the theatrical event of the week: to wit, the Save VCA protests, which culminated in a 1000-strong march this morning to Parliament House, where the troops were rousingly addressed by Geoffrey Rush and Julia Zemiro. (Ms TN, alas, could only be there in spirit). As Crikey's Ben Eltham reports:

The University seems to have badly under-estimated the strength of feeling about the proposed changes to VCA. The protests are now starting to garner broader media attention, owing to strong feelings in Melbourne’s tight-knit artistic community and the high profile of Rush and Zemiro. Now three prominent members of the VCA Advisory Board have quit in what looks suspiciously like a protest.

The situation has been exacerbated by the University’s ham-fisted attempts to spin the issue. The embattled new Dean, Sharman Pretty, who has become the lightning rod for student and staff discontent, was initially held back from all but hand-picked media appearances, until this strategy started to look like arrogance. When she finally fronted up to be interviewed by the ABC 774’s Jon Faine this Wednesday, it was deer-in-the-headlights stuff as Faine took her apart on air.

The strength and feeling of student, staff and community protest about the VCA course changes appear to have surprised senior executives at the University, who perhaps thought the VCA could be successfully integrated without too much fuss.

Instead, it seems to be turning into something of a PR disaster for the University of Melbourne and Vice Chancellor Glyn Davis. And certainly for Dean Pretty, whose evisceration by Jon Faine can be heard here. Save VCA is calling for the Federal Government to fund the VCA as a national training institution, as it does NIDA and other institutions.

Photo: courtesy of Twitter

In lieu of a post: a pointer to the discussion on TN about the reforms at VCA.

Update: more info on VCA action - tent cities! flash mobs! sing outs! - and links to more info at Twitter and Facebook.

This week, SaveVCA is organising a last-ditch round of protests against the changes to the college, culminating in a march to Parliament House on Friday August 21.

For the past few years, along with most Melbourne arts observers, I have been glumly following the continuing story of Melbourne University's predatory absorption of the Victorian College of the Arts (now known as VCAM). It's a complex story - detailed at length, with useful media links, on the informative Save VCA website - which boils down to a battle about the philosophy of arts education, between a generalised, more academic approach, as promoted by the new regime under VCA Dean Sharman Pretty, or the extraordinarily successful practice-based teaching that the VCA has refined over the past three decades.

Although the battle seems all but won, with the winning hand being the one with all the money, a number of alumni, students and interested arts affiliates are leading a growing protest against the changes. All power to their arms, I say: it's difficult to see how the proposed changes, which include savage redundancies, reduced teaching hours and axing of courses (so far, in Puppetry, Music Theatre, Music Repertoire and Music Composition) will benefit students or the wider culture.

Friday's protest march begins at 10am at the St Kilda Rd entrance, VCA Campus, 234 St Kilda Rd, Southbank. It will feature prominent industry speakers, MC'd by Julia Zemiro. And there will also be "after-event details revealed on the day".

Update: some early industry responses on the Ragged Claws blog.

The Productivity Commission today released its long awaited report on the parallel importation of books. I've only had time to read through the overview, but the conclusions are clear. The commission unequivocally recommends the total abolition of restrictions. Surreally, it says that any "contraction" in the publishing industry or in "cultural externalities" (I think they mean all the things that make books different from clothes pegs or fridges) caused by this decision should be countered by... the Federal Government giving more subsidies to literature!!!

That free market ideologues could actually recommend a higher rate of state subsidies, in the name of increasing competitiveness in the publishing industry, totally does my head in. They're effectively passing the responsibility for cultural value from the market to the state. It makes no sense, certainly from my understanding of what free market ideology is supposed to be, but I'm sure this is what it says. Perhaps someone else has a better translation?

RECOMMENDATION 1
The Government should repeal Australia’s Parallel Import Restrictions (PIRs) for books. The repeal should take effect three years after the date that it is announced.

RECOMMENDATION 2
The Government should, as soon as possible, review the current subsidies aimed at encouraging Australian writing and publishing, with a view to better targeting of cultural externalities. Any revised arrangements should be put in place before the repeal of the PIRs takes effect.

It further recommends an assessment after five years, presumably to see what the damage is, while openly admitting that there isn't enough information about the publishing industry available now to make decent decisions. This also does my head in.

If this report is ratified by the government, it will have one immediate effect on me, and the majority of other Australian authors who are able to do so: I will think very hard before publishing in Australia from now on. I will be far better off publishing in the UK or the US, where I will have the benefits and royalty protection of territorial copyright. Which makes me a bit sad.

And I would hate to be a new Australian writer now.

Update: George Hunka on British playwrights, responding to David Cote's Time Out blog, is a must-read. And see Andrew Haydon in the Guardian on the banning of a play by Anthony Neilson in Malta. Godwot, it's been a busy week in Britannia...

______

Caryl Churchill's new play, Seven Jewish Children, is presently stirring up a huge brouhaha (or is it a furore? Anyway, one of those words that you never read outside articles like this one).

Billed as a "ten-minute history of Israel, ending with the bombing of Gaza", it is being staged as a free event at London's Royal Court, after performances of Marius von Mayenburg's play The Stone, which is about German attempts to deal with its Nazi past. Predictably, given its implied critique of the State of Israel, Churchill's play has been accused of being anti-Semitic, and even of bringing up the blood libel. This stems from a line that reads: "tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her." Which is a tough line, yes, but is also plainly a response to the kind of commentary which also sparked articles like this one from Gideon Levy in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

You can read Churchill's text for yourself here. The dingdong argument at the Guardian theatre blog continues here, Andrew Haydon has a review and discussion here and George Hunka has more here. George intriguingly reports that the New York Theatre Workshop - which caused another furore when it first booked, then cancelled, a NY production of My Name is Rachel Corrie (TN background here) - is putting out feelers about putting on Churchill's play.

