It's a shock to suddenly notice that I am a childless orphan, possibly stuck behind enemy lines, in a world that seems to be unravelling. We are teetering in a strange balance between building on the achievements of the past and desperately trying to dismantle them. In many countries, the current generation is poorer than the previous one, upending generations of dreams by working class parents and migrants for a better life for their children. In this time of upheaval and change – both good and bad – creativity is needed like never before.
Beginnings, middles and ends
Creativity and destruction, beginnings, middles and ends – they are all intertwined. Once we went to parties, now we go to funerals – perhaps the two are connected. When life finally gives up the ghost, whether you’re famous to the whole planet or just to your own friends and family, everyone is a hero in their own small way and a loss to the world when they go.
‘Understanding, assessing and communicating the broad value of arts and culture is a major and ongoing task. There has been an immense amount of work already carried out. The challenge is to understand some of the pitfalls of research and the mechanisms and motivations that underpin it. Research and evaluation is invaluable for all organisations but it is particularly important for Government. The experience of researching arts and culture in Government is of much broader relevance, as the arts and culture sector navigates the tricky task of building a comprehensive understanding in each locality of the broader benefits of arts and culture. The latest Arts restructure makes this even more urgent.’, Better than sport? The tricky business of valuing Australia’s arts and culture.
Crossing boundaries – the unlimited landscape of creativity
‘When I was visiting Paris last year, there was one thing I wanted to do before I returned home – visit the renowned French bakery that had trained a Melbourne woman who had abandoned the high stakes of Formula One racing to become a top croissant maker. She had decided that being an engineer in the world of elite car racing was not for her, but rather that her future lay in the malleable universe of pastry. Crossing boundaries of many kinds and traversing the borders of differing countries and cultures, she built a radically different future to the one she first envisaged’, Crossing boundaries – the unlimited landscape of creativity.
Beginnings, middles and ends
Creativity and destruction, beginnings, middles and ends – they are all intertwined. Once we went to parties, now we go to funerals – perhaps the two are connected. When life finally gives up the ghost, whether you’re famous to the whole planet or just to your own friends and family, everyone is a hero in their own small way and a loss to the world when they go.
A man and his boy, the Central Highlands of Tasmania - the end of the Earth in the middle of nowhere.
I was remembering someone I used to work with a lifetime ago, someone even older than me, who had lived in England at one stage and owned a house in France. I wondered if she has gone back there when she retired. My fellow traveller said ‘she’s probably dead’ and I thought that perhaps people already wondered that about me – ‘whatever happened to such and such, he’s probably dead by now.’
It’s not what you know, it’s who you want to know
© Stephen Cassidy 2024
When my mother-in-law died earlier this year, she was the last in a complete set of parents slipping away from their moorings, sailing out into the bay, like the mournful farewell for some departing chieftain laid out on a black clad skiff. My in-laws saw enough of how sour the world could turn – my father-in-law and mother-in-law were both conscripted into the German Army during World War 2. My father-in-law once said to me ‘I’d had enough of armies’.
The night of my mother-in-law's death I noted ‘My beloved mother-in-law died this morning buoyed by morphine and surrounded by her three children – a rare alignment for most families. What a life! At one point she was having a psychological assessment and was asked how she felt. She replied 'happy'. She was asked if she could elaborate a bit and she said 'very happy'. As she got older she became both more happy and more succinct! That for me summed up the positive disposition that got her through the fall of Berlin in 1945 and the disappearance of her homeland East Prussia after World War 2. Having lived through the evils of Nazi Germany, she invariably stood for the good for ever after. She came to the other side of the world and had the most fabulous and happy life here in Australia. People like her made this country what it is – and hopefully what it could become. I am crying tonight.’
Bad stand up comedians constantly make jokes about mother–in-laws. Like most stereotypes and slogans they are foolish contrivances. Most men see in their mother-in-laws the same qualities which attracted them to their daughters, so more often than not they quickly establish very sound relationships.
