why this work is important - Community Arts Network Western Australia

© 2012 Community Arts Network WA Ltd (CAN WA)
CAN WA supports community arts and cultural development practice in
local government in Western Australia through its nationally recognised
Community Engagement and Cultural Planning training, the Creative
Networks Fund and by offering other professional development and
networking opportunities. See canwa.com.au for more information.
Project Management by Pilar Kasat, Sian Brown
Edited by Jenny Bunbury, June Moorhouse, Sian Brown
Written by Sandra Nicolaides, Bill Bunbury, Jon Hawkes
Design by Qalam Design
Photos of wildflowers by Pilar Kasat
The following photographs may contain the names or images of people who are now deceased.
Some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities may be distressed by seeing the name, or
image of a community member who has passed away.

TEN PROJECTS

contents
4 Foreword EMERITUS PROF. MARGARET SEARES AO
6 Introduction PILAR KASAT
7 Editorial SIAN BROWN
10 Why this work is important JON HAWKES
26 Ten projects – community arts and cultural development in local government BILL BUNBURY & SANDRA NICOLAIDES
68 How to – community arts and cultural development in local government SANDRA NICOLAIDES
74 Recommended resources
77 Definitions
79 About the writers
TEN PROJECTS 3

growing communities
Emeritus Prof. Margaret Seares AO
Former Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor at The
University of Western Australia
Previously CEO with the Western Australian
Department for the Arts (now the Department of
Culture and the Arts), and Chair of the Australia
Council, the Australian Government’s arts funding
and advisory board, Margaret Seares was also
a member of the Foreign Minister’s Australia
International Cultural Council and a Director of the
Australia Business Arts Foundation.
Margaret Seares has served on many boards
including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s
Arts Advisory Committee, the West Australian
Symphony Orchestra, and the Creative Industries
Innovation Centre, and the Expert Advisory
Committee for Humanities & Creative Arts for the
Australian Research Council. She is currently on the
board of the Chamber for Arts and Culture and the
Perth International Arts Festival.
In 2003 she was awarded an Officer of the Order of
Australia for her contribution to arts and education.
4

foreword
A decade or so ago the Australia Council for the Arts
commissioned the first major research report on
Australians’ attitudes towards the arts, which involved
surveying and interviewing a broad cross-section
of the population.
The research had many interesting findings, as well as
some that were more self-evident. One that surprised
many who worked in the arts was that, when a sizeable
portion of the community spoke about ‘the arts’, they
tended to refer to a very narrow range of creative
activities. ‘Opera’ or ‘classical concerts’, for example,
were regarded as ‘the arts’, whereas literature, novels
and poetry were not. People who wrote or recited
poetry, or who were potters, or artists, or craftspeople, or
photographers, did not readily identify themselves with
‘the arts’, despite the fact that the activities they were
undertaking as either a hobby, for leisure, or as an abiding
passion are generally seen as being part of the creative
endeavour of our community.
So it should come as no surprise that our local
communities are actually full of artists, even if the people
within them would not describe themselves as such.
They may or may not earn a living from their art. They
may or may not have achieved renown for it. It might
be something they do every day, or only once a year. It
may occur very publically or it may be undertaken totally
within the home. So the questions for local governments
are: Where and through whom are arts and culture
occurring in your community? In what ways does your
Council support them? In what ways could you facilitate
even more activity in your local area and give even more
people the unique experiences that the arts can bring,
both as creators and participants? Some local government
authorities have already embarked on the transformation
of their communities through arts and culture. It is our
hope that the others, having read what both Pilar Kasat
and Jon Hawkes have to say, and having read the stories
contained within this publication, will see it as a key
priority to do likewise.
Emeritus Prof. Margaret Seares AO
5

growing communities
introduction
I am delighted to present this publication to you; I feel it is
long overdue. It has been more than ten years since
CAN WA published a special resource for local
governments. This was a guide to cultural planning
which provided practical information to encourage local
governments in Western Australia to take up arts and
cultural planning with their communities.
It is wonderful to acknowledge that today it is a fact
that local government contributes greatly to the
planning and delivery of arts and culture for Western
Australian communities. In 2008-09, local government
funding for cultural activities represented 17% of total
cultural funding provided by all levels of government. 1
The provision of libraries (in partnership with the State
Government) and cultural facilities is a highlight of local
government’s commitment to the cultural life of their
communities. Community arts projects, festivals and
events have also become highlight activities for many
local governments in metropolitan Perth and in regional
WA. Some local governments have gone a step further
and have embraced the broader role of arts and culture
in addressing community and social challenges. Hence
they are developing sophisticated approaches to effective
cultural development and planning that builds community
engagement, cohesion and resilience.
It is also a fact that there are still some local governments
in WA who are not entirely sure of the benefits and longterm
impact that their involvement in arts and culture
will have in their communities. This publication hopes
to re-invigorate those who are already convinced of the
positive outcomes of involvement in arts and culture and
to encourage and inspire those who might still need to be
persuaded of its benefits.
CAN WA invited Jon Hawkes, author of the ground
breaking ‘The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: culture’s
essential role in public planning,’ who is one of Australia’s
leading commentators on cultural policy, to write a
renewed case for why investing in arts and culture is now
even more important than ten years ago.
In the past decade Western Australian communities have
undergone profound changes, both economically and
socially, and whilst some communities and regional areas
are experiencing huge financial prosperity others are
languishing. There are very real environmental pressures,
social challenges and also huge opportunities. Within
this context local governments have found themselves
under immense sustainability pressures; questions about
their role and their relationship to their local communities
have become more relevant. It is in this complex array of
global and local conditions that this publication emerges.
I urge you to read Jon’s article entitled ‘Why this work
is important.’ He makes a compelling case that reminds
us that arts and culture are not the decoration and the
trimmings which we can have once all the ‘important
bits’ are in place. Culture is fundamental to our humanity,
it helps us define who we are and through the arts
and cultural expression we can manifest our collective
creativity and sense of place and identity. At times of
uncertainty, complexity and challenge, knowing ‘who
we are’ provides a solid foundation to look forward with
a clearer vision. We need imagination and creativity to
develop that future. Our culture provides us with the
values and aspirations to formulate a positive vision. The
arts enable us to express today, the future of tomorrow.
I hope this publication assists and inspires many more of
you who are involved in local government to make arts
and culture ‘your business’.
Pilar Kasat
Managing Director
CAN WA
1 http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/08D25D1FC1B64BB0CA2577C00013B5C6?opendocument
6

Growing Communities is designed to inspire people
working in local government, to continue creating
community art and cultural development projects. This
publication celebrates the work that is taking place within
local government in WA telling the stories of ten different
projects that have occurred in recent years.
These stories give you insight into the diversity of each
of these communities and the creativity and strategic
thinking of the local government staff, the artists and the
participants involved.
Firstly, read Jon Hawke’s article exploring the role of
community arts within local government and the deeper
significance of this for us all. Revealing the connections
of ‘art-making’ in society with sustainability, social justice
and democracy, his article urges local government to
make community art a priority.
Growing Communities aims to reveal the various
perspectives and experiences of each project, from the
big picture concerns of a CEO to the personal moments
of transformation of the participants. Writers, Bill Bunbury
and Sandra Nicolaides interview key representatives from
each local government, including Mayors, CEOs, project
managers, the artistic facilitators, project participants and
project managers.
The stories have been gathered from all over the state
with both writers travelling through changing landscapes,
from the red dust of Port Hedland to the wildflower
country of Mullewa.
These stories include an arts project in Waroona, born
out of the ashes of a fire that destroyed the one hundredyear
old Drakesbrook School. This building that had played
such an important role in the lives of the locals once again
brought the community together as they relived their
memories. You will read about a touching and amazing
City of Perth project that reveals a history of returning
Aboriginal servicemen and ‘The Coolbaroo League’ that
began in a modest hall in East Perth.
The ten projects showcased are all different however
each demonstrates a collaborative approach with the
community, arts administrators and artists working
together. They all used creative mediums to explore or
celebrate their community’s cultural identity, including its
values and ideas.
Growing Communities will be distributed throughout
Western Australia to government, media, arts and
community workers, and the general public. Through this
publication we encourage and inspire you to do more of
this important work in local government cultivating the
creativity and well being of your local communities.
Sian Brown
Arts and Cultural Development Manager
CAN WA
editorial
7

growing communities
8

TEN PROJECTS
9

why this work
why this work is important
is important
growing communities
Jon Hawkes
Jon is one of Australia’s leading commentators
on cultural policy. He is the author of the
groundbreaking The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability,
which is recognized around the world for its
contribution to the understanding of cultural
policies. He is the resident Cultural Analyst with
the Cultural Development Network of Victoria and
has been Director of Community Music Victoria,
a Fellow of the Community Cultural Development
Board (Australia Council), Director of the Australian
Centre of the International Theatre Institute and a
founding member of Circus Oz and the Australian
Performing Group (Pram Factory).
The United Cities and Local Government (UCLG)
declared in 2010, that ‘Culture is the Fourth Pillar
of Sustainability’.
THIS BOOK DESCRIBES A RANGE OF WONDERFUL
ACTIVITIES. THE STORIES ARE INSPIRATIONAL;
THEY ARE FILLED WITH IMAGES OF
EMPOWERMENT – PEOPLE WORKING AND PLAYING
TOGETHER AND, IN THE PROCESS, EXPRESSING
THEIR IDENTITIES, HOPES, ACHIEVEMENTS AND
RESPECT FOR EACH OTHER.
After the glow, the questions that emerged for me were:
widely embraced? and,
encouraged with public support, particularly at a
local level?
I think it may be because public arts support tends to
focus on the outward manifestations of professional
production while not recognising the need to care for the
ground that supports these emanations.
The largest items of public investment in the arts are
usually for the development, upkeep and management
of facilities for the storage and presentation of traditional
artefacts and rituals; next is usually subsidy of the
industry that makes content for these facilities; third is
the training of personnel for employment in these fields;
and fourth is often schemes to increase consumption of
the products available from these facilities.
If it is there at all, the smallest item is always for the
support of community-based, community-envisioned and
community-implemented arts activities. That is, the sorts
of activities described in this book.
These investment priorities may make sense if arts
production is viewed through an industrial or commercial
lens. But they start to look a bit threadbare when other
points of view are brought to bear. If art also describes a
social process, a creative process, an experience, as well
as an industry that makes stuff for consumption, then
some other priorities raise their heads.
To recognise that the most profound impacts of artistic
endeavour come through the actual process of making,
and to recognise that all people have the capacity, right,
need and desire to directly experience these impacts,
and to recognise that this experience has profound
social benefits must surely alter, if not reverse the
traditional priorities.
10

ExtravagANTza at ‘Keela Dreaming’, Kellerberrin, photo by Toni Wilkinson
WHY THIS WORK IS IMPORTANT
11

growing communities
I don’t question that witnessing the results of arts
production can be profoundly moving, but that should
not divert focus from the benefits communities derive
from actively making their own art. Energetic local arts
production is the foundation of a healthy arts ecology.
It is also at the foundation of much more: our sense
of ourselves, our sense of each other, our collective
memories, our collective problem-solving capacities, our
pleasure in living. The stories in this book beautifully
document the truth of this assertion.
I simply do not understand how investment in local
art-making is not a top priority for any government
committed to sustainability, social justice or democracy.
Perhaps it’s because we live in a world where that old
saw, ‘what can be counted counts, what can’t doesn’t’,
holds sway. To the point that we fear that if we can’t
express (I mean articulate in rational language) the
significance of an activity then it can’t have any. This
leads to the not uncommon suspicion among many public
servants that art (and even more so, community art) is
really just decoration that should only be thought about
after the real issues have been dealt with (or at least that
their colleagues and superiors are of this opinion).
The consequence of these fears is that a great deal
of government rhetoric about the arts lacks a confident
and grounded demonstration of what is at stake.
Instead of bold clarity we get desperate and defensive
rationales, new age sentimentality, aggressively
enthusiastic corporate speak, dull bureaucratese,
unsupportable quality of life claims and cries for the
preservation of ancient rituals. And I haven’t come across
any poetry. It is little wonder that local arts development
remains relatively invisible 1 . This publication being a
notable exception.
My purpose in this essay is to offer some alternate ways
of thinking about art and its function in society. The ideas
that emerge from this other way of looking may make it
a little easier to present a convincing case to and within
local government.
Imagine convincing oneself, and then others, that
Council would be mad not to go all out supporting the
participatory arts activities of its constituents. My
mission is to help develop the language that achieves
just that.
I have structured this material around five themes:
collaborative art-making
from which art-making can be usefully viewed
As I’ve already mentioned ‘community art’ and ‘artmaking’
and now that I’ve dropped ‘participatory’ and
‘collaborative’, I should begin with some clarity about the
‘art’ that I’ll be attempting to express the value of.
I’ve read reams of material about the value of art, and the
one thing all have in common is that they’re talking about:
Very few talk about the value of making art.
For me, making is both the most valuable and the most
undervalued aspect of ’arting’. I say ‘arting’ in homage to
Christopher Small who invented the word ’musicking’ to
emphasise the fact that music is an activity not a thing, a
verb, not a noun 2 . And so it should be with all arts. The
fundamental value is in the doing.
Which is to say that, while I recognise the worth of the
Keeping Place, the Artefact and the Artist, in this instance
I’m on about a more fundamental level – what was known
for a while as community arts and now, most often, as
participatory arts. This phrase denotes empowered and
hands-on community involvement in collaborative artmaking.
Its practice embodies the principle that we are
all creative and that we all have the capacity, need, right,
responsibility and desire to be actively involved in making
our own culture.
The ‘we’ in the above is not just the aggregation
of individuals, but also the overlapping and shifting
groups into which these individuals connect. That is,
communities also have collective capacities, needs,
rights, responsibilities and desires. I’m trying to
emphasise the point that I’m not just talking about
individual needs, etc, here but of the needs of
communities as well. I’m also accepting that art-making
is, at its most effective, a social, co-operative, fulfilling
and engaging activity.
Now, as I’ve said, nearly all current evaluations of the arts
focus on the value of the product/result:
national) genius
Despite these impressive traits, I’m convinced that
the value of the product dribbles into insignificance in
comparison to the value of the practice. That is, the
value of collaborative and participatory arts practice in
communities – its value both to the wellbeing of each
individual and to society at large.
12

L>R ‘Fired Up Youth Arts Project’, City of Stirling/CAN WA, photo by Sian Brown
Very few talk
about the value of
making art
WHY THIS WORK IS IMPORTANT
13

Art-making facilitates the outpourings of our innate creativity. It lets us document our dreams.
growing communities
L>R ‘Beats, Breaks and Skills’, Northbridge Youth Engagement project, Department of Culture and the Arts /CAN WA, photos by Lucy Ridsdale
14

Creative and collaborative play:
in order to survive, we NEED to learn, and to
learn to enjoy, doing things co-operatively; if our
life’s journey is undertaken with experientiallybased
expectations that co-operative work can be
productive and fulfilling, then it’s more likely to turn
out that way. Song, dance and music-making in
particular, give us that opportunity, but it seems to
me that most other creative activities (from imagemaking
to story telling, from gardening to cooking,
from games to rituals) offer a similar context.
Art-making is fundamental to collaboration and
social cohesion.
The importance and value of participatory and collaborative art-making
If one puts aside the usual criteria outlined above, one
has to come up with a different but at least as persuasive
a framework. One that:
and,
aspect of becoming human and of maintaining
community.
The first step is to express what art ‘is’ as distinct from
what art is good for – its intrinsic value.
Connection: Art-making puts us in touch with the
unknown, the unconscious, the muse, the irrational,
the imaginative. It is our link with the mystic, with
that aspect of ourselves, and of others, that is apart
from reason.
Expression: Art-making facilitates the outpourings of
our innate creativity. It lets us document our dreams.
One can think of art as a channel through which we
breathe in (connection) and breathe out (expression).
These characteristics offer every person a way of
applying their imagination in their lives 3 .
With these foundational values expressed, it becomes
possible to demonstrate that these qualities give artmaking
the capacity to enhance many of the fundamental
conditions of human existence. It is indeed a tool with a
myriad of applications. These include:
Making sense:
our insatiable quest to make sense of our
surroundings is facilitated through art-making.
We NEED art-making to compose patterns and
‘connect the dots’. We don’t choose to make sense
of the world around us, and our place in it; we are
hardwired to go at it from the moment we are
conscious. Long before logic, science, philosophy
and faith become tools, our creative imaginations
are hard at work.
Art-making is fundamental to how we
make meaning.
Different ways of seeing:
making art opens us to seeing ourselves, others
and the world we live in, in entirely new ways. The
flashes of insight, lateral connections and intuitive
epiphanies that come with the exercise of creativity
are essential tools for discovering effective solutions
to living on this planet.
Art-making is fundamental to innovation and
problem-solving.
WHY THIS WORK IS IMPORTANT
15

Belonging and connectedness:
Transmission:
growing communities
the process of making art together creates ties
between people, and between people and place,
that are enormously powerful, not least because
the binding is at an emotional level. It comes as
no surprise that sociological researchers have
discovered, for example, that music is the primary
medium through which young people develop their
individual and social senses of identity.
Art-making is fundamental to wellbeing
and engagement.
Memory:
our sense of the past, our primary avenue to
understanding and expressing our heritage, and the
stimuli that activate our own memories are, more
often than not, based in acts of creativity.
Art-making is fundamental to heritage and tradition.
Ceremony:
marking significant occasions, be they
anniversaries, assemblies, openings, closings,
mournings, or celebrations, always involves applying
artistic imagination.
Art-making is fundamental to ritual.
the advertising industry understands better than any,
just how powerful the arts can be in enhancing the
effectiveness of a message.
Art-making is fundamental to communication.
Education:
educational researchers have been telling us for
decades how useful creative practices can be in
facilitating learning.
Art-making is fundamental to learning.
Place making/animating:
both the built environment and the activities within
it can be artful. Everyone knows more than a couple
of places where it is the art of the place that makes
the place.
Art-making is fundamental to the design and
animation of public space.
All of these ‘instrumental’ functions stem
from art’s intrinsic values: its capacity to make
inspirational connections and its power to embody
awesome expressions.
There’s no doubt that engaging with the results of artmaking
can have profound effects (there’s many a person
whose life has been changed by a book and many for
whom experiencing a concert takes them to heights that
are otherwise unachievable).
What I have tried to demonstrate is that it is in the
making that the most profound effects occur. And that
in this age of specialisation and consumer frenzy, a
rediscovery of DIY art is urgently needed.
So what is at stake with this attempt to describe the
value of art-making?
I don’t think it’s too great a claim to say our humanity,
both in terms of individual fulfilment and of benign
social cohesion.
So that’s the first theme explored. Perhaps this exposition
may be useful in demonstrating to the engineers and
the accountants that art-making has a more important
function than simply being the decoration that, if one has
any time and money left, one might allow to be added
after the really important issues have been dealt with 4 .
16

