Humphrey Bower

Last week, I was going through a huge scrap book of memorabilia which was given to mum when she retired from the Australia Council at the end of 1979 just 5 months before she died of cancer. I came across a document that she wrote on the relationship between the newly created Community Arts Board, as it was then called, and council policy as a whole.

A belated addition to the structure of the Council, the Board was set up in September 1977, community arts being at last no longer the Cinderella of the arts, as mum ironically put it. She was formerly appointed its first Director in May 1978, although she had ben a vital force working behind the scenes for the community arts movement ever since she began as a senior consultant with the Australian Council for the Arts under Nugget Coombs in the late sixties.

The following words must have been written either in late 1977 or early 78 as they are still signed Rosalie Bower, acting Director:

We must make the government aware of the long-term benefits which will accrue from investment in the arts. This goes beyond the currently articulated demands for subsidy by companies threatening to go out of business. Education has not won funds by arguing that schools will go broke. Culture must win funds on the basis that the arts ensure against cultural impoverishment, a serious deficiency which will affect the overall national interest.

Now, mum was always a sharp-eyed visionary and these words are even more timely in an era when schools, universities, hospitals, nursing homes, public transport and other essential services of the mind and the body have precisely been redefined as businesses and surrendered to the profit imperatives of the market.

In such an era it seems to me that the role of community arts and cultural development is even more vital to the often flagging spirit of the nation. As she wrote in another report in 1976:

Outside the mainstream of professional arts activities, people should be able to communicate, enjoy and practise the arts at all ages and in all walks of life. The scrutiny to which community arts support has recently been subjected -

and I remind you that this was written after the change of government in 1976 -

emphasises the need to develop a coherent rationale for supporting the arts, in particular for the provision of opportunities to participate in artistic activities of choice in contrast to the preservation of high culture.

She goes on to ask the hard question, "Why should government money be spent on the arts?" "What are the social values attaching to the arts?" "Are the social values calculated in terms of individual benefit, personal identity, community benefit, or national identity?" Among the values of investment in community and cultural development she identifies:

Discovering artistic talents and vocational directions, building audiences and patrons for the professional arts, developing esteem for artistic skills, developing aesthetic values, which will be reflected in community behaviour and environment, developing outlets for individuals whose schoolwork, family, environment may be frustrating, unrewarding, unstimulating, unloving, joyless and offering little contribution to self-awareness or self worth.

Finally - and for me most suggestively - she writes:

If education is seen to consist mainly of acquiring information and skills directed to handling known problems and situations, the arts provide opportunities for interpretation, exploration and empathy directed to things and situations which are, to all intents and purposes, unknown. And perhaps the more delectable because they are in a finite sense unknowable. This expansive role of the arts is of crucial importance to define.

This combination of enthusiasm and pragmatism was typical of mum, and inspired all who encountered her. It characterised what might be called her hard-nosed idealism. A paradoxical awareness of the inefficiency of pure rationalism without the effective guidance of long-range dreaming.

What do we mean by community? It seems to me that community arts and culture are different from the privileged state art and culture represented by the so-called major organisations that Lex is so fond of, because of community's essential plurality. This does not mean that community arts should be conflated either intentionally or unintentionally with so-called identity art or worse still, identity politics.

Community has to do with identity, no doubt, but unlike the kind of identity conferred by membership of a group or an institution, community identity is not something we choose but somewhere we discover ourselves to be already situated, by virtue, for example, of our race, our gender, our sexuality, our age, our class, or our geographical location. Communities overlap and each of us belongs to many of them.

This co-existence of communities and through them our possible co-existence in a society transcends the competing and even exclusive claims of individuals, groups, and institutions for themselves. As such, communities are the key constituents of a society worthy of the name. If, as Noel Pearson argues, a government which claims to act "for all Australians" implicitly refuses to acknowledge the rights of some in order to serve the interests of others, then perhaps the concept of a community and of a community of communities is of pressing tactical importance if we are to survive and flourish as a unique coalition of cultures. Thank you.