The accusations of anti-Semitism made against Churchill are very depressing. They are part of a political strategy to undermine critique by conflating legitimate criticism of a state with the ugliest racism. What is worse is that the bombing of Gaza has prompted some of the vilest anti-Semitism I have seen recently, which seems - erroneously - to legitimise this stance. However, confusing Churchill's play with anti-Semitism helps nobody, and worst of all, trivialises what anti-Semitism actually is.

Coincidentally, an email from the distinguished US poet Adrienne Rich recently landed in my inbox, in which she explains, not without anguish, her reasons for joining an academic and cultural boycott against Israel. She also outlines this particular mechanism of repressing political critique as clearly as anyone I've seen:

As an American Jew, over almost 30 years, I’ve joined with other concerned Jews in various kinds of coalition-building and anti-Occupation work. I’ve seen the kinds of organized efforts to stifle — in the US and elsewhere -- critiques of Israel’s policies -- the Occupation’s denial of Palestinian humanity, destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods, the “settlements,” the state’s physical and psychological walls against dialogue—and the efforts to condemn any critiques as anti-Semitism. Along with other activists and writers I’ve been named on right-wing “shit-lists” as “Israel-hating” or “Jew-hating.” I have also seen attacks within American academia and media on Arab American, Muslim, Jewish scholars and teachers whose work critically explores the foundations and practices of Israeli state and society.

Me, I'll just point out that libelling artists of conscience as anti-Semites in order to stifle debate and criticism is as wrong as racism itself.

Pondering whether to attend a theatre conference or the weekend protests in London against the violence in Gaza, Chris Goode decides he will probably attend the conference. "I want, I need, and above all I believe in, an artistic practice that does not feel discontinuous with the actions of those who will demonstrate tomorrow," he writes. "And there's ... a kind of sorrow produced by this tension, a realization that, for all my commitment to a theatre that's passionately and intrinsically politically motivated, I fear that the conversation that the relatively little community ... will be having with itself tomorrow may feel trivial and self-indulgent at a time like this.

"But, I guess, that's the point: the current situation in the Middle East is hardly anomalous, for all its grievous pitch in the last few days; it's always a time like this, and the worst thing about contemporary theatre is exactly how insulated and disconnected it feels in relation to these times. I guess it's obvious that the best use of my voice is making that case where it needs to be heard. Even so, it's impossible to be sure that this isn't purest self-delusion. I suppose it all comes back to how I always feel when people deride the idea that theatre can (meaningfully) change the world. Not all the theatre has been made yet, and not all the results are in."

I've written at length in the past about what I think art might be and do in the situation of continual crisis in which we find ourselves, most coherently perhaps in an essay called (portentously, I admit, but it wasn't my title) The Imaginative Life and the Social Responsibility of Writers. For a number of reasons, I usually stay away from direct politics on this blog, although a politics is always at least implicit; but writing about culture is always and inescapably political. Artists are always among the first to be targeted under any repressive regime, not because they necessarily work against the government, but because even the slightest lyric poem can suggest another possible world in the face of what is always presented as an inevitable reality.

Today, however, I'm not pursuing my own reflections. I'm hosting an essay from David Lloyd, Professor of English at the University of Southern California and a member of the US collective Teachers Against Occupation, which is about the olive trees of Palestine and the destruction of culture.

Olive Branches

In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon, a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.

The Zionist, it seems, does not much like olive trees.

As the Israeli military thunders into Gaza and as its planes and ships continue their merciless bombardment of an imprisoned population, as the bombing of schools and mosques, refugee camps and universities continues, our grief and anger focus as they should on the hundreds of human deaths and thousands of human wounded. And yet, as this slaughter of the innocents continues, and as the toll of casualties and of material destructions mounts to a point where it can scarcely be absorbed any more, it is hard not to hear behind it all the creaking sound of falling olive trees, the smashing of gnarled, grey branches, the crackling of burning groves.

For in Gaza the casualties of invasion are not only human. They include, as they did in Lebanon in 2006, the groves of olive trees that Palestinian farmers have cultivated for centuries, some of them up to a thousand years old and still bearing fruit. They are a material sign of the longevity and endurance of the Palestinian people in the semi-desert lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, symbols of a culture long adapted to its environment and of the inseparability of a culture from the things it has grown and made. The destruction of a tree is to be grieved over almost as one grieves over a human being.

Like so many other aspects of the present assault on Gaza that will not make the news, tanks and shells uprooting groves of olives are part of a long and continuous pattern of destruction of the Palestinians and their culture. For decades, the Israeli army has been bulldozing olive trees in order to make way for settlements and roads and security fences. For decades, the Israeli army has been cutting down trees on the pretext of clearing away camouflage for Palestinian rocket launchers or stone throwers; the security barrier, stretching miles through Palestinian land, cuts farmers from their groves; the army have been routinely preventing those farmers from harvesting their trees, claiming they cannot protect them from assaults by Zionist settlers. Meanwhile, those settlers, whose homes are built on already uprooted olive groves, regularly set fire to the surviving groves, harass farmers at harvest-time or as they water their crops, or shoot at them as they work.

A strange hatred for the olive tree, among a Biblical people by whom the olive was revered. Its oil anointed kings and priests. Its wood was consecrated in the building of the doors of Solomon’s Temple. In Deuteronomy, the olive is among the prized crops of the Promised Land: “A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive oil, and honey.” What brings about this frenzy of destruction, this new Samson burning the vineyards and olives of the Philistines?