Collaborative creativity is at the foundation of building connectivity and purpose.
‘Beats, Breaks and Skills’, Northbridge Youth Engagement project, Department of Culture and the Arts /CAN WA, photo by Lucy Ridsdale
WHY THIS WORK IS IMPORTANT
17

Independent Perspectives From Which Art-Making Can Be Usefully Viewed: Needs
growing communities
It’s all very well to make claims for art that arise directly
from its own attributes. It would be useful if there were
ways of contextualising the value of art within other
independent frameworks.
One of the most obvious of these is needs theory.
Humans have devoted much thought to the classification
of human needs. Where might art-making fit as a fulfiller
of human needs?
For a long time, needs theory was not a very friendly
place for the arts. Up until quite recently, Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs 5 has been the most common
reference point (despite having been developed more
than 50 years ago and subject to constant criticism
since). With its pyramid formation, it’s expressly based
on the belief that, quite literally, the most basic needs
must be met before the ‘higher order’ ones can. It clearly
identifies creative needs as being the icing on the cake
(one might say, the snow on the summit). This rather
antiquated notion comfortably supports the ‘art-asdecoration’
notions I referred to earlier.
Maslow and his colleagues were developing their
psychology movement of the post-war period, a time
in which creativity and imagination were not widely
recognised as having much of a contribution to make to
the dominant paradigms of efficiency and advantage.
More recent models rise out of conflict resolution and
development theory. More often than not, these are
presented as spectrums rather than hierarchies, in
recognition that we have simultaneous, complementary,
interactive and fluctuating needs, and that a significant
part of life is the constant negotiation of competing
I am particularly attracted to the taxonomy of the Chilean
economist, Manfred Max-Neef 6 because of the beauty
of the conceptual framework he has developed. He has
refined needs into an elegant and coherent set of oneword
conditions or states; he then concisely nominates
the qualities, things, actions and settings required for
their effective fulfilment. The result is a model that is
accessible and functional.
He also characterises the range of needs ‘satisfiers’
as violators or destroyers, pseudosatisfiers, inhibiting
satisfiers, singular satisfiers, or synergic satisfiers.
After intensely studying the matrix of qualities, etc
in his chart, I can’t help but conclude that art-making
is a synergic satisfier. Perhaps, keeping in mind the
instrumental qualities I outlined earlier, it can be shown to
have a positive impact on ALL of the nine ‘fundamental
human needs’ that Max-Neef identifies. I have been
unable to imagine any other ‘satisfier’ that has as broad a
‘synergic’ influence.
To my mind, an arts policy in need of an independent
rationale could do far worse than to integrate its thinking
with contemporary needs theory.
‘Yarns of the Heart’ doll making workshop, CAN WA, photo by Cecile Williams
18

Independent Perspectives From Which Art-Making Can Be Usefully Viewed: Rights
Since the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, we have
been able to claim ‘the right freely to participate in the
cultural life of the community’ 7 . Sixty years later, the
Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of
the UN’s Economic and Social Council received a paper 8
in which it was opined that ‘under international law, five
human rights are generally understood as cultural rights:
and its applications;
moral and material interests resulting from any
scientific, literary or artistic production of which the
person is the author, and
creative activity.’
The Council of Europe Compendium website 9 states that,
‘in international discourse, cultural rights are seen as part
of civil rights relating to:
creative work;
benefits accruing from scientific, literary and
artistic production;
equally accessible and available cultural, library and
information and leisure services;
cultural identity.’
The primary focus of international cultural rights
development has been in relation to those of indigenous
peoples 10 and to the peoples in and from developing
countries 11 . Nevertheless, this has not diluted the original
intention to develop frameworks with universal relevance.
What this body of work offers arts policy makers is
another independent basis on which to build reasonable
arguments for public support of art-making. This is
particularly the case if one accepts that rights aren’t worth
the paper they’re written on unless constituents have
the opportunity to exercise them. An important aspect of
governance should be focused on ensuring and facilitating
these opportunities.
Dolls from ‘Yarns of the Heart’ doll making project, CAN WA, photo by Nicola Davison
WHY THIS WORK IS IMPORTANT
19

The Value Of Art-Making To Local Government
growing communities
Most of the value described above accumulates to
individuals and the communities in which they mingle.
Even though this provides more than enough reason
for active public support, participatory arts also offer
significant governance-enhancing opportunities.
As a reminder, what I wrote before bears repeating:
participatory arts describes empowered and handson
community involvement in art-making. Its practice
embodies the principle that we are all creative and that
we all have the capacity, need, right, responsibility and
desire to be actively involved in making our own culture.
And that if we don’t, it is inevitable that we will become
alienated, disconnected and pissed off.
‘Our Secret River Performance’, Denmark Arts, photo by Nic Duncan
But back to how this practice can improve the ways
we run ourselves. There’s plenty of evidence to
demonstrate that participatory arts can be useful in
governance because:
through art-making make it easier for them to
become better and more effective citizens;
community education, community building, health
promotion, cross-cultural understanding, etc, will
enhance organisational responsiveness, delivery
and flexibility; and
of governance has the capacity to improve
community engagement, communications,
decision-making, policy development, expression
of goals and evaluation.
So, on the one hand I’m saying that it is a basic
democratic right that every community have access
to the resources that will allow them to make art,
to exercise their creativity, to make and express their
own meanings.
On the other hand I’m saying that participatory artmaking
is an invaluable instrumental tool:
healthy and engaged citizens;
social communications;
objectives, including, not least, the building
of community.
The sort of long term sustainable social change that is
really needed (that is, universal respect, engagement,
empowerment and fulfilment) can only be achieved
through the widespread application of participatory
arts activities.
Why? Because collaborative creativity is at the
foundation of building connectivity and purpose. And
without these, everything else is ashes 12 .
20

Approaches To Engagement
If the foregoing has been sufficient to encourage the
reader to at least entertain the notion that there are
powerful reasons for actively encouraging participatory
art-making, then we can now consider how to go about it.
This section of the essay focuses on attitudinal and
behavioural approaches that can facilitate development
from way before a specific program is designed
and implemented.
A key area of cultural development at the local level
is within the agencies responsible for facilitating that
development. Without change within these agencies,
their capacity to productively assist communities to
develop their cultures will be inhibited.
Two fundamental challenges need to be successfully
dealt with:
The first challenge is unawareness, and the
response should be learning and advocacy.
A society’s health and capacity to effectively
respond to change is fundamentally dependent
on the energetic engagement of its people. This
can be encouraged, focussed and maintained by
supporting local cultural development.
This argument needs to be understood
and promoted.
The second challenge is insensitivity, and the
response should be listening and self-examination.
The values and behaviours that surround State
interventions significantly affect their impact.
Particularly in the area of local cultural development,
the way that State agents choose to engage with
the communities they serve will profoundly affect
what happens.
Bureaucracies can’t help themselves; history shows
us that these systems inevitably exhibit a range
of tendencies designed to make the world more
manageable, more predictable, more secure, more
measurable. Perfectly understandable, but not really
conducive to discovery. For art-making to flourish these
tendencies need to be recognised and reined in 13 .
Government may be the biggest threat to local cultural
development, but it is also its greatest hope. Statesupported
creative approaches to facilitating local cultural
development have the potential to take us many steps
toward resolving the crisis we are in.
How can this threat be transformed into hope? How
can this potential be realised? How can a creative
approach to local cultural development be achieved? What
might ‘learning and advocacy’ and ‘listening and selfexamination’
initiatives look like? What is to be done?
I believe change is necessary at two levels - in the
values and behaviour of those at the senior levels of the
agencies of public support for culture, and in the ways
that communities go about dealing with these agencies.
For now, I’ll focus on the public agencies, where, as I
have said, there is a lot of learning to be done:
There’s a range of creative skills that urgently need
development among agency staff:
Sympathetic ears:
The art of ‘really’ listening and the exploration of
alternate ways of facilitating community expression.
Golden tongues:
The art of saying what one means in ways that strike
responsive chords with the listeners - what might be
called accessible expression.
Soft hands:
The art of service as opposed to control; how to ‘let
go’, how to trust in the capacities of communities.
Dancing feet:
The art of facilitating community initiative - how to
lead without threat, how to recognise and honour
emerging and half-formed visions.
Enquiring minds:
The art of respectful curiosity - how to stay open
to surprise, how to develop an appreciation, and
capacity to express, the eternal synthesis between
diverse cultures as they rub against each other.
Then there’s:
that enhance staff contribution to agency culture.
that enhance staff engagement in collaborative
creativity.
at which communities can creatively mingle,
engage in visionary discourse, celebrate their
existence and be fruitfully listened to by the
agencies responsible for facilitating their selfdirected
development.
This may appear to be a paltry contribution in the face of
the problems facing the public sector, but ultimately the
solutions are in the hands of the agencies - see things
differently and the solutions will emerge. What I am
proposing here is a different perspective 14 .
WHY THIS WORK IS IMPORTANT
21

What’s Needed
growing communities
If one can imagine that there might be an agency
exhibiting most of the characteristics described above,
what might it then actually do to:
fulfilment of human needs; and,
Or, to make the task a bit more practical, how might
that agency most effectively stimulate the development
of independent, self-sustaining, inclusive, welcoming,
regularly occurring, participatory, collaborative art-making?
To my way of thinking, the answer lies not so much in the
implementation of proactive interventionary programs,
or in exemplary model projects, but in recognising that
for communities to achieve maximum engagement in
creative participation, they need widespread and easy
access to a range of resources. These include:
Recognition:
public recognition and promotion of the value of
their activities and the importance of their status;
confidence in their cultural function and the public
support for carrying out that function.
Time:
there are many options; for example - a shorter
working week, mandatory arts elements in
educational programs, paid time for cultural activities
as a part of workplace agreements, a recognition
that time spent in creative activity is socially
productive.
Networks:
of common interest and experience, of support
and sharing - networks that facilitate discovery,
exchange, dissemination and promotion; while
these networks need to be independent, their
development would benefit from, for example,
the availability of training opportunities for
community activists and the facilitation of
co-operative resource sharing.
Information:
about examples and models, guidelines to best
practice, contact details, exposure to alternatives.
Equipment:
the tangible materials and tools with which to
make stuff.
Sites:
in which to work, to practice, to mingle, to play, to
experiment, to make and to show.
Public space:
places where widespread face-to-face social
interaction can be facilitated. This is a key to civic
engagement and to local cultural development.
Facilitation:
people who are really good at liberating the creativity
of others.
Skill development:
decentralised and local ownership of an ongoing
skill-base; keeping in mind that the fundamental
skill is CONFIDENCE and that development is the
opposite of envelopment. The skills I’m thinking of
are not just those of specific art-making techniques
but also of group-work and cross-cultural facilitation.
Diversity:
opportunities to experience and collaborate with
people with different experiences, values and modes
of expression.
Continuity:
‘access to continuity’ may sound strange, but it
is meaningful; communities need to be able to
experience ongoing cultural engagement - stop-start
projects can be counter-productive.
Gentle hands:
resource and service providers whose behaviour is
founded on their understanding that their function is
to serve rather than control.
Money:
although, if all of the foregoing resources were
available to communities at a minimal cost to them,
then perhaps money wouldn’t be an issue at all.
22

Conclusion
Most communities could not hope to achieve accessibility
like this on their own: public initiative is clearly needed.
The challenge for agents of governance is to ensure that
the distribution of these resources is achieved in ways
that make them accessible, productively used and, as far
as possible, locally owned and sustainable.
If the tools of artistic production were to become
universally accessible, the results would not simply be
the universal and democratic exercise of cultural rights,
but also a massive outburst of creativity 15 .
Taking on board the stories in this book certainly got my
emotions and my mind working. I hope others will be
equally stimulated.
My excitement led me to try to present some coherent
and persuasive reasons why:
being human, to community health and to good
governance; and,
It will very soon be fifty years since the first time I
earnt money from art. For the ensuing half century, the
question, in all sorts of different forms, about whether
what I was doing was worth doing has kept coming up.
The first ‘worth’ to be discarded was economic. I’ve
been unable to make a decent living from my obsession.
Shortly followed by health. Injuries go with the territory.
Then went fame, happiness and finally vision: the
presumption that I had a ‘view of the world’ that I must
share with my fellows.
It’s only been in the last decade or so that I’ve begun to
be able respond to the question in ways that have begun
to make sense.
I watched Bruce Springsteen tell Elvis Costello why he
wrote songs the other night on TV – ‘I’m just trying to
figure it out for myself’. We’re all driven to join the dots.
Since early humans imagined pictures in the night skies
we’ve been impelled to make sense. And, when the
chips are down, it may well be the most important thing
we do make.
I hope that I’ve been able to make some sense in
this essay.
WHY THIS WORK IS IMPORTANT
23

Endnotes:
1 Much of the content of this page is adapted from Challenges for local cultural development, my paper for the Barcelona Institute of
http://community.culturaldevelopment.net.au//Challenges.html
2 Small, Christopher (1998) Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening Wesleyan University Press
3 For a diagramatic view of the connections between creativity, art and culture see
http://community.culturaldevelopment.net.au//CHARTConnections.html
4 Adapted from Creative democracy, my address at ‘Interacció ’06; Community Cultural Policies’ hosted by the Barcelona Provincial
http://community.culturaldevelopment.net.au//Barcelona.html
5 Abraham Maslow: hierarchy of human needs from Human Needs Theory (1954)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow_hierarchy_of_needs
SEE FIGURE 1.
6 Manfred Max-Neef: Fundamental Human Needs from Human Scale Development: an Option for the Future (1987)
SEE FIGURE 2.
7 http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml
8 See http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/
discussion/ElissavetStamatopoulou.pdf
9 See http://www.culturalpolicies.net/web/ethics-human-rights.php (accessed 6/4/11)
10 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, see http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/drip.html
11 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity,
growing communities
see http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13179&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html followed by
2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions,
see http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
12 Adapted from Delivering long term sustainable social change through the arts, my speech to the ‘Social Inclusion & the Arts’ forum,
http://community.culturaldevelopment.net.au//SocialInclusion.html
13 In Challenges for local cultural development
http://community.culturaldevelopment.net.au//Challenges.html, I identify some of the negative tendencies that often infect
bureaucracies.
14 Adapted from Challenges for local cultural development
see http://community.culturaldevelopment.net.au//Challenges.html
15 Adapted from Understanding Culture, my address to the National Local Government Community Development Conference.
see http://community.culturaldevelopment.net.au//UnderstandingCulture.html
24

Figure 1. Figure 2.
self-actualization
esteem
love and belonging
safety
morality, creativity,
spontaneity, problem
solving, lack of prejudice,
acceptance of facts
self-esteem, confidence,
achievement, respect of
others, respect by others
friendship, family, sexual
intimacy
security of: body,
employment, resources,
morality, the family, health,
property
Need
subsistence
protection
affection
understanding
Being
(qualities)
physical & mental
health
care
adaptability
autonomy
respect
sense of humour
generosity
sensuality
critical capacity
curiosity
intuition
Having
(things)
food
shelter
work
social security
health systems
work
friendships
family
relationships with
nature
literature
teachers
policies
educational
Doing
(actions)
feed
clothe
rest
work
co-operate
plan
take care of
help
share
take care of
make love
express emotions
analyse
study
meditate
investigate
Interacting
(settings)
living environment
social setting
social environment
dwelling
privacy
intimate spaces of
togetherness
schools
families
universities
communities
physiological
breathing, food, water, sex,
homeostasis, excretion
participation
receptiveness
dedication
sense of humour
responsibilities
duties
work
rights
co-operate
dissent
express
opinions
associations
parties
churches
neighbourhoods
leisure
imagination
tranquillity
spontaneity
games
parties
peace of mind
day-dream
remember
relax
have fun
landscapes
intimate spaces
places to be alone
creation
imagination
boldness
inventiveness
curiosity
abilities
skills
work
techniques
invent
build
design
work
compose
interpret
spaces for expression
workshops
audiences
identity
sense of belonging
self-esteem
consistency
language
religions
work
customs
values
norms
get to know oneself
grow
commit oneself
places one belongs to
everyday settings
freedom
autonomy
passion
self-esteem
open-mindedness
equal rights
dissent
choose
run risks
develop awareness
anywhere
WHY THIS WORK IS IMPORTANT
25

01
SHIRE OF
WAROONA
02
CITY OF
ROCKINGHAM
03
TOWN OF
PORT HEDLAND
04
CITY OF
PERTH
05
06
growing communities
SHIRE OF
MULLEWA
07
CITY OF
MANDURAH
CITY OF
MELVILLE
08
SHIRE OF
KATANNING
09 10
CITY OF
CITY OF
BUNBURY
ARMADALE
26

community arts and
ten projects cultural development
in local government
01 Shire of Waroona
02 City of Rockingham
03 Town of Port Hedland
04 City of Perth
05 Shire of Mullewa
06 City of Melville
07 City of Mandurah
08 Shire of Katanning
09 City of Bunbury
10 City of Armadale
28
32
36
40
44
48
52
56
60
64
TEN PROJECTS
27

shire of
WAROONA
01 Drakesbrook School Memorial Footprint
growing communities
I was called by my son at 7am. When I got
there I couldn’t talk to the police. I was absolutely
devastated. There were three boys who had
attended that school. Now they were in the fire
brigade and as they were standing there I could
just imagine their thoughts as my thoughts.
Glenece Walmsley, President of the Waroona Historical Society
Glenece Walmsley, President of the Waroona Historical
Society, remembers the fire that destroyed this hundred
year old school building in July 2005.
Fire is a great destroyer, but in the Australian bush, fire
can renew. Drakesbrook School had gone; but out of the
ashes grew a simple but remarkable arts project.
The century-old wooden building ceased to function as
a school in 1988. It lay neglected for a while but was still
regarded affectionately in the community. The building
had been leased to the Waroona Historical Society as
a museum and at the time that the old school burned
down, the Waroona Shire Council was in the process of
having conservation works completed. Many valuable
artefacts which were stored in the building were lost.
And then only a year after the fire plans were afoot, quite
literally, to cement the school’s place in local history.
The Waroona Historical Society conducted a community
survey that produced a varied response.
Glenece Walmsley remembers that several residents
wanted to rebuild the school as it was.
But once a thing has gone it is gone. It would
probably only get burned again. It didn’t matter
what it was as long as it represented a memory
of the school.
L>R: After the fire, photo by Maree Ellis; Waroona Historical Society, Drakesbrook School, photo by J Wrankmore
28