Celebrations of a kind
While funerals are sad moments, even if also celebrations of a kind, what makes them bearable is that they are one third of a crazy package – along with birth and serious partnerships, amongst which is marriage. It’s all intertwined, like some roller coaster puzzle. At every big moment, like birth and death and the start of serious partnerships, everyone who has ever been important in your life is present – even if not physically – because in so many ways they have become part of who you are. Like scars and callouses, life is just a series of bruises to prove you’ve been out on the slopes, playing on the monkey bars, climbing a tree or three – and you’ve lived to talk about it. The secret is to make every small moment a part of a big moment.
Big moments continue to inform a lifetime of both small and big moments. Meeting someone, spending so much effort getting to know them backwards, so that it’s a hard thing to ever do again, is big. If you are lucky you might find you’ve spent so much time together in so many different situations that you complete each others sentences. It’s as if you’d spent your life taking pictures in black and white and someone suddenly invented colour. It’s a big moment in colour, a silent movie with sound, a melody with lyrics attached. It’s a time to remember everyone important to you, to be remembered by everyone important to you and to celebrate and never stop.
I have started sitting the way my father sits
I was sitting in a chair one day and I suddenly noticed something. I thought ‘I have started sitting the way my father sits’. As we get older, we see ourselves in our parents and, hopefully, they see themselves in us. I realise how much I am the son of my father and my mother. From them I have picked up, as have my brother and sister, all my important personal values – of honesty, fairness, tolerance and respect for other people, and my sense of doing the right thing. I have to blame them for my sense of humour, my creative ability, and my determination to lead an interesting life.
Often you look at photographs of the children in your family and think they look like one relative or another, sometimes jumping across several generations. But it’s not just faces we inherit, it’s personalities and values. As much as someone lives during their life – no matter how long or short – they live on for much longer afterwards, through memory and through their unending influence – even influencing the way we sit. As long as we remember them and carry forward their legacy, they are still with us.
My father’s life was, from very early on, a partnership with my mother. They were married for 57 years, having met in kindergarten. It’s true that my father was better at building dams than he was at explaining how he felt about them. In his diary for 1950, which has a lot about quantity estimates and coffer dams, he wrote a simple entry for the day he was married: ‘Wedding Day. Fine day in town in morning, collected flowers, wedding at 5 o’clock’.
When band of brothers meant something
My father was the youngest of six boys, and he thought the world of his big brothers. The older brothers all served in World War II, on Lancaster bombers over Europe, on convoys bound to Murmansk, and on motor torpedo boats in the Adriatic. Through a miracle almost impossible to imagine, they all survived. My father tried to join up too, but his father refused to sign his enlistment papers – I wish my grandfather was still around so I could thank him.
Several of the brothers were decorated during the war. Uncle Jim, two brothers older than my father, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross twice. We grew up hearing about their exploits, and I remember my father and I watching documentaries about Lancaster bombers together. Suddenly Uncle Jim was the only brother left – then, almost as suddenly, he wasn’t.
Dam busters became dam builders
Even though my father was too young for the war, that second Great War, in many ways he and his generation were part of another massive effort, but instead a non-war effort. They were the heroes and heroines of the immense nation-building projects in Australia immediately after the war. Instead of dam busters, they became dam builders.
My father and his generation of engineers went into the wilderness – as Tasmania was in the 1950s – to build Australia. These projects, and those who built them, laid the foundations for the country we know today. My father mixed freely with all these new arrivals – drinking vodka with the Poles in Bronte Park was particularly dangerous. Once I remember him telling me how surprised he was that the German mechanics were so good at fixing the caterpillar tracks of D9 dozers – until he discovered that they had all trained repairing Tiger tanks.
The end of the earth in the middle of nowhere
Like war, nation-building wasn’t without its dangers. I still remember when the brakes on my father’s ute failed on a hill, and he ended up with a string of stitches on his chin. Or the time he waded in the dark up a flooded, collapsed tunnel, to check what was holding back the water. I don’t know if he was scared, but we all certainly were.