The destruction of the olive trees is a material attack on what remains of the Palestinian economy and of Palestinian culture. Every living olive tree is at once a material and a symbolic value. It is also a standing reproach, and maybe herein lies the rage that always seems to exceed the pragmatic rationale for destruction, to the long-cherished myth that it was Zionist settlement that made a desert bloom. We grew up with that settler colonial fable and with the one about “a land without people for a people without land.” To both, the ancient olive groves of Palestine give the lie. For centuries, Palestinians—Moslems, Christians, Jews and others—have cultivated these lands and tended the olives. The olive tree has been the anchor of a culture adapted to the land and to the climate of the region, cleaving to the terraced hills and conserving its scarce and precious water. Like every colonialism in the world, Zionism has imported its material and ideological culture with scant regard for a culture and a people that have evolved a workable ecology over centuries. Progress and development unroll their concrete over confiscated lands, building Orange County in the Promised Land like strips of astro-turf unrolled beneath a Mediterranean sky. Over-population and over-consumption are exhausting the groundwater, 40% of which comes from the occupied territories, and stimulate the lust to annex more land and the water tables of Palestine and Lebanon, so that Israeli lawns can glow green and Palestinians thirst.

The olive tree speaks of another possible world. Long before the people of Israel existed, their Bible relates, it was the sign the dove bore to Noah in his ark. The olive branch remains the sign of peace. We forget too easily that the same dove was the precursor of a covenant, a covenant in which God forswears another genocide: “neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.” Both literally and figuratively the destruction of the olive trees is a crime against humanity, a form of slow and deliberate ethnocide, as surely as is the strangulation of Gaza by siege or the imprisoning of the Palestinians by security walls and blockades on their roads, seaports and airports. It is a sign of the murderous fiction of a terra nullius that has corrupted whatever utopian possibility lingered in the Zionist dream. The catastrophic sound of falling, ancient trees, the spectral rustle of burning leaves, echoes out to the world. The call is clear: “It is time for this to stop.”

Please note:

The Campaign for Labor Rights is accepting donations to support the PFU's efforts to aid farmers in Gaza. You may follow this link to make a credit card donation. Be sure and check the space marked "Other" and to write "Gaza/PFU" where it says "Enter Name". Contributions are tax deductible.

You can also make out a cheque to the Campaign for Labor Rights, put "Gaza/PFU" in the memo line, and send it to:

Campaign for Labor Rights--Gaza Farmers Fund
1247 E Street SE
Washington, DC
20003
United States of America

The Australia Council yesterday released its Draft Children in Art Protocols, which will determine council funding where artists are working with children. They are available for comment and response online.

The immediate response from arts organisations is that areas of real concern are already covered by existing laws and that key recommendations are unworkable. For example, among the recommendations are that all photographs of children (who are defined as anyone under 18) - clothed or unclothed - can only be exhibited with the permission of their parents or guardians. Which will make life a little difficult for documentary makers and street photographers. Moreover, there is concern that such protocols shift the Council's role from funding body to regulator.

And don't think that these protocols only apply to photographers. They apply to all artists - as the documents says, "photography, painting, printmaking, performance, sculpture, written text, digital imagery, etc". Young adult fiction writers will, I imagine, be particularly concerned about the insistence that young people cannot be portrayed in writing in an "indecent" manner.

As always, the question is what constitutes indecency: while in law such restrictions are clearly made to forbid pornography involving children, the inclusion of this clause in an arts protocol means that it can be more widely applied to include any literary depiction of the sexuality of anyone under 18. The conflation with pornography of - say - Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, or the beautiful and sensitive books of David Almond, draws ever closer.

I keep wondering if no one remembers what it's like to be 13.

At present the protocols are disturbingly vague, which means they can be extended far beyond their original purpose. They were originally foisted on the Australia Council as a kind of deal after the fact-free shockjock hysteria that surrounded (and still surrounds) the work of Bill Henson: if you don't make them, said Garrett, Rudd will. And that will be worse. Anyone who doubts this is over can check Hetty Johnson's comments in the Australian today, where she claims that the controversy over Bill Henson's work demonstrated that "the existing legal framework is far from adequate".

In the meantime, the nightmare of compliance these protocols imply suggests that their main effect will be to make childhood a no-go area for artists. And I'm not at all sure that's a good thing, for children or for artists.

Over the weekend, Ms TN's body found new and nasty ways to remind her that she is human, all too human. I succumbed to a few minor but uncomfortable conditions, all of which are apparently "stress related". Ha! I am always reluctant to admit to myself that stress is an issue, since it seems really wimpy when all I do is write things. Imprinted somewhere in my psyche is the image of the lady of leisure at her Georgian writing desk, jotting menus for the cook on purple notepaper before she idly lops some roses into a basket.

Yes, my name is Alison, and I am a workaholic. Perhaps I should enter a 12-step plan of concentrated holidays and enforced idleness. In fact, I am planning soon to do just that. But before that, I have a little work to do. And as a practised procrastinator, in order to distract myself I have been also following the local hobby of pondering precisely what it is that makes being someone who values art and who lives in Australia a peculiarly stressful existence. Making art is hard anywhere, and here it is in fact more materially comfortable than in many other places. But that tends to elide its challenges.

Watching the US election yesterday, I couldn’t help comparing it to the last Australian election. Yes, there was euphoria (soon sobered into what one Labor politician in the 1980s called “the latest political reality”); but I confess my major feeling was an overwhelming relief that the Howard era was over. I spent some time as a young reporter following industrial affairs, and it disillusioned me so thoroughly that I refused to vote at all. And I had a certain scepticism – a feeling since borne out in many ways – about the Rudd government: Rudd was largely elected because he was Howard-lite, a younger and more progressive conservative model. I fear that the blackly funny ABC comedy series The Hollow Men got Australian politics right.

