ARTS
Australia
Brush up your har-mo-nee
Rupert Christiansen looks at the problems facing Paul Keating and his visionary policy for the arts Paul Keating has got culture the way other people get God, and there's no stop- ping him. As prelude to publication of his map of the road to republicanism, the bullish Australian Prime Minister has found A$250 million of Federal money to back a clutch of new measures, organisa- tions and projects set out in 'Creative Nation', a visionary policy for the arts, 'her- itage' and 'multi-media' which has been hotly debated here since it was announced last October.
In many respects, 'Creative Nation' is an admirable document, one which Australia should be proud of and which Britain might well envy. (I hope it has found its way to the desk of Labour's promising Department of National Heritage Shadow Minister, Chris Smith.) It is imbued with ICeating's evangelism, as well as his genuine passion for music and architecture in par- ticular. It has grasped the principle that a nation should think of itself not so much as subsidising its culture as investing in it, yet it is properly tight-fisted. Its tenor is stern: it expects a good return on its investment and requires art to be active on its own behalf and attentive to public demands. It endorses and enhances the powers, budget and independence of the Australian Coun- cil (equivalent to the old Arts Council of Great Britain) and it aggressively addresses contentious issues of technological devel- opment, notably the dreaded information highways and byways.
Yet there is also about 'Creative Nation' a curious thick fog. For pages at a time it reads more like a sermon than a policy. Pious assertions about multicultural imper- atives follow back-patting tributes to the excellence of this and the worth of that. At times it becomes immensely tedious: just who are they trying to kid? one wonders. The answer, I think, lies in the common perception that Australia is at a 'critical moment' (a phrase which occurs in the first lines of 'Creative Nation'), marked by the uncertainties consequent to the 1992 Mabo ruling which opened the floodgates to Abo- riginal land claim and left all subsequent settlers under the shadow of some form of dispossession. The descendants of Europe have been told that they have no spiritual rights in the continent, and must find some other way to define themselves. Through- out 'Creative Nation' nervous deference is shown on every page to the 'Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders' in contrast to the embarrassed downplaying of the brute fact that for the last 200 years on this continent the English language and British values have, for good or ill, predominated. The knot into which Australia is now tying itself on this score looked horribly convoluted in a bizarre scene I witnessed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A team of brightly enthusiastic white girls was briskly showing a party of sullen and totally unresponsive Aboriginals round a room dedicated to some magnificent Aboriginal painting. What was striking was that the whites seemed so much more comfortable with the art than the blacks. It was as though the natives were being reintroduced to their confiscated property, washed and ironed. We know this is your religion and we love the fact that it's so important to your wonderful culture, came the message, but we just thought we could look after it better in our air-conditioned gallery. Doesn't it look nice here? Why don't we all enjoy it together in peace and har-mo-nee? 'Leave us alone' was the only answer I could imagine on those impenetrable Abo- riginal faces.
'Creative Nation' asks the same ques- tions, I fear, and meanwhile ignores what is blatantly the fundamental dynamism of Australian culture; intense inter-state corn.; petitiveness. The true spark of artistic endeavour in Australia seems to be lit by the fear in Sydney that Melbourne, or per- ish the thought, Brisbane or Adelaide, might get there first. The copycat instinct runs rampant between those four centres and I am not at all sure that it's a bad thing (look what a touch of it did for Edinburgh, vis-à-vis Glasgow). Inter-state enmity rather than federal har-mo-nee keeps the troops alert and the pulses racing, even if the hostilities are sometimes carried to a pitch of self-destruction.
Adelaide, for instance, has just lost the Grand Prix to Melbourne — but only because Melbourne is ripping out a vast chunk of public park to accommodate a new stadium. Adelaide has taken a fancy, devious revenge: the Melbourne Festival has been locked for months in combat with the Victorian State Opera over who should present the first Australian production of Wagner's Ring; suddenly they are both overtaken on the inside track by the State Opera of South Australia, a relatively mod- est outfit which announces with properly Wagnerian megalomania that it is sinking A$6.4 million into importing to Adelaide a not terribly thrilling production of the work from Paris. So pooh Melbourne, you're bottom, as we used to shriek at prep school. Further furious rounds of this game will doubtless be caused by Sydney's host- ing of the Olympic games in 2000 and the arts jamborees which attend them.
'Creative Nation' is, of course, a federal document, which seeks to unite Australians in a national strategy. The trouble is that the states are jealous for the prestige of their own opera companies, symphony orchestras and modern dance troupes with- out having the tax-paying populations, let alone the ticket-buying audiences, to pro- vide them with solid support. 'We've got to get real about this,' insists Michael Lynch, Keating's new broom at the Australian Council. 'There are going to be casualties, because there is nothing to justify so much duplication of resources.' The successful rationalisation of the British regional opera network is not lost on him.
Room for the expansion of Australian culture lies in the direction of Southern Australia. This, as is well-known, is another of Keating's obsessions (as evinced by his recent crawling defence of Japan's trade barriers against the US) and 'Creative Nation' proclaims it as though it were Manifest Destiny. Brisbane has taken an impressive lead in the field with a big Asia- Pacific Contemporary Art Triennial, but the possibilities are being explored in all sorts of directions; Victorian State Opera, for example, is in the process of setting up a 'commercial division' specifically designed to develop big productions of musicals and popular operas which can tour to the new lyric theatres currently being completed in Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, all hungry for imported products. Whether the traffic might in the longer term work in the other direction too remains to be seen: at the moment, it is still to the London-Paris-New York nexus that Australia looks for its styles and standards. Of course, you're not meant to say that — all eyes are now offi- cially focused on the Aboriginal and Tosses Strait Islander inheritance — but it would be dishonest to pretend that the old colo- nial hang-ups no longer obtained.
Australia still has a big problem with masculinity (Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) and femininity (Muriel's Wedding); a lot of what I witnessed depressingly fitted the tired old debate about the 'cultural cringe' and the 'cultural strut', suggesting people trying too hard to be things they're not. But just as often I was hit by this head-on, I might almost say republican exuberance and exhilaration. I.-heard it in the brilliant young Australian Chamber Orchestra as they played Bartok's Divertimento as though they were standing on hot bricks; I saw it in John Olsen's paintings in the Vic- torian Arts Centre and in the corps of the Australian Ballet as they fearlessly plunged and rose through the supreme challenge of La Bayadere. It's there in Judy Davis's acting, in Peter Carey's fiction. It is a bold, brave note and it is to Paul Keating's credit that 'Creative Nation' shows so much faith in sounding it.
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