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Culture and the arts

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Bronte Beach, Sydney
Jonathon Marks/Tourism Australia

Australia’s arts and cultural activities reflect the nation’s unique blend of different cultures, new influences and old traditions. They are the product of an ancient landscape that is home to both the world’s oldest continuous cultural traditions and also to a rich mix of migrant cultures.

Australia today has a vibrant artistic and cultural scene and all forms of the performing arts, including music, theatre and dance, have strong followings.

Visual arts

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Thousands of people enjoy the Sydney Festival act ‘Sticky’ in the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House, January 2003

Visual artists play a vital role in shaping Australia’s image of itself. In the early 1970s, the works of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists attracted international attention. The transfer of mythological Dreamtime designs from sand paintings to boards and canvases by elders of the Northern Territory Pintupi people was one of many initiatives that have created new connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

During the 1980s and 1990s acclaimed artists such as Rover Thomas and Emily Kngwarreye painted contemporary art that remains grounded in the spiritual traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.

Did you know?

At least 88 per cent of all Australians attend a cultural event or performance every year. The most popular art form is film, attended by about 70 per cent of the population each year. Over 26 per cent attend a popular music concert; 25 per cent go to an art gallery or museum; 18.7 per cent see an opera or musical; 18 per cent attend live theatre; 10.9 per cent attend a dance performance; and 9 per cent attend a classical music concert.

Artists such as Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Sidney Nolan painted an Australia that captured life in the country in the late 19th and early 20th century. Their paintings remain an important part of Australia’s cultural landscape and provide a bridge to the country’s past.

Australia’s contemporary visual artists tell the story of a different Australia. Artists such as William Robinson, Tracey Moffat and Rosella Namok use many media—including photography, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance art—to produce works that reflect issues confronting contemporary Australia, including environmental problems, urban disengagement and changes within the community.

Performing arts

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Artworks created by Australia’s Indigenous people continue to attract international attention
Oliver Strewe/Tourism Australia

Australia’s performing arts are full of energy, originality and diversity. Companies such as Circus Oz and the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Indigenous groups such as Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre are acclaimed around the world for the quality of their productions.

Australian dance is renowned for its exuberance and originality. Major companies such as the Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company tour regularly, with a diverse repertoire of Australian and international work. Australian choreographers and dancers such as Lucy Guerin, Gideon Obarzanek and Maggie Sietsma produce contemporary work that is finding new audiences through seasons at nightclubs and other unconventional venues; and physical theatre companies such as Legs on the Wall can be found performing on the exterior walls of buildings as well as inside them.

Australian music has been greatly enriched by post-war immigration and covers an astonishing range. Virtuoso guitarist Slava Grigoryan, born in Kazakhstan, explores the Argentinean tango and Brazilian bossa nova, while orchestras such as the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and the Australian Chamber Orchestra have world-class status. Violinist Richard Tognetti, pianists Roger Woodward, Geoffrey Tozer and Simon Tedeschi, and conductor and violinist Nicholas Milton are familiar faces on Australian stages and in the world’s concert halls.

Opera Australia, the national company, is the third-busiest opera company in the world; it has as its home the spectacular Sydney Opera House. The legacy of operatic legends such as Dame Nellie Melba and Dame Joan Sutherland has been handed down to stars such as Deborah Riedel, Lisa Gasteen and Yvonne Kenny.

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Indigenous performers at the Barunga Festival, Northern Territory
Paul Blackmore/Tourism Australia

Australian music theatre is a unique blend of creativity and daring, and includes works such as The Boy from Oz, a recent hit on Broadway with Hugh Jackman.

Australia is well known for its original rock and pop music with solid popular foundations set by bands such as silverchair and Kylie Minogue. The national youth radio station Triple J actively promotes emerging Australian talent, and the annual Rock Eisteddfod supports emerging Australian bands and individual musicians. New artists such as Missy Higgins, Jet and Ben Lee are also beginning to enjoy international acclaim.

