My review of the most recent edition of the Griffith Review is now up on artsHub.

It’s been a kind of harrowing few days reading so many essays, memoirs and short stories about terrible disasters and the things that go wrong in people’s lives but these things do seem to bring out some great writing. Well worth reading.

Margaret Hansford, Partnership Solutions

I first heard about Margaret Hansford when I did an interview with The Song Company (for the article Building a Better Arts Business), who recommended her as a great person to talk to on the subject of managing change in a not-for-profit or arts organisation. It took a few months for me to finally catch up with her and I’m so glad we did. Margaret was so giving of her time and what she had to say about how organisations should think about managing change processes was illuminating. Not rocket science but surprising how rarely organisation even recognise that change is something that can be managed, communicated and planned effectively.

You can read the article on artsHub here: Change management in the arts

The annual fiction edition of the Griffith Review is out and my review of it is up on artsHub: Griffith Review No 34

There are stories by Nicholas Low, Benjamin Law, Chris Womersley, Romy Ash, Amy Espeseth and, well, stacks more!

Dear Blog,

Yesterday I had to get up very early. This isn’t something I particularly like doing, especially in the dark, wet and cold of Melbourne but I was going to the Sofitel to listen to an economist talking about the arts.
This turned out to be quite interesting.

A lot of people would recognise Saul Eslake forward facing grey hair from his many grabs for the media. He’s now Director of Productivity Growth Program at the Grattan Institute, and he used to be the Chief Economist at ANZ . The other speaker was Lynne Anderson, Managing Director of Repucom International – Australia and New Zealand. She’s headed up the research AbaF have done on private sector support for the arts.

Eslake noted four key and closely linked observations on the current condition of the Australian economy. First, despite coming through the GFC unscathed Australians are seemingly indifferent to the way the government, our banks generally and our financial institutions prevented a crisis happening here as it did in the US and Europe. Perhaps gratitude or thank-you card were always unlikely but he said, ‘somehow the government has been spectacularly unsuccessful in selling that achievement.’

Instead of being relatively optimistic, Australian consumer sentiment is subdued. We’ve stopped spending and started saving. Saving should be a good thing but it has had a negative effect on areas of the economy directly affected by household expenditure such as the retail sector.

The second point is that Australia is experiencing the largest mining boom in our history thanks to the growth of China and India. This is a fortuitous situation that is likely to continue for another 15 or possibly even 25 years. When it is over however, to state the obvious, it will be over. What we do with this unprecedented and likely never to be repeated wealth is a critical question for Australia.

The third point was that the mining boom is having a combination of negative effects. It’s affecting the exchange rate, making imports cheaper and thereby harder to compete with for local producers and bringing less tourists and foreign students to our shores. As yet, it has not spawned the sort of broad based inflation that can occur in booms as resources are pulled from other areas of the economy to fuel areas of growth, even though our economy has been at near full capacity for some time. Perhaps the GFC has been helpful.

It was odd that Eslake didn’t mention, the technological changes and the rapidly shift of Australians to online vendors particularly those overseas. Personally, I think this has had as much of an effect on the decline in Australia’s retail sector as subdued consumer sentiment. The business models of the big retailers seem hopelessly inflexible when it comes to e-tailing, but I get annoyed when they blame the carbon tax instead of their own lack of foresight.

Eslake’s point about the exchange rate also seemed a bit simplistic. Mining is an obvious and tangible demand for our currency dollar but speculation and the falling US currency relative to ours has also been a big factor. The mining boom isn’t the only reason, for that. It’s as much to do with the effect of the GFC elsewhere.

And while I was pleased to hear his balanced, more or less apolitical observations of the world I did worry about the linear and prescriptive economic development model he suggested. That is that economies will more of less move through almost pre-destined stages of economic development, from rural to industrial to service industries – at least that was the insinuation I thought he was making.

