Above: Escape From Woomera, screenshot.

Marcus Westbury’s column for The Age has been exploring some really interesting topics in cultural policy. His most recent column is one of his best. Now posted on his blog, the article examines the relative responses of the ABC  and the Australia Council to the disruptive cultural transformations wrought by digital technologies.

Westbury argues that while the ABC has done surprisingly well, “the “Australia Council has retreated further and further away from engagement in contemporary culture. The results are on the board to see.” More over the fold.

Westbury took his cue from the recent joint ABC-Australia Council event, Revealing the Arts: creative conversations and solutions for the digital era (an event we were both invited to, but which we declined to attend, in my case because no travel assistance was offered). It posed a perfect opportunity to examine the relative approaches both agencies took to digital culture:

A cursory glance at the program makes it clear it is aimed squarely at the major cultural institutions that dominate the Australia Council’s budget and its thinking.

That the Australia Council is interested at all is a positive. Their recent “Arts content for the digital era” strategy is a step forward. Yet there are vital basic assumptions that are rarely questioned: that the culture, the cultural organisations that deliver it, the cultural needs and infrastructure of Australia will remain more or less fixed. Technology is merely about the marketing, the branding, the language, the revenue and the education programs. The idea that the culture itself is changing and evolving is rarely considered. Technology merely changes the hype and the pitch to keep the kids interested.

The ABC has long moved beyond that. The broadcaster has realised that in order to justify its continued existence, it needs to keep questioning and evolving its roles. Since the handful of hobbyists built the first ABC website in the 1990s, ABC leadership — to varying degrees — has recognised the importance of experimentation, innovation and branching into new areas. It has not been easy. They’ve got it wrong at times and done so against a background of constant sniping that resources were being drawn away from core areas.

The Australia Council has largely taken the opposite tack. They’ve retreated towards a heritage rump. They’ve engaged occasionally, mostly faddishly, with experiments in new media — they created with much fanfare a new media arts board. They subsequently abolished it. They’ve acted defensively, not inquisitively, strategically or even opportunistically.

As the ABC has invested in new audiences, new ways of doing things and new initiatives, it has largely paid off. Parts of the ABC are growing, parts are vin decline but on the whole it’s a healthy and — most importantly — a culturally relevant system to most Australians.

Meanwhile, the Australia Council sits on narrow terrain that has seismically shifted. The entire world of professional and amateur creation, of ad hoc exhibitions and global audiences opened up by the internet, has been ignored. Changing forms have clashed with archaic art-form definitions. The result is that proportionally less and less Australian art and culture has anything to do with the Australia Council.

As the ABC was divesting itself of orchestras the Australia Council was acquiring them — to the point where they now dominate its budget. As the ABC was opening new media initiatives, the Australia Council was closing them. As the ABC was diversifying into innovation, experimentation and decentralisation, the Australia Council was investing in fewer, more established and more traditional companies. The contrasts could not be more stark.

Over at my blog, I discuss some of the broader historical context of the Australia Council’s decision to turn its back on digital culture:

I think the decision to abolish the New Media Arts Board will eventually be seen as the beginning of the end of the autonomy of the Australia Council – perhaps of the entire Australia Council model. The naked reactionism of the decision has  only grown more obvious with hindsight,  along with the policy irrelevance of OzCo more broadly. Exercises like Revealing the Arts reveal nothing more than the fact hat The Australia Council as it currently exists is comprehensively captured by the major organisations it funds – despite some cosmetic attempts to “Make It New” and a one-off injection for small-to-medium performance companies.

What do our friends here at LP think?

I’ll have more to say about this soon, as this OLO piece is a spinoff from my talk for the Queensland Writers Centre on the Digital Age and the future of writing. I’m working that up in longer form for publication.