My parents were part of a young crowd thrown together in the middle of nowhere in the Central Highlands of Tasmania, building the modern Australia we call home. It must have seemed like the middle of nowhere at the end of the earth. They made their own fun, putting on shows, making their own costumes, dressing up. My mother was at the heart of it all. When she and I took my father's ashes to Pine Tier Dam in the centre of Tasmania – the first dam he built, an old rough concrete structure of its time – the old chalet in Bronte Park, now sadly burned down, still had black and white photos of my mother dressed up for Empire Day processions in the 1950s.
Longer and heavier
As we get older our lives become longer and heavier. At the same time we become smaller and lighter, shrinking into time – in the end, that imbalance is what finishes us all. As those we know age and enter a world of falls and spills and forgetting, it's good to remember that their lives were always full of dancing, friends and family – and fun.
I am very proud of my father, of the fact he was a distinguished and respected engineer, and of all the things he built. Even though family slide nights could be a bit dull for us kids – a series of excavations, flumes and concrete pours – my father always had great stories to tell, of carting concrete in open trucks through the snow, and then having to jackhammer the hardening mix so it could be poured into the formwork. In those days he seemed to be permanently in gumboots, standing around in mud, slush and snow – and that was just the backyard.
The value of education
He would sometimes talk to me about what he wanted to leave for his children and grandchildren. I would say, ‘You make the most of it while you can.’ He and my mother had already given us the most important things we needed in life – not money but a sense of humour, an ability to get on with people, and an education.
My father understood the value of education. Starting life as a child of a single parent, whose mother died when he was eight, and whose father had worked as a railway carpenter, my father always wanted to go to university, but the family couldn’t afford it. While he worked hard at night to get his qualifications, it was his three children to whom he gave the chance to finally step inside a university – and there was no way that any of them weren’t going.
I’m still sad that in a fit of youthful wilfulness, fired with radical enthusiasm I boycotted the ceremony awarding the degrees they had worked so hard to achieve for us. It would have been a crowning moment for my parents and I will regret it till the day I die.
I don’t regret that I was a student ratbag. Young and radical seem to go hand in hand – if we are lucky – and when I look at how we are demonising the young demonstrators protesting what’s happening with Palestinians in Gaza, it feels as though I am suddenly back in the 1960s and 70s, hearing the same admonishing voices that were just as unsuccessful back then. I am as astounded as Sarah Schwartz, a lawyer, lecturer and executive officer of the recently formed Jewish Council of Australia, by the way institutions are falling into line with prevailing orthodoxy, as they have done so many times before. When did supporting a separate Palestinian state become a radical and reviled position? It was probably when the spin doctors took over.
Living behind enemy lines
My mother was the last of our parents – now, as their children, we are the oldest generation in our family. Now she is also gone, it is strange no longer to have my weekly phone chats with her. My father went ten years before her, a pathfinder in all things. You know you are hovering by the boundary between the living and the dead when you suddenly think you need to tell some important news to someone – then realise they have long gone.
Looking back from later in life my parents were even more remarkable than I realised – but perhaps all parents are more remarkable than their children recognised at the time. It’s easy to think that history is fixed and only the future can change, but the past is just as fluid as the future. As we move through life our perspectives are constantly shifting – and the past shifts with them.
In the same way, we approach where we grew up and where we go on to live from ever-changing perspectives. Bill Bryson, a prolific writer, famously wrote that he grew up in Des Moines, Iowa – as he commented, someone had to. He went on to say that people used to say that Des Moines was a great place to bring up kids – the problem, he said, was that if you are a kid, the last place you want to be brought up is somewhere about which people say that.
Why are we here?
I do remember once, quite a few years ago now, thinking to myself that on my death bed I didn't want to be saying how I was promoted to such and such a level, but rather that I helped deliver Australia's first ever national Indigenous languages policy, or a list of other similarly useful things. There's the legacy you leave and the legacy you have – the legacy you have is the memories of all the friends (and possibly the actual friends themselves) and the interesting and exciting moments and insights you've had.
If all that has made you want to write (or talk or perform or paint), I think it's good to make sure it doesn’t slip past undone – at least that's the approach I'm trying to take. Lately, having moved from my series of tiny cascading courtyard gardens into an apartment, I've found time for writing. In particular I’ve been writing up my daily travel journals from when we travelled overseas, back when people did that sort of thing. The last trip, apart from a foray to New Zealand in early 2023, was in 2019 when I and my fellow traveller went to Norway. I always wanted to be a travel writer, so this is my solitary outlet.