However, India unlike Australian and Europe in many ways has always had a more service based economy due to its large population – it seems unlikely they will go through an industrialisation stage similar to ours of 200 years ago and the uses of labour and the make up of economic growth are likely to be very different. History is not linear and nor is economics. I think he would agree, but he didn’t go into it for this event.

Eslake point out that the areas of the Australian economy that are doing less well are where most people live and work and that is consequently fuelling far more political tension for politicians. The south east corner of the country feels like it’s ‘doing it tough’. But there are other parts of the country experiencing levels of growth not seen in 100 years. (I’ve written more about this on ArtsHub).

Private contributions are up, but sponsorship has dropped just a little. Even so, Lynne talked about the strength of sponsorship. While the arts may have had a fall, other areas have grown, particularly community and grass roots areas. The appetite is there – you just have to tell the right story.

Jane Haley (CEO AbaF) backed that up. She said the growth in private sector contributions to the arts has not been wholly serendipitous, pointing to the strategic approach taken by many major performing arts organizations and peak cultural collecting institutions to drive donor programs. But there are two things that AbaF hears strongly from businesses considering relationships with the arts she says: a desire for more creative approaches and a need for measurable evidence to show how the arts can achieve the objectives and goals that a business is pursuing.

She did try to say that they had expected a dip in sponsorship as previous experience overseas was that there was a ‘lag’ of 18-24 months in contributions to the arts when businesses fell on leaner times. That would suggest the results are still to be felt as the worst point of the GFC was March 2009, hence the effect should’ve been felt at the end of 2010 and early 2011. Yet, Australia has escaped a ‘recession’ so why would there be any effect at all?

So oddly, the arts should be winning as it’s coming and as it’s going. Not only is investing marketing dollars in the arts effective in harder economic times such as those being experienced by some sectors, it is more justified when it comes to engaging with audiences as the media landscape contorts and stretches people’s attention. Then for those companies and high-net worth individuals who are flush with cash thanks to the mining boom there ‘should’ be a capacity to give back to the community and the arts far more. It remains to be seen whether they will.

Here’s some more of Saul Eslake had to say (transcript):

Being in a room you haven’t paid for would seem to be the best way to travel and the more luxurious the upgrade the better. Yet, at least for me, it intensifies the conscientiousness and guilt. It just seems to make me very serious. Why am I here and what am I supposed to say? Do I, should I, say it? How objective, how critical should I be given I’m only here because they’ve paid for me to come. Of course, journalists are supposed to take it all in their stride, not be influenced by anything. But that’s rubbish and everyone knows it.

The view is nothing to speak of, a twin curtain contraption covers the floor to ceiling view of the building across the street. There’s a black out curtain to avoid all light and a gauze haze curtain to avoid the view. Whenever I enter the room I switch off the air con. It’s too cold. I open the curtains, I want to see outside. I want the tropical humidity to seep in, even if the windows themselves can’t open. The sounds and smells can then rise up from the street of frying and vegetables in bins, calls, shouts and horns and clatter.

There are plants dying on the building opposite just above my high level from my room, for some inexplicable reason they’ve been planted in pots four storeys in the sky, propped within a narrow balcony. They’re large plants, potentially trees and desperate for more water than the rain seems able to provide or their pots are able to absorb. They’re left deficit and struggling, plants trying to grow for too long too far from the earth.

Within the room, however, there are amusements and distractions. A very large TV with very many TV stations sits on a low bench thus creating a separation in the open space between the lounge area and the bedroom area. There’s a gym down the hall where people sweat for pleasure and on the top floor an infinitiy pool.

To the side of the lounge however, near the door is where I spend most of my time, at the desk with the plugs offering international power choices. There’s a bar fridge filled with items I dare not touch, some crockery in cupboards, and the Nescafe machine that it has taken me two days to decipher. A selection of very nice teas has been my beverage of choice though, particularly the Chamomile at 3am when I’m stilling staring at my laptop. From the wide desk, I stare across the empty room out the window, feel the patter of day and night. Even when it’s 4am I refuse to dampen this places daily cycle with my own screwed up one.