Obama’s election was different. Even though, when you get down to it, his stated policies weren’t a million miles from McCain’s, that wasn’t what was most striking about the billion-dollar theatre that is an American Presidential election. Obama so clearly embodies the desires and hopes of a constituency that wants to reinvent itself as what it believes it is: the Greatest Country in the World, the place of freedom and opportunity. Yesterday it was possible to believe that these aren’t just words falling idly from lips that meant the precise opposite. It was possible to believe, however briefly, that these weren’t just the lies of Empire. That belief shone in the faces of Obama’s supporters, in the people standing patiently in line waiting to vote, in the stories of old men and women, born just after slavery, voting with all their heart for what, only months ago, seemed a complete impossibility: a black president.

America’s great talent for myth-making suddenly stood large in its heart and seemed for once an admirable thing. And whatever I think about the American political machine, I’m not prepared to be cynical about the hope that yesterday's events so dramatically expressed. It’s real, and it’s a powerful force. Democracy is a contract that American people believe in, and yesterday that contract was observed.

To move to Australia, it illuminates harshly something that is missing here, and not just in our politics. In our artistic life, there is something something fundamental missing from our social fabric. It seems to me that what we lack, the ur-problem from which all others evolve, is a vital culture.

Culture isn’t the same as art. Culture is the contract, however defined, between an artist and his or her public. Culture is the lively communal yeast that makes everything rise. It’s the air that lets art breathe, the space where it can swing its arms, the multiple influences that flavour it.

If our theatre culture is deeply impoverished, it’s not because there are not committed and skilful artists, or that there aren’t audiences – even enthusiastic audiences – for what they do. It’s because something crucial is missing in between, in that implicit contract between the creation and reception of art. Whatever the causes – and they are manifold, historical and difficult to track – the effects are plain.

The first and major effect is the constant need to justify having art at all. No artist in Australia can assume that his or her work matters for its own sake, and the inability to make this assumption, the need to continually justify one’s existence, generates a corrosive spiritual exhaustion. At its worst, it makes our art at once reactionary and timid. Art becomes a package which delivers an aesthetic experience according to certain given guidelines: the matrix of “standards”. This underlying assumption – which is by no means confined to conservative critique – edits out the raw energy of actual innovation, which challenges those aesthetic standards, often by breaking them, always by interrogating them, sometimes by paying them serious homage rather than lip-service.

It’s been the same for as long as I have been thinking about these things.

What follows is an attempt to sketch out what I mean. It is, I fear, very long.

******

A couple of days ago, Jana Perkovic at Mono no aware posted an interesting quote from British theatre blogger Andrew Hayden, in which he compared a European production of a recent British play with its British premiere. In particular, Jana honed in on a major observation of Andrew’s: what he saw as British theatre’s “abandonment of metaphor”. By implication, Jana was pointing towards a crippling literalism in Australian theatre.

It’s an interesting and pertinent issue, and I began to write a reply. But it was like pulling the thread on a jumper: the whole thing began to unravel, and before long I found I was digging towards a fumbling definition of something that has been bugging me for some time. I don’t think Australian theatre lacks metaphor, or liveliness, or skill, or inventiveness, or innovation. I think it possesses all these things, in actuality as well as in potentia. Of course there are shows that are less exciting than others, but for every Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot you can point to a Food Court.

Andrew Haydon’s comparison of the difference between English and European approaches towards text made me think of Daniel Keene's play, To Whom It May Concern. This is a 20 page play which premiered here in the late '90s as a 20 minute piece in an evening of three short works. It was a straightforward poor theatre production by the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, performed as a modest two-hander.

When it premiered in France in 2004, directed by Didier Bezace at the Théâtre de la Commune, this 20 page play went for seventy five minutes. It was performed on a big stage on a set that required a dozen technicians to make the transformations. It starred two very famous actors, including Jean-Paul Rousillon, who was a very old Comédie-Française actor (in fact, it was his last role) who had been directed by Beckett in Waiting for Godot. It was a sold-out hit and drew a lot of hyperbole, including a claim from an excited France Inter critic that it was the most important Paris premiere since the first production of Godot in 1953.

There is obviously an enormous difference of resource here. Théâtre de la Commune has suffered from the Sarkozy cuts, which have slashed French cultural funding by two thirds over recent years, but it regularly plays to 90 per cent capacity. Before the cuts, its state funding amounted to something like 70 per cent of its total budget (as compared, say, to the MTC's 13 per cent). But the difference in scale and notice is about more than funding - it's about the theatrical possibilities that are easily reached for within a culture, the space given both culturally and personally to artistic imagination. It’s also about an ability to read the theatrical potential and meaning of a text, an ability to discriminate critically that stems from a basic intellectual and social confidence in the value of art.

La Commune is a mainstream company, if proudly radical (it is in the middle of the last Communist arrondissement in Paris). Bezace himself was part of the radical theatre movement of 1968; he founded La Cartoucherie with Ariane Mnouchkine, and their work plugs into a French cultural history that places theatre at the centre of social revolution, right back to the Revolution itself. (In connection with this, it's worth remembering how the theatre was at the centre of the Velvet Revolution, eventually making playwright Vaclav Havel president of the country). Theatre has seldom been so literally a force for change in English speaking countries, although it has of course a tradition of political radicality, and this is a major difference from Europe. English-speaking culture is much more tied to the idea of theatre as entertainment. This is not all bad, but it's not all good either.

