Although 30 per cent of Australians live in regional and rural areas, those same areas attract just 3 per cent of arts funding, says Australian opera and theatre director Lindy Hume.
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Ms Hume spoke at a Federation University presentation of her essay Restless Giant: Changing Cultural Values in Regional Australia last night.
Billed as as ‘open discussion on how to create opportunities to connect regional and urban arts communities through a truly integrated national arts landscape’, participants in the discussion challenged the status quo of how art and performance can be perceived in Ballarat.
In her address, Ms Hume argued that artists and practitioners outside of the metropolitan area should abandon the appellation of ‘regional’ arts and adopt the term ‘counter-urban’.
In an interview with The Courier prior to delivering her platform paper, Ms Hume said it was imperative the notion of ‘regional’ could no longer be equated with ‘second-best’ or somehow not on the same scale of quality as art produced in the ‘city’.
The metro-centric view of artists based in regional Australia as ‘poor cousins’ is, she suggests, badly mistaken and a lost opportunity. Now is a 'moment of emergence' for regional arts in Australia.
Ms Hume’s paper also articulates the case for better understanding and greater flow between artists and arts organisations in metropolitan and regional centres.
She said that funding for metropolitan companies touring to regions is classed as regional funding, even though the money actually goes to a metropolitan body.
“It (regional funding) can be bumped up from 3 per cent to 15 per cent by that formula, but it doesn’t go to the arts outside of the actual city,” said Ms Hume.
There is a strong and vibrant world of artists making work in country Australia, and they need to communicate with each other more coherently by establishing matrices of influence, she argues.
“Artists need to be more assertive in taking their cultural rights. This increasing metro and regional disconnect – there needs to be a political shift and a civil shift.”