In an increasingly globalised world, Australian creative talent has been playing a leading international role for decades. Nowhere is that more apparent than with the Australian presence in the global film-making machine of Hollywood. One of Australia’s leading national cultural institutions has captured that phenomenon in a new exhibition about the role of Australians in Hollywood, celebrating iconic moments in contemporary Australian film and the people and stories that brought them to life.
Despite the wallowing by some Australians in insular inward-looking nostalgia and a backwards-looking yearning for a non-existent self-reliant Aussie past, for many decades Australian talent has been playing a central role in the global creative economy.
The front entrance to the National Film and Sound Archive |
Because the creative economy is based on content, it draws on, intersect with and contributes to Australia’s national and local culture and is a central part of projecting Australia’s story to ourselves and to the world – it help channel those who write the stories, paint the pictures and dance the dances that tell our story. As part of Australia's culture sector and the cultural economy that derives from it, it shares the critical function of managing the meaning of Australia and what being Australian means. It is closely linked to the profile of Australia as a clever country, both domestically and internationally.