Edition 44
Cultural Solutions
- Published 6th May, 2014
- ISBN: 9781922182258
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
The cultural solutions explored across the edition vary in approach, scale and purpose.
Robyn Archer suggests it might be time to rethink and revalue the importance of culture, including artists themselves. Big hART’s Scott Rankin discusses the great return-on-investment offered by cultural solutions and how even a modest investment can have a far-reaching impact on the seemingly intractable social problems.
Alice Pung explores the importance of storytelling to give marginalised children a voice, while Maria Tumarkin wonders if the growing need for communication to be packaged into attractive stories means we are missing out on more complex information.
With essays from Marcus Westbury, Jim Hearn, Kris Olsson and Kate Veitch; stories from Craig Cliff and Chris Armstrong; poetry from Susan Varga and a powerful photo essay from Raphaela Rosella, and much much more.
Cultural Solutions puts flesh on the bones of the cultural richness around us and proves its success in providing new fixes for old problems.
Griffith Review 44: Cultural Solutions – Notes from the front examines the many layers of culture through essays, memoirs, and interviews from key cultural producers.
Each piece serves as a case study for an exploration of our engagement with culture, how it is employed to address societal problems, and what benefits can be derived from it.
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Reviews
‘For community-art deniers, an essay by [Scott] Rankin in the latest Griffith Review should be compulsory reading.’ – Matthew Westwood, The Australian
Cultural Solutions ‘features the usual impressive list of contributors, with iconic performer and festival director Robyn Archer leading the pack.’ – Courier-Mail
‘Culture is recognised as one of the four pillars of a successful society – along with political, economic and social institutions. These are admirably showcased in this edition, putting “flesh on the bones of the cultural richness around us, and its capacity to provide solutions to intractable problems”.’ – PS News
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In this Edition
Soggy biscuit
IN THE FIRST month of John Howard's government, my then toddler son offered the new prime minister a soggy biscuit. That moment came early in my attempt to set up a savvy arts-based company that could experiment with cultural approaches to complex social problems....
The way things work round here
IN SEPTEMBER 2013, four hundred men and women gathered in the Northern Territory town of Katherine for the Women of the World Festival (WOW). This landmark event was a partnership between one of Australia's newest and smallest cultural centres, the recently opened Godinymayin Yijard...
The decisive deal
THE EUROPEAN UNION does not have a cultural policy. It has programs, such as the Capital of Culture, which Greek actress and former minister for the arts Melina Mercouri proposed in the early days of the European Union as a vehicle for cultural understanding...
Soul of an open country
IT'S 4 AM in late June, and we're in Longreach, driving to Winton in central western Queensland for the opening gig of the 2007 Queensland Music Festival, which is at sunrise on a property just past the town. It's freezing out here in June,...
From karaoke to Noongaroke
THIS IS THE story of how karaoke, that quintessentially global entertainment, came to Noongar country in Western Australia in the 1990s and was transformed into Noongaroke, a twenty-first century version of corroboree events of bygone days. Noongar people engaging with karaoke created a contemporary...
The idea of home
…for to know a place in any real and lasting way is sooner or later to dream it. That's how we come to belong to it in the deepest sense. – William Least Heat-Moon I WAS BORN to two mothers, one of flesh and one of...
Great Dane
AT THE OUTBREAK of World War II the Nordic economies of Finland, Sweden and Denmark were amongst Europe's most backward. Neither cars nor furnishings were manufactured for export in great numbers. There was no world-leading cinema, technology, architecture or fashion. And as for cuisine,...
You have my heart
HOUSEWIVES, A HUNDRED or more women at each performance, call out to an actor as she wanders mindlessly around her kitchen doing chores. They encourage her to stay positive, correcting her mistakes, answering her soliloquies. Roma is her audience, engaged with them in a...
Real momentum comes from love
AT FIRST GLANCE, four years ago, Elwick Bay foreshore in the northern suburbs of Hobart was a barren, reclaimed and disjointed waterfront reserve. The shallow mudflats were considered so contaminated and smelly that dumping a few shopping trolleys and truck tyres didn't raise an...
Finding hope in the spotlight
IT IS A glowering mid-January day and the noise of cicadas flows like an angry wave through the air as students collect on the campus of the University of Wollongong. Though school is still weeks away, these keen teenagers are preparing for their HSC...
This narrated life
JOAN DIDION WROTE 'we tell ourselves stories in order to live', and so often has the idea that humanity runs on stories been asserted of late that it has come to resemble a self-evident truth until, in next to no time it seems, we...
Abandoned islands as art galleries
AT THE END of World War II, with the city of Tokyo a smoking ruin, Hiroshima and Nagasaki pulverised, and food shortages so acute that throughout Japan people were dropping dead of starvation in the streets, a young photographer named Yoichi Midorikawa sought refuge...
How to bake a sponge
MY GRANDMOTHERS WERE bakers of bread and of cakes. My mother and my aunts are bakers. I bake occasionally. This (mostly) matrilineal and intergenerational baking is one that holds the women of my family together. Many recipes have been shared over the years between...
