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Culture and the arts

Australia’s cultural and artistic scene reflects the nation’s unique blend of established traditions and new influences. It is the product of an ancient landscape that is home to both the world’s oldest continuous cultural traditions and a rich mix of migrant cultures.

Australian governments at all levels are committed to supporting the arts and preserving, promoting and expanding the nation’s cultural heritage – whether through tangible items such as paintings, books, oral histories or natural history specimens, or intangibles reflected in traditions and custom.

Government sources provide about $5.5 billion each year in Australia for a wide range of arts, cultural and heritage purposes. The total size of Australia’s arts and related industries sector is estimated at $34 billion.

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The Australia Council is the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body. It directly supports young, emerging and established artists as well as new and established arts organisations. The Council provides more than 1700 grants throughout Australia each year to artists and arts organisations involved in community cultural development, dance, literature, music, new media arts, theatre, visual arts/crafts and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts.

Australia has a vibrant cultural and artistic life and all forms of the visual and performing arts have strong followings.

According to one recent survey, 14 million (85 per cent) adult Australians attend a cultural event or performance every year. The most popular art form is film, attended by about 65 per cent of the population each year. More than 25 per cent attend a popular music concert; 23 per cent go to an art gallery or museum; 16 per cent see an opera or musical; 17 per cent attend live theatre; 10 per cent attend a dance performance; and 9 per cent attend a classical music concert.

Visual arts

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

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

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There are an estimated 54.9 million objects and artworks located in Australia’s museums, and national and state libraries hold 11.3 million items.

The Heidelberg School of the 1890s was the first significant art movement in Australia. Artists such as Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts painted an Australia that captured life in the country in the late 19th and early 20th century. Their paintings remain an important part of Australia’s cultural landscape and provide a bridge to the country’s past.

While the Heidelberg School and its nationalist painters were mainly Melbourne-based, it was in Sydney that the early modernist movement started, with painters such as Nora Simpson and Grace Cossington-Smith.

The emergence of symbolic surrealists such as Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker introduced a new dimension into Australian art, with Nolan focusing on Australian icons, especially the legendary bushranger Ned Kelly. Other notable artists of the mid to late twentieth century include Russell Drysdale, John Olsen, Margaret Olley, Fred Williams, Howard Arkley, Margaret Preston, Jeffrey Smart, Clifton Pugh, William Dobell and Brett Whiteley.

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

Performing arts

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

Australian dance is renowned for its exuberance. Major companies such as the Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company tour regularly, with a diverse repertoire of Australian and international work. Australian choreographers and dancers such as Lucy Guerin, Gideon Obarzanek and Maggie Sietsma produce contemporary work that is finding new audiences through seasons at nightclubs and other unconventional venues.

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

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According to a 2005 report prepared by the Australia Council, more than 2.9 million Australians are involved in some form of paid or unpaid work relating to the arts and culture. Of those who received payment, more than 185 000 people were involved in writing, 239 000 in design and 183 000 in visual arts. Of those who did not receive payment, more than 580 000 were involved in event organisation, 597 000 in the visual arts and 336 000 in writing. 

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

Australia is well known for its original rock and pop music with solid popular foundations set by artists such as the Easybeats, AC/DC, INXS, Paul Kelly and Midnight Oil. The national youth radio station Triple J actively promotes emerging Australian talent. New artists such as Missy Higgins, Jet, the Waifs, Wolfmother and Ben Lee are starting to enjoy international acclaim. The Wiggles have won an enthusiastic following amongst children in many countries.

Each Australian state has a major theatre company in addition to many smaller companies and theatre groups.

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

In addition to arts performances regularly staged in a broad range of theatres, cultural centres and music venues, Australia hosts several major arts festivals and a large number of diverse community and regional festivals each year.

Australian writing

The history of Australian literature started with the storytelling of Indigenous Australians and continued with the oral stories of convicts arriving in Australia in the late 18th century. As the new colony grew, these stories and experiences were increasingly recorded, laying the foundations for a uniquely Australian storytelling tradition.

Some of the early works have remained part of the Australian canon, including Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, the short stories and bush ballads of Henry Lawson, and Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s poems, including the classics The Man from Snowy River and Waltzing Matilda. Two important writers in the early 20th century were Miles Franklin (who wrote My Brilliant Career in 1901) and Ethel Richardson, who wrote under the pen name Henry Handel Richardson. Australia has one Nobel Prize for Literature to its credit, with novelist Patrick White receiving the award in 1973.