The international business travellers privilege is to turn off the solar rhythm others abide by and follow their own internal tick, should they be able to find it. But I want to be in this place, even if all I seem to experience is within walls that could be anywhere. This is Singapore, it could be anywhere but it’s not.

It is comfortable, familiar and foreign in comfortable balance and I only have four days.

I’m supposed to be writing about how the NSW election is shaping up for the arts industry but instead find myself musing on the election more generally. In part this is because finding much on the arts policy initiatives is difficult in part because the rout expected is so extraordinary.

I lived in Sydney for four years around the turn of the century, yes, that’s sounds like such a long time ago, 10 years. To be nostalgic for a moment, it was a time when we were excited about the Olympics and Sydney was proud. There hadn’t been Tampa or 9-11, or Iraq or Obama or the GFC. Houses were ridiculously expensive, but they were to get more so, and those who owned them were very happy. Everyone seemed to be watching renovation shows and imagining themselves as property tycoons, shares were going up, the we-can-all-be-millionaires bug had well and truly bitten and climate change and environmental catastrophes were something only fringe dwelling loonies thought was really happening. Ah yes, the good ol’ days.

Looking from afar at the upcoming NSW election, it seems incredible how vicious and angry an entire Australian state has become. The spite is being thrown straight at the Labor government, perhaps deservingly, but it seems that that’s just one of the splashes coming from a molten pool of resentment. Perhaps the government is more representative of the people than any would care to admit to? More than anywhere else in Australia, NSW seems to embody all the political extremes as though the nation is torn through east-west and north-south in the one state.

But what’s also strange is that for all the anger when you try to look at the issues supposedly causing this resentment, they seem somewhat selfish. People don’t want to ride on trains that don’t have air-conditioning. They don’t want to wait for trains. They want the trains to go faster. They want their bills to be lower. They want fewer immigrants. They want their roads to be cheaper and easier to drive on, less congestion. They want hospitals to be more efficient, to not have to wait. But they don’t want to pay more in taxes. They want services but don’t want to pay the real costs of providing them. They want politicians to not help their developer friends and corporate buddies, while for years they’ve believed in the Howard era rhetoric of individualism’s ascendancy over social responsibility, private industry and free market efficiency and have turned a blind eye to the outcomes of avariciousness and getting ‘deals done’. To be fair a media ‘they’ is unlikely to represent anyone well, these collective nouns dwell on generalisations.

Still, it seems a bit late at stage to be getting cross about a lack of infrastructure when government has been so enthusiastically progressively stripped of it’s legitimacy to tax, borrow and build for the people by the people in favour of an outsourced society; one where private interests have benefited. Surely someone will now see the logic that if you tell governments they can’t do things well, they’ll stop trying too? Or, someone will point out that economically efficient public services and infrastructure are ones that are of a lower quality than we’ve had in the past, that the costs of high quality services are unworkably costly, ie. not profitable. Of course, they never were but it used to be we didn’t mind.

But the other killer seems to be a perceived in-action or inability to ‘do something’ and that seems to come down to division. Division and factionalism seem to have been the real killers. Left and right are blurred by the self-interest of a handful of people who purport to represent each side, when the real basis of the split is not ideological but Machiavellian.

Yet for all that resentment, is it so bad? Really? With the plasma screens and the new kitchens and the cheap clothes and the gourmet foods and the astounding constant connectivity to a global community, are we actually so badly off? Why suddenly are people calling for better public services when for so long all they’ve cared about is having more for themselves? I’ve upgraded all that I have, why hasn’t the government upgraded all the things I want from them too? Greed is a beast.

The call for vision that seems to be coming up at every level of politics in Australia and perhaps around the world, not just this NSW election campaign should be seen with more clarity. It’s a call for unity. Unity comes from purpose, laying aside some individual goals for the benefit of a greater communal goal.