This European tradition creates a different kind of literacy and feeds into different audience expectations: unlike Australian audiences, French and German audiences will sit through three hour plays without a murmur. A Paris production of the Scottish playwright David Harrower's Knives and Hens, another 20-page play, went for four hours (and then afterwards most of the audience stayed on for a lively and long discussion). Which is as unimaginable here as actors going on strike.

However, it’s ridiculous to complain that we are not Europe. Of course we aren’t. Some time ago I decided to live where I am, instead of wishing to be somewhere else. I see enough exciting work to make it worthwhile, and over the past four years the parameters of our theatre culture have changed out of sight. Specifically, the expectations of main stage theatre have changed: the Malthouse, the Melbourne Festival and the STC have all contributed to this change. Most astonishingly, this change has been wildly successful.

It is no longer possible to assume – as theatre academic Hilary Glow did only last year – that “mainstream” means naturalistic, populist and consciously “Australian” plays while “fringe” means weird non-naturalistic “internationalist” experiment. This binary, which has always been highly dubious, informed the theatre establishment through the 90s, cheer led by critics like the Age’s Leonard Radic. Now we are as likely to see so-called avant garde work on our main stages and new experiments in naturalism from new companies.

Richard Watts rang me earlier this week to discuss this change. He perceives what he called a “lull” in independent theatre in Melbourne, and expressed a fear that the fact that the Malthouse “cherry picks” the best independent work in Melbourne has resulted in a concomitant lack of energy. I confess that I was surprised by this: independent theatre here has been strong for years, and surely main stage exposure can only give it more confidence and brio. When you look at fortyfive downstairs, The Eleventh Hour, Ranters, La Mama, Red Stitch, Theatreworks, Hoy Polloy, White Whale, Black Lung, Liminal Theatre, the Dog Theatre and the overwhelming local content of the Fringe Festival, it’s hard to think there’s not much going on.

But I suspect that Richard is onto something. Now that the categories of mainstream and fringe have been so thoroughly destabilised, it is possible that “alternative” theatre has lost a major reason for its being: to be a reaction to the mainstream, to be “new”.

This begs a very big question. If innovation in our theatre has only been driven by these reactionary impulses, this suggests a concomitant lack of depth in our artistic vision and possibility. There are reasons to make art that go beyond mere reactiveness. How much is our culture driven by a desire for novelty rather than the expression of individual artistic vision, the responsiveness to the world we live in? How interested are we, really, as artists, as audiences?

Louis Nowra complained many years ago that Australians have no sense of metaphor. This explains the radical shift from his early work - brilliant plays like Inside the Island, Inner Voices and The Golden Age - to the more palatable naturalism of Summer of the Aliens or Cosi, plays which were much more commercially successful and for which he is much better known. Perhaps he is right.

One of the ironies of Australian culture is that we have produced more brilliant poets per capita than practically anywhere else. Australian poetry is rich, diverse, intelligent and inventive; yet hardly anybody knows this. Aside from a couple of names like Les Murray, Australian poetry is a dark and unknown country, and our poetic history remains practically unknown outside a small coterie of readers. Francis Webb (whom Sir Herbert Read hailed as the peer of Rilke, Pasternak and Eliot ,"one of the greatest poets of our time . . . one of the most unjustly neglected poets of the century") is out of print. David Campbell, Randolph Stowe and untold others are forgotten. The situation is little better for most contemporary poets. The work is there, but very few people either know about it or are interested. It is certainly hardly a source of national pride.

This irony persists, to a lesser extent, through all our artistic disciplines. Even compared with Britain, Australia's grasp of the idea of a living culture embedded in its society is rather tenuous. This manifests in many ways: in the infantilism of the conservative criticisms made against Kristy Edmunds, which were more or less the equivalent of Nagg in Endgame crying "I want me pap!" You also see it in the impatience that demands Results, and hangs artists when they don't deliver. George Devine’s oft-cited “right to fail” – a most misunderstood right, which has to be earned through honest work – is not a concept that really exists in public discourse.

As regular readers will know, I will always call failure if I perceive it, and although I do attempt to be fair even when I loathe a work, calling failure always looks – and no doubt is – brutal. If I am to be honest as a critic, I have no choice. I personally feel that I owe it as a duty to art. (Yes, it sounds high-minded and even prim, but then, I was ever thus). How else is success to mean anything? I have never believed my opinion is the last word on any work: to do so seems to me the highest hubris, and is directly contradicted by some famous historical examples of critical maulings (Ibsen, Puccini, Kane spring to mind).

But nevertheless, as the Sydney critic James Waites said recently, there is an unease in doing so. Not because of the fact of failure, which is the risk of making art. But because perceptions of failure enter the public discourse in ways that can be crippling.

As a culture, we do not know how to deal with artistic failure, a judgment that is always – and must be – arguable. I have adored shows that others have loathed, and vice versa: that is how it should be. Having failed myself, and spectacularly, on many fronts, I don’t consider failure a life-blighting shame. (Some of the things I consider failures, I should note, have been publicly considered “successes”, and some of my private successes have publicly been considered failures – but perhaps, being a critic myself, I have a different relationship to criticism than most artists.) Success and failure have always seemed to me to be, as Giacometti said, secondary questions. Yet to fail in Australia gathers around itself a moral dimension, as if it’s a sin and a personal defect, rather than part – sometimes a necessary part – of the continuum of artistic endeavour.

This seems to me to denote a more general failure of attention. The evolution of artists is not considered an interesting phenomenon. It is a common complaint from practically every artist – unless they're popular superstars like Tim Winton or David Williamson – that to launch a new work always means starting from scratch. There is no sense in how art is received of a cumulative credit earned through the production of good work, no sense of continuity. Each work lands on the cultural stage existentially alone, hermetically sealed from its individual history, from its social context and artistic tradition. It is presented as a object that we consume, before we move onto the next, and is quickly absorbed and forgotten.