Each Australian state has a major theatre company in addition to smaller but well-known companies and theatre groups. Much effort is going into audience development, touring to regional Australia, theatre education for the young, access and participation for the disabled and developing new talent in writing, acting and production.

In fact

Government sources provide about $4.9 billion each year in Australia for a wide range of arts, cultural and heritage purposes. The total size of Australia’s arts and related industries sector is $31.8 billion, and more than 2.9 million Australians are involved in work relating to arts, culture and leisure.

Arts in regional Australia

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Cones (1976–82), Bert Flugelman, National Gallery of Australia
Marian Langworthy/Tourism Australia

The Australian Government is committed to ensuring that regional communities can develop and sustain a vibrant cultural life that strengthens community identity and wellbeing and encourages broad participation.

One example of a dynamic, regional arts company is the Flying Fruit Fly Circus. The troupe is made up of children and youth performers. The ‘fruit flies’ attend school and study circus arts. They perform both nationally and internationally and are a great example of ‘ordinary kids’ doing ‘extraordinary things’.

Cultural heritage

Australia’s unique, diverse and vibrant cultural heritage is found in the many different faces of the nation today. It is expressed through customs, folklore, language and traditions, reflected in the natural and built environment, and captured in the objects created and collected.

Australian governments are committed to preserving and making widely accessible the nation’s cultural heritage—whether through tangible items such as paintings, books, oral histories or natural history specimens, or intangibles reflected in traditions and habits.

Did you know?

Book publishers sold 114 million books in Australia in 2002–03. During the same period there were 8553 new Australian books published.

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Film—a cutting edge

Sandra Hall

Australian film-makers and performers continue to move routinely between home and abroad to work. Sydney director Peter Weir’s Master and Commander—a spectacular adaptation drawn from the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian—was one of the great international successes of 2004. And actors such as Nicole Kidman, Geoffrey Rush, Guy Pearce, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Watts and Toni Collette are just a few of the more prominent names among a large and distinguished company of Australians who have carved out film careers for themselves in Australia and abroad. The same goes for Australian-based New Zealanders Jane Campion and Russell Crowe, winner of an Academy Award in 2001 for Best Actor. It’s quite an achievement for a film industry that was virtually moribund before an injection of government money brought it back to life in the early 1970s.

Nonetheless, consistent box office success remains elusive for locally made films, and the past year has seen an intensification of the debate about how best to fund and market them. Helping to spur this debate was the release in 2003 of a series of low-budget comedies that failed to find favour with either critics or audiences. Subsequently, in an effort to add diversity to the mix, the industry’s principal funding body, the Film Finance Corporation, instituted a new scheme aimed at promoting projects of quality that might otherwise have foundered for lack of a commercial pre-sale.

More cheering was the acclaim attracted by Somersault, a first feature by talented writer-director Cate Shortland, when it was launched at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. But although it went on to win 13 of the categories in the Australian Film Institute Awards it, too, did disappointing business.

Difficulties of funding and marketing are nothing new for the Australian film industry. They have gone in tandem with its successes ever since the early years of its revival.

First to make their mark were films about the country’s colonial history. International audiences and critics responded to The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), My Brilliant Career (1979), Breaker Morant (1980) and Gallipoli (1981), all of which took universal themes and set them down on a new frontier—a landscape lit with such golden clarity that the films’ visual beauty was a distinction in itself.

But stories about modern Australia took longer to capture the public imagination. There were isolated successes such as George Miller’s low-budget thriller Mad Max (1979), which dazzled action fans with the visceral energy of its style, as well as introducing a new international star in Mel Gibson. Paul Hogan took the outback hero into the late 20th century with his popular comedy, Crocodile Dundee (1986), and the finely crafted contemporary films of Melbourne director Paul Cox won prestige on the world’s film festival circuit.

