Junction 2010: Connecting Regional Art Workers

There are Melbourne’s many musicals and exhibitions; Sydney’s stunning starlets and film festivals and Brisbane’s bands and ballerinas, but what of the creativity that doesn’t actually occur in the main metropolitan hubs of Australia? Our cities can often cast a shadow across the rest of the nation, with artists in regional and remote communities trying desperately to be heard. Junction 2010, happening in Launceston this week, aims to provide a sense of cohesion for remote arts workers and to help to facilitate discussions that will provide solutions to some of the issues that they face.

Junction 2010 will be a veritable smorgasbord of arts workers with upwards of 1000 industry professionals from around the country braving the august chill of the Tasman for a meeting of the minds. It isn’t often that artists, policy makers, volunteers and students come together in the one place to work towards a common goal, so organisers have put in the hard yards to ensure the program is as beneficial to the regional arts community as possible.

Two events that will aim to break down some of the issues surrounding community and integration are Leading Ladies and RAA Speaks Out, where the leaders of ABaF and Regional Arts Australia will provide a forum to help inspire ideas and discussion.

ArtsHub spoke to the CEO for ABaF, Jane Haley, about her ‘Leading Ladies’ discussion that she is chairing with Robyn Archer AO and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, winners of AbaF’s Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Arts Business Leadership Award. This event will mainly focus on leadership within the arts sector, and how relationships can be developed to foster funding from businesses. On the flip side of the coin will be Julie Boyd from Regional Arts Australia who will speak at RAA Speaks Out, an event that aims to evaluate how the arts can work creatively with other organisations towards building a better life for Australians.

Whilst each event has its own, arguably noble, agenda; each is working towards a goal of improving the arts for communities within Australia.

Haley, whose home town is Launceston, said that some of the biggest challenges for the arts in regional Australia are, “The isolation and the kind of disconnectedness. That’s where a conference like this certainly enables networks to be built and experiences to be shared. A national conference gives people an opportunity to experience some of the ideas that are being developed and evolved and to make a contribution to those. I think you can do a lot of that stuff online and via shared stories... but the value of face-to-face is inestimable.”

She will be leading a panel that aims to dissect what is needed from our leaders, and what sort of skills a great leader can provide. Certainly, with mismatched locales and artistic endeavours, and even a country that cannot determine what leader we want, these skills are essential to, without sounding too much like a political slogan, moving forward on key issues affecting the arts community in regional Australia.

The arts are essential to the successful operation of communities, especially in areas where there is not much to do. Says Haley, “The arts has an aesthetic value, but also a very strong instrumental value, where they can actually contribute to identity and community cohesion and community building.... Instruments of community development can bring people together and make people feel positive and enhance confidence and develop communication and bring cohesion and coherence to a community where perhaps there has been challenges and fractures.”

“It is about sharing that experience and recognising that location is only one dimension of what you’re doing and that in fact creativity and innovation are things that you can develop even in small and remote places..... It’s also about resourcefulness of individuals.... I think that you can work well in well funded structures, or in well developed structures, but often at times it is the resourcefulness of the individual and the capacity of that individual to make connections within communities and between communities, no matter how big or small they be. That makes a real difference, and that’s what I see as being a real defining aspect of leadership,” adds Haley.

When ArtsHub spoke to Julie Boyd, the director of Regional Arts Australia she shared many of the same viewpoints as Haley but adds that, “An arts and cultural sector is the core component, it’s the sole of your community, if you don’t have a strong arts sector then your community is really missing out dramatically.”

But what will happen in the future? “I think regional arts Australia and regional arts per se has a very strong future, it will not be an easy future but it will certainly be a strong future. One of the things we need to do is help politicians understand what the arts sector does, because too often we tend to pick on the arts ministers and talk to them about concerns, whereas I think communities need to be almost regularly talking to their local members, both state and federal, about why the arts sector is important and encouraging them to get involved so that the arts is seen as mainstream.” says Boyd.

And Junction 2010 will certainly help encourage a strong arts strategy for years to come.

Regional Arts Australia National Conference
26 - 29th August
Launceston, Tasmania