A telling example this year has been how the STC's Actors Company - one of the most ambitious mainstream experiments in our theatrical history, and certainly the most ambitious in the past decade - disappeared without a ripple. I have not seen a discussion anywhere that considered the implications of its failures or evaluated its successes (which, in my view, were considerable and exciting). Perhaps the commentators are waiting for the final production (the History plays, starring Cate Blanchett with the company) in January before they write their obituaries; but I still find the lack of comment after the announcement of the STC’s 2009 season startling. The end of the ensemble surely means, for example, the death of the persistent dream of a permanent ensemble that has haunted Australian theatre for decades. But even that barely raised an eyebrow.

Aside from some major problems of vision, and what was no doubt an increasingly unjustifiable expense in the light of complaints from subscribers, the major problem with the Actors Company seemed to be that audiences got sick and tired of seeing the same faces. They got bored seeing Pamela Rabe being brilliant in yet another role, or watching Hayley McElhinney again demonstrate that she is one of the best young actors in Australia.

As Diana Simmonds put it on Stage Noise:

Although the repertory company is now viewed through the rosy specs of nostalgia, there were many reasons for its demise: economics, television, bingo - and boredom. Boredom!

Boredom has arisen with Sydney's incarnation not necessarily because of play choice (more of that later), nor because the company actors are not - in the main - the crème de la crème, but because what started out as a glorious indulgence for a bunch of very lucky performers has turned into something much less for punters. Not least because there is even more crème left out in the cold, unable to get a gig because of this mob.

Even during the first season in 2006 variations on the following were overheard on a number of occasions in STC auditoria: "I love John Gaden and Pam Rabe is lovely, but I'm sick of them. I don't want to see them in every single show. I'm not renewing my subscription."

Aside from the fact that the Actors Company was actually not doing "every single show", and the palpable ressentissement of envy, this made me reflect. The Comédie-Française has survived for centuries, despite boring a large part of the Parisian theatre audience rigid. And “boredom” isn’t a complaint levelled against Mnouchkine’s ensemble, the Théâtre du Soleil – perhaps helped by the fact that they make one new show every couple of years, rather than 12 in two. (A major complaint was in fact that the Actors Company wasn’t as achieved as the Théâtre du Soleil. But how prepared are we to support an ensemble that will produce a new show every two or three years?) Rather than its failures, it seems to me to be more notable that the Actors Company produced some real triumphs in its brief life, despite a gruelling schedule and some dubious programming.

What does this suggest about Australian audiences and, perhaps more tellingly, commentators? It says to me that, while they might be briefly interested, even at times entertained, by art, they are not interested in culture. They are not interested in the kinds of evolution of practice that the Actors Company displayed in shows like The Lost Echo to The Season at Sarsaparilla. Watching the evolution of particular artists is for me of enormous and abiding interest, whether it's reading the oeuvre of a poet or novelist or following the trajectory of an actor. But perhaps in this I am a little odd.

What Australian audiences want, it seems, is the either the new or the expected. Whatever falls in between - being neither new nor a repeat of what went on before - falls through the cracks into a strange invisibility. It’s hard not to think of this as an inability to perceive art for its own sake; in either case it expresses a need for art to feed a desire that is extrinsic to the work itself: either a desire for novelty or a desire for consumable distraction. If neither of these things are present, the cultural mind glazes over.

In other words, success – the redefining of mainstream expectations – can open up another kind of failure (and not in the Eliotic sense). “Success” means the loss of the patina of the new. This is in fact right and necessary, part of the continuous dynamic evolution of culture. But in our case, it comes at a heavy price that is perhaps the reason why so many people complain that our culture is as thin as our topsoil.

We have little vocabulary to describe the evolution of artistic work. There are two choices: the new, young and “alternative”, which is its own justification, or a slide into torpid mainstream repetitions, which seems to be the mainstream definition of "success". What about artists who do not rest on their laurels, who are constantly exploring the possibilities mapped out in their early work? Where do they fit in? So far as I can see, precisely nowhere. And this, more than anything else, betrays the essential lack of depth in our culture.

What it means is that is very difficult in this country to build early success into deep achievement. Daniel Keene is a lucky exception – he has the resources of European theatre supporting his work, which means he can dream of big stages, large casts and imaginative directors, and has the freedom to explore all sorts of impulses in his work, in the knowledge that these investigations will be realised on stage. That this freedom is not available to most of our writers has been very clear in our playwriting over the past three decades. Its debilitating effect is nowhere clearer than in our film industry, where directors routinely disappear after their second film.

The crisis for mid-career artists - those who have a track record and experience and now are poised to make the work of their lives - was recognised by Paul Keating. His Australian Artist Creative Fellowships were introduced to counter this very problem, after he famously met the pianist Geoffrey Tozer and discovered to his shock that he earned less than half the yearly income of Keating's 18-year-old secretary. Predictably enough, those fellowships created not excitement, but envy and resentment, especially from those taxpayers who couldn’t see why money should be “given away” to artists, and they were scrapped quickly under Howard in favour of smaller grants to younger artists, which were, as always, easier to justify.

I should emphasise at this point that this is not the disgruntled plaint of a middle-aged artist against the brash interpolations of youth. If a young artist is valued more for her youth than her artistry, she is in as much trouble as the middle-aged concert pianist struggling away on $6000 a year. Although perhaps she is less tired.