Notable 20th century Australian novelists include Thomas Keneally (winner of the 1982 Man Booker Prize for Schindler’s Ark); Peter Carey (winner of the Man Booker Prize in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang); DBC Pierre (Peter Warren Finlay) who won the Man Booker Prize in 2003 for Vernon God Little; Kate Grenville; Christopher Koch, Elizabeth Jolly, David Malouf, Christina Stead, Morris West and Tim Winton. Geraldine Brooks won the 2006 Fiction Pulitzer Prize for March.

Contemporary poet Les Murray and non-fiction writers Helen Garner and Robert Dessaix have also received considerable critical acclaim. Of the many expatriate writers who have achieved international recognition yet retain strong ties with Australia, Germaine Greer, Geoffrey Robertson, Shirley Hazzard, Robert Hughes, Clive James and Peter Porter are among the most prominent.

Vibrant fashions

Australia’s reputation as a vibrant, individualist nation is well illustrated through its fashion, which is characterised by a rich and colourful mix of exuberant style.

Australian designers who have received international acclaim include Akira Isogawa, known for the impressive cross-cultural fusion of his work, and Collette Dinnigan, a regular on the international circuit whose high-profile fans include Naomi Watts, Sarah O’Hare, Helena Christensen and Charlize Theron.

There is also a new generation which takes its inspiration from Australia’s surf culture, graffiti, art and childhood dreams, then creates its own unique sense of style with a completely different set of rules. Dynamic new labels include Tsubi, based near Sydney’s Bondi Beach; sass&bide, and Willow, a lingerie-based line that recently debuted its sequin-strewn confections on the international runways.

Australian Film - A New Era          by Michaela Boland

In 2008, Australia's most precocious filmmaker Baz Luhrmann toiled on his first film in five years, an epic outback romance starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman set against the bombing of Darwin by Japanese forces during the Pacific War.

The sweeping tale of an English rose who inherits a remote cattle station but is forced into a pact with a stockman to protect her property from a takeover is audaciously titled Australia.

Appropriating his country's moniker was a bold move by Luhrmann, director of Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom. It raised the stakes but the director and his double Oscar-winning wife, designer Catherine Martin are the pair who were most likely to deliver a great result.

Twentieth Century Fox released worldwide in January 2009 the first identifiably Australian blockbuster ever made. It is produced almost exclusively by Australians at Fox Studios in Sydney and in far-flung locations in Queensland and NSW, in Darwin, Western Australia’s Kimberley Ranges and Kununurra.

While preparing to shoot Australia, Luhrmann helped lobby for new production incentives which now enable Australian filmmakers and their international co-production partners to claim an offset on 40 per cent (20 per cent for television) of their qualifying Australian costs.

Australia is the first studio-backed film to use the rebate, while an animated feature called The Guardians of Ga'Hool is being made at the Sydney design and effects company Animal Logic with backing from Warner Bros.

Animal Logic created the digital effects for the tap-dancing penguin musical Happy Feet with director George Miller, a project that redefined the possibilities of computer graphic imagery.

In 2007 Happy Feet, a film set in a penguin colony in Antarctica, became the highest-earning Australian film ever, grossing approximately US$400 million worldwide. It also won the Oscar for best animated feature at the 2006 Academy Awards (in 2007).

To get a complex picture of Australia, a robust young country keen to explore and celebrate its rich multicultural history, it is necessary to look across the slate of contemporary Australian films.

The Home Song Stories, director Tony Ayers' powerful semi-autobiographical portrayal of his family's difficult immigration to Australia from Hong Kong was feted in 2007 at the Berlin Film Festival and the Australian Film Institute Awards. It also heralded the arrival of stunning new actors, Irene Chen and Joel Lok.

The recipient of the 2007 Australian Film Institute (AFI) award for best film, Romulus, My Father portrays a difficult European migrant experience and was also distinguished by its acting, in this instance from Eric Bana, Marton Csokas, Franka Potente, Russell Dykstra and a newcomer still in primary school, Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Smit-McPhee has since been cast in the Hollywood adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's grim blockbuster novel The Road, merely the latest of the conga line of Australian actors working the world's stages and screen industries. It is directed by expat John Hillcoat.