TEN PROJECTS
29

growing communities
One survey response had suggested rebuilding the
school but also putting a big fence round it so it can’t
be damaged.
A constructive suggestion from a local Shire Councillor
lent direction as to how any ‘memory’ might look.
Whatever we put there needs to be able to be used by
the whole community.
Gary Aitken, the Fremantle based lead artist and mentor
who designed and constructed the work, extended the
notion of ‘use by the whole community’. The father of
small children himself, he saw that any reminder of the
school should depict it as a place where children could
feel at home.
Young people are going to play on this. You’re going
to get kids on skateboards. So let’s make it strong
enough to withstand all those pressures.
The physical reminder is a concrete slab, the exact size
and dimensions of the original building. But it was more
than just a slab and is now known as;
The Drakesbrook School Memorial Footprint.
The Footprint shows visitors the exact area, measured to
size, of the original school building. And thanks to Maree
and Glenece’s hours of watching the cement dry, there
are no unwanted footprints on the Footprint.
The new ‘school space’ represented play outdoors
as much as learning indoors. A miniature school
bell still rings on site but marked spaces shaped by
aluminium strips offer children’s games. Hopscotch
and knucklebones are there, while an array of marbles
suggests other games.
Children have readily taken up the offer. The Footprint
is now very much a play space in Waroona’s well-used
Centennial Park.
In his search for other Footprint components Gary
Aitken suggested an archaeological dig on the original
school site. He thought it might be a good idea to see
what turned up amongst the charred remains of the old
wooden building. Not much emerged, the odd marble,
an old cup and a fifty cent coin. The best find was a pile
of bricks from the original classroom fireplace, which
were saved by Shire workers. These were salvaged and
re-erected on the Footprint.
Glenece Walmsley noticed the attention the fireplace
drew from former pupils.
Everyone had memories of the brick fireplace. In the
winter kids used to come to school in the freezing
cold and warm their hands at the fire.
The journey from burnt timber to concrete reminder
took time. Maree Ellis recalls a lot of consultation, and a
lot of meetings.
We had a community reference group which would
meet to make decisions. Whenever the artists came
up with an idea we would all meet. Everybody was
well informed all the way through.
Children contributed to the steel decorative edging of the
footprint that features cut-outs of people. Some were
made in the classroom and others by community groups.
They were put together by a Community Mentored Artist,
Jeannie Marie Hawkins. Today one of the guessing games
for locals, children and adults alike is finding their own
design at the footprint’s fringe.
For members of the Waroona Historical Society, the
Footprint opening in May 2008 was the culmination of
two years’ work.
Everybody made positive comments. Many said they
would have loved to still have the old school but liked
what we’d achieved. We were pleasantly surprised by
their response because we were using very modern
material to replace something that was very old
and traditional.
Not surprisingly many Waroona citizens had contributed
as volunteers to complete the job. A Shire Councillor laid
the bricks with help from the Town Planner.
The day the concrete was poured there was a real
festive atmosphere at the park.
Maree’s most cherished recollection of the
Drakesbrook School revival is the way the opening
brought people together.
It brought a lot of people back to town. People
sat around with their cups of tea and had a really
good catch-up.
It’s important to bring people together to celebrate
their memories of the school but I think it’s also
important to have a recollection of what happened in
your grandparents or great grandparent’s days.
Bringing people together can pose risks. Glenece
Walmsley has a cautionary tale. Some of those memories
became public on opening day and pupils stood up to tell
stories ‘out of school’.
We had one particular teacher sitting in the audience.
They had teachers from the different eras there and
my niece was a pupil from this teacher’s era. My niece
said, “I can remember I went home from school and
my mother said, ‘You’re quiet. What’s wrong with
you?’. ‘I’m not going to school tomorrow.’ ‘Why not?’
‘Because the teacher said if I didn’t shut up she’d tie
my tongue to the table’.
And the same teacher was sitting there in
the audience.
Oh! The perils of oral history.
30

Waroona is a small rural community with a population
of about 4,000. It is sandwiched between Mandurah
to the north-west and Bunbury to its south. Both those
cities are experiencing rapid population growth and this is
beginning to impact on Waroona.
The Shire of Waroona Strategic Plan 2005-2025 states
that this Council values its rural identity above all else and
is firmly resolved to retain it. The main aim and focus is to
maintain a strong sense of rural community.
Driving into the township, I experienced the quiet,
country atmosphere that still separates Waroona from
its neighbours;
But for how long? CEO Ian Curley had an answer.
Here we are separated geographically. We have
boundaries all around, so we set ourselves apart
from some of our neighbours. Some municipalities
see their way forward in getting bigger and bigger,
but development means infrastructure costs and
this can outweigh the benefits of extra rates coming
in. We’re not anti-development, but we don’t see
development as being the only key to success. That is
why community development and cultural issues are
so important to this Council.
We do a lot of work with community groups and help
them out as best we can. We undertake a number of
cultural and community development activities each
year. Waroona has always had a strong community
development focus; it is embedded in the community.
With all our projects, the initiative comes from the
community and we work with the community to
achieve our goals.
The Drakesbrook School Memorial Footprint is one
community initiative that responds to Waroona’s rural
identity. When it burned down, the old school was one
of only two remaining pre-1900 weatherboard one-room
school buildings in Western Australia.
A larger district school had been built in a more
practical location. The old building, on the original site,
was highly valued as a reminder of early settlement days
in a rural setting.
The Council was lobbied strongly by the community
who wanted the old school preserved so it remained
and the surrounding land was developed into a park now
known as Centennial Park. The 2005 fire left nothing of
the old school but the bricks from the fireplace and a few
other relics.
In an effort to preserve the memory of the building
for future generations the Council asked the Historical
Society for a solution and gave assistance to create a
memorial footprint of the school at the site.
The community supported the footprint concept and
the Waroona Shire Council provided financial and in-kind
support. A generous local gave financial sponsorship
and the project was also supported by a grant from the
Maree Ellis explained that artists, Gary Aitken and Jeanie
Marie Hawkins involved the community in a mini-dig
to forage for any relics from the site. Also, previous
teachers and students were asked to tell of any
experiences they might have had at the school and
their stories directly influenced the artists’ concept.
The Drakesbrook School Memorial Footprint is just
one example of the way in which the community has
expressed its rural values and identity. Shire CEO Ian
Curley believes that a community will be stronger and
more resilient if you support their independence and build
their capacity to help themselves.
We could pick this community up and put it anywhere
and it would succeed. However, sometimes it can be
tough going and there are difficulties and challenges
to overcome. We’re seen by the Wheatbelt as being
almost in the city and by those in the city as being
way out in the country.
This sometimes makes it hard to attract grants. The
Drakesbrook School Memorial Footprint and other
projects have been undertaken by the Shire without
government help. However Ian is philosophical.
The community is used to being self-reliant when it
comes to funding its own projects. The Council assists
where it can to provide back-up to the community.
The local community has given a clear message that it
will not support wholesale development that maximises
land profit at the expense of its rural lifestyle and the
environment. However, with developers knocking at the
door, Waroona is unlikely to be able to hold them at
bay forever.
Ian concedes that the threat of change is real but has a
ready response.
If we have to have it, we want quality development
that reflects our lifestyle and values. Until then, we
are happy to remain as we are.
Meanwhile the Drakesbrook School Memorial Footprint
stands in the centre of a community park as a symbol of
days gone by and a reminder of the resolve of Waroona to
preserve its history and retain its rural identity.
L>R: Drakesbrook School Memorial Footprint View, photo by Gary Aitken;
Drakesbrook School Memorial Footprint View, photo by Maree Ellis
TEN PROJECTS
31

growing communities
city of
ROCKINGHAM
02 Jarrah, Jetties and Journeys
We started working with jetty timbers that had
been in the ocean for sixty years. We took them
apart, sliced them up and glued them together.
We also came across big piles of ballast rock and
used that as well.
Fremantle sculptor, Jon Denaro
‘Castnet’ foyer sculpture, photo by Margy Timmermans
A deceptively light looking sculpture, Entry Net, suggestive
of canvas and spars, looks as if it wants to catch a breeze
and sail away. But it’s made from sterner stuff and tethered
tightly to the wall of the Gary Holland Community Centre
in Rockingham.
Entry Net is just one of several public art sculptures which
now greet locals and visitors to the city.
Sculptor Tich Dixon is co-creator of Ballast Stone Seating,
another of the highly visible outcomes of Jarrah, Jetties
and Journeys.
I just love history and I find a good place to start an
arts project is by reflecting history.
The City’s own story provided the inspiration. For a long
time this once small town was an important Western
Australian timber port.
From its wooden jetties sail, and later steam, carried away
our jarrah to Europe. Visiting ships left ballast behind in the
shallow waters of Cockburn Sound.
Project co-ordinator, Margy Timmermans, saw that steel
rails, jetty timber and foreign rock from India, England and
elsewhere provided highly relevant material with which to
capture local history and create public art.
Starting in December 2007, the project took a year to
complete. The first step was to invite local artists to try out
ideas, draw sketches on easels and tease out the potential
of three dimensional art. They were helped along the way
by Fremantle sculptor, Jon Denaro and Bec Juniper, curator
of the final exhibition which ran for three months at the
end of the following year.
In his role as mentor Jon Denaro made it a pivotal part of
the process to find authentic material with which to tell
the story.
We started working with jetty timbers that had been
in the ocean for sixty years. We took them apart, sliced
them up and glued them together. We also came
across big piles of ballast rock and used that as well.
Irene Osborne, co-creator of an exterior artwork,
Sculptured Billboard, worked closely with Jon and relished
the way discarded jarrah could now take on a new texture.
32

TEN PROJECTS
33

growing communities
Burning the timber was exciting. We needed the element
of fire to give it a burned look and authentic character,
which is in keeping with what you often hear about old
burned jetties.
The natural environment also played a strong role in
Irene’s creation. Her colourful design for the billboard is
based on the exquisite cross–section stem pattern of
the xanthorrea, the grass tree, and a familiar part of
the local coastal bush.
For the four artists selected to finish Jarrah, Jetties and
Journeys, the experience meant working long hours, and
for some, experimentation with new and demanding
materials; rock, steel, concrete and old timber.
Safety was also an issue. At times the sculptors felt
they were working on a building site, nearly tripping over
lengths of railway line and heaving and shifting heavy
blocks of stone and timber.
Their work also meant teamwork. Under Jon Denaro’s
watchful eye, the artists learned about each other’s choice
of material and the skills of lifting and bracing very heavy
and unwieldy structures.
The steady process of assembly went on for months
in the former Ambulance Centre, affectionately known
as “Ambos” in Kent Street. They were very much in the
public gaze, which Jon Denaro recalls as fruitful.
One of our philosophies was to work in view of the
community and we were bringing in lots of material
like railway lines from the old jetty at Safety Bay. So
there was a lot of dragging things around and lifting
them up with winches and making a lot of noise. But
it was also appropriate because people could see
what was happening as they were passing by.
And sometimes, as Tich Dixon recalls, these strangers
offered assistance.
When we were working here with the doors open a
lot of people watched us work and offered help. “I’ve
got a few days off, if you need a hand with
that concrete”.
34
For several of the artists these were new ways
of working and thinking. Inevitably there were
compromises between intent and outcome. Mentors
and advisers Bec Juniper and Jon Denaro tried not to
predetermine outcomes.
But because of the technical nature of the work
we had to have fallback positions. So there were
moments when we had to evaluate what was going
on and then come up with an alternative solution. We
were not trying to put our stamp on it, but that was a
good professional fallback.
And the outcome?
Film maker Lee Kennedy covered Jarrah, Jetties and
Journeys from its birth to the final exhibition in the Gary
Holland Community Centre on 17 December 2008.
I’m on an arts funding panel and you often see
terms like “mentorship” and “development” thrown
around all the time and you wonder if those are just
token words. But in this process you really saw an
evolution and the direct results. It probably gave
invaluable experience that could not be achieved in
any other way.
And the artists’ reaction?
Tich Dixon’s labours to create Ballast Stone Seating had
taken nearly a year, often with shifts well into the night.
But she felt the experience had been great for morale.
We learned so much.
Irene Osborne’s Sculptured Billboard had given her the
novel sensation of working on a big scale.
Sheryl Osborne saw her Entry Net finally hoisted into
position on the wall of the Community Centre. For her its
installation was a tense reward.
Because the items I made were so heavy. And my
heart was in my mouth as I watched them being
craned up.
Similarly Tich Dixon thought that her Ballast Stone
Seating was going to fall apart when it was hoisted
up. Because concrete has very good compressive
strength but is no good when you’re lifting it up and
putting it down at the other end. But it got there.
For Margy Timmermans the project achieved one
distinctive goal. While the sculptures that emerged from
the ‘journey’ were more abstract than literal, public
acceptance suggested that when something is relevant
and in place and people are stimulated by it, then
preconceived ideas about Rockingham change. We
have changed perceptions of public art.
Below: Jon Denaro and Hilda (Tich) Dixon sanding timber set,
photo by Margy Timmermans

I drove to Rockingham on the southern coastal fringe of
the Perth Metropolitan Area to talk about Jarrah, Jetties
and Journeys with City of Rockingham CEO Andrew
Hammond, Gay Thornton, Director Community Services
and Margy Timmermans the project co-ordinator.
I asked Margy to tell me about the involvement of the
community in this project.
The project theme came to me during the
development of an earlier project, the Waterfront
Pioneer Rotary Walk.
At the same time a funding opportunity arose when
the Gary Holland Community Centre was being built
and a percentage of the building budget had been
allocated to public art.
We had 20 local emerging artists attend a series of
drawing classes with the view of developing concept
designs based on the Jarrah, Jetties and Journeys
theme. These classes, conducted by professional artist
Jon Denaro ran over five months, three days a week.
The idea was for the artists’ drawings to directly
influence the design of the Centre as it was being
built and also for the best of the concept designs
to be developed into three dimensional works for
the Centre, using jarrah, ballast stone and other
salvaged materials.
The participants agreed not to sign any of their drawings,
but to display them all together when the classes had
finished and then jointly decide which of them should be
developed into 3D artworks. Four of the participants had
their concepts chosen, and they continued to work with
Jon to fabricate these into public art. As Margy explained,
this took some time.
The process of developing the concept designs into
artworks took a year, but it was extremely rushed.
Next time we should give ourselves at least 18
months and preferably two years.
An exhibition of all the drawings from the initial classes
was held as part of the opening of the Community
Centre. This enabled all the participants to see their work
displayed. The four fabricated artworks were installed in
and around the Centre.
The theme is evident in the foyer where displays of
sailing boat replicas, ballast stone and timbers have been
installed in large circular display units in the floor. Margy
got the idea from The Hague, in the Netherlands.
When they were digging to create an underpass under
the city centre for the new tramline, they found artefacts,
so they placed them in floor display units on the tramline
platform which was inlaid with timber parquetry mirroring
the streetscape design above. It looked great!
The project has had other spin-offs, such as a subsequent
Castaways Sculpture by the Sea project. Artists were
invited to submit sculptures built from recycled material,
such as ballast stone remnants. Council received 50
submissions and the works were exhibited along the
foreshore. As Gay advised me
This is all part of the process of encouraging residents to
think about local identity and reflect back on aspects of
our history.
I commented that the Jarrah, Jetties and Journeys project
appeared to link with most of the key priorities in the
Council’s published Strategic Plan.
However it turned out that this Strategic Plan had just
that week been superseded by a new Community Plan.
Andrew explained.
This Community Plan mirrors the previous Strategic
Plan but the main actions and strategies have come
from the community. The new plan contains 16
aspirations, one of which directly relates to culture,
arts and education. It was adopted by Council on
Tuesday night and will be available on our web page
in a few days’ time.
It was evident from Andrew’s words that the Rockingham
Community Plan had pre-empted the recent call by
the State Government for all Western Australian local
government councils to adopt a ten year Strategic
Community Plan which clearly links the community’s
aspirations to the Council’s vision and long term strategy.
As Gay told me, with some pride
Ours is already adopted. Out of our community plan,
a specific purpose plan is being developed and this
will contain the various departments’ team plans,
including a cultural plan.
This will bring about an integrated approach, making
the City of Rockingham one of the first WA Councils to
introduce integrated planning. The City will have a clear
line of sight all the way up to the Community Plan.
In developing its Community Plan, Council invited
4,000 households to participate in five Planning for the
Future workshops run by a consultant with no Council
involvement. The invitation got a good response and
about 220 residents participated.
At the conclusion of each workshop the participants
selected a spokesperson to represent the outcomes at a
final workshop, which also involved elected members and
senior management of Council. The result is a Community
Plan that has been truly driven by the community.
Andrew spoke of how Jarrah, Jetties and Journeys fed
directly into the Plan.
Jarrah, Jetties and Journeys and other projects
before it have resulted in high level strategic ‘buy in’
for the arts. When members of the community were
asked if they were interested in culture and the arts,
they said ‘yes’.
This overwhelming community response has resulted in
local sponsors doubling their support for the next three
years. It has also led to a new partnership with TAFE for
placemaking to be included in its curriculum.
TEN PROJECTS
35

town of
PORT HEDLAND
03 Krakouer! A play about Aboriginal VFL players inspires Port Hedland.
growing communities
Phil talked about the importance of getting an
education. He succeeded in football in his youth,
but when he retired, he had nothing to fall
back on. We wanted Phil’s story to strike a chord
with young kids up here, who mightn’t be very
interested in going to school.
Lorna Secrett, Manager of Community Development
Opposite: Phil Krakouer meets with local football players.
The Swans football team, Sarah Cunningham, Sheila Cleiver, Phil Krakouer and Lorna Secrett,
photo by Cecile Lucas
After a two-hour flight north from Perth, I was met by
Lorna Secrett, Manager of Community Development with
the Town of Port Hedland whose office was conveniently
based at the airport!
Port Hedland is one of the Pilbara’s two major regional
centres. The port itself is one of the largest in the world
in terms of iron ore tonnage exported. The local Council is
responsible for managing the Town of Port Hedland, which
has a population of around 20,000.
Lorna told me how she came to her current position in the
Pilbara and about her recent learning curve.
I moved here in April last year from Busselton,
where I had been Cultural Planning Officer in the
Town Planning department at the Council. Here in
Port Hedland my work is more focussed on cultural
development, though I still work with planners and
the engineering department. However I quickly found
out that what works in the south doesn’t necessarily
translate here!
The town is very much in partnership with the mining
industry and being so remote, it makes it hard to plan.
There has been massive growth… we’ve got a new
directorate in Community Development, so we’re now
able to do lots of cross-development programs. Sport
and Recreation used to sit with Engineering and Arts
used to sit with Strategic Services. Now we can work
all together.
36