Hotel homeless
SO I'M STANDING in front of a six-burner stove at the Winsome Hotel in Lismore. After leaving Rae's on Watego's as head chef and writing High Season: a memoir of heroin and hospitality (Allen & Unwin, 2012), as Chopper might say, I've really landed...
White ears and whistling duck
IN YOLNGU CULTURE – the Aboriginal language group of north-eastern Arnhem Land – there is a song sequence for the small, anchovy-like fish that lives, uniquely, around the estuarial brackish where ocean water marries fresh in a long, deep kiss. The fish is called...
Not for me
I HAD SEEN the flyers around. 'Come and try theatre, learn writing and performance skills in a supportive environment.' Stupid. Embarrassing. A waste of money. A waste of time. Not for me. Never for me. I am just a statistic. THEY BECOME FRAGMENTS. Memories. Flashes of who you have been,...
Dad’s funeral
'CAN I MAKE it?' a scary thought crosses my mind as the plane climbs away from Sydney into the night's sky. 'Your dad is not very well,' Mum's voice echoes in my head. She has never said that before and there is something in...
Resurrection myths
I WAS BORN dead. I didn't breathe. Maybe I didn't want to. Perhaps I was simply over-thinking it. I do that. Holding back nervously. Contemplating for just a bit too long whether I actually wanted to sign on to this project, to join this...
The language of belonging
HULYA'S HEART BELONGED to words. It was the heaviest item she packed when she migrated to Australia as a new bride and a new mother at sixteen. She settled in Footscray with her husband and his parents, leaving her youth in Turkey along with her...
Thank you for listening
MAY 2012: I'm sitting at rehearsal of the Nothing prepared me for this show at La Mama Theatre and mentally I'm listing the occupations of some of the cast on stage: professional biographer, school counsellor, teacher, visual artist, lawyer, police officer, psychologist, writer, student, removalist, art...
Back on dry land
Well take her once, take her twice / She can leave you cold as ice Oh my, she is so nice, my lithium lady. – from Lithium Lady, Eddie Ink I SORT OF figured something was wrong or I was different right at an early age when...
Icons, living and dead
ALICE SPRINGS, THE modern town at the centre of the Australian continent, is also a converging point of ancient Aboriginal songlines and for thousands of years the homeland of Arrernte-speaking clans. Today Aboriginal people, with Arrernte in the majority, make up one fifth of...
Cultivating creativity in children
IN 1992, COLIN Duffy was profiled by Susan Orlean in Esquire magazine about his thoughts on wealth, consumer products, recycling and abortion, among other issues. Yet he was not a celebrity, or politician, or anyone famous. When 'The American Male at Age 10' came...
Interview with
Kristina Olsson
Kristina Olsson as Brisbane-based writer. She worked as a journalist for many years, writing for The Australian, The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Telegraph. She has written novels and memoirs, including In One Skin (2001), Kilroy Was Here (2005) and The China Garden (2009), and Boy, Lost (2013) won the 2014...
Interview with
Maria Tumarkin
Maria Tumarkin is a cultural historian and the author of three books of ideas: Traumascapes (2005), Courage (2007) and Otherland (2010). She has taught at universities and writing centres, and holds a PhD in cultural history from the University of Melbourne. In this interview she discusses her essay 'This narrated...
Interview with
Craig Cliff
Craig Cliff is a Wellington-based writer. His short story collection, A Man Melting, won the Best First Book in the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and he published the novel The Mannequin Makers in 2013. I this interview he speaks about the ways he finds time for writing,...
Parents in decline
EVERYTHING IS FINE and then one day it isn't. Rogue jets on shower nozzles start spraying at odd angles, getting us in the eye when we open the shower door. Bathmats never seem to dry. When we eat toast a daub of Marmite is...
The history lesson
THIS IS 1975, over a hundred and twenty years since the event, and I don't reckon history is that important but Dad sent me along because Mr Doyle wants a photo of the old massacre site and the graves. Mr Palmer is the only...
Sydney
It's been a long time, you old harlot. From my rented flat I see your big-ticket items – solid arc of Bridge, glinting slivers of Opera House. Still heart stoppers, old girl. This corner of the Cross is the closest I'll get to Europe now. You were my second home, Sydney, until I deserted...
A modest proposal
Money is a kind of poetry – Wallace Stevens It sounds oracular but really no one knows what Wallace meant. Conversely then, we're bound to ask 'Is poetry a kind of money?' It circulates and has a value; is often to be found on paper tattered at the edges - even sometimes in our...
When Johnstone’s Circus came to town
At an unfashionable seaside resort, no more than a country town that happened to be near salt water, Johnstone's Circus arrived for its annual summer season, though most of its well-known family of spangled, toothy artistes had long ago died, replaced by a motley ensemble. 'The Big Top' wasn't big; more like'The Medium Top'. Small...
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Kieran Finnane is a journalist and arts writer. She has lived in Alice Springs since 1987. A founding journalist...
Jim Hearn
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Kristina Olsson
Kristina Olsson is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction and journalism. Her most recent novel, Shell, was published by...
Alice Pung
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