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‘Art and Working Life’: Australian Trade Unions and the Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

David Watt
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Extract

In the feature on Australian theatre in NTQ5 (1986). Peter Fitzpatrick pointed to a burgeoning community theatre movement, made possible by the shifts in arts funding which were the subject of Graham Ley's interview with Malcolm Blaylock in the same issue – while Tom Burvill's article on Sidetrack Theatre described one of the emergent companies. His concentration on Sidetrack's workplace shows, and on Loco in particular, highlighted an area in which the community theatre movement had made some strides in the construction of a popular political theatre. These have been achieved since the Australia Council – the antipodean equivalent of the Arts Council of Great Britain – introduced its Art and Working Life Incentive Programme, designed to foster arts activities within the trade union movement, in 1982. David Watt, who teaches Drama at Newcastle University, here offers a report on a developing relationship between theatre companies and the union movement, with particular reference to two companies which have been most closely associated with the programme, and places their work in the industrial contexts of state patronage and the trade union movement.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 6 , Issue 22 , May 1990 , pp. 162 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

Notes and References

1. Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels (London: Comedia, 1984), p. 36.

2. 1970 saw the establishment of a Special Projects Committee, which funded community arts as part of a wider brief. This gave rise to the establishment of a Community Arts and Development Committee in 1973, and eventually a Community Arts Board in 1977. A brief history of state subsidy can be obtained from Rowse, Tim, Arguing the Arts: the Funding of the Arts in Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1985)Google Scholar. More specific accounts of the history of community arts subsidy can be found in Hull, Andrea, ‘Community Arts: a Perspective’, Meanjin, XL, No. 3 (1983), p. 315–24Google Scholar; and Robertson, Toni, ‘Community Arts: a History’, Art Network, No. 5 (1982), p. 18–20.Google Scholar

3. Ibid., p. 26.

4. Some of that range is evident in Fotheringham, Richard, ed., Community Theatre in Australia (Sydney: Methuen, 1987)Google Scholar, a collection of ‘notes from the front’ which offers brief descriptions of a number of groups and projects.

5. See Rawson, D. W., Unions and Unionists in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986)Google Scholar, for a useful brief account of Australian trade unionism in the early 1980s.

6. See Carey, Alex, ‘Capitalist Corporations and the Management of Democracy’, in Wheelwright, E. L. and Buckley, K. D., eds., Communications and the Media in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987)Google Scholar, for an exhaustive account of New Right strategies and their penetration of Australia. See also Coghill, Ken, ed., The New Right's Australian Fantasy (Ringwood: Penguin, 1987).Google Scholar

7. Breen Creighton, ‘Trade Unions, the Law and the New Right’, in Coghill, op. cit., p. 74–92; and Deery, Stephen and Mitchell, Richard, ‘Industrial Relations: the New Management Offensive’, Arena, No. 77 (1986), p. 128–41Google Scholar, offer accounts of several major disputes in which the New Right has been prominent.

8. ‘Union Blues, or: Getting Back into the Community’, Australian Left Review, No. 100, July/August 1987, p. 9.

9. ‘A Transitional Programme to Socialism’, in Crough, G., Wheelwright, E. and Wilshire, T., eds., Australia and World Capitalism (Ringwood:Penguin, 1980), p. 242Google Scholar. See also AMWU education officer Ogden, Max, ‘The Accord: Intervening to Deepen the Democratic Process’, Australian Left Review, No. 90 (1984), p. 27.Google ScholarEwer, P., Higgins, W. and Stevens, A., Unions and the Future of Australian Manufacturing (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987)Google Scholar, offer a detailed account of a less radical version of the Accord, almost certainly closer to the ACTU position.

10. ‘Australia Reconstructed: a Personal View’, Arena, No. 83 (1988), p. 162. An indication of the present mood of the ACTU is that Bolger has been subjected to a campaign to oust her from her position in the Royal Australian Nurses' Federation, her views on the Accord obviously being a factor.

11. Two recent books have offered partial accounts of this activity: Stephen, Ann and Reeves, Andrew, Badges of Labour, Banners of Pride: Aspects of Working Class Celebration (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984)Google Scholar; and Reeves, Andrew, Another Day, Another Dollar: Working Lives in Australian History (Melbourne: McCulloch, 1988).Google Scholar

12. Australia Council, ‘The Arts and Working Life: a Discussion Paper’, reprinted in Martin Comte, Alan Morgan, and Lee Emery, eds., Communicating Arts (Carlton: Prendergast McCulloch, 1982), p. 58–60, offers a brief account of that resurgence; and Kaye Morrisey, ‘George Seelaf: a Life Working for Working Life’, ibid., p. 61–2, chronicles the work of one of its major architects.

13. See Burn, Ian, ‘ACTU National Conference: Art and Working Life’, Art Network, No. 5 (1982), p. 37–8Google Scholar, for an account of the conference which highlights some of the mismatch of political intent between union organizers and community artists and arts officers.

14. Cassidy, Stephen, Art and Working Life in Australia: a Report Prepared for the Australia Council (Australia Council, 1984), p. 3.Google Scholar

15. Burn, op. cit., p. 37, points out that this was not without a significant erosion of the ‘political edge’ of the ACTU's 1980 arts policy.

16. A Good Night Out (London: Methuen, 1981).

17. Unpublished interview between the author and Blaylock, Malcolm, Adelaide, 6 12 1988.Google Scholar

18. See my ‘The Trade Union Movement, Art and Working Life and Melbourne Workers' Theatre’, Australasian Drama Studies, No. 14 (1989), p. 5–18, for a fuller account of the company's work.

19. See Burvill, Tom, ‘Sidetrack: Discovering the Theatricity of Community’, New Theatre Quarterly, II, No. 5 (02 1986), p. 82–4.Google Scholar

20. Interview, Melbourne, 29 June 1988. Information on the company is drawn from this and further interviews with company members Stephen Payne and Andrew Bovell, and with Keith Coffey from the Jolimont advisory committee, conducted in Melbourne on 28 and 29 June 1988, and with Stephen Cassidy in Sydney on 8 November 1988.

21. Tom Burvill's piece on Sidetrack, op. cit., and mine on Melbourne Workers' Theatre, op. cit., are two lonely articles describing the very tip of the iceberg. Brown, Paul, ‘Making Coal Town’, Meanjin, XLVI, No. 4 (1987), p. 477–86Google Scholar, offers a playwright's description of Death Defying Theatre's project with the Miners' Federation in Collinsville, north Queensland; and Alison Richards, ‘We Can Work it Out: an Interview with Graham Pitts’, ibid., p. 487–95, concerns itself with Please Yourself, another project partly funded under the Programme.