A Regional State of Mind. Making Arts Outside Metropolitan Australia

Lyndon Terracini

Platform Papers No.l1. Sydney: Currency House, January 2007

ISBN 978 0 97573 019 5

Reviewed by Helen Lancaster

By the author’s own admission, some of what is found in this gem of a book has been said before – most of it by Terracini himself as he has promoted the various adventures here described. Finally, they are in print, hopefully ensuring a wide dissemination of his philosophy and example.

Lyndon Terracini’s career has taken him to the great opera houses of the world, but this book describes a different journey – one of discovery, of ‘learning more and more about the strong links that bind people to “their places”’. Terracini uses these links to create art which reflects individual cultures, and this book abounds with examples of these experiences.

The book seeks to define local culture, offering real examples rather than a wordy explanation. At the same time, it introduces issues of national significance into local settings. For example, it discusses how a festival might reflect a sense of place, and how that might be transplanted on a wider stage. Its undercurrent is the importance of making art at the grassroots level, of connecting with audience using ‘stories from our own backyard.’ Terracini likens them to stories which Aboriginal Australians have always told ‘of their country, their people, and their everyday activities,  … passed on by the “story keepers” of their place’.

With a successful record of ‘passing on’ such stories from local cultures, it would have been easy for Terracini to use this book as a platform for his own achievements. After all, he has had a transforming influence in many corners of Queensland in particular. Instead, he seeks to make his example feasible for others. He questions our obsession with creating masterpieces. He challenges funding principles which support arts companies to present works with no connection to regional audiences. He proposes building a new Cultural Pyramid with a grassroots foundation and an elitist tip, ‘a new model of cultural and artistic democracy … much more sympathetic to Australian thinking than the hierarchy we have at present’. Further, he dares to confront the issue of appropriate management of arts activity, offering a model conducive to creativity. An academic could find a dozen texts which would support his theory, but for Terracini it’s almost instinctive.

The book is peppered with examples – stories from Terracini’s experience directing and producing work for the Queensland Festivals in 2003 and 2005, and the Brisbane Festival in 2006. It reminds us of his work at NORPA in Lismore, and his dream of a Creative Laboratory for artists which had an all-too-brief incarnation at NORPA from 2002-2005. From dancing bobcats to a world forum on climate change, Terracini’s examples offer real illustrations of local culture coming to life as art, of local transformations, and the ‘well, I’ll be…’ responses from the masses. They should give confidence to artists and directors everywhere. Actually how Terracini imagines these feats is more elusive. He describes how the ideas come to him in such a matter-of-fact way that it belies the vision behind them.

And vision abounds – the text documents new work by artists of all creeds in all corners of Queensland (and a tiny bit of northern NSW). It disputes Queensland’s ‘country redneck’ image – or at least shows that it has its own artforms. It isn’t judgmental. It abounds with quotable quotes, one of the best of them being ‘The fact that I have earned my living by singing opera around the world for the past thirty years does not prevent me from defending the rights of those who find opera elitist and alien’. Such is his example. Terracini’s defense of local cultures offers a proven and remarkable role model.

It’s an easy and all-too-brief read, with a sense of stories told over the dinner table, interspersed with the frustrations of bureaucracy and funding. But it approaches them in a positive way, offering a way forward which is viable and vibrant.

Although it transcends borders, this book should be compulsory reading for all arts bureaucrats, artists, politicians, funding agencies - anyone with any connection to the arts in Australia. It has the capacity to change the way we create and think about art and its connection to audience. As Terracini quips, ‘If we continue to do things the way we have always done, we will always get what we’ve always had’.

As former founding Director of Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Helen Lancaster has experienced the trauma and triumph of producing art in regional Queensland.

Music Forum Vol 13 No 3