The Town Crier: Is Your Fringe Looking Good?
Hear ye, Hear ye,
The Centre of the Public Square was #beyondthrilled to host the launch of ‘Fringe to Famous’ last week, a scholarly work into the way Australian culture is nurtured in Australia.
One of the authors was my friend Tony Moore, a true intellectual dynamo. Apart from his work on culture, he has built an incredible body of work around the true history of Australian convicts and especially the number of exiled political dissidents.
‘Fringe to Famous’ dives deep into the way culture is created, rejecting the notion of both the alternative: mainstream binary and the economic ‘cultural industries’ framework.
Instead, the authors see the fringe as a constant nutrient for culture, where the policy challenge is to build the pathways for creators to develop rather than just picking winners.
The book was launched by Peter Garret, there was a discussion with the authors facilitated by Per Capita’s Emma Dawson and I got a chance to run an inter-active session with some industry leaders using our Civility engagement tools.
I’ve long admired Garret’s preparedness to climb down from the cheap seats and enter the political fray; from the Nuclear Disarmament Party (my first federal election vote!) to entering the Parliament as a member of the ALP, he harnessed his celebrity with integrity.
With his permission, it’s worth reproducing some of what Pete had to say at the launch:
At heart I’m a political activist and a cultural patriot. That stance, in partnership with my gifted brothers in music - Rob Hirst, Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey - enabled us to develop our craft and fulfil our vision, however flaky at times.
We went to the suburbs and got solid, watertight and defendable in the cauldron of initially indifferent Aussie pubs and clubs, and thus weatherproofed, were able to launch a more durable transmission vehicle further afield.
It was never a given that we would succeed, let alone last 45 years on and off. Luck, happenstance, timing, talent, character (‘a stubborn bunch of bastards’ as we are often called) working with great people; all these factors played a role.
We never sought the bright lights, nor the critics’ acclaim, we simply wanted to serve the songs - wherever, whenever, however - and give meaning to their sentiments by our actions on and off stage.
And in keeping with Fringe to Famous, we (and our brave managers) constantly straddled that line between fringe, or outsiders as we still see ourselves, and the businesses, including one very large multinational corporation, we had to work with and sometimes around.
Fringe to Famous posits the notion of ‘generative hybridity’ to describe this process. What I can say is that our hybridity was rarely comfortable, and sometimes close to extinguishment.
But ultimately we made it work, with our fair share of trials and tribulations, emerging as it were from a marathon wrestling match with a multi limbed giant, creative sanity intact.
Yet the music industry we inhabit, made up as one writer put it by “ ...some highly commercial organisations fed by a huge artesian well of self- exploitation, second jobs and burn out’, at it’s best a generator of joy, jobs, emotional, spiritual and political solace, is in a death roll.
Assailed on one side by ridiculous bureaucratic entanglements and the failure of the market economy, and on the other by global behemoths of production and digital content; unregulated, unaccountable, unethical and utterly fixated on numbers.
A few months back my second solo album, ‘The True North’, debuted at No 1 on the Aria album chart. It was a brief appearance, and chart positions are calculated by a mysterious mix of streaming and physical sales.
But in that week mine was the only Australian album in the top 60, and the same fate awaits those who follow. Of the handful of local albums who made the top 100, most were greatest hits and compilations. And now local festivals, the mainstay of working artists, are on the ropes.
So I strongly support Recommendation 5, one of ten recommendations the authors of Fringe to Famous offer for consideration; namely that that the promise made by Arts Minister Tony Burke to broaden Australian content requirements to all media, including streaming be fulfilled.
Amen to that, and the percentage should be lifted too, if the emasculation of locally generated work is to be arrested. On this matter the entire Australian music industry is holding its breath and waiting.
A few of these themes weave neatly into the latest Burning Platforms which we called ’who stole our books’.
Both Lizzie O’Shea and I, were among 180,000 authors worldwide whose work was stolen in the Book 3 data breech which has seen our work – in our cases critiques of Big Tech - actually feeding the large learning models, I assume to teach them to critique themselves.
Australian Writers Guild CEO Claire Pullen takes us through how the heist was perpetrated and what we, if anything, we can do now.
You can listen to the podcast here.
And here is the YouTube link :https://youtu.be/ywIN9ZooXf0
Policy updates:
AI Sovereignty – Our policy lead Jordan Guiao has put together this submission for the Senate inquiry into AI calling for a national approach not just to regulating AI but to developing it. As he writes: AI is meant to be reflective and representative of a particular region’s culture and information, enough so that its recommendations are understood and tailored to that region’s context. Why then, would we rely on foreign companies to decide this local context for us? Read the submission here: https://percapita.org.au/blog/our_work/public_australian_ai/
What we are clicking:
· Rewilding the Internet – this remarkable essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon draws on ecology and enclosure laws to make a compelling case for a more decentralised internet - https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/
· Are Websites the New Black? – this read in the New Yorker asks whether the humble web page is making a comeback in the face of platform enshitification - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-revenge-of-the-home-page
· That Apple Ad – the crushing of everything that is beautiful in our lives under a vice as a selling point for the very thin iPad Pro has Alex Clark wondering about the importance of real things - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/12/with-its-new-ipad-pro-apple-is-offering-us-the-thin-end-of-the-wedge?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Peter Lewis
Convenor of Centre of the Public Square