My mother – and my father – were both creative in many different ways, something that they have jointly passed on to their descendants. My mother was an expert seamstress and green-thumbed gardener, with a love of music, leaving her mark everywhere. Exactly where creativity comes from is always an intriguing question for all families. The challenge is to acknowledge its importance, recognise it and apply it – and in the process move the world on.
The night of my mother-in-law's death I noted ‘My beloved mother-in-law died this morning buoyed by morphine and surrounded by her three children – a rare alignment for most families. What a life! At one point she was having a psychological assessment and was asked how she felt. She replied 'happy'. She was asked if she could elaborate a bit and she said 'very happy'. As she got older she became both more happy and more succinct! That for me summed up the positive disposition that got her through the fall of Berlin in 1945 and the disappearance of her homeland East Prussia after World War 2. Having lived through the evils of Nazi Germany, she invariably stood for the good for ever after. She came to the other side of the world and had the most fabulous and happy life here in Australia. People like her made this country what it is – and hopefully what it could become. I am crying tonight.’
'At one point she was having a psychological assessment and was asked how she felt. She replied "happy". She was asked if she could elaborate a bit and she said "very happy". As she got older she became both more happy and more succinct!
Bad stand up comedians constantly make jokes about mother–in-laws. Like most stereotypes and slogans they are foolish contrivances. Most men see in their mother-in-laws the same qualities which attracted them to their daughters, so more often than not they quickly establish very sound relationships.
Celebrations of a kind
While funerals are sad moments, even if also celebrations of a kind, what makes them bearable is that they are one third of a crazy package – along with birth and serious partnerships, amongst which is marriage. It’s all intertwined, like some roller coaster puzzle. At every big moment, like birth and death and the start of serious partnerships, everyone who has ever been important in your life is present – even if not physically – because in so many ways they have become part of who you are. Like scars and callouses, life is just a series of bruises to prove you’ve been out on the slopes, playing on the monkey bars, climbing a tree or three – and you’ve lived to talk about it. The secret is to make every small moment a part of a big moment.
‘It’s all intertwined, like some roller coaster puzzle. At every big moment, everyone who has ever been important in your life anywhere in the world is there – even if they’re not physically present, because in so many ways they have become part of who you are.’
Big moments continue to inform a lifetime of both small and big moments. Meeting someone, spending so much effort getting to know them backwards, so that it’s a hard thing to ever do again, is big. If you are lucky you might find you’ve spent so much time together in so many different situations that you complete each others sentences. It’s as if you’d spent your life taking pictures in black and white and someone suddenly invented colour. It’s a big moment in colour, a silent movie with sound, a melody with lyrics attached. It’s a time to remember everyone important to you, to be remembered by everyone important to you and to celebrate and never stop.
I have started sitting the way my father sits
I was sitting in a chair one day and I suddenly noticed something. I thought ‘I have started sitting the way my father sits’. As we get older, we see ourselves in our parents and, hopefully, they see themselves in us. I realise how much I am the son of my father and my mother. From them I have picked up, as have my brother and sister, all my important personal values – of honesty, fairness, tolerance and respect for other people, and my sense of doing the right thing. I have to blame them for my sense of humour, my creative ability, and my determination to lead an interesting life.
‘As much as someone lives during their life – no matter how long or short – they live on for much longer afterwards, through memory and through their unending influence – even influencing the way we sit.’
Often you look at photographs of the children in your family and think they look like one relative or another, sometimes jumping across several generations. But it’s not just faces we inherit, it’s personalities and values. As much as someone lives during their life – no matter how long or short – they live on for much longer afterwards, through memory and through their unending influence – even influencing the way we sit. As long as we remember them and carry forward their legacy, they are still with us.