The reasons for this blind spot in our cultural attention have been endlessly discussed for decades over every kind of table. I suspect one reason is that we are the only nation on earth that was founded as a bureaucracy, a fact which has had a much more lasting impact on the creation of our cultural mores than our convict past or the slaughter of bronzed Australian sons at Gallipoli. Crucially, the cultural contract between artists and their public is to a large extent formed by how art is written and spoken about in the public arena. And there's no escaping the fact that much of our cultural commentary, particularly in our mainstream media, has left a lot to be desired.

This doesn't erase the work of journalists who struggle against the limitations of daily newspapers or radio or television to cover the arts. Outside the mass media, there are many people attempting to bridge the gap: people like theatre historian Julian Meyrick, who addresses the persistent problem of Australian cultural amnesia, or initiatives like Currency House's excellent Platform Papers, which is a bold attempt to build public discussion. The situation now is a definite improvement on a decade ago, when aside from RealTime there was almost no intelligent discussion about the performing arts anywhere. In addressing the question of the cultural contract, the problem is that most of these outlets are specialist and remain outside the wider public discourse.

What I fear is what has always happened in Australian culture, the possibility which flares with wild promise and then splutters out into ashes of amnesia, the exhaustion which stems from the necessity for hope's constant resuscitation. Here culture has seldom suffered swift execution: much more often it is death by a thousand cuts, the gradual suffocation of the soul. The Rudd Government is presently giving little encouragement that much has changed since Michael Dransfield wrote in Like This For Years:

In the cold weather
the cold city the cold
heart of something as pitiless as apathy
to be a poet in Australia
is the ultimate commitment.

I guess the truth is that any real change is incremental and long term. And I am ever hopeful.

Welcome back to the world!

Robert Musil (1880-1942), the great German novelist and intellectual, observed once that if there was to be real social change of any kind, what was required more than anything else was not idealists nor intellectuals, but managers: those who knew the nuts and bolts of creating and maintaining organisations, and understood how to change organisational structures.

It's a view that is not exactly popular among artists, and sometimes for good reason: a dismaying large proportion of the hard-won arts dollar goes, not into making art, but into paying administrators. But nevertheless, there is a great deal of sane wisdom in Musil's observation. One example close to hand is the Malthouse Theatre, the fortunes of which were turned around by a radical corporate restructure. The artistic shift was simply not possible without the remaking of the relationships within the organisation, from the Board down to the bar staff.

One of the most useful weapons in an artist's survival arsenal is a practical understanding of how cultural policy and funding work, not from the narrow view of a practitioner applying cap-in-hand for the advantage of his or her project or organisation, but from the wider perspective of the place of culture in political and financial economies. This understanding is often rare among artists, not least because practitioners are too busy practising to have the time to read government reports. I find all this stuff fascinating, but I quite understand why it might make the eyes of others glaze over. But one simple way to glean some understanding is to subscribe to Currency House's Platform Papers, which regularly publishes overviews of public arts policy.

Getting Heard: Achieving an effective arts advocacy, released yesterday, is a stimulating and pragmatic analysis by Chris Puplick of the way Australian arts funding works. In particular, he examines, from his various experience as a politician, Australia Council Board member and Chair of various arts organisations, how Australian culture depends crucially upon the "kindness of strangers": that is, how policy has been driven by the interest of influential individuals, rather than by any broad-based policy.

As Ms TN gloomily noted in the Guardian after the election, arts patronage is not an exclusive policy of the Left. In fact, the arts have often done better under Liberal Governments than under Labor, and there's no reason to believe that the election of a Labor Government means better times for the arts. And one of Puplick's major points is that good arts advocacy ought to be non-partisan.

He also notes the lack of a peak body for the arts, a major problem in this country, since it means that instead we have a bunch of rival bodies squabbling for their share of the pie, rather than looking at the bigger picture and arguing for a better pie. I thought that the 2020 Summit might herald a change in this - the single most valuable part of the exercise was how a lot of people from differing disciplines were brought together and discovered that they had a lot of concerns in common, both within the arts community and outside it.

Puplick makes some valid (and not so valid) critiques about the 2020 Creative Stream. He discusses the way facilitating directed the conversation, and how this caused a mass rebellion, but doesn't take into account how this same facilitation distorted what was reported. For instance, he says one of the Summit's most disappointing aspects was its "deafening silence" on the topic of "soft diplomacy", or using the arts as other countries do as a key part of international diplomacy. This was in fact a topic to which I was assigned with people like David Throsby and Rupert Myer, and our group came up with at least half a dozen recommendations, including the reinstatement of the DFAT touring fund that the Rudd Government axed and the beefing up of the presently inadequate cultural arms at our embassies, several of them "cost-neutral" (as instructed). * But there we go.

Aside from the Bill Henson fracas and the much publicised 2020 letter - the subject, incidentally, of a new book by David Marr, The Henson Case, which is due for imminent release - the possibility of a group which speaks for all cultural interests has not materialised. For which I, for one, am sorry. Puplick could have acknowledged too, in criticising Cate Blanchett for being "partisan", that she was the single international movie star who signed the letter, ensuring that it hit the headlines and letting herself in for a lot of wingnut abuse. It's an act which perhaps makes her partisanship slightly more principled and complex. But enough of 2020.

As Puplick points out, one problem with the lack of a peak body is how culture gets hived off as separate from the rest of society, apparently blind to the needs of, say, hospitals or schools, which contributes to the perceptions of the arts community as an out-of-touch elite. This is a strong, if erroneous, perception which artists are very slack about addressing. (Not that media coverage like this helps; let's face it, there's not a lot of interest in the non-arts media in cultural affairs, unless they involve naked girls, scandals or controversial curmudgeons). And he suggests that we are still stuck in the old ways of arguing, instead of embracing the model of the "creative economy". (I'm not sure that's entirely true - the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, is certainly driving that rhetoric).

