What strikes me as funny are Ballarat council's global announcements that the city is focused upon achieving or that it has achieved a world-renown as a creative city.

Invariably, the gobbily goop that constitutes Council's strategic arts strategy attempts to explain how best to rescue Ballarat's culture from stagnation.

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Its unswerving loyalty to its own way of thinking is unfortunately damaging. We are left desperate to know just what "culture" in this context means. There's no doubt it is a confusing word.

"Culture" it can be said has three meanings (putting to one side any more sinister connotations). There's culture as a means of individual enrichment, as when we say that someone is "cultured".

There's culture as a group's "particular way of life," as when we talk about French culture, corporate culture, or multiculturalism.

And, there's culture as an activity, pursued through museums, concerts, theatre, books, and movies that might be encouraged by government.

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These three ideas of culture are actually quite different, and compete with one another. But each time we use the word "culture," we incline toward one or the other. Ballarat Council's bias to the third is clear. But such an approach is a disservice.

There is one more meaning that is apposite. Culture as an unpredictable expression of human potential for its own sake. In other words, it is organic, spontaneous and plots its own course. It is not dependent upon or driven by government policy.

In a post-COVID world, I feel the time is right to rethink ways of improving our culture in its broadest sense, and not by just selective referencing its parts. This is where I suggest our emphasis now should be.

Seeking to rescue Ballarat's culture is perhaps a noble aim, but so is taking an interest in understanding our community, in its artistic and intellectual life, in its identity, in its ways of living and making it better.

My wish is that Ballarat folk might discover, together, a good way of life; that their good way of life might express itself in their habits, institutions, and activities; and that those, in turn, might help individuals flourish in their own ways a world in which our collective attitudes and institutions further everyone's individual growth.

Maybe, in such a world, the meaning of "culture" would be more obvious; we wouldn't have to look it up.

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