TEN PROJECTS
37

growing communities
Jimi Bani, Mayer Kelly Harlett and Phil Krakouer, photo by Cecile Lucas
I spoke with Lorna and her cultural team about the
Krakouer! Visit to Port Hedland project.
Krakouer! is a play about the trials and tribulations of the
famous Aboriginal VFL players, Jimmy and Phil Krakeour.
Both Jimmy and Phil had very successful careers as
footballers, but when they retired in their twenties they
found the going pretty tough.
The play was the climax of the project, but Phil arrived
three days earlier. He went to the schools and told the
students about the challenges he had faced.
Lorna emphasised the importance of this project for the
Aboriginal community.
The whole story of the Krakouer brothers
is appropriate.
Phil talked about the importance of getting an
education. He succeeded in football in his youth,
but when he retired, he had nothing to fall back on.
We wanted Phil’s story to strike a chord with young
kids up here, who mightn’t be very interested in
going to school.
Sarah Cunningham, Club Development Officer, had
suggested bringing Phil to meet the South Hedland
Swans Football Club and have a sausage sizzle after
school and after training, for a general kick around with
school kids. As Sarah explained, this proved to be a
good move.
The key person in getting involvement in this project
was the Club and Program Development Officer for
the Swans. This opened lots of doors.
In return, we offered to show Swans memorabilia in
the foyer during the play and this gave people the
chance to have a look at it. We do have other clubs,
but the South Hedland Swans have 95% Indigenous
membership. Quite a few came to the show. It kicked
off the pre-footy season. Some brought their kids.
The team also linked Phil up with the Kicking Goals
program, which is sponsored by BHP Billiton Iron Ore
to encourage kids to stay at school. Sheila Cleaver,
Community Development Officer, sketched the
background to this program.
Kids have to attend school before they can come
to Kicking Goals. They get to go on trips, such as
going to Perth and sometimes to Melbourne to watch
the finals.
The process created community ‘buy in’, with some
sports people talking with arts staff for the first time.
By sending Phil out to the community and schools,
people realised that Council was interested. Cecile Lucas,
Events Promotion Officer, painted a very positive picture.
We got fantastic feedback from the primary school.
We had a double classroom filled with children. The
whole talk gave you a warm, fuzzy feeling; watching
the kids taking in what Phil was saying. He impressed
upon them the importance of getting an education.
Then, at the play later, we saw the mix of faces in the
theatre. Many were first timers, but they were clearly
engaged. Ah! It worked.
We got lots of new people coming because of Phil’s
talks to their kids - and because the play was relevant
to them.
The actors from the play were also involved. They ran a
drama workshop at Hedland Senior High School and gave
a talk to the audience after the performance. BHP Billiton
Iron Ore, Fortescue Metals Group and ESS Compass also
came to the party, providing free tickets to the play for
Indigenous organisations.
And future plans?
For Nicole Roukens, Recreation Coordinator, value adding
has to be a priority.
We are very isolated here, so much value-adding is
necessary. We plan to add all sorts of value to projects
without increasing the budget and make the most of
it for everyone.
38

Sheila agreed. She also emphasised the importance of
bringing to Port Hedland projects that have appeal and
relevance for the Aboriginal community.
We’re hoping to present more plays which are
Aboriginal focused. Next time, we’re looking at
getting the actors to visit the Aboriginal communities.
We want them to take a day to go where the people
are, instead of expecting them to come to us.
My next meeting was with CEO Paul Martin. Paul
expressed his delight with the benefits to the community
gained from the work being done by Council staff in the
name of culture.
Lorna has definitely broken down silos in this
organisation. It’s exciting that Culture and
Recreation are now working so closely together, and
so successfully.
Overall, we’re trying to build a city; a place where
people are happy to live and proud to call home.
We’re working to develop smaller shows, to attract
some major iconic events but also to develop
reconciliation and multiculturalism.
For Paul, building that multicultural “pillar” is perhaps the
most important.
When I started one and a half years ago, I had to
do a presentation, so I did one on people. I looked
back over time to see what had changed. I noted that
past strategic plans didn’t include Indigenous issues
as the responsibility of Local Government. Twenty
to thirty years on, things hadn’t changed, but there
was a growing acknowledgement that they needed
to change.
So now this Council runs a quarterly Aboriginal
Forum and we’re supporting the Aboriginal
community in developing an Aboriginal Cultural
Centre. I believe that people from different cultures
should integrate, but should also be supported to
express their own culture.
After my meeting with Paul, we looked in on a
community forum where a well-filled room of Aboriginal
people were enthusiastically discussing youth issues.
My final stop was the Port Hedland Courthouse Gallery, a
building with a terrific exhibition space and a wide range
of quite beautiful retail stock. On the way there, we went
along the coast and the water looked particularly inviting
in the 35 degree heat. Why was no one swimming? Lorna
put me straight.
Water snakes, crocodiles and sharks keep people out
of the sea.
Well, at least the wildlife can’t keep the local community
from enjoying the cultural experiences that the Town of
Port Hedland is now providing.
Visit at the Wangka Maya Pilbara Language Centre, photo by Cecile Lucas
TEN PROJECTS
39

growing communities
40
city of
PERTH
04 The Coolbaroo Club Exhibition – October 2010
My Aunt Monica was invited to
Government house as “Miss Coolbaroo”.
She felt like a princess for the evening. In
hindsight she felt that some of their comments
were probably condescending; but on that
night she felt spectacular. Here was a young
woman who lived outside the exclusion zone in
overcrowded housing, being courted and feted
by high society in Perth.
My guides to the Coolbaroo Club project were City of
Perth CEO, Frank Edwards and Curator, Jo Darbyshire. Jo
explained how this exhibition came about.
I was researching social venues in Perth for a possible
exhibition when I found out that Aboriginal people
had been prohibited from entering a five kilometre
square area of Perth, including social venues, between
1927 and 1954.
None of them could even come through Perth unless
they had proof that they had ‘lawful employment’ or
they carried a ‘native pass’ with them.
But the strange thing was that nobody seemed to know
much about it, apart from a writer and filmmaker called
Stephen Kinnane, who had produced a documentary
about it, (with Lauren Marsh) in 1996. Stephen had written
Shadow Lines, published by Fremantle Arts Press in 1993,
which also covered the story.
When Jo contacted Steve Kinnane she was convinced
that she had found a basis for a worthwhile and important
exhibition.
I felt that here was a very important story to tell and
while I realised this story had been well covered
by Steve Kinnane’s work, I found that most West
Australians still did not know this story. So I felt that
my role was to make this information more available
and even better known.
I got in touch with Steve and he agreed to allow us to
screen his documentary as part of an exhibition.
The documentary is about a group of Aboriginal
people who, in 1947, set up their own dance club in
East Perth - just outside the prohibited area. They
showed real resourcefulness.
As Frank Edwards noted, paradoxically war offered young
Aboriginal men the equality denied them in peacetime.
The second World War allowed the experience of
servicemen, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to
fight side by side, drink together and become mates.
However, when they came home to Perth, they were
ordered not to fraternise with each other again,
and this led non-Aboriginal servicemen to question
whether things were right.

L>R: Monica Ingram - Government House Ball. Photographer unknown;
Photo of Coolbaroo Dance c.1948. Photographer unknown
TEN PROJECTS
41

growing communities
Jo pointed out that servicemen were the founders of the
dance club.
Two Aboriginal servicemen, the Poland Brothers,
joined by a white serviceman Geoff Harcus and a
young woman Helena Clarke, became the founders
of the dance club, calling themselves the Coolbaroo
League. They named the club ‘Coolbaroo’ – a Yamatji
word for Magpie, because it can, among other
connotations, suggest a union of black and white.
I learned from Jo and Frank that the Coolbaroo Club had
held popular dances every Friday night until 1960 and
that various national and international musicians, such
as Harold Blair and the Harlem Blackbirds made a point
of going there. The Coolbaroo League also welcomed
Nat King Cole and artist Albert Namatjira to Perth. The
organisers took the dances to country areas where
racism was rife and became activists for other Indigenous
issues. The Coolbaroo League also published its own
newspaper, the Westralian Aborigine from 1952 to 1957.
An exhibition about the Coolbaroo Club, covering the
historical facts that led to its creation, was developed
and presented in the Town Hall by the City of Perth in
documentary, it became a springboard for the much
wider dissemination of Perth’s ‘prohibited areas’ story, as
Jo outlined.
Copies of the exhibition’s interpretive panels have
been given to the Aboriginal section of the Education
Department and the “Coolbaroo” Neighbourhood
Centre in Thornlie.
The exhibition established a strong and positive response
from Aboriginal elders, particularly those who had
frequented the Coolbaroo Club. Some had even met their
partners there.
Jo recalled that on the night of the opening, there was
a great feeling among Aboriginal people – a terrific
sense of pride and respect. It was a very emotional
event for relatives of Coolbaroo Club members;
seeing their grandparents in some of the photos
made them proud. We received lots of comments in
the Visitors’ Book.
42
The exhibition was a big educational leap forward
for a lot of people and was considered ‘a long time
coming’. This project marks the first work of this
nature about Aboriginal issues undertaken by the
City of Perth, and Council is very keen to continue
this work.
The Prohibited Areas provisions were finally rescinded
in 1954. Only then was the Coolbaroo Club at last given
permission to hold a Ball in the Perth Town Hall.
As Jo explained the exhibition rekindled a desire to have
reunion Coolbaroo Balls in the Perth Town Hall.
We’ve had the first one in June, hopefully they will
continue after that.
Frank added We were lucky to bring one of the original
founding members of the Coolbaroo League, Helena
Murphy (nee) Clarke, to the launch from Darwin. This
was the first time Helena had been honoured publicly
for the work she had done.
An interview recorded with Helena Murphy was the
first Indigenous oral history recorded by the City of
Perth Library. Since then, the local studies librarian has
recorded oral histories with other Aboriginal elders.
Frank’s commitment as CEO to the city’s connections
with community through history and the arts is evident.
This project is about the City’s interface with
its diverse communities. It links with our desire
to encourage tolerance and understanding.
To understand where we are now, we need to
understand how we got there. During the War,
Italian and German communities were incarcerated
in camps; detained. So they were also penalised at
that time.
The Coolbaroo Club exhibition marked the ‘beginning
steps’. We are not asking people to ‘do’ something,
but simply try to understand what happened.
The project also served to educate our staff. Now
they know.
Clockwise from top: Coolbaroo Club welcomes Albert Namitjira 1957;
City of Perth CEO Frank Edwards and Mrs Helena Murphy; Prohibited
area map based on original map in state records office; Mrs Helena
Murphy, photos by (and courtesy of) City of Perth

I don’t think much is known about the Coolbaroo
Club nowadays. The exhibition definitely raised its
profile but I am still surprised by the number of young
Aboriginal people who don’t know this story. Some
didn’t know there was a prohibition zone. What’s
wrong if we don’t know this history?
short film, Miss Coolbaroo, former broadcaster,
and now CAN WA Aboriginal Arts and Culture
Development Manager.
For City of Perth Curator Jo Darbyshire
One of the good things about this exhibition was
that it was an eye-opener for the City of Perth Council
staff. It made them look at Aboriginal people in a
different light.
On 18th March 1927, the Government of Western
Australia had relied on the Western Australian Aborigines
Act 1905 to declare the City of Perth a ‘prohibited area’
for Aboriginal people.
But in the testing conditions of war young Aboriginal
men had earned the respect and friendship of their
fellow white servicemen; a friendship many wanted to
continue, but sharing a social evening together proved
difficult in post-war Perth. The Coolbaroo Club, or
Coolbaroo League as it was also known, was a clever
response to this predicament.
As Michelle White told me
It was quite revolutionary in bringing blacks and
whites together; one of a few mixed Clubs in Australia
at that time.
People were coming in from everywhere - from the
Wheatbelt, and would all congregate wherever the
dances were held on Friday night.
But there were also tense occasions. Police frequently
hovered outside the dance hall to see if there was ‘grog’
on the premises and survey which ‘whitefellers’ were
consorting with Noongars.
When the Prohibited Areas Act was repealed in 1954 this
was largely because of the Coolbaroo League; the black
and white Australians who had made the Coolbaroo Club
a visible expression of defiance of racism.
Aboriginal girls weren’t allowed to enter beauty
contests at the time so the Coolbaroo dances decided
to have their own bathing beauty competitions. The
young Aboriginal contestants were able to present
themselves as competent, beautiful young women.
Michelle White, who helped research material for the
2010 Exhibition, was also able to contribute from family
experience. Her aunt, Monica Ingram, (later Monica
Jones) had regularly attended Coolbaroo Club dances and
in 1954 was the first ‘native girl’ to attend a Ball.
My Aunt Monica was invited to Government House
as ‘Miss Coolbaroo’. She was almost presented as a
curio for upper class whites but spoke fondly of it as
the best of day of her life. She felt like a princess for
the evening. In hindsight she felt that some of their
comments were probably condescending; but on that
night she felt spectacular. Here was a young woman
who lived outside the exclusion zone in overcrowded
housing, being courted and feted by high society
in Perth.
The exhibition attracted curiosity. Jo Darbyshire counted
four thousand people coming through the exhibition
over three weeks. We had a visitors’ book and
the comments suggested that most people were
astounded. They’d lived here all their life and they
didn’t know this story and I think that points to a
certain blindness; a ‘looking away’ which I think the
Perth community is now ready to confront.
Jo also found an unexpectedly large demand for
catalogues from organisations that wanted to inform
and educate their own staff, students and Aboriginal
community groups.
We ran out of catalogues, We realised these would be
valuable but didn’t realise how crucial they were. We
had to print another 1,000 copies.
They went to all kinds of institutions and people such
as the WA Education Department and the Department
of Housing. People wanted to educate their own staff.
Banksia Hill Detention Centre took copies to give out
to young kids in detention.
At the opening of the exhibition, Jo found Reverend
Sealin Garletts ‘Welcome to Country’, a short speech in
Noongar language particularly memorable.
He spoke for five minutes and that was a very
powerful experience because it made people
remember that we were occupying a country where
other languages had been spoken. And it was the first
time we’d had a proper Welcome to Country spoken in
the Town Hall in connection with a City of Perth event.
And hopefully we’ll make that a matter of course.
Jo also felt that this contemporary history was important.
The value of this story for Aboriginal people
is proof that they didn’t just sit back and accept
discrimination. They fought back in a very creative
way. They fought back through dances and social
networking and that was the way they
were successful.
In preparing the exhibition we’d interviewed
people who’d been to the Coolbaroo dances. Even
though this is such a sad story of discrimination,
the Coolbaroo League dances are a source of joy in
the Aboriginal community. And so many Aboriginal
people have parents who met at the Coolbaroo
dances and it’s an integral part of their history.
And for a non-Aboriginal audience?
Every generation needs to know this history!
This has been a very powerful tool of education but
people have also been shocked out of complacency and
perhaps that knowledge will go out into the community
and we will look at how Aboriginal people have been
treated and with a bit more empathy for the past.
Lisa Scaffidi, Lord Mayor of Perth, felt that the Exhibition
showed that while we can’t change history, we should
acknowledge it and talk about it.
TEN PROJECTS
43

growing communities
shire of
MULLEWA1
05 Made by Hand, Inspired by Nature
…to bring people together, develop skills,
build new relationships, reduce social isolation
and develop local pride and identity. Both Indigenous
and non-Indigenous residents were invited to come
along and it didn’t matter whether you were a
beginner or experienced in jewellery making.
Everyone was welcome.
Rachel McKenzie, Community Project Officer, the Shire of Mullewa.
Mullewa is a small municipality located 482 kilometres,
and at least five hours by road, from Perth. Geraldton, 100
kilometres to the west, is the nearest regional centre.
I spoke with the Shire of Mullewa CEO, Tom Hartman and
Community Project Officer, Rachel McKenzie about Made
by Hand; Inspired by Nature.
As Tom Hartman put it
Distance is a significant problem for the Shire. The
cost of bringing artists to Mullewa is also an issue.
We’re so far from Perth, there’s no option but for
artists to stay here for their whole project. Travel and
accommodation end up costing more than the rest of
the project put together.
The Shire of Mullewa Council, in conjunction with the
Mullewa Arts Development Group, engaged jewellery
artist Pam Annesley for a three week residency to run
jewellery making workshops with members of the local
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal community.
For Rachel, an important consideration was what would
remain with the community after the artist left.
It costs a lot to bring artists into the community and
while they are here it’s great but we wanted to find a
way that locals could continue to develop their skills
after the project finished. We did this by incorporating
certification training for four local women in these
jewellery making techniques, into the overall project.
The artist was resident in the community for three
weeks, which was a real treat as usually we only have
artists for two weeks, because of the expense.
After the residency four local women went on to do
a series of training that gave them additional skills
while qualifying them to teach polymer and silver clay
techniques. These women then returned to Mullewa and
conducted a series of workshops for local youth.
44
1 Since the completion of this project the Shire of Mullewa has
amalgamated with the City of Geraldton to become part of the City of
Greater Geraldton.