Yet it was not until the birth of the so-called ‘quirky’ Australian comedy in the early 1990s that the real turning point occurred. Strictly Ballroom (1993), Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Muriel’s Wedding (1995) supplied evidence of a new vigour—and humour—at work in Australian film-making.

More recently, there have been offbeat successes such as Lantana (2001), Ray Lawrence’s sophisticated ensemble drama, which did particularly well internationally, and Japanese Story (2003), with Toni Collette as an Australian geologist who has a romance with a Japanese businessman during a trip to the Outback. There has also been an upsurge in Australian feature films devoted to Indigenous themes and characters. Among the most successful was Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), adapted from Doris Pilkington Garimara’s book about her mother’s experiences as a member of the ‘stolen generation’—Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their families to be assimilated into ‘white’ society during the 20th century.

And a particular cause for optimism has been the burgeoning of new talent among film-makers in their twenties and thirties—many of them graduates of the Australian Film, Radio and Television School—who have produced entertaining and accomplished first features at a remarkably low cost.

Technically, too, the Australian industry has seen remarkable advances, with the development of studios sophisticated enough to accommodate productions of the size and complexity of The Matrix (1999), Mission Impossible II (2000), Moulin Rouge (2001), and Attack of the Clones (2002), the most recent episode of George Lucas’s Star Wars series, which was filmed partly at Sydney’s Fox Studios.

In an industry dominated by Hollywood, the life of any national cinema is a precarious one. But the tenacity and creativeness of the Australian film-making community means that it is still able to face the future with confidence.

Sandra Hall is film critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and the author of several books on Australian film and television.

Online

Australian writers—a unique breed

Gerard Windsor

‘Unemployed at last’, begins Such is Life, one of Australia’s great novels, first published in 1903. The title itself was the last remark of an outlawed bushranger, Ned Kelly, before the hangman’s trapdoor opened beneath him in a Melbourne jail in 1880. Both phrases capture a distinctively Australian style—witty, wry, laconic, cool-eyed about the world and what it has to offer.

Unsurprisingly, the earliest Australian literature that is still popular are the short stories of Henry Lawson, bush tales from the 1890s of endurance and humour written in a bare style that we now think of as peculiarly modern. Any half-decent writing will always be about love and death. But the Australian additive to these eternal questions is European civilisation being set up in the Southern Hemisphere, in an environment totally alien, amongst an Indigenous people at first little understood, and even after that only gradually understood. It’s a lot for the writer to digest, for Australia, in existence as a federated country for only one hundred years, has had to do a crash course in nation building.

Australia already has one Nobel Prize for Literature to its credit, with the stern, mordantly funny, yet epic, novelist Patrick White winning the award in 1973. The country’s novelist of the moment is Tim Winton, a boy prodigy who has lived up to all his early promise. Winton relishes a knockabout, hometown boy image, crazy about surf and the simple pleasures. His writing, however, brims with verbal freshness, and the structure and reach of his books is ambitious and sophisticated, his characters vividly true, his charting of life on the western littoral of Australia wellnigh exhaustive, and his theological underpinning rich and integrated.

I’d recommend four other writers, and one collective. The bush ballads of AB (‘Banjo’) Paterson, a contemporary of Lawson’s who didn’t wear himself out so early with drink, are good fun, very recitable, and include the classic poems The Man from Snowy River and Waltzing Matilda. For something completely different there is the contemporary poet Les Murray, a writer of extraordinary linguistic and rhythmic inventiveness. Murray is a bundle of paradoxes, identifying himself as one of the simple country folk, while being in fact a polymath, a celebrator of the rural world yet also of the modern city and its machines and constructions. And in secular Australia he’s an almost embarrassingly religious poet. Any betting individual should put money on Murray the next time the Nobel goes to an English-language poet.