My father’s life was, from very early on, a partnership with my mother. They were married for 57 years, having met in kindergarten. It’s true that my father was better at building dams than he was at explaining how he felt about them. In his diary for 1950, which has a lot about quantity estimates and coffer dams, he wrote a simple entry for the day he was married: ‘Wedding Day. Fine day in town in morning, collected flowers, wedding at 5 o’clock’.
When band of brothers meant something
My father was the youngest of six boys, and he thought the world of his big brothers. The older brothers all served in World War II, on Lancaster bombers over Europe, on convoys bound to Murmansk, and on motor torpedo boats in the Adriatic. Through a miracle almost impossible to imagine, they all survived. My father tried to join up too, but his father refused to sign his enlistment papers – I wish my grandfather was still around so I could thank him.
Several of the brothers were decorated during the war. Uncle Jim, two brothers older than my father, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross twice. We grew up hearing about their exploits, and I remember my father and I watching documentaries about Lancaster bombers together. Suddenly Uncle Jim was the only brother left – then, almost as suddenly, he wasn’t.
Dam busters became dam builders
Even though my father was too young for the war, that second Great War, in many ways he and his generation were part of another massive effort, but instead a non-war effort. They were the heroes and heroines of the immense nation-building projects in Australia immediately after the war. Instead of dam busters, they became dam builders.
‘They were the heroes and heroines of the immense nation-building projects in Australia immediately after the war. Instead of dam busters, they became dam builders.’
My father and his generation of engineers went into the wilderness – as Tasmania was in the 1950s – to build Australia. These projects, and those who built them, laid the foundations for the country we know today. My father mixed freely with all these new arrivals – drinking vodka with the Poles in Bronte Park was particularly dangerous. Once I remember him telling me how surprised he was that the German mechanics were so good at fixing the caterpillar tracks of D9 dozers – until he discovered that they had all trained repairing Tiger tanks.
The end of the earth in the middle of nowhere
Like war, nation-building wasn’t without its dangers. I still remember when the brakes on my father’s ute failed on a hill, and he ended up with a string of stitches on his chin. Or the time he waded in the dark up a flooded, collapsed tunnel, to check what was holding back the water. I don’t know if he was scared, but we all certainly were.
My parents were part of a young crowd thrown together in the middle of nowhere in the Central Highlands of Tasmania, building the modern Australia we call home. It must have seemed like the middle of nowhere at the end of the earth. They made their own fun, putting on shows, making their own costumes, dressing up. My mother was at the heart of it all. When she and I took my father's ashes to Pine Tier Dam in the centre of Tasmania – the first dam he built, an old rough concrete structure of its time – the old chalet in Bronte Park, now sadly burned down, still had black and white photos of my mother dressed up for Empire Day processions in the 1950s.
Longer and heavier
As we get older our lives become longer and heavier. At the same time we become smaller and lighter, shrinking into time – in the end, that imbalance is what finishes us all. As those we know age and enter a world of falls and spills and forgetting, it's good to remember that their lives were always full of dancing, friends and family – and fun.
‘As those we know age and enter a world of falls and spills and forgetting, it's good to remember that their lives were always full of dancing, friends and family, and fun.’
I am very proud of my father, of the fact he was a distinguished and respected engineer, and of all the things he built. Even though family slide nights could be a bit dull for us kids – a series of excavations, flumes and concrete pours – my father always had great stories to tell, of carting concrete in open trucks through the snow, and then having to jackhammer the hardening mix so it could be poured into the formwork. In those days he seemed to be permanently in gumboots, standing around in mud, slush and snow – and that was just the backyard.
The value of education
He would sometimes talk to me about what he wanted to leave for his children and grandchildren. I would say, ‘You make the most of it while you can.’ He and my mother had already given us the most important things we needed in life – not money but a sense of humour, an ability to get on with people, and an education.
My father understood the value of education. Starting life as a child of a single parent, whose mother died when he was eight, and whose father had worked as a railway carpenter, my father always wanted to go to university, but the family couldn’t afford it. While he worked hard at night to get his qualifications, it was his three children to whom he gave the chance to finally step inside a university – and there was no way that any of them weren’t going.
‘He would sometimes talk to me about what he wanted to leave for his children and grandchildren. I would say, ‘You make the most of it while you can.’ He and my mother had already given us the most important things we needed in life – not money but a sense of humour, an ability to get on with people, and an education.’