Jewellery from ‘Made by Hand, Inspired by Nature’, photo by Rachel McKenzie and Eliza Thomas

growing communities
The workshops attracted about 50 young people and
28 women. For Rachel, the aim was to bring people
together, develop skills, build new relationships,
reduce social isolation and develop local pride
and identity. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous
residents were invited to come along and it didn’t
matter whether you were a beginner or experienced
in jewellery making. Everyone was welcome.
Workshop participants learned the techniques of using
polymer clay and silver metal clay to create their own
jewellery. The results were startling!
I asked Rachel if she was surprised at the extraordinarily
high standard of the pieces created by the participants.
I’m not surprised, because the arts have been
building in Mullewa over the past four years, but I am
impressed.
Some of the jewellery created during the residency was
documented in a glossy catalogue to acknowledge the
significant achievements of the participants. As Rachel
remarked
We felt that making the catalogue for the project
was important, it was a nice way to bring the results
of the project together and proved to be a treasured
keep sake, so much so that we had to print more
as participants wanted to send them to family and
friends. Now we have it to show our funding bodies
as proof of the high quality results achievable in our
rural community.
In this type of development work, it is not important
what the medium is – as long as it attracts people
to participate. We had a project involving people
painting power poles in the town to improve the
main street. The community got involved and when
they’d finished they were really proud. As a result of
this community ownership the poles have not been
touched by graffiti.
While funding bodies contribute towards professional
artists’ fees, travel and materials, the planning and
coordination involved can be onerous on an already busy
council staff. Tom commented on additional challenges
that smaller, more remote communities face.
Take Pam’s residency, for example. Her workshops
needed to be crammed into the time she was here;
instead of being spread into weekly sessions, which
usually suit communities better.
This put additional strain on Rachel, who had to
ensure that Pam’s time was fully utilised, while also
doing all her other work. Our biggest difficulty is that
Rachel does most of this stuff on her own.
We’ve applied for funding for labour and wages in the
past, but it is very hard to get. We’re sick and tired of
trying to explain it. You would think by now funding
bodies would understand the need for this, but we
have to prove it all the time.
However, we’re on the right track as far as I’m
concerned. Council will continue to fund this sort of
thing because the Councillors and the community can
see the results.
This project has been so successful that it has had many
flow-on outcomes, in particular the development of the
Made by Hand, Inspired by Nature enterprise project.
This project has seen a group of Indigenous and non-
Indigenous women come together to create a series of
jewellery that focuses on local flora that is aimed at the
wildflower tourist market.
You only have to glance at the exquisite patterns of
leaves, animal shapes, berries, flowers and plant
structures that make up an exhibition of jewellery; to
appreciate that the title: Made by Hand, Inspired by
Nature - and made in Mullewa is no idle boast.
Involving women and youth from many sectors of the
community, their efforts culminated in both an exhibition,
and an expansion of the Made by Hand project to other
rural communities.
For project co-ordinator Rachel McKenzie, the idea
came from attending a TAFE Class in Geraldton where
participants worked with polymer clay.
And when we came back and showed our work to the
women here, they were very excited. So we set up a
project where we could share that excitement with
the Mullewa community.
But along with that excitement, Rachel had another aim
in mind.
An arts project is what I present to the community
but my ‘secret’ agenda is also about trying to get
some social outcomes for the community.
Mullewa has its share of social issues and has a lot
of social divides. We have a farming community and a
town community, the non-Indigenous community and
the Indigenous community. In the past they didn’t
come together very often and through these types
projects we have consistently tried to bridge
that divide.
So with this project we aimed to have non-Indigenous
and Indigenous people all working together, sitting
in the same room. That’s something that doesn’t
happen very often.
Was there a potential for conflict between community
good and community art?
Right: Jewellery from ‘Made by Hand, Inspired by Nature’, photos by Rachel McKenzie and Eliza Thomas
46

I know in community arts there’s always that
argument about process versus product but I like to
work on both. I think that process is essential for a
community development outcome. But the product
itself and how we present it, is equally important for
the participants’ pride and self-esteem and for the
community in general.
With support from the Shire of Mullewa Council and local
community members the jewellery making workshops
got going. But this was only after a lot of groundwork by
Rachel.
I’m very careful that we don’t just blaze ahead and
come up with an idea. I want to make sure that there
is community support before we begin. Four or five
of us might be excited but that isn’t enough to build
a sustainable and successful project. It is important
that people understand what the project is about,
how we can make it work and that there is enough
community support and interest.
The initial task was to find a theme that would appeal to
a broad range of community members. The answer lay
in the rich diversity of flora in the surrounding country.
Nature’s own local designs seemed to unite and
motivate everybody.
Everyone has a connection somewhere or other to
the place where they live and to the environment
around them.
Workshops were held in different venues. Farm women
traditionally meet at the Art & Craft Station. Aboriginal
women generally worked at the Moorehead Building.
However Rachel found that people wanted to be
involved in the project. So whether or not they were
comfortable in these different spaces, they would
still turn up and, after a couple of days people felt
more at ease.
In previous projects, when we first started using the
arts to address local social issues there were some
whose families had been involved in recent feuding.
They’d both be in the same room but not necessarily
talking to each other or even sitting at the same
table. But at day’s end they’d all be sitting round the
same table asking each other “Can you pass me that
tool?” or sharing their experience of how a piece
is working out. People began to leave those social
problems at the door.
Made by Hand appears to have made Rachel’s ‘secret’
agenda work too.
A lot of non-Indigenous people came into the space
where Indigenous women used to paint and that
really opened that door. Now we’re holding more
workshops there and the non-Indigenous women
realise that it’s OK for them to also come in here and
do things.
And there were other very practical flow-on effects from
both the workshops and the exhibition.
The four women who went on to qualify as
Contemporary Clay Instructors are now running courses
in communities beyond Mullewa. Not only have
skills remained in the community but the successful
instructors are now doing paid work. They have also been
able to contribute to the further development of local
talent by running youth workshops in Mullewa itself.
In addition, as Rachel explained, the catalogue that
accompanied the Made by Hand exhibition went all over
the State and received a lot of good feedback. It’s very
easy when you live in a small town to think that all the
things of value come from the city or larger regional
centres and that the stuff we do out here doesn’t
stack up. So to have feedback from other towns saying
“We want you to come and do that with us” has
been incredible for the local community; that others
recognise the skills they have gained and people view
them as having something they want themselves.
Jewellery made in the workshops is now selling at
Mullewa’s Tourist Bureau along with cards naming the
individual artists.
And I guess the flow-on from that has been the
enterprise project that we’re setting up rather than just
making it an Indigenous or a non-Indigenous activity.
We’re developing a brand that is just ‘Mullewa’. And
both groups are going to sell their work together under
this label.
Rachel confesses that her personal highlight from Made
by Hand was an addiction to polymer clay, but her most
cherished moment was
When the Indigenous ladies had some pieces and
they thought they were a little bit rough. They felt
they couldn’t quite do what they wanted to do. And
then we strung them together and made them into a
complete piece and people coming through the centre
were just blown away by the work. And just that sense
of pride and accomplishment that gave them was
really beautiful to see.
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47

city of
MELVILLE
06 A Cultural Vitality Plan
growing communities
We found out that neighbourhoods wanted the films
to be provided locally, so now we provide smaller
individual events in each of the four neighbourhoods;
and the films are well attended making this event an
economically sustainable venture for Council.
Christine Young, Director of Community Development, City of Melville.
I visited Melville, a local government area that borders the
Swan River south of Perth. Christine Young, Director of
Community Development, Hannah Katarski, Community
Development Officer and Marcia Coelho, Neighbourhood
Support Co-ordinator talked me through the process of
developing the Melville Cultural Vitality Plan.
Their first step had been to find out how residents
thought that Council could enhance the cultural vibrancy of
their city.
Consultation mechanisms included:
Photovoice competition,
35, culturally diverse groups and arts organisations.
For Photovoice, participants were invited to email or post
photographs they had taken of their favourite place or
experience in Melville. The resulting photographs and
comments were then assembled into a display from
which Council gained valuable feedback on residents’
appreciation of the city’s cultural assets.
For the art project, one school in each of Melville’s four
neighbourhoods was invited to participate. Community
artist Louise Snook worked with students to create a
composite painting which captured their vision for Melville.
48

Student canvas - Caralee Community School, photo by Louise Snook
TEN PROJECTS

growing communities
The four paintings, now exhibited in the City’s two
community centres, depict a place that is colourful and
exciting. The people in the pictures wear multi-coloured
clothes. Dogs, butterflies, flowers, trees, ducks and birds
are also brightly coloured with spots and stripes.
Melville is shown as a place where there is plenty of
room for children to play, for dogs to run around and
families to picnic. People are swimming, sailing and
canoeing, while some are in a cinema watching movies
and eating popcorn and ice creams. These are references
to the Swan River and the local cinema within Melville
areas. There are plenty of choc tops for everyone!
The general feeling from the children’s paintings is one
of sharing, enjoyment and harmony. In a park there is an
orange tree that is ripe with fruit for people to pick.
While the young people were being consulted, Council
was also finding out about the expectations of the wider
Melville community via face-to-face meetings and piloting
an online consultation forum and poll.
Extensive internal consultation also took place with
officers currently responsible for other plans asked
to identify areas of overlap. The Cultural Vitality Plan
has allowed an opportunity for the documentation of
synergies across the organisation and across existing
Council documents.
One of the mechanisms used included the Council’s
Community Wellbeing Scorecard. Responses provide
valuable information which can be used to assist with
planning for stronger communities. The Council has
also recently issued a Customer Perception Survey for
community feedback.
Community input to all these surveys and consultations
permeates the various departments and feeds up to
the central planning processes of Council through a
sophisticated online reporting tool called Interplan. Staff
from across Council’s different departments use Interplan
to report on their activities in a consistent fashion.
Christine explained the rationale for this arrangement and
its importance for Council decision-making.
The City of Melville is serious about implementation,
so need is to ensure staff are accountable for
managing various projects and report on a
regular basis.
Reporting needs to be easy for everyone to
understand. This enables all our projects to be clear in
the budget and for staff to clearly see the links to the
Corporate Plan. Our top level goal is A City for People.
The Cultural Vitality Plan will inform how we achieve
that goal through other set strategies, including
‘Enable a vibrant and connected community’. It will
provide clear direction to guide a range of actions.
Once completed and endorsed by Council, the
Cultural Vitality Plan will form part of the City’s suite of
plans. Thus it is important to understand how a Cultural
Vitality Plan fits within a local council’s comprehensive
planning processes.
Christine explained:
The development of an Arts and Culture Strategy was
an action contained in Melville’s Community Plan
2007-2017 People Places and Participation.
It was prepared using a state planning process called
Network City and included extensive dialogue with
the City of Melville’s community and stakeholders.
The Community Plan identified high-level aspirations
that informed the City’s current Corporate Plan:
Plan for the Future 2008 – 2012. The Corporate Plan
contains several key goals including A City for People.
Christine emphasised the importance of ensuring that the
community understands the value of planning and the
fact that Council cannot support projects and programs
that don’t fit within the intent set out in its overall plans.
It’s important that people recognise that there is
planning and that it’s very transparent so that our
actions can always be tracked back.
Going forward, we can’t do a project just because
it feels good. We have to compete for resources
across Council and we have to demonstrate clear and
transparent processes to our Councillors and
our community.
Melville’s integrated planning processes also provide
an effective means by which actions included in the
Cultural Vitality Plan can be implemented across different
departments of Council.
A seamless integrated planning process requires a
willingness to collaborate across Council’s different
departments. Projects most likely to benefit from an
inter-departmental approach are those aimed at providing
the community with broad-ranging, cultural, social,
environmental and economic gains.
An integrated cultural plan will also assist the
development of robust indicators and would also enable
the Council to determine a fair way of unit costing. For
example, this could be the cost per person attending a
community event. The unit cost would fall as the number
of attendees increased.
Even before the Cultural Vitality Plan has been completed
by Council staff have successfully taken into account
social, economic, environmental and cultural factors in reinvigorating
the Melville International Film Festival where,
as Hannah Katarski explained
Numbers were falling.
We found out that neighbourhoods wanted the films
to be provided locally, so now we provide smaller,
individual events in each of the four neighbourhoods;
and the films are well attended making this event an
economically sustainable venture for Council.
I left Melville impressed by their integrated approach to
community projects. The future of cultural development
would seem to be in good hands.
50

Brentwood Primary School work on their ‘Cultural Vitality Canvas’, photo by Louise Snook
TEN PROJECTS
51

growing communities
city of
MANDURAH
07 Mall Memories Project Stretch Festival Mandurah:
Getting Smart with Smart Street
Mandurah isn’t Fremantle. There are not many
historic buildings. Many are from much more
recent times but there is a wealth of stories
not evident from the physical structures but
rather from the people who occupy them.
Art projects give us an opportunity to tease
these histories out and make them very
tangible, not just stories on paper but stories
to touch or hear.
Jane Tillson, Arts and Cultural Development Officer, City of Mandurah.
It opened my eyes. I thought I knew all about
museums and history being used to colour arts
projects but I realised I really didn’t until we went
through with this Smart Street Project.
This enthusiastic response came from Community
Museum Officer, Nicholas Reynolds.
Contemporary history is perhaps the easiest history to lose
because it happens all around us and it is quite possible to
look up and find it’s gone. And because it is contemporary
we don’t appreciate its potential value. That’s particularly
true of built heritage.
In earlier times a fish-processing plant, Smart’s Cannery
on the sea-front, gave the street its name and since then
Smart Street has become in succession, a site of barracks
for Japanese workers and a residential street. Later, as
Mandurah became more of a holiday resort, flats and
tourist accommodation sprouted.
Smart Street’s most recent face is as a commercial and
retail centre. It became a shopping mall in the 1970s.
Jane Tillson, Arts and Cultural Development Officer for the
City of Mandurah, sensed that art and history seemed to
talk to each other along this street.
Mandurah isn’t Fremantle. There are not many historic
buildings. Many are from much more recent times
but there is a wealth of stories not evident from the
physical structures but rather from the people who
occupy them. Art projects give us an opportunity to
tease these histories out and make them very tangible,
not just stories on paper but stories to touch or hear.
Jane’s idea for the Mall Memories project gained
urgency as Mandurah was gearing up for yet more urban
development. Shopkeepers who leased premises in the
mall were becoming aware that there was a risk that the
buildings they worked in might be knocked down and that
they would have to re-locate or close up.
As a self-confessed retail therapist, Jane knew, from
overheard conversations, that many Smart Street
shopkeepers had been around for a long time and had
become de facto custodians of social change.
52

Writing on pavement, photo by Carolyn Marks

growing communities
Some of the ladies running the shops in Smart Street
Mall have been there forever. So if shopkeepers have
to move on, this area of social history might be lost.
In their time they’ve seen fashion changes, technical
changes in tills, credit cards and so on. And during my
time with the Mandurah City Council I became aware
of their concerns about losing their premises. The
arts allow for social commentary on issues like these
through community art projects.
As Stretch Festival co-ordinator, Carolyn Marks had
the task of making that happen in the autumn of 2010,
describing herself as the spider in the middle. I threw
out the webs to the community to turn Jane’s seed of
a concept into visual, sound and literary histories.
The theme for Stretch in 2010 was Senses, Taste,
Touch, Sound and Sight. So we wanted to connect
with people regardless of what physical or intellectual
impairment they might have. For people without
sight there were sound installations and oral histories
to listen to, and those with hearing loss could see the
artwork and sculptures.
We started by capturing social histories and the visual
artwork, sculptures and sound installations that we
set up in Smart Street, all developed from those oral
histories. A writers’ group used the oral material
recorded by Jan Baker to write about the history of
the mall.
Two project co-ordinators, Carol Nicolson and Linda
Jones, studied the histories and worked with artists to
pull the fabric of the project together. Words, sound and
vision eventually came together as a large installation in
the mall.
Carolyn recalled some good outcomes
We had a wonderful chalk artist, Deb Hiller, who
chalked the writers’ words down on the paving. The
words on the ground acted as placemaking tools
where people would come and discuss what they
read and relate them to the connected sculptures in
the middle of the mall. People walking down the
mall got great pleasure from seeing all the artworks
flowing down the length of the paving surrounded by
the chalked text.
The sound installations were under the sculptures so
you could hear what our sound artist, Fish Gill, had
pulled together from reading the extracts from the
oral history transcripts that the artists had chosen.
Visual displays in sculptural shapes recaptured former
memories. The Santoy Ballroom that backed onto the mall
(now the site of a surf shop) was re-created by children
and their teachers from the Frederick Irwin Anglican
School. Visitors could peek in through the windows and
see figurines of people dancing around the ballroom
accompanied by music of the period. Children could
envisage the life their grandparents and parents had lived.
Was sculpture stretched? Was it accessible?
One powerful visual feature was a sculpture of
two fish made entirely from tin lids and wire. The
‘stretchers’ hoped it would allow the audience to use
their imagination.
There were challenges which also stretched the
organisers. Sound installations and some sculptures
needed to tap into the power supply in the light poles
which was only available at night. Some nifty negotiation
overcame this challenge. Even with power assured,
Carolyn Marks and her team had to order special sound
cords and these had to be set above human reach.
People coming out of the nearby nightclubs might
jump up and swing on the electrical fittings. These
cords came late and had to be installed at the very
last moment. We wondered if we were going to have
a sound installation at all, wasting all of that effort
and missing the opportunity to listen to the stories.
Another problem was that we had to store the
sculptures away each night in case somebody
pinched or damaged them and then we had to reinstall
them the next day. We were dependent on our
volunteers to do that, many of whom had jobs to go
to besides helping us.
Goodwill was needed from all quarters. Council staff
often provided equipment to help with technical set-ups.
Jane Tillson recalls one evening when a borrowed ladder
had been left in the mall.
I didn’t want our reputation lost by not returning
borrowed equipment. So that night I walked down
the mall, grabbed the huge ladder, struggled with it
down to the foreshore, parked it against a tree and
secured it with a chain and padlock so that Works
& Services could get it next morning as they went
through on their morning check.
And the legacy of Stretch 2010?
For Nicholas Reynolds the project had a special bonus.
We had already interviewed some of the oral history
participants well before the festival but then we’d
asked general questions about the town. Now we reinterviewed
them with much more specific questions
about the mall. And the floodgates opened and
wonderful stories came out.
Carolyn Marks recalled a very positive reaction to
the displays.
The number of people who went though the mall was
huge because at least three schools were involved
and that meant that a lot of people contributed to
the project. Parents and grandparents came down.
They wandered through the mall stopping to read,
stopping to listen and taking their time wandering
around, being curious and interacting.
And like a stone thrown into a pond there are
always ripples. Carolyn hopes that now with any
redevelopment of the Smart Street Mall, pieces of
text from this project could be incorporated into the
urban design to act as placemaking tools so that
people could read and be aware of the Smart Street
history. That would be a lovely ripple effect from
this project.
54