The irony is, our successes, our wealth, our achievements having been made leads to this very state of being. Achievement is what has diminished the power of our communal goals and unleashed the destructive competition of narcissism. Is it that when we achieve goals of greater wealth and a ‘more efficient, productive economy’ as we have pursued so vigorously for 20 years, we don’t know why we got here? Sadly, it seems we just need an upgrade, Vision 2.0.

No one really knows what’s happening but they know we’re not keeping up. People have every reason to be uneasy as our economy is morphing before our eyes, not just jobs but careers, business models, climates and beliefs, families and governments. The impact of globalised decentralisation is going to break-up and erode everything that was built in the 20th Century into a new model. We’re atomising.** That can be a good thing. It’s certainly an exciting thing. But it will be a very different world, to live in, to work in and to govern.

I find it fascinating that the ALP may be reduced after this election to the lowest level of representation they’ve had since they first contested a NSW Election in 1908. Now, we really know we’re in a new century, when things devolve and start again.

** Oddly, or perhaps not, the best place to see this global change most clearly in its infancy is the independent arts, that underground arena where change and creativity meet.

Well, we had an election over the weekend. It rained – a lot. We did our democratic duty and ate sausages cooked as an opportunistic fund raiser for something or rather.

It seemed an underwhelming day and I’m in two minds about the result. I can’t say I’m surprised by it. It seemed like there were enough things out there that really annoying people, combined with shirty ‘give the other bloke’ a go’-ness, that it was an near impossible task for the ALP to win another term.

Having a political week writing wise was interesting week too. Looking at the policies and talking to the various parties about what they think is important at the moment. I was disappointed that the stuff I personally think really matters most was almost entirely off the agenda until 48 hrs beforehand, so it got no traction or discussion.

Greens

Labor

Liberal

This week seems to have flown by – more so than usual. A funny week too, which has shown me yet again the wild variations that writing for ArtsHub proivdes.

Starting this week I was talking to Dr Kim Walker from the Sydney Conservatorium. She spent the week before at the 70th Anniversary Celebrations of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. It would seem from her description that like just about every other field of endeavour China has decided to make sure they’re the best in the world. They’ve invested in training classical musicians as well as musicians in traditional Chinese instruments and providing them with the best infrastructure they can.

We were talking about the way musicians, orchestras and academics are transposed around the world to build their careers, and how that breeds cultural understanding. As we talked however, I learnt far more about how Conservatoria around the world are trying to coordinate their degrees and courses to catchup with the way musicians are now working. There were a lot of things I had to look up afterwards, like the Bologna Accord. And to think about, Walker talked about how students today have to learn the theory and music of every age that has been, classical, baroque, new classicism, and presumably contemporary as well, but fit learning it into less time.

Then, the next day I got to have coffee with Lindy Cameron, the crime writer. She’s starting her own publishing company, Clan Destine Press. I’d missed the launch on Saturday night, so she was filling me in. She’d spent six years working for Lonely Planet when it was a much smaller company, and so she’d asked Tony Wheeler to launch Clan Destine for her, which he had. Being someone who’d started small, stapling his books and carrying them round himself basically, she figured he was sympathetic to the enterprise. It was fun to talk about genre writing and how we enjoy sci-fi and fantasy.

Lindy was getting so enthusiastic someone from the table behind us chipped in and started a conversation about the romance and metaphor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Gallactica’s social relevance. Not something that often comes up in interviews, but the danger of cafe venues, I suppose. Most exciting Lindy invited me along to a writing group session. This is very cool, and hopefully will getting me scribbling my own fiction more vigourously, as my NaNo month has not been going well.

Next week, I’ll be writing about the Queenscliff Music Festival, a Hip Hop Street Art ‘festival’ and considering the various political parties arts policies for the Victoria election.