I’m still sad that in a fit of youthful wilfulness, fired with radical enthusiasm I boycotted the ceremony awarding the degrees they had worked so hard to achieve for us. It would have been a crowning moment for my parents and I will regret it till the day I die.
I don’t regret that I was a student ratbag. Young and radical seem to go hand in hand – if we are lucky – and when I look at how we are demonising the young demonstrators protesting what’s happening with Palestinians in Gaza, it feels as though I am suddenly back in the 1960s and 70s, hearing the same admonishing voices that were just as unsuccessful back then. I am as astounded as Sarah Schwartz, a lawyer, lecturer and executive officer of the recently formed Jewish Council of Australia, by the way institutions are falling into line with prevailing orthodoxy, as they have done so many times before. When did supporting a separate Palestinian state become a radical and reviled position? It was probably when the spin doctors took over.
Outside the US Communications Base at North-West Cape in the 1970s - the checked shirts were regular wear until someone asked me what I did with the bottoms.
Living behind enemy lines
Many decades ago, when I lived in Melbourne, I saw a slogan on a wall around the corner from Smith Street, Collingwood, ‘We are living behind enemy lines’. It stuck in my memory. Sometimes, when I look at much of what is happening around me, it zooms back into my mind, like a nagging doubt. Perhaps we might be living behind enemy lines. Certainly many of the values of democracy and equality we hold dear are everywhere under threat from the rich and powerful and distateful.
My father might have found my youthful enthusiasm for social change alien, but it was a direct result of the values my parents had taught me. It didn’t seem to derail his interest in history. He was the historian of the family. He was fascinated by his origins, and produced a detailed family tree stretching back to Scotland and Ireland in the 18th century. He was a great lover of crossword puzzles, and looking at his pencil drawings of this map of generations, I was reminded of this, and of his training as a draughtsman. He researched and wrote a couple of fascinating photocopied books, on his own history, and on his brothers and their war service. It’s no surprise that he went on to take his place, no longer at the end, but in the middle, of that family tree which fascinated him so much.
‘You know you are hovering by the boundary between the living and the dead when you suddenly think you need to tell some important news to someone – then realise they have long gone.’
My mother was the last of our parents – now, as their children, we are the oldest generation in our family. Now she is also gone, it is strange no longer to have my weekly phone chats with her. My father went ten years before her, a pathfinder in all things. You know you are hovering by the boundary between the living and the dead when you suddenly think you need to tell some important news to someone – then realise they have long gone.
‘It’s easy to think that history is fixed and only the future can change, but the past is just as fluid as the future. As we move through life our perspectives are constantly shifting – and the past shifts with them.’
In the same way, we approach where we grew up and where we go on to live from ever-changing perspectives. Bill Bryson, a prolific writer, famously wrote that he grew up in Des Moines, Iowa – as he commented, someone had to. He went on to say that people used to say that Des Moines was a great place to bring up kids – the problem, he said, was that if you are a kid, the last place you want to be brought up is somewhere about which people say that.
Why are we here?
I do remember once, quite a few years ago now, thinking to myself that on my death bed I didn't want to be saying how I was promoted to such and such a level, but rather that I helped deliver Australia's first ever national Indigenous languages policy, or a list of other similarly useful things. There's the legacy you leave and the legacy you have – the legacy you have is the memories of all the friends (and possibly the actual friends themselves) and the interesting and exciting moments and insights you've had.
'There's the legacy you leave and the legacy you have – the legacy you have is the memories of all the friends (and possibly the actual friends themselves) and the interesting and exciting moments and insights you've had.'
If all that has made you want to write (or talk or perform or paint), I think it's good to make sure it doesn’t slip past undone – at least that's the approach I'm trying to take. Lately, having moved from my series of tiny cascading courtyard gardens into an apartment, I've found time for writing. In particular I’ve been writing up my daily travel journals from when we travelled overseas, back when people did that sort of thing. The last trip, apart from a foray to New Zealand in early 2023, was in 2019 when I and my fellow traveller went to Norway. I always wanted to be a travel writer, so this is my solitary outlet.