Smart Street has been a feature of Mandurah for over 100
years. The mall was built in the 1970s and its proposed
redevelopment is part of the City’s revitalisation plan.
This project aimed to preserve social and cultural history,
before redevelopment takes place.
As Mayor Paddy Creevey described it
The Smart Street Mall has always been considered
important. It almost became a symbol of Council’s
attempts to revitalise the town. There was nothing
special about the mall, but it started to take on a new
life, with the project being the catalyst. It evoked a lot
of interest.
John Hughes, Manager of Libraries, Learning, Arts and
Culture, took up the story.
The starting point for the project was a brainstorming
session between officers to develop
ideas for the 2010 Stretch Festival. The issue of the
proposed redevelopment of the mall emerged and we
started talking about ways in which its history might
be captured. The project developed from there.
The Stretch Festival is an annual event. In 2010 the
Festival Co-ordinator asked the Community Museum to
collaborate on a project about the mall that involved local
artists using various media, a sound artist, local painters,
three primary school teachers, an art specialist and
members of the local writing group. An oral historian and
scribe were also part of the ‘delivery team’.
The historian and the scribe talked with retailers and
shoppers about their memories, experiences, stories
and opinions of Smart Street. This information was then
processed by the artists and writers to create sculptures,
paintings, text, mixed media and oral recordings.
In John’s view the process transformed the
community’s information into lots of artistic works,
which greatly enhanced the atmosphere of the mall.
It also pinpointed significant events over the course
of the street’s history. For instance, one of the
exhibits was a flickering black and white screen
representing the first TV set in Mandurah. When
television first came here, it was displayed in a shop
window in Smart Street and people would gather
outside and peer at the test card in disbelief.
The project brought schools, artists, writers and
heritage groups together with two departments of
Council, along with retailers and shoppers. It has
become a symbol of what can be achieved through
strong partnerships across the community.
For Nicholas Reynolds the community connection with
the museum was a vital ingredient.
People in Mandurah are engaged in heritage and they
really do care about preserving the city’s history. The
Mandurah Community Museum has 27 volunteers,
but only one and a half paid staff. The oral history
component was developed by the volunteers. We
couldn’t have done without them.
We’re finding good examples of partnerships and
tolerance in the past through projects like the Smart
Street Mall. A model of a dance theatre that was once
in the street had American soldiers dancing inside
and Indigenous youth swimming across to join them.
It showed how well Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
youth got on with each other in those days.
Following the Festival, the art works were relocated to
the Falcon eLibrary in a nearby suburb for two weeks
and then added to the Mandurah Museum’s Oral History
Collection for future exhibition and touring.
John has no doubts that the Smart Street Mall project has
also provided some important spin-offs.
We’ve also identified ways that elements of the
project can continue, such as for consultations about
the Old Traffic Bridge, the possible redevelopment
of a caravan park and projects about the natural
environment.
The Mayor had the final word.
We could certainly use some elements of the
Smart Street Mall project for the Old Traffic Bridge.
Discussion needs to take place with the community.
That’s the way to go!
Man with Sausages;
Tin Fish, photos by Carolyn Marks
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55

shire of
KATANNING
08 Malay Youth Sewing Project
growing communities
We are very proud of the multicultural community
and its relationship with Council. The Harmony
Festival now has a state-wide profile. Lotterywest
is saying they want to fund it. The Harmony
Festival had about 50 cultures participating and
running their own component. Council just
provided a free venue, the official welcome and
promoted the event on the web.
Carl Beck, Acting CEO and Manager of Community Services, Shire of Katanning
Opposite: Showcasing outfits at the 2010 YACWA Fairground Conference, photo by James Campbell
Carl Beck, Acting CEO and Manager of Community
Juaini Taylor were my guides to the Malay Youth Sewing
Project.
Significant numbers of Aboriginal, Cocos and Christmas
Islander, Afghani, South African, Chinese and Burmese
people live in Katanning and a Mosque caters for the
approximately 400 Muslims in that mix.
The wide main streets of the town had a typical Australian
country town look about them, housing prominent
pubs, an old flour mill, a heritage park and a railway line
dividing the business district. I had been hoping to find a
multicultural cafe or two.
I met Juaini at the Katanning Recreation and Leisure
Centre and all was revealed. The Centre was packed!
We found Carl busy behind a counter looking after a
line of people, as the usual receptionist was off sick. He
was wearing a Recreation and Leisure Centre t-shirt and
certainly didn’t look like a typical CEO.
While we were waiting for Carl to finish serving his
customers, Juaini told me how she first became involved
in the Malay Youth Sewing Project.
I came to Katanning seven years ago from Bunbury.
When I was 18, I got a job in the Health Department,
which is how I discovered youth development. I
noticed there were no youth programs happening.
56

growing communities
Four Malay girls wanted to learn how to sew
traditional Malay outfits. These are in high demand
for community events, but they can’t be bought off
the shelf anywhere in Australia.
There was no one in Katanning to teach them but
my Mum and her sister in Bunbury are professional
seamstresses. They agreed to run a workshop. We
ended up with twelve girls aged between 14 and 24.
The girls learned basic sewing techniques and to design
and create their own outfits. And then Juaini helped to
organise a modelling class.
When the outfits were finished, we asked a lady to
run a modelling class in my lounge room. Within a
few hours, she’d taught the girls how to parade, so
we organised a fashion show here at the recreation
centre and invited friends and family along.
Later, we ran another workshop and two more
girls joined in. We then paraded the outfits at the
Harmony Festival in 2009. All our programs, including
the parading of the outfits from the Sewing Project,
feed into this annual festival. The events are all made
up by the community, for example, a multicultural
fashion parade involving local Chinese, Filipino, Thai,
Fijian, African, Afghan, Indian, Scottish, Malay and
Dutch people.
This year we included a Harmony Art Exhibition at
the Katanning Art Gallery for the first time. This will
become an annual event too and the girls can exhibit
their outfits if they don’t want to parade next year.
When Carl Beck joined us I asked him to tell me more
about the Council’s cultural development programs.
A rural council’s primary focus is usually on economic
development because their councillors tend to be
farmers and business people. This council is no
different, so we have to demonstrate how the arts can
benefit the community. We’ve found that the key is to
make sure we pitch our messages and the benefits in
a positive way.
The Malay Youth Sewing Project has been one of
the cornerstones for getting community cultural
development to happen here.
We are very proud of the multicultural community
and its relationship with Council. The Harmony
Festival now has a state-wide profile. Lotterywest is
saying they want to fund it. The Harmony Festival had
about 50 cultures participating and running their own
component. Council just provided a free venue, the
official welcome and promoted the event on the web.
The Malay Youth Sewing Project is not only
consistent with the Shire’s mission, which is,
Progressing the community through the celebration of
diversity and achievements. It has also paved the way
to delivering both cultural and economic outcomes for
Katanning residents.
Ira Taylor was one of the participants in the Malay
Sewing Project
Before the workshop I didn’t know what I wanted to
do or be career-wise, but the experience of doing the
sewing workshop gave me the motivation to pursue
work in the industry.
One could say, ‘As you sew, so shall you reap.’ That was
certainly true for more than one young woman from
Katanning’s Malay community after taking part in the
Sewing Workshop Project in 2009.
Ummira Aeson helped kick start the idea.
One of my cousins and her friend went to a Career
Expo in Katanning. They came back and spoke to
Juaini Taylor, who is the Youth Officer here with the
Katanning Shire. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to start a
sewing project?
But not any old sewing project. When Juaini arranged
for me to meet the sewing group on a cold winter’s day
in Katanning she introduced me to several of the young
women who had taken part in the workshop and also to
their mentors, her mother and aunt, Jenita Taylor and
Elok Enjia.
Ummira drew my attention to Elok’s beautiful full length
silk dress in rich yellow with striking patterns. It was a
colourful reminder of a distinctive Malay dress tradition; a
tradition that Ummira wanted to make sure continued.
Most of the elders here are getting on so we want
them to pass down their skills to the younger
generations.
The Malay elders had come to Katanning in the mid
1970s when the Katanning Abattoir opted for a Halal
slaughtering practice to make it easier to export sheep to
Islamic countries.
Malay slaughtermen and meat-workers from the
Cocos Islands and from mainland Malaysia were offered
jobs in this rural Great Southern community. They brought
their families.
Their children attended the local schools and they are now
a distinctive but integral part of Katanning life. The request
for help with a Malay-focused sewing workshop was
no surprise to the Shire Council. The town has a strong
tradition of inclusiveness having also welcomed Karen
people from Burma, refugees from Afghanistan and the
Congo as well as Chinese workers.
Juaini took up the young women’s request. They
had already approached TAFE Katanning to see if they
would run a sewing course but the cost proved beyond
their means.
So I approached the Shire. At this time, I was a
panellist for Y-Culture, which is a program that funds
arts projects for young people aged 12 to 18 years
old living in regional areas. I spoke to the girls about
this, and two of them volunteered to help put the
application together.
58

The project received a $5,000 grant from Y-Culture run by
Country Arts WA, $500 from the Islamic Association as
well as in-kind support from the Katanning Shire Council.
TAFE Katanning also came back into the picture.
We were thankful that TAFE had sewing machines
left over from a previous project and they were quite
interested in starting up a sewing workshop. They
also allowed us to use their art room. I think they
were quite happy that both the room and the sewing
machines were being used again because most of
their courses were in horticulture or farming.
The next step was to set up a five-day workshop.
And one of the easiest things for me was that
the girls took ownership of their project. They got
themselves there, they came on time and they
brought and shared their food. That made it an easy
project for the shire to run. And when I got there on
the fifth day they were learning to do other projects
because they’d completed their work in four days.
There were perhaps unexpected benefits from the five
days’ work.
Nurbayti Taylor had never sewn before.
And I just thought it might be something to
do during the holidays but I learned how to sew
Malay clothing and also how to sew a dress and the
special occasions when we wear it, like Ramadan
and weddings.
Another participant, Ainatul Aeson, gained a casual job
at the library at the end of the course. At the public
fashion parade which rounded off the workshop, Ainatul
mentioned to CEO Carl Beck that she was interested in
library work. He offered her a volunteer opportunity that
later led to casual employment.
There were benefits too for the course mentors. Art
worker Jenita Taylor came to Australia in 1976 from the
Cocos Islands and was glad to pass on her skills.
It is a good idea for us to teach the young ones
because it’s much easier for them in the future if they
know how to do it. And the tradition of wearing the
right clothes is very important.
Siti Mariam Normateen had only recently arrived in
Australia. Already an experienced seamstress, her course
work was soon rewarded when a local Shire Councillor
asked her to sew a Malay outfit. But for Siti the five-day
workshop offered an additional bonus.
I have been sewing since I was eleven but being very
new to Australia I also learned how to talk in English
as well.
For Ira Taylor a career now beckoned.
I’m now designing clothes and I’ve gained more skills
from the workshop.
Ira also designed a Facebook page, which put her in
business as a dress designer.
She showed me a portfolio of her recent work, dresses
which she has designed and illustrated from a photo-shoot
set in the Great Southern landscape. Mottled wandoo
trees form a warm, but not intrusive, background for the
models who displayed Ira’s vivid, striking and distinctively
Malay-inspired outfits. If fusion cooking has taken hold in
Australia then fusion dressing has also arrived.
In her role as course organiser, Juaini Taylor also came to
appreciate the value of the source culture.
It was only at the workshop that most of the girls
realised how important it is to have these traditional
clothes because we have so many Malay weddings
and other special occasions when we wear these
clothes. We thought what would happen if we
couldn’t source these; if we didn’t have our elders
to sew these for us. What would we wear to these
events where traditional outfits were compulsory?
And these were soon on display, as Ira Taylor recalls.
At the end of the workshop we set up a fashion
parade and invited people from the Shire. We showed
them what we actually did. Then in Perth we were
invited to a youth conference where we paraded the
dresses we had made and made a little speech on
what we got out of it, what we’d learned and why it
was important to us.
TEN PROJECTS
59

city of
BUNBURY
09 Bridging the Gap: Circus Train – Slow Down
growing communities
To witness the delight on the faces of participants
and especially the man with disability whose hand
was used as the model for the sculpture was just
a delight. He was tremendously proud and I was
proud that we had made him proud.
David Smith, Mayor of The City of Bunbury.
To witness the delight on the faces of participants and
especially the man with disability whose hand was
used as the model for the sculpture was just a delight.
He was tremendously proud and I was proud that we
had made him proud.
David Smith, Mayor of the City of Bunbury, recalling the
‘Bridging the Gap’ sculpture, Circus Train-Slow Down
installation on the Leschenault Inlet foreshore.
‘Bridging the Gap’ if it was to do just that, meant forging a
link between two groups of people who looked as if they
had little in common.
Former railway workers in the Bunbury region felt that with
the passing of steam and the diminished role of rail, their
role in the community had been forgotten.
The railway had been a major local employer and the
Bunbury Railway Institute, now sadly burned down,
was a vital part of the city’s life; a centre for dances and
social gatherings.
The workers now wanted a public memorial of their
contribution to the community.
60

Bradley Iseppi and Dave (Jock) Lindsay in front of ‘Circus Train-Slow Down’, photo by Matt Scurfield

growing communities
At almost the same time, DADAA (Disability In the Arts,
Disadvantage in the Arts), a community arts organisation
based in Fremantle, was also seeking council funding to
help Bunbury men and women with disability create a
public artwork in a prominent public space.
When both groups sought space and funds, Sonya
Dye, then Cultural Development Officer for the City of
Bunbury, was faced with a dilemma. Public sites were
on expensive land and funds could probably only support
one project.
Her solution? Put them together.
We pursued the idea of creating a genuine
community cultural development project rather than
a purely public art project, and linking the two.
We thought the aspirations of the two groups
weren’t that dissimilar. Both were looking to have
their story told.
Story was integral to the project. In an initial bid to find
out what should be said and also depicted, artist and
historian Helen Seiver ran workshops where railway
workers freely told their stories. To cite just one
One woman who lived alongside the railway regularly
lined up bottles on her fence line. Passing engine
crews took delight in knocking them off with lumps
of coal. They had no idea that it was the coal that she
was collecting.
To help those with disability to work as artists, DADAA
recruited Nicole and Alex Mickle, an experienced artist
and sculptor team. At the first workshop they thought
their well laid plans for drawing and sketching out ideas
would get them started.
But within fifteen minutes of being in the room
we had to re-think everything; holding a pencil for
example. Some found that hard. Others had difficulty
in communicating what they wanted to do. We also
had to find materials they could work with. We spent
time switching between wire and clay.
Reconciling the hopes of those with disability with those
of the railway men took time. Alex recalls one rail retiree
asking what railways had to do with disability.
And this guy was standing there with only one arm.
As Sonya Dye had predicted, the two groups had a lot
in common. Some railwaymen had suffered injuries in the
course of their work and both groups could claim to feel
marginalised. For the project to succeed the key was to
find sensory and visual elements that would appeal
to everyone.
The wheel looked promising. For some with disability a
wheelchair suggested difference from other people, but
it also offered mobility. The spoked wheel was also iconic
for men who had worked with steam engines.
Two other inspirations came from the story of the
circus train; at one time an important event in the life of
Bunbury. Families turned out en masse to see the Worth’s
Circus train unloaded, with the elephants taking on the
task of pulling the wagons full of other animals off the
train and onto the platform. It was a wonderful spectacle
in itself, let alone the circus that followed.
At one of the early workshops Helen Seiver read a short
story by Ray Repacholi about this regular event. The
response was joyous and immediate. Both those with
disability and those who had worked on the railway could
remember when the circus came to town. A bond had
been forged.
The circus was also a reminder of a slower, more relaxed
era before television and organised mass entertainment.
‘Slowing down’ and the ‘circus train’ became key
elements in the final choice of sculptural design.
As Nicole Mickle commented, the ‘circus train’ also
became a metaphor for ‘life as a circus’, the hectic
pace of our everyday lives and the yearning to just
slow things down.
Another visual breakthrough came when the would-be
artists had been shown two hundred or so photographs
and were asked to name those which appealed to them.
62

