By Sally Pryor
For a community forum attended mainly by people in the arts, it was a disappointingly sedate affair. The last round of public consultations for the latest ACT Arts Policy Framework review was attended by 60-odd people, and there wasn't one bit of biffo.
And this, says director David Whitney, is a sign of how far we've come. When he took the helm seven years ago, he recalls a fair bit of angst – both specific and existential – about what it means to be part of a growing arts community like Canberra. Now, people are more engaged with the nuts and bolts of how to keep the arts ticking along.
Retiring ACT Arts director David Whitney.Credit: Rohan Thomson
Regrettably or otherwise, this means dealing with a lot of words – sentences and paragraphs that are both subtle and blunt, nuanced and straightforward, malleable and set in stone.
But that's policy for you.
'Arts by its nature will change, but the fundamentals have to be there': ACT Arts Minister Joy Burch.Credit: Matt Bedford
And this is what daunted the chair of the review panel, David Broker, most. As a mainly visual arts person – he is director of Canberra Contemporary Art Space – he admits he had never put much thought into the relative merits of placing "access" first in the list of arts policy objectives, before "excellence", "sustainability" and "innovation". Like most people, he found it hard to get excited about a framework made up of words that didn't seem to have much application in day-to-day life.
But a five-month process involving community consultations, focus groups, a public forum and more than 300 submissions from artists, organisations and members of the general public, has changed his view substantially.
"I think we've done a great job reworking the policy – it's now much more artist-focused," he says.
ACT Arts Minister Joy Burch, who announced the review and the panel in January, said it had always been the intention to revisit the policy framework two years after it was put out in 2012, "to see if it was meeting the needs of our community in terms of government and artists alike".
"The arts is an incredibly valuable asset to a community, but we've got to be responsive to the artists for them to be able to – without sounding too corny – flourish within the community, because that's how they build up the asset that we all benefit from," she t said last month.
"Arts by its nature will change, but the fundamentals have to be there. Do we facilitate arts practice, from beginner right through to expert? Do we have our funding and policy setting right through key arts organisations and those other sort of institutions, for want of a better word?"
The review panel included David Williams of arts advocacy outfit the Childers Group; Gavin Findlay of Music ACT; director of Gorman and Ainslie arts centres Joseph Falsone; writer Rosanna Stevens; and director of the ANU Centre for European Studies Jacqueline Lo. Together, they have nutted out both the broad-ranging themes facing Canberra and regional artists – funding, access to facilities, community participation – and, most interestingly, the "nitty-gritty issues" that artists face daily.
Issues such as professional development, acknowledgement of Indigenous artists, the logistics of being a mid-career artist with children, how to be creative and entrepreneurial at the same time – suddenly, the carefully crafted words of the framework policy that have been guiding the arts sector since it was formulated in 2012 take on a whole new meaning.
"We thought the old policy was quite good, until we started thinking about it in detail and cracks started to appear," Broker says.
The re-drafted policy has been lodged with Burch and will be discussed and tabled in June, before Whitney's departure in early July.
Whitney says one of the key themes that has shone through during the review process is that, in a manner of speaking, Canberra is finally growing into its size.
"It's a bit like this continual argument about, do you build a building, or do you support a program?" Whitney says.
"You don't have to build super flash buildings everywhere – I think that we've got enough in Canberra at the moment – and actually that's what we've been hearing in the review process, there are enough, let's actually make them work."
Broker agrees.
"One of the big questions has been, are we making the most of what we've got?" he says. "And the feeling has been, we have enough institutions, and now it's time to focus on what we do have."
One thing we apparently don't need, though, is a dedicated Canberra festival. Turns out there was a bit of mild biffo at April's community forum after all, during a splinter discussion group on local festivals. Broker was there, and suggested that Canberra was now vibrant enough to amalgamate many of its successful, smaller festivals – Enlighten, balloons, music – into something larger.
The response, he recalls, was a violent no. Perhaps something to revisit, then, when the next review comes up.