My mother – and my father – were both creative in many different ways, something that they have jointly passed on to their descendants. My mother was an expert seamstress and green-thumbed gardener, with a love of music, leaving her mark everywhere. Exactly where creativity comes from is always an intriguing question for all families. The challenge is to acknowledge its importance, recognise it and apply it – and in the process move the world on.
© Stephen Cassidy 2024
See also
An everyday life worth living – indefinite articles for a clean, clever and creative future
‘My blog “indefinite article” is irreverent writing about contemporary Australian society, popular culture, the creative economy and the digital and online world – life in the trenches and on the beaches of the information age. Over the last ten years I have published 166 articles about creativity and culture on the blog. This is a list of all the articles I have published there, broken down into categories, with a brief summary of each article. They range from the national cultural landscape to popular culture, from artists and arts organisations to cultural institutions, cultural policy and arts funding, the cultural economy and creative industries, First Nations culture, cultural diversity, cities and regions, Australia society, government, Canberra and international issues – the whole range of contemporary Australian creativity and culture’, An everyday life worth living – indefinite articles for a clean, clever and creative future.
‘My blog “indefinite article” is irreverent writing about contemporary Australian society, popular culture, the creative economy and the digital and online world – life in the trenches and on the beaches of the information age. Over the last ten years I have published 166 articles about creativity and culture on the blog. This is a list of all the articles I have published there, broken down into categories, with a brief summary of each article. They range from the national cultural landscape to popular culture, from artists and arts organisations to cultural institutions, cultural policy and arts funding, the cultural economy and creative industries, First Nations culture, cultural diversity, cities and regions, Australia society, government, Canberra and international issues – the whole range of contemporary Australian creativity and culture’, An everyday life worth living – indefinite articles for a clean, clever and creative future.
Beyond a joke – surviving troubled times
‘We live in troubled times – but then can anyone ever say that they lived in times that weren’t troubled? For most of my life Australia has suffered mediocre politicians and politics – with the odd brief exceptions – and it seems our current times are no different. Australia has never really managed to realise its potential. As a nation it seems to be two different countries going in opposite directions – one into the future and the other into the past. It looks as though we’ll be mired in this latest stretch of mediocrity for some time and the only consolation will be creativity, gardening and humour’, Beyond a joke – surviving troubled times.
‘We live in troubled times – but then can anyone ever say that they lived in times that weren’t troubled? For most of my life Australia has suffered mediocre politicians and politics – with the odd brief exceptions – and it seems our current times are no different. Australia has never really managed to realise its potential. As a nation it seems to be two different countries going in opposite directions – one into the future and the other into the past. It looks as though we’ll be mired in this latest stretch of mediocrity for some time and the only consolation will be creativity, gardening and humour’, Beyond a joke – surviving troubled times.
Dawn service – revisiting a long and personal story
‘Waking before dawn on ANZAC Day I suddenly thought I’d take part in my own one-person Dawn Service by thinking quietly about those in my own extended family who had been to war. That’s my five uncles all of whom fought in World War 2 – and survived – with a sense of humour and a string of medals. It’s also my family-in-law – my father-in-law and mother-in-law who were both conscripted into the German Army. My father-in-law once said to me ‘I’d had enough of armies’. My under-age father tried in vain to join up to be with the brothers he adored, but his father refused to sign the necessary papers – luckily, otherwise I might not be here, part of a later generation, remembering them all with great sadness’, Dawn service – revisiting a long and personal story.
‘Waking before dawn on ANZAC Day I suddenly thought I’d take part in my own one-person Dawn Service by thinking quietly about those in my own extended family who had been to war. That’s my five uncles all of whom fought in World War 2 – and survived – with a sense of humour and a string of medals. It’s also my family-in-law – my father-in-law and mother-in-law who were both conscripted into the German Army. My father-in-law once said to me ‘I’d had enough of armies’. My under-age father tried in vain to join up to be with the brothers he adored, but his father refused to sign the necessary papers – luckily, otherwise I might not be here, part of a later generation, remembering them all with great sadness’, Dawn service – revisiting a long and personal story.