The clear favourite was an inter-twining of steel; a
glowing criss-crossing of rail lines. This picture could
represent a number of ideas including a suggestion of
unity or possibly confusion; a condition which those with
disabilities frequently faced in their daily lives. It was
perhaps also a recognition that the artists, like the rail
workers, identified with railway culture.
For their part, the rail men spoke not only of the
mechanical side of their work but passionately recalled
the noise and the steam and the rush of wind when
you stood by the track.
Sonya Dye had noticed almost immediately that a sense
of the elemental and of freedom also pervaded their
project partners. The artists with disability worked without
any inhibition.
There was no “What shall I draw?” syndrome.
They drew freely and that freed up everyone else to
explore imaginatively.
Mutual recognition of these elemental memories drew
debate about how a sculpture would embody memory by
moving away from the purely representational towards
a stylised concept of power and inclusion. Initially the
railway workers had envisaged a realistic mural of a
stream train but increasingly they came to support an
abstract approach.
A union of disability and railway history in the final
sculpture was recognised in the form of the joined casts
of two hands. One was Dave (Jock) Lindsay’s; a railway
man who had led the push for rail workers’ recognition.
The other was the hand of Bradley Iseppi. Iseppi is a
man in his mid-forties with an intellectual disability.
Bradley lives in Australind in a group home, and works
at Activ Foundation’s business services making Visy
board packaging and labels for wine. He also volunteers
in the community for organisations including St. John
Ambulance. Bradley enjoys anything to do with cars,
including going to the speedway.
Much earlier in Bridging The Gap, one of Bradley’s
charcoal drawings had inspired Alex Mickle and helped
create the basis for the Circus Train sculpture. Jock and
Bradley shook hands once again on the day of the launch.
Friendships had grown during the five year project. Helen
Seiver remembers an artist with disability who told a rail
man that her father had worked on the Trans Australia rail
line. It formed a bond.
Next day he came in with a replica small steam
engine. They were friends.
It was a very rewarding project for Helen herself.
I think it changed all of our lives starting with those
workshops through to the end. Abilities, courage and
perseverance; that was the spin off for us.
For me it was connections that were made – right
from the beginning with people who didn’t think they
could work together to find that there were so many
things in common, just seeing them sitting at tables,
talking, drawing, sketching.
For Alex, Bridging the Gap was an eye opener
At the start of the workshops I thought, “This is
something I’ve got to go to on Friday and in a few
weeks I’ll get through it, whatever comes of it.” But
pretty quickly I started to look forward to Fridays
more than the rest of the week.
I saw the value of community arts projects for the
first time because I was totally uninterested. I was
interested in producing my own art.
‘The Gap’ was finally bridged at a celebration at the edge
of the Leschenault Inlet, not far from the site of the old
railway bridge and rail yards.
Mayor David Smith launched Circus Train-Slow Down
on September 11, 2010. He remembers that moment
as one that acknowledged a learning curve for both
parties; a process of trial and error, requiring patience
and education for people making the effort to do
something. There was growth on both sides; a warm
feeling for those who’d helped and pride for those
who’d tried.
It is too easy to say something is too hard. It is
hard, but their perseverance lifts the whole spirit of
the community.
TEN PROJECTS
63

growing communities
city of
ARMADALE
10 The Champion Centre Holiday Mosaic Project
There were so many sticks and nuts lying
around and that gave me an idea. This project
was about the seasons, about nature, about the
world around us. It helped us to design the
project in an abstract way. We didn’t want to be
literal, just use colours, shapes and textures.
Community artist, Danka Scholtz
L>R: Starting the mosaic; Completed Snake ready for mounting;
Starting the Snake Holiday Mosaic Project participants, photos by City of Armadale staff
When I walked into the Champion Centre I was greeted
by two impressive displays. One is a mosaic of the Six
Seasons; the Noongar reading of our annual weather.
Subtle changes in hue in this colourful masterpiece
suggest more effectively than any words the way in
which the Western Australian nature calendar works.
Sticks and nuts gathered from the surrounding bushland
give the design a distinctive warm texture.
The other mosaic, The Snake, is a glistening serpent that
winds around the walls of the children’s crèche. Both
mosaics were made by local children.
I talked about this project with Jodie Clarke, Indigenous
Development Co-ordinator, artist, Danka Scholtz and
Indigenous Centre Development Officer, Nicole Hayward.
Jodie always gives visitors a tour of the centre.
Comments on the artwork are always positive. And
when you tell them the ages of the kids (who made
it) they always think it is the work of adults.
Armadale’s Champion Centre focuses on projects that
encourage creative activity with something to show for it
at the end.
For Nicole and Jodie “creative activity” for the annual
January Intensive School Holiday Program meant more
than sport. While many local Aboriginal parents were
pushing for sports activities at the Centre, both women
wanted to open their eyes to other possibilities.
Jodie’s aim was to turn the Centre into a place where
Aboriginal children could have their art up on the wall for
all to see.
It was a strenuous project for the kids, very ‘in depth’,
but we wanted to be ‘outside the box’.
They engaged Danka Scholtz, an experienced artist in
working in multicultural settings. But she soon presented
a problem.
We had to kick Danka out a couple of times because
she wanted to stay longer.
Danka herself was swiftly taken aback.
64

Mosaic at the Champion Centre, photo by City of Armadale staff

Top>Bottom: Local youngsters display Mosaic Talent, photo by
Marcelo Palacios; Head of the Snake, photo by City of Armadale staff
I was surprised by how quickly the children picked up
what was needed and, from an artistic perspective,
it was amazing, right down to the tiniest one. The
enthusiasm was fantastic.
I don’t think they got tired. I couldn’t keep up
with them. I got tired but I also got so much help.
Everybody got involved, staff, friends and families. I
didn’t have to ask for help with problems. Everyone
seemed to know when to step in and how to help.
Danka’s first task was to discuss what the children could
do within the limited time provided (a fortnight) and how
every child could be involved. The surrounding bush
helped out.
There were so many sticks and nuts lying around
and that gave me an idea. This project was about the
seasons, about nature, about the world around us. It
helped us to design the project in an abstract way.
We didn’t want to be literal, just use colours, shapes
and textures.
Almost from the beginning, the project was as much
about self-organisation as about art. A core group of
children asked Danka to write down a list of materials that
their parents would need to buy for them to complete the
art work.
The fortnight stretched on for seven weeks. School had
started but many children still came back to the Centre in
the afternoon. However, as Danka remembers, it didn’t
start that way.
I had my doubts because the program was quite
ambitious. It was a huge project. There were two big
groups and little time and one group didn’t turn up on
the first day. But the word spread around and in the
next two days we got a big group that kept coming.
And kept on coming…
Each time she takes visitors into the children’s crèche to
see the Big Snake, Jodie tells a story against herself.
The girls were all sitting around on the floor and
Danka had pieces of the snake out on the floor
and there were all these coloured beads and I said
to Danka,
“Do you think we should take the coloured beads
off them?”
Because I thought it was too much, a bit over the top,
but now when we see the snake mosaic, all grouted
and mounted, all those glass pebbles glisten and
that’s the first thing visitors talk about when they
walk in. And I always remember that, because this is
a piece of art that some very little children did. And
there was I saying, “Take those things away because
it looks horrible”.
For staff and the child artists alike, the launch of the
Holiday Mosaic Project on 25 March 2010 was reward
enough for the five additional weeks of work. But a
lot more action had gone on behind the scenes. The
extra weeks of child artistic labour also put demands on
supervising staff. It was January. Most afternoons were
hot and children were working with potentially dangerous
cutting tools.
But under Danka’s firm instructions and supervision,
no mishaps occurred. Jodie felt that the launch justified
their efforts.
These children don’t often have an event where
they are given a certificate, asked to come up on
stage, get a handshake from the Mayor. But perhaps
the important thing is that these kids feel good
about themselves.
Danka summed up the project.
I very much enjoyed the whole experience. It was
hard work. I hate hot weather but I didn’t notice
how hot it was because the work was so interesting.
And the kids most of all, cheeky, witty, funny, very
positive, full of life and yet co-operating like little cells
in one big brain. They always somehow got together.
66

The City of Armadale is 28 kilometres south east of Perth,
at the foot of the Darling Ranges. Aboriginal people make
up about four per cent of the City’s population, nearly
twice the State average.
The Champion Centre has given Armadale a focus
for services to Aboriginal residents. As soon as the
doors opened, the Centre received funding from the
Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing,
Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA).
It has now become a one-stop shop and home to a range
of other organisations, all supporting Aboriginal children
and families.
CEO Ray Tame set the scene.
The City of Armadale has had an unwavering
commitment to the Indigenous sector for the past
14 years, a commitment in our hearts from the
Mayor down.
However it hasn’t been easy to manifest. The
challenge has been to find ways of developing a
closer relationship with Aboriginal residents. The
opportunity arose with the birth of the Champion
Centre.
The Centre is based in a Council building previously
leased to the Police and Citizens Youth Club. When the
club relocated, the Council decided to make the centre
available for use by the local Aboriginal community. But
Council did not immediately envisage the benefits to the
community and the City.
Members of the local Aboriginal community give
leadership, which ensures that the centre operates in
ways that accord with Aboriginal needs and customs. But
equally the Champion Centre welcomes everyone.
The six staff are all Aboriginal. They have proved to be a
crucial asset in helping the Council meet its commitment
to the Aboriginal community.
Early on, the staff consulted with the local Aboriginal
community and this led to a school holiday program with
a difference. The theme is always arts based. Neil Kegie,
Executive Manager of Community Services for the City of
Armadale thinks this model may be unique to Armadale.
We’re yet to find another council doing what we do.
During the school holidays children create artworks
which are hung up in the centre for display. This is
gradually changing the atmosphere of the building
from sport to a gathering place for Aboriginal people.
For Ray Tame, the importance of all children gaining an
education has long been a priority.
Jodie Clarke explained that when the centre
commissioned artist Danka Sholtz to work on the
school holiday program, the project focus was motor
skill development and civic mindedness; to be a
member of a team and then to open up to the
broader community.
The underlying aim for Danka was to provide new
experiences and to teach new skills, because some of
the children were normally disengaged. Most of them
didn’t go to school, so they didn’t have much to keep
their minds occupied.
Danka is a well-known artist and experienced in working
with community groups, but this was the first time she
had worked with children. Danka started with the basics,
by taking the children through an intensive study in
mosaics and sand casting.
Danka told them they had to complete their training
before she would permit them to contribute to the
artwork. The kids were having lots of fun with Danka,
so they willingly completed their training.
I asked Jodie whether any of the kids caused any trouble
during the project.
No, we don’t have tagging anymore. At first we
had a kid tagging the centre. He and his mates
turned up to the school holiday program and he
was overheard talking about it. So he was pulled
aside and talked to about ownership. At the end, he
brought his Dad down and was so proud about what
he had done here.
While six panels, representing Noongar seasons were
created by the artist with contributions from the older
children, the younger children worked on the mosaic
snake. They created the 120 pieces. As Jodie recalled
putting it together took ages, but nobody minded.
They didn’t know how long the snake was going to
be. It just grew and grew.
Now that the snake occupies pride of place in the
children’s crèche, Jodie finds that some of the kids come
in from time to time, just to look at the snake and
point out which bits they did.
Neil was interested in the final outcome.
Danka has been instrumental in ensuring the quality
of the work. We’re planning to bring her back to
do more. It was clear that she was not only an
accomplished artist, but she also had a natural ability
to work with children, to keep them engaged and to
get the desired results.
We’re also planning to extend the work to other
sectors of the Indigenous community, for example,
we’ve just applied for funds to bring young women in,
to bring the old sewing circles back.
The City of Armadale Strategic Plan emphasises
community wellbeing. The community has definitely
gained from the opening of the Champion Centre and in
particular, from the many and diverse outcomes of the
Holiday Mosaic Project.
Neil wraps up
We couldn’t list the names of the participants in the
artwork as some of them are under child protection.
But we wanted to acknowledge them so we ended up
having a discreet launch, with the Mayor giving each
child a certificate and a handshake.
On the day of the launch, we watched the kids
bursting through the doors, dragging their parents
and grandparents along. They were all very proud.
TEN PROJECTS
67

how to
community arts and cultural
development in local government
This section provides tips for local council officers who are involved in community arts and cultural
development projects.
01 PREAMBLE
02 GET TO KNOW YOUR COUNCIL’S STRATEGIC PLANS
03 GET TO KNOW WHAT OTHER DEPARTMENTS ARE PLANNING
growing communities
04 DEVELOP INTERNAL PARTNERSHIPS
05 TAKE ADVANTAGE OF NETWORKING WITH OTHER COUNCILS
06 GET TO KNOW THE COMMUNITY
07 ENGAGE IN STRATEGIC LONG TERM PLANNING
08 USE THE END OF THE FINANCIAL YEAR
09 USE THE BEGINNING OF THE CALENDAR YEAR
10 FAMILIARISE YOURSELF WITH STATE AND COMMONWEALTH GOVERNMENT PRIORITIES
11 USE YOUR MANAGER TO OPEN DOORS AND DISSEMINATE INFORMATION
68

01 Preamble
Experienced practitioners have compiled these tips to
help you generate support for community arts and cultural
development within your local government. Of course,
given the diversity of local government across Australia,
not every idea here will apply to every circumstance.
However, we hope the principles will prove helpful to you
as you go about your work and advocacy.
02 Get to know your council’s
strategic plans
The most important thing to do is to become familiar with
the key planning documents at your council. These vary
but will probably include one or more of the following:
The annual report is also a useful source of information
about council’s latest strategic priorities and concerns.
Study the key performance areas, aspirations, priorities,
strategies or goals (or whatever words have been chosen
to articulate the main directions of the council). Make
sure that your work responds to as many as possible and
that you can talk about your projects and programs in
terms of these priorities.
Next, take a look at your council’s cultural plan (if you have
one) and make sure that it directly reflects the directions
in the strategic and corporate plans. If not, start working
towards its revision (or maybe the strategic plan needs
to be revised!) to ensure that your planning and work is
aligned to the broader goals of your council.
03 Get to know what other
departments are planning
Sometimes arts and cultural officers complain that their
work is not well understood by other departments or that
other staff don’t know anything about what the arts unit
is doing. This may be true, but have you checked whether
arts and cultural officers know much about what other
departments are doing?
Do as much as you can to understand the work of others.
A good start is to familiarise yourself with the major
plans or documents that have been produced by each
of the departments across council. This might include
a recreational plan, a social plan, an environmental or
sustainability plan or an economic development plan. You
will probably discover that there are many opportunities
for your people to collaborate with other staff to jointly
address one or more of the main goals of your council.
HOW TO
69

04 Develop internal partnerships
growing communities
Even if you can’t identify a project with another
department, remember what an important resource your
council colleagues can be.
(i)
(ii)
Utilise the skills of:
social planners to keep abreast of population
trends and changes so that your projects are in
line with the makeup of the community.
environmental planners to gain support
for any proposed arts projects that address
environmental issues.
economic planners to obtain information about
economic development opportunities, such
as tourism proposals that could include an
arts component.
Meet with each of the above departments to
discuss ways in which you might collaborate in the
future. For example, sometimes other departments
include an arts component in their projects without
informing the arts unit – and vice versa. This can
result in the project having a weak link, such as an
artist being commissioned by the environmental
planning team (for instance) without a watertight
contract, maintenance plan or copyright agreement
being in place. On the flip side, the arts team
might undertake a public art project without
understanding the environmental context of its
placement. In each of these cases, collaboration
between the arts and environmental planning
teams would ensure a successful outcome for both
projects.
(iii)
(iv)
A formal agreement between all departments
of council to pursue a collaborative approach
to cross-disciplinary projects would result in a
greater success rate of projects and an integrated
approach to service provision. This could involve
the establishment of a cross-functional committee,
comprising one representative from each
department, whose role could be to coordinate
input from each department affected by the project.
Arts and cultural development is often seen as a
lesser priority in councils because of its (often)
intangible outcomes. It can be difficult to justify the
cost of some cultural activities, especially those
that don’t result in a visible product, when the
same money can be spent on a new pavement that
everyone can see.
So how can we make the arts and culture
more visible? One opportunity is to talk to the
staff responsible for your council’s Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) and request a cultural
layer be included in the system. Not only could this
layer map all the heritage sites in the area, it could
also identify creative industries or the places where
people gather for cultural activities.
Another way to improve the visibility of your work
is through partnerships with other departments,
providing a cultural component to broader projects
that do have an immediate visible outcome.
Arts and cultural development often have a natural
link to your council’s marketing because much
of what you do generates ‘good news’ for your
council. Develop a good relationship with the
marketing staff and enlist their help to get your
events calendars and other promotion circulated
more widely for little, if any, cost to your unit. Ask
them to alert you if any department is promoting an
event that could include a cultural add-on.
(v)
(vi)
The staff managing your council’s consultation
processes are also valuable allies and you may have
much to offer them. Maintain a dialogue with them
about council’s approach to consultation and keep
in touch with the consultation processes underway.
Encourage an integrated approach where different
departments can join in one process to achieve
community feedback or, at least, where feedback
is shared across the organisation. This could avoid
the problem of community members being overconsulted
and thinking that council officers don’t
actually know what each other is doing (which is,
sadly, often the case!)
Consider whether your activities and events offer
opportunities for some innovative consultation
processes. Can you involve your community artists
in consultation processes? Or can your projects
and processes help to engage those difficult to get
to members of the community?
The planning department is a particularly important
partner even though it may take persistence to
engage them. Your cultural planning should be
informed by their work and vice versa. Depending
on the size and sophistication of your council, the
cultural unit may be able to contribute its expertise
to planning new residential developments,
ensuring that planners consider how to enhance
opportunities for community gatherings and
connection or what facilities are needed to
encourage arts and cultural development.
70

(vii)
If a community facility is being developed ensure
access to early discussions with developers and
architects. This will give you the opportunity to
ensure that the design takes into account the
‘personality’ of the community expecting to use
it, and to suggest that artists be brought in to
develop design themes that respond to community
values and tastes. If the building is to be used as a
multi-purpose community centre or an arts centre,
then you need to ensure that the builders get it
right. One council built a performing arts venue
but failed to plan sound-proofing between the two
theatres inside. This resulted in the smaller theatre
having to remain dark whenever the larger theatre
was in use. Another built a hall that needed to
accommodate school and community productions
but there was no loading dock, no 3-phase power,
no wings, no room for a lighting grid and no
dressing rooms. Furthermore, the door leading to
the performance area was too low and narrow to
allow pianos and large sets to be brought in and
out. Sounds improbable, but it happens!
Find out which community groups meet with
council departments and ask the hosting
departments if you could come along to one of
their meetings to suggest a get together with
one or more of the groups the arts team works
with. For example, a cross-cultural cooking group
might be interested in catering for a cross-cultural
traditional dance night; a walking group might want
to link with a drawing group to jointly propose
illustrated interpretation along a walking track; a
heritage group might want to link with a literary
group for a night of stories about early life in a local
historic house, etc.
05 Take advantage of networking with
other councils
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
Look for opportunities to meet with officers from
other councils, as joint projects involving more than
one council can attract significant funding from
state and federal governments.
Networking with other arts officers can also lead to
other opportunities, such as swapping exhibitions
or projects; sharing resources, such as artists’
registers, portable stages, events trailers; or even
swapping jobs for a period.
It is also useful to consider benchmarking with
other councils – not just on your projects and
work but also on your budget allocations, pay and
conditions. Providing tangible comparisons to
support your application for more resources or for
improved conditions can be very effective.
06 Get to know the community
(i)
Consider seeking new initiative funding from
council to undertake a skills, assets and interests
audit of the community and use the council’s
mail outs (such as rates notices, welcome packs
for new residents, annual calendars for rubbish
collection, etc.) to distribute a survey to all
households at no cost to your unit. Also canvas
people in shopping centres, public thoroughfares
and tertiary institutions to reach non-ratepayers.
(ii)
The idea is to identify any residents who have
skills or an interest in a particular artform (or
cultural pursuit) so that you can build up a
database of both professional and recreational
be asked to provide their contact details if they
wish to be informed of, or involved in, future
opportunities, such as paid work, voluntary work,
events, festivals, workshops, forums, etc.
This information could feed into more artists on
your artists’ register, more volunteers for cultural
events, the involvement of new blood, the
opportunity to bring people with a shared interest
together, a clearer idea of the current makeup of
the community and its span of interests, a more
targeted resident mailing list, better opportunities
to utilise local people’s skills and respond to their
interests.
If you are undertaking a cultural planning process,
use the above mailing list and those generated by
other departments to identify residents who may
be interested in joining a cultural planning group,
either on a neighbourhood or municipality-wide
basis. Propose regular meetings with the group
to discuss issues, opportunities and ideas to
inform the cultural plan. Preferably the meetings
should be chaired by unit staff but take place
outside council and at a ‘neutral’ venue. Not only
could this group provide valuable information
to feed into the cultural plan (and other council
planning documents), but it could also become
a very useful conduit between council and the
community.
HOW TO
71