In any case, Puplick's view of how arts funding works here, even if it makes Australia sound dismayingly like a local parish, is a very clear and useful document. It's full of need-to-know information, including a list of the major public inquiries into the arts that have mostly shaped Australian cultural policy. It's well worth a read.

Watch out too for news of an upcoming forum at the Malthouse on November 10, when Chris Puplick will be here to discuss his paper.

* I checked the Final Report of the 2020 Summit (available since May) and found the relevant bit on "Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy", which follows for anyone interested:

The group discussing soft power and cultural diplomacy was asked to identify strategies whereby Australia could project ‘soft power’ internationally through cultural and other creative endeavours. The concept of ‘soft power’, as enunciated by Joe Nye, was discussed and its elements enumerated—such as arts and cultural exchange, promotion of Australian ideas, and media and other people-to-people contacts. Better projection of Australia’s creativity and cultural strength should augment Australia’s international credibility and influence. There would be domestic benefits within Australia because such a strategy would send to Australians a strong message about the nation’s values, achievements and confidence.

Indigenous culture was acknowledged as especially relevant—indeed, ‘central’ to international promotion of Australian culture given its distinctiveness, quality, high impact, international appeal, and importance to Australian identity. It was emphasised that it was ‘hard to curate a national vision’ or to choose the themes for promotion internationally. Australia’s international image and engagement was a composite picture, influenced by many factors. There was some criticism of the government’s decision to cut the funding provided to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for its international touring and other cultural programs, and there was a call for more cultural attaches to be placed in Australian diplomatic missions and consolidation of resources allocated across various departments and agencies. (Italics mine).

The group endorsed the value of cultural exchanges and residencies such as those arranged by Asialink, noting the importance of casting the net widely to include relevant institutions such as universities in these programs. There was discussion of the role of arts festivals in Australia and overseas in developing productive international links between Australia’s creative community and international counterparts.

The economic dimensions of international cultural promotion were canvassed. One speaker highlighted the export potential of Australian culture, arguing that other economic activity often followed cultural connections overseas. Another participant raised the challenges faced by Australian writers given the continuing British dominance of the international book-publishing market by virtue of its possession of British and Commonwealth rights from US publishers. Globalisation was seen as raising other challenges, such as displacement of Australian cultural activity by international products and other influences. Others saw new opportunities for outward looking engagement in a global domain. The key was to strike the right balance between national and local on one hand and international on the other.

While our elusive Arts Minister, Mr Peter Garrett, spends his time propping up the pulp mill industry, it's nice to know that at least one member of the Federal Ministry is thinking about the value of the arts.

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, made an impassioned defence of the humanities in a speech to the Canberra Press Club last week. Announcing a raft of plans to support education and scientific research and development, he pointed to the close links between Research and Development and the humanities in creating innovation.

"They are both part of the same innovation system," he said. "It is obvious that scholars in the humanities, arts and social sciences benefit from advances in technology. Perhaps less obvious is the debt industry owes those scholars, who generate demand for new technologies by building a creative culture – a culture that is smart, curious and unafraid of risk."

Moreover, he claimed the changing nature of contemporary scientific research was making the humanities crucial to their development. And he finished with a ringing endorsement of the value of the arts in themselves.

"I believe the creative arts – and the humanities and the social sciences – make a terrible mistake when they claim support on the basis of their commercial value. Whatever they may be worth in the marketplace, it is their intrinsic value we should treasure them for.We should support these disciplines because they give us pleasure, knowledge, meaning, and inspiration. No other pay-off is required."

How long since you heard a politician say that? He is dead right, too. Science and art make each other smarter. You can read Senator Carr's speech, which makes for interesting perusal, here. And maybe Mr Carr is the one to invite to your next show. According to Nick Pickard, there is probably more chance of his turning up.

In other news today, Performance Space at CarriageWorks in Sydney has announced the appointment of its new director, Daniel Brine. Brine is returning to Australia to take up the position after a decade in the UK where, for the past seven years, he has been with the Live Art Development Agency (LADA). He is presently LADA's Associate Director, and has developed an impressive track record in performance and live art.

Brine takes over from Fiona Winning, Performance Space’s current Director since 1999. After nine years as Director, Winning — having strategically developed and relocated the organization to its new home at CarriageWorks — is returning to freelance writing and producing.

In fact, things are looking up in Sydney, where the Arts are now a Premier's Department portfolio. And the blogging community is steadily growing. The latest member is yet another colleague who has finally made the jump to cyberspace. Sydney crrritic James Waites, formerly of the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald, has - at last - started his own blog. He promises to discuss many things, so expect shoes and ships and sealing wax as well as theatre reviews. If you haven't met before, you can make your acquaintance with James here.

Meanwhile, an odd note in Martin Ball's Age review of Vamp caught my eye. He claims that "for the first half of the show, the opening night audience sat in bemused silence, unsure where the show was going or what they should be thinking." And adds:

Meow Meow didn't take this indifference lying down. When one dramatic entrance failed to elicit any response, she pointedly remarked "I'm going to try that again", asserting control over the passive crowd. It's what we needed, really, to know our place.

Funny, I thought that was a carefully choreographed joke. And surely part of being in a Meow Meow audience is knowing your place (in the back row, for preference). Were we there on the same night? It was opening night, right? I recall enthusiastic applause and cheers after every song, right from the first number. Was I hallucinating? Was it that wibbly-wobbly time-wimey stuff? I'm curious to hear from anyone else there on that night who experienced this eerie silence...