Lucky Miles explores with comedy the more recent experience of Middle Eastern asylum seekers arriving on Australia’s remote north coastline while The Jammed, a micro-budget independently-financed drama, explores the seedy underbelly of people trafficking. It defied the odds to secure a cinema release and win the 2007 Inside Film (IF) Award for best film.

Forbidden Lie$ has collected numerous documentary awards for its unflinching pursuit of the truth behind serial fabricator Norma Khouri, author of Forbidden Love, a fictional story peddled by its author as fact.

The Black Balloon is a gentle suburban family drama which garnered accolades at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008 while teen drama Hey, Hey Its Esther Blueburger explores the Jewish Australian experience, both star Toni Collette.

Australian filmmaking has come a long way since Paul Hogan was Crocodile Dundee.

Michaela Boland is Australia reporter for Variety, film writer at the Australian Financial Review and co-author of ‘Aussiewood, Australia’s Leading Actors and Directors Tell How They Conquered Hollywood’.

Film industry

The Australian film industry has a reputation for innovation and quality, and for producing unique films with an Australian flavour that have global appeal.

While the industry is modest in international terms, it nevertheless employs about    50 000 people and more than 2 000 businesses are involved in film, television and video production. In 2006-07, 27 Australian feature films started production (including three co-productions).

Australia is a highly regarded location for foreign films to undertake production. Producers come to Australia to take advantage of world-class facilities, spectacular and varied locations, acclaimed cast and crew talent and world’s-best companies providing post, digital and visual effects production services. In 2006-07, six foreign feature films shot in Australia, three of which had budgets over $20 million, and a further 16 films undertook post, digital and visual effects production here. Foreign films that have shot in Australia in recent years include Superman Returns, The Matrix trilogy, Charlotte’s Web, Ghost Rider and The Ruins.

Australia’s actors, directors, producers, costume designers, writers, cinematographers and animators are attracting growing international acclaim. Australia’s film and television practitioners are among the best in the world, highlighted by recent international recognition for their skills and achievements. Actors such as Nicole Kidman, Toni Collette, Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts and Eric Bana have amassed a significant body of work and have won awards, critical acclaim and commercial success. Cinematographers such as Dione Beebe and Andrew Lensie have each won Academy Awards. Award-winning and critically acclaimed film-makers include Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Phillip Noyce, Baz Luhrmann and George Miller.

The Australian film industry is one of the oldest in the world. The Story of the Kelly Gang, produced in 1906, is thought to be the world’s first full-length narrative film.

Australian cinema thrived through the silent era but the industry went into a decline in the 1920s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Australian governments intervened to help the industry and, following the establishment of film funding bodies and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, a new generation of Australian filmmakers emerged.

First to make their mark were films about Australia’s earlier history such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), My Brilliant Career (1979), Breaker Morant (1980), and Gallipoli (1981). Other successful films with more contemporary themes included Mad Max (Road Warrior) (1979), which introduced a new international star in Mel Gibson, Paul Hogan’s popular comedy Crocodile Dundee (1986) and the finely crafted films of Melbourne director Paul Cox.

The early 1990s saw the emergence of ‘quirky’ Australian comedies such as Strictly Ballroom (1992), Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Muriel’s Wedding (1994). More recent notable films include: Shine (1996), Looking for Alibrandi (2000), Lantana (2001), Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), Crackerjack (2002), Japanese Story (2003), Look Both Ways (2005), Wolf Creek (2005), Little Fish (2005), Ten Canoes (2006), Kenny (2006), Happy Feet (2006) and Jindabyne (2006).

Australia currently has film co-production treaties with the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Israel, Germany, Singapore and China, and memorandums of understanding with France and New Zealand. A treaty with South Africa is also under negotiation.

Government support for Australian film and television production has evolved in recent years. While direct funding support continues to be available through the Film Finance Corporation Australia (FFC), the Australian Film Commission (AFC) and Film Australia, a new Australian Screen Production Incentive which provides enhanced levels of indirect support came into effect in September 2007. The incentive provides three mutually exclusive benefits:

The Government is also moving to bring together the majority of FFC, AFC and Film Australia functions under a new statutory authority, to be called Screen Australia, which is expected to become operational from 1 July 2008 following the passage of legislation through the Federal Parliament.

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