Returning to reading – finding the best of all possible worlds
‘It’s a strange time we live in – but then, has any time not been a strange time. I often think that there is no way on Earth that I would ever want to live in an earlier era, before medicine was so developed, when the average life expectancy was in the mid thirties, when life for most people was a short spell of drudgery punctuated by poverty and fear. I’m making the most of it. Lately I’ve started to balance my fascination with the easy-earned opinion of the online universe with a return to reading writing, as distinct from glancing at jotting’, Returning to reading – finding the best of all possible worlds.
Driveway dawn services – reclaiming remembrance
‘I usually pass Anzac Day quietly, as befits remembrance. I try to avoid the flag waving and the speeches and the politicians – difficult as that is during an election. However, the day touches on so many issues that affect the future of Australia, that it always makes me think about where we have come from and where we are going. Lest we forget – or be doomed to repeat’, Driveway dawn services – reclaiming remembrance.
‘I usually pass Anzac Day quietly, as befits remembrance. I try to avoid the flag waving and the speeches and the politicians – difficult as that is during an election. However, the day touches on so many issues that affect the future of Australia, that it always makes me think about where we have come from and where we are going. Lest we forget – or be doomed to repeat’, Driveway dawn services – reclaiming remembrance.
Art at work – imagining a future Australia
Better than sport? The tricky business of valuing Australia’s arts and culture‘In our strange new universe, where much of Australia burns while politicians make excuses for inaction, it’s time to take a hard look at what the arts can do. It’s an issue in the minds of many in the arts and culture sector. Part of the potential role of arts is around bushfire recovery – a much bigger part is around bushfire prevention. Artists have a role to play in designing a different future than what’s on offer and writing the story of a different future. Those social movements that are most powerful are the ones where arts and culture embodies and carries forward the essence of what they stand for. Think of the power of ceremony and ritual in the world – that is ultimately the power of art at work’, Art at work – imagining a future Australia.
Out of the ashes – art and bushfires
‘While the current bushfires raging across much of Australia are unprecedented in their scale and severity, they are a reminder of how people have responded after previous fires, rebuilding communities and lives in the affected areas. They have also focused attention on the impact of the fires on creative practices and business and on how those in the arts and culture sector can use their skills to contribute to bushfire recovery into the future’, Out of the ashes – art and bushfires.
Out of the ashes – art and bushfires
‘While the current bushfires raging across much of Australia are unprecedented in their scale and severity, they are a reminder of how people have responded after previous fires, rebuilding communities and lives in the affected areas. They have also focused attention on the impact of the fires on creative practices and business and on how those in the arts and culture sector can use their skills to contribute to bushfire recovery into the future’, Out of the ashes – art and bushfires.
‘Understanding, assessing and communicating the broad value of arts and culture is a major and ongoing task. There has been an immense amount of work already carried out. The challenge is to understand some of the pitfalls of research and the mechanisms and motivations that underpin it. Research and evaluation is invaluable for all organisations but it is particularly important for Government. The experience of researching arts and culture in Government is of much broader relevance, as the arts and culture sector navigates the tricky task of building a comprehensive understanding in each locality of the broader benefits of arts and culture. The latest Arts restructure makes this even more urgent.’, Better than sport? The tricky business of valuing Australia’s arts and culture.
Crossing boundaries – the unlimited landscape of creativity
‘When I was visiting Paris last year, there was one thing I wanted to do before I returned home – visit the renowned French bakery that had trained a Melbourne woman who had abandoned the high stakes of Formula One racing to become a top croissant maker. She had decided that being an engineer in the world of elite car racing was not for her, but rather that her future lay in the malleable universe of pastry. Crossing boundaries of many kinds and traversing the borders of differing countries and cultures, she built a radically different future to the one she first envisaged’, Crossing boundaries – the unlimited landscape of creativity.
ReplyDeleteLovely article, thanks Stephen. Very interesting to find out more about your parents. I love that notion of “being stuck behind enemy lines” - it’s a bit how I feel at the moment living in this version of Australia.