07 Engage in strategic
long term planning
It is often the case that arts and cultural officers in
councils work long hours and can have months of
overtime clocked up, with little time to take it. This is
particularly the case for those staff locked into delivering
a range of annual events that the community and the
council have come to expect. This doesn’t stop new
ideas and projects emerging to cater for the changing or
growing interests of the community.
The only way to deal with this (apart from burning out
and retiring to the Bahamas!) is to take advantage of the
council’s long term strategic plan or similar. By aligning
the cultural plan and your work plan to this key document,
the arts unit will be able to gradually phase out some
activities in order to make room for new initiatives. Each
year leading up to a shift in priorities or activities, the plan
could include steps that reduce involvement in one area
and build incrementally towards the new activity. This
approach should mean that by the time the change is
fully enacted, the community and councillors are ready to
accept something new.
08 Use the end of the financial year
Quite often towards the end of the financial year,
councils have unexpended funds in budgets across the
organisation. This can happen when staff have been a bit
too ambitious with their planning or when events beyond
their control have prevented them from completing their
commitments.
Connecting with colleagues in other departments at the
beginning of June may open up ways for the arts unit
to produce projects using these unexpended funds. The
downside to this is that ‘on paper’, the other department
is still seen to spend the money (through the arts unit),
so if your council allocates each department a percentage
increase in their budget for the next year, that amount
boosts the other department’s budget – not the arts
unit’s. However, with the emphasis now on integrated
planning, and the state government requiring all WA
councils to develop integrated plans, a new funding
arrangement that takes into account these adjustments
could be possible.
09 Use the beginning of the
calendar year
The first quarter of the calendar year is when staff
become involved in the budget process and each
department competes with the others for a larger slice
of the pie. Usually, each department is given a small
increase based on CPI, plus additional funds for new
initiatives that address council’s priorities.
This is the time when you can benefit from all that
work you have been doing building relationships with
other officers and departments across council. Being
the first to develop cross-functional initiatives means
that the funding for them will rest with your unit and
other departments will support them. This will improve
your project’s chance of surviving the final cuts that are
determined by the senior management team.
growing communities
72

10 Familiarise yourself with
state and federal
government priorities
11 Use your manager to open doors
and disseminate information
(two way)
(i)
(ii)
Keep up to date with the priorities of the state and
federal governments and the relevant government
agencies so that you are alert to funding
possibilities for various projects. The more your
project responds to those priorities, the more likely
it is that you’ll be successful.
Keep in mind that state and federal governments
have limited capacity to develop direct links with
the community and therefore local government is
an important conduit for them to achieve goals that
rely on community partnerships. This is especially
so with matters of regional development. It is also
clear that the more partners you can bring to the
table on projects (especially across the region), the
more likely the project is to be funded.
Also take advantage of relevant priorities of state
and federal governments to support the actions
you propose in the cultural plan or the projects you
develop. For example, the current requirement for
WA Councils to develop integrated plans would
support your proposal to integrate your program
across council.
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)
Request that your manager keeps you well
informed of relevant discussions or outcomes from
any meetings that you have not had access to,
such as directors’ or managers’ meetings and interagency
meetings.
Ask for your manager’s support in building your
understanding of the broad operations and
priorities of council. Make the most of your
manager’s relationships across council, particularly
in creating partnerships with other departments.
Use your team meetings to greatest advantage.
This might involve requesting an agenda
beforehand, so that you can add items you want to
discuss or find out more about.
Keep your manager informed of all ‘good news’
stories from your team so the information can
move up through the organisation. Your success is
their success.
HOW TO
73

ecommended recommended
resources
resources
Advocacy
Hawkes, J, 2001, The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning. Common Ground Publishing in association with the Cultural Development Network, Victoria, Australia.
Holden, John J, 2004, Capturing Cultural Value; how culture had become a tool of government policy. Demos, London.
Matarasso, Francois 1997, Use or Ornament? The social impact of participation in the arts. Comedia.
Palmer, D & Sonn, C, 2010, Naked Practice: Outcomes of Two Community Arts Projects in Regional Western Australia. Perth: Community Arts Network WA, Australia.
Seares, M Prof. with assistance from Gardiner-Garden, J Dr, 2010 Cultural policies in Australia. Australia Council, Australia.
growing communities
Sonn, C & Green, M, Drawing Out Community Empowerment Through Arts and Cultural Practice. Community Arts Network WA, Australia.
The United Nations, Declaration of Human Rights. Available from: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Community arts and cultural development
Adams, D & Goldbard A, eds. 2002, Community, Culture and Globalisation. The Rockefeller Foundation.
Adams, D & Goldbard A, 2001, ‘Theory from Practice: Elements of a Theory of Community Cultural Development’, Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, The Rockefeller Foundation, New
York, Chapter Five, pp. 58 – 69.
Australia Council, 2011, Australian Arts Organisations Directory, NSW, Australia. Available from: http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/resources/reports_and_publications/subjects/arts_sector/australian_arts_
organisations_directory_2011-12
Community Arts Network WA, 2012, Dream. Plan. Do. A Resource Guide to Community Arts and Cultural Development. Community Arts Network WA, Australia.
Creative City Network of Canada, 2005, Arts and Positive Change in Communities, Creative City Network of Canada, Vancouver.
Goldbard, A, 2006, New Creative Community: the Art of Cultural Development, New Village Press.
Hawkins, G, 1993, From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.
74

Lewis, A & Doyle, D eds. 2008. Proving the Practice: Disability in the Arts Disadvantage in the Arts Australia (DADAA).
Mills D & Brown P, 2004, Art and Wellbeing: A Guide to the Connections Between Community Cultural Development and Health, Ecologically Sustainable Development, Public Housing and Place, Rural
Revitalisation, community Strengthening, Active Citizenship, Social Inclusion and Cultural Diversity, Australia Council for the Arts, NSW, Australia.
Regional Arts Australia, 2008, Big Story Country: Great Arts Stories From Regional Australia, Australia.
Sonn, C, Drew, N & Kasat, P, 2002, Conceptualising Community Cultural Development, Perth, Australia.
United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisational UNESCO, 2005, Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Available from: http://unesdoc.unesco.
org/imges/0014/001429/142919e.pdf
United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisational UNESCO, 1996, Our Creative Diversity.
Cultural planning and place making
Anderson, K, Ang, I and Lally, E, 2011The Art of Engagement: Culture, Collaboration & Innovation. University of Western Australia Press.
Authenticity, 2008, Creative City Planning Framework. A Supporting Document to the Agenda for Prosperity: Prospectus for a Great City, Toronto, Canada. Available from: http://www.toronto.ca/culture/pdf/
creative-city-planning-framework-feb08.pdf
Burges, R 2004, ‘Creative Partnerships and Collaborations Forum’ in Cultural Planning Bulletin. Community Arts Network WA, Perth, pp. 7 – 10.
Effective Change, 2002, Evaluating Community Arts and Community Well Being: An Evaluation Guide for the Community Arts Practitioners, Victoria, Australia.
Grogan, D and Mercer, C & Engwicht, D 1995, The Cultural Planning Handbook: An Essential Australian Guide, Allen & Unwin, Australia.
Jackson, C 2007, ‘Cultural Planning, Core of Strategic Planning in the Shire of Lake Grace’, Cultural Planning Bulletin
Kins, A and Peddie B, 1996, Planning a Complete Community; A Cultural Planning Guide for Local Government. Community Arts Network WA, Australia
Matarasso F and Landry, C 2006, Balancing Act: Strategic Dilemmas in Cultural Policy, CoMedia, United Kingdom.
Mills, D 2003, ‘Cultural Planning - Policy Task, Not Tool’ in Artwork, Community Arts Network SA Inc, Adelaide, Issue 55, May 2003 www.ccd.net/pdf/art55_cultural_planning.pdf
Newman, N 2003, ‘Cultural and Urban Planning: Should The Two Meet and Why?’ in Cultural Planning Bulletin: Cultural and Urban Planning: Should the Two Meet and Why? Community Arts Network WA,
Perth, pp. 4 – 7.
NSW Ministry for the Arts, 2004, Cultural Planning Guidelines for Local Government, New South Wales, Australia.
Pamille Berg Consulting, 2005, Toward a New Cultural Plan: The Arts and Cultural Strategy Consultancy Report, Coffs Harbour City Council, New South Wales, Australia.
Sandercock, L. 2003, ‘Out of the Closet: The Importance of Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice.’ Planning, Theory and Practice 4 (1):11-28.
Sandercock, L 1998, Towards Cosmopolis. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Local government and community engagement
Ajuntament de Barcelona, Institut de Cultura, 2008, Local Agenda 21. Available from: http://agenda21culture.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44&Itemid=58&lang=en
Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) 1997, Declaration on the role of Australian local government, Available from: http://www.alga.asn.au/about/declaration.php
Chapell, B author, 2008, Community Engagement Handbook: A Model Framework for leading practice In Local Government in South Australia, South Australia, Local Government Association of South
Australia and Government of South Australia. Available from: http://www.lga.sa.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/Community_Engagement_Handbook_March_2008_-_PDF.pdf
Mulligan, M and Smith, P, 2010, Art, Governance and the Turn to Community. Putting Art at the Heart of Local Government. Globalism Research Centre, RMIT University.
Available from: http://mams.rmit.edu.au/fc1d0uu0zhpm1.pdf
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
75

Relevant websites
Agenda 21 for Culture
http://www.agenda21culture.net
Artsource
http://www.artsource.net.au
Australia Council for the Arts
http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au
Centre for Cultural Partnerships, Victorian College for the Arts
http://www.vca.unimelb.edu.au/ccp
Charles Landry
http://www.charleslandry.com
CoMedia
http://www.comedia.org.uk
Community Arts Network WA (CAN WA)
http://www.canwa.com.au
Country Arts WA
http://www.countryartswa.asn.au
Creative City Network of Canada
http://www.creativecity.ca
Cultural data online (Australia)
http://www.culturaldata.gov.au
Department of Culture and the Arts (DCA)
http://www.dca.wa.gov.au
Department for Culture Media and Sport
Division of Local Government
East Perth Revitalisation Authority EPRA
http://www.epra.wa.gov.au
International Association of Public Participation Australasia
http://www.iap2.org.au
International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies
http://www.ifacca.org
Jon Hawkes
Museums Australia
http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au
Office for the Arts
http://www.arts.gov.au
The Place Leaders Association
http://www.placeleaders.com.au
growing communities
Cultural Development Network
http://www.culturaldevelopment.net.au
Culture and Recreation portal
http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au
Demos
http://www.demos.co.uk/publications
Villagewell
http://www.villagewell.org
WA Local Government Association (WALGA)
http://www.walga.asn.au
For relevant arts and funding bodies go to:
The CAN WA links page
http://www.canwa.com.au/canwa-resources/links
The above list of resources is a sample of the diversity of approaches to cultural development and is by no means exhaustive.
76

definitions
definitions
Arts
Culture
Cultural mapping
The arts consist of many creative endeavors and
disciplines including visual arts, literary arts, the
performing arts, multi media and film, among other forms
and fusions of these forms.
A society’s values are the basis upon which all else is
built. These values and the ways they are expressed are a
society’s culture. The way a society governs itself cannot
be fully democratic without there being clear avenues for
the expression of community values, and unless these
expressions directly affect the directions society takes.
These processes are culture at work. 1
Cultural mapping involves a community identifying
and documenting local cultural resources. Through this
research cultural elements are recorded – the tangibles
like galleries, craft industries, distinctive landmarks, local
events and industries, as well as the intangibles like
memories, personal histories attitudes and values.
Cultural planning is the process of working with a
community to create a strategic plan for it’s future cultural
development. 2
1 J, Hawkes, 2001, Fourth Pillar, Cultural Development Network, Vic. Australia
2 The Commonwealth Department of Communications and the Arts, 1995, Mapping Culture, ACT, Australia
3 Community Arts Council of Vancouver, 2010 and Adams and Goldbard, 2002 quoted in P Kasat,
Community Arts – A Transformative Practice (working title) thesis (forthcoming), Australia, 2012
4 Community Arts Network WA, 2012, Dream. Plan. Do. A Resource Guide to Community Arts and Cultural Development.
Community Arts Network WA (CAN WA), Australia
5 Sourced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_consultation
6 Cavaye, J.M. 2004 quoted in, S Ruane, DRAFT Community Engagement and Cultural Planning manual, CAN WA, Australia, 2012
7 Project for Public Spaces, New York, http://www.pps.org/articles/what_is_placemaking/
DEFINITIONS
77

Community arts and
community cultural development
Community arts and
cultural development
Community engagement vs
Community consultation
growing communities
The definition of the practice has largely been approached
by trying to define two key concepts: community arts
and community cultural development. At different times
both of these terms have been used interchangeably. At
other times they have been understood as two separate
but complementary processes. Community cultural
development has been described as the process and
the philosophical underpinnings of this practice and
community arts as the medium or tool to achieve
the artistic outcomes. This point is illustrated in the
definition below:
Community cultural development is the process of
collaboration between artists and community members
on agreed upon goals. Community art is the medium
through which this collaboration can take place and
includes visual, media and performing arts. The principles
behind the work are active participation, intentional
inclusivity and ongoing learning. The process builds
community, increases awareness of the value of the arts
in our lives, develops creativity and addresses common
issues” (Community Arts Council of Vancouver, 2010).
Community Cultural Development describes the
work of artist – organisers (“community artist”) who
collaborate with others to express identity, concerns
and aspirations through the arts and communications
media, while building cultural capacity and contributing
to social change. In community cultural development
work, community artists, singly or in teams, use their
artist and organisational skills to serve the emancipation
and development of a community, whether defined by
geography (e.g., a neighbourhood), common interest
(e.g., members of a union) or identity (e.g., members of
an indigenous group) (Adams and Goldbard, 2002). 3
A more contemporary way of describing this work is
as community arts and cultural development, which
encompasses both concepts, community arts and
community cultural development.
As the practice of community arts and cultural
development has evolved in Australia it has made
important contributions in areas such as health,
education, cultural diversity, rural and regional
revitalisation, sustainability and social inclusion. This
has led to some strong partnerships between artists,
arts organisations and other agencies such as local
government, various state departments and agencies,
other non-government organisations and community
based groups and corporate supporters. In fact, most
successful projects these days result from collaboration
between different supporters. 4
Public consultation, or simply consultation, is a regulatory
process by which the public’s input on matters affecting
them is sought. 5
It is important to note that the term engagement does
not replace the term consultation. While consultation
is a form of engagement, community engagement is
generally used to describe a more intense form of public
participation, where citizens are more actively involved in
joint decision making and planning processes. It is a twoway
flow of information and ideas where decision-makers
and community members work together to mutually
formulate policies, plans and actions (Cavaye, 2004). 6
The arts is an effective tool for community engagement.
Placemaking
Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning,
design and management of public spaces. Put simply, it
involves looking at, listening to, and asking questions of
the people who live, work and play in a particular space,
to discover their needs and aspirations. This information is
then used to create a common vision for that place. The
vision can evolve quickly into an implementation strategy,
beginning with small-scale, do-able improvements that
can immediately bring benefits to public spaces and the
people who use them. 7
78

about the writers about the
writers
L>R: Bill Bunbury; Sandra Nicolaides
Bill Bunbury
Born in the United Kingdom, Bill Bunbury has worked as
1969, producing education programs before joining the
newly formed ABC Radio National Social History where
he produced programs for Background Briefing, Hindsight
Verbatim, Street Stories and Encounter from 1985 to
2007. Bill is currently Adjunct Professor of History and
Media at Murdoch University.
He has won various awards including the United Nations
Peace Prize, 1986, for his documentary Vietnam The War
Rages On; the New South Wales Inaugural Premier’s
Award, 1997 for his six part radio series Unfinished
Business and Gold Medal; and in 1996 the New York
Radio Festival Award for Best history documentary,
Timber For Gold.
Bill has also worked extensively in International Radio
Training in Pakistan, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea and in
Australia with indigenous radio, both with the ABC and
at Bachelor College Northern Territory. More recently he
has completed radio production with South West Noongar
people for Community Arts Network WA.
With an initial Honours degree in Literature, Bill has
always emphasized the importance of narrative, of
storytelling as an important aspect of communication,
whether it is in history or the arts. The arts, whether
in the form of music, writing, painting or acting, he
believes, breathe life into the human story and enrich any
community that they serve.
Sandra Nicolaides
Sandra has 20 years’ experience working with
communities towards community cultural development
outcomes. While with the Tasmanian Community Arts
Network, she collaborated on many projects with Local
Councils state wide, assisting them to develop integrated
cultural plans and policies.
In 1997, Sandra joined the Australian Capital Territory (ACT)
Government as the ACT Cultural Planner and won three
planning awards for her cultural planning work before
initiating and developing a Cultural Map of the ACT.
the Australian Capital Region to help them develop their
own cultural maps. The resultant Regional Cultural Map
was launched at the Australian National Museum in 2002.
In 2008 Sandra established her own cultural planning
company, Cultural Edge and since then has written
cultural strategies and plans for four city councils and
collaborated with 15 Victorian regional councils to assist
them develop greater links with their communities.
ABOUT THE WRITERS
79

TOWN OF PORT HEDLAND
Perth Office
King Street Arts Centre
Ground Floor
357-365 Murray Street
Perth WA 6000
Published by Community Arts Network WA (CAN WA)
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data:
Growing Communities: Arts and Culture in Local Government
growing communities
PO Box 7514
Cloisters Square
Perth WA 6850
T (08) 9226 2422
F (08) 9226 2230
E admin@canwa.com.au
www.canwa.com.au
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ISBN: 978-0-9586491-6-2
The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect
those of the Community Arts Network WA staff, the Board or members.
CAN WA reserves editorial rights on all copy for inclusion in CAN WA
publications, unless otherwise agreed prior to publication.
All care has been taken to advise project coordinators of protocols and
responsibilities with regard to representing communities in articles and
photographs. These responsibilities lie with project coordinators who
have supplied CAN WA with photographs and information.
Community Arts Network WA manages the Creative Networks Fund
on behalf of the State of Western Australia through the Department of
Culture and the Arts.
Thank you to all of the local governments who contributed to this publication
Pioneering
the Pilbara
80

www.canwa.com.au
Growing Communities celebrates the
contribution local government makes
to community creativity, arts and wellbeing.