Much of the best writing in Australia at the moment is non-fictional prose. Helen Garner’s major achievements are her urban realist fiction and her analytical reportage. She represents a subtle, sympathetic feminism, and her writing is both tough-minded and humane, lucid, observant, and a self-scrutinising memorial for the Australians and the values that came of age in the 1960s. She could be paired with Robert Dessaix, a contemporary who only began publishing in the 1990s. Dessaix’s essays and autobiographies are whimsical, intelligent, scholarly, intimate, and teasing in their subtlety and argumentativeness. A writer of broad appeal like Garner, he has taken a gay sensibility out beyond any niche market or ghetto and wowed a broad audience with a blend of charm, tough logic and high jinks.

Australians are inveterate travellers, and there’s a whole swag of expatriate writers who are internationalist yet remain very Australian. Try anything you come across by Germaine Greer, Shirley Hazzard, Robert Hughes, Clive James, Peter Porter. They’re dazzling, learned, funny, cranky, and can even sometimes express the milk of a very rich human kindness. They’re never, ever dull.

Gerard Windsor has published eight books of fiction, essays and memoir, the most recent being the novel I Have Kissed Your Lips.

Vibrant fashions

Natasha Inchley

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Part of Akira’s European Spring–Summer collection, 2005
Stephen Ward

Australia’s reputation as a vibrant, individualist nation is perfectly illustrated through its fashion—a rich and colourful mix of exuberant style. Start with the impressive cross-cultural fusion of Akira Isogawa’s aesthetic. It’s clear the designer is blessed with a rare romanticism, shot through with a delicate thread from his native Japanese heritage. In his collections shown in Paris and Sydney each year, the designer combines these influences beautifully, reinterpreting them as a modern bouquet—a tantalising vision for both the art world and those who adore his hand-worked collections.

Also a regular on the international circuit is Australia’s red-carpet queen, Collette Dinnigan. With high-profile fans such as Naomi Watts, Sarah O’Hare, Helena Christensen and Charlize Theron, Dinnigan’s lace-trimmed dresses, wispy layered skirts and beaded satin gowns are housed in over 80 premiere stores worldwide including her own boutique in London’s exclusive Chelsea Green. She has also teamed with UK retailer Marks & Spencer to create the exclusive lingerie collection Wild Hearts.

Then there’s the new guard. This maverick generation takes its inspiration from Australia’s surf culture, graffiti, art and childhood dreams, then creates its own unique sense of style with a completely different set of rules. Take Tsubi, a renegade label based near Sydney’s Bondi Beach, best known for its roughed-up denim and catwalk high jinks. Add to the list sass&bide, a collaboration between dynamic duo Heidi Middleton and Sarah Jane Clarke, who parade whimsical creations with bohemian spirit both here and in New York, and then Willow, the lingerie-based line that recently debuted its sequin-strewn confections on the international runways. All three labels follow singular and creative paths, proving that you don’t need to be an established fashion house to stand out.

Not surprisingly, Australian designers have also made their mark on the international swimwear market. The beach is an undeniable inspiration for antipodean designers the likes of Zimmermann and Tigerlily, with their tropical-print bikinis and sculptural maillots. There’s also a lot to be said for Australia’s diversity and spirit in fashion. Hailing from Brisbane, Easton Pearson has made romantic, peasant style its signature, while Melbourne labels Maticevski and Scanlan & Theodore both demonstrate ingenious tailoring interspersed with feminine, whimsical and thoughtful designs. Each season, Scanlan & Theodore plucks the trends from the air, musses them up and makes them appealing to a woman who likes her clothes on the softer side. Its collection blends fashion’s current obsessions—fabulous swirl prints, delicate silks and lingerie touches—with bright unexpected colours and a sense of our sunny lifestyle.

Ultimately, what unites this group of creative leaders is their quest for personal creative fulfilment regardless of what the industry dictates. But as with most things Australian, a sense of adventure is to be expected.

Natasha Inchley is the fashion news director at Vogue Australia.

Last update May 2005