Lisa Andersen

Magic Light, Silver City: the business of culture in Broken Hill

Abstract This article examines cultural industries in Broken Hill—the iconic ‘Silver City’ of Australian mining in far western NSW—and comes from research funded by arts and regional development agencies during 2006 and 2007. In interviewing and surveying the ‘movers and makers’ of the local cultural sector a picture emerged of a successful group of mainly informally qualified professional visual artists and crafts people working from home studios who spend more time on their practice and make more money than their metropolitan counterparts. Broken Hill also has a thriving service sector, fine weather and competitive location infrastructure for screen industries, and a community proud of its ‘arid artists’ and its historical and international reputation as a film set. Artists enjoy the lower-than-city costs of accommodation, the quality of light, their proximity to ‘Outback’ and industrial landscapes, and sustainable local and seasonal tourist markets. With a focus on richly coloured landscape painting and traditional crafts and some contempt for the city ‘art mafia’, there is limited diversity of cultural products and a ‘half-Sydney’ market ceiling price on local sales. The Indigenous arts sector has a low profile and is surprisingly—given high numbers of international tourists—underdeveloped. The arts community is fragmented by divisions that both reflect the male-dominated, rugged independence and ‘us and them’ heritage of this desert mining and ‘union town’ and inhibit cooperative development. Remoteness means wariness of newcomers and new ideas; young people leave; limited access to business expertise, production services and training; and high transport costs. Isolation means a unique local culture; a friendly community; freedom from city-based art fads, stress and busyness; and blue skies, time and a clear view.

Creative Business in Australia Learnings from the Creative Industries Innovation Centre, 2009 To 2015

As the largest ever Australian government investment in creative industries development, the Creative Industries Innovation Centre delivered tailored business services to more than 1500 creative businesses from 2009 to 2015 and provided industry intelligence and advice for public policy and peak sectoral activity. This collection gives an overview of the current ‘state of business’ in Australia’s creative industries – both as an industry sector in its own right and as an enabling sector and skills set for other industries – and reflects on business needs, creative industries policy and support services for the sector. With contributions from the Centre’s team of senior business advisers and from leading Australian researchers who worked closely with the Centre –including experts on design-led innovation and the creative economy – and case studies of leading Australia creative businesses, the book is intended as and industry-relevant contribution to business development and public policy. Content links to the publicly accessible Creative Industries Innovation Centre Collection Archive at the UTS Library, which holds material from Centre’s activities over its six years of operation.

Creating Shared Value Through Service-Learning in Management Education

Service-learning has gained strong interest among educators as a model of experiential education through community engagement. Its potential to contribute to multiple stakeholders, including students, community partners, faculty, and university, is well recognized. While research has focused on elements of this teaching model that contribute to the realization of student-related benefits, there has been less emphasis on what aspects enable the creation of shared value to other stakeholders. We describe a postgraduate, elective management consulting course based on service-learning pedagogy, which has been running for 10 years at the University of Technology Sydney Business School leading to the completion of 75 community projects to date, and evaluate how it creates shared value to multiple stakeholders. We identify four main elements of the course that enable it to deliver value to multiple stakeholders: a dedicated role of client engagement coordinator, a coaching program involving industry experts, student autonomy, and authentic assessments. The main challenges in continuously providing value to all involved parties are developing focused and realistic project briefs, managing students’ commitment and differences in students’ skills, and recruiting industry coaches.

All Culture is Local : good practice in regional cultural mapping and planning from local government

This book is an outcome from a five year Australian Research Council funded research project, CAMRA cultural asset mapping in regional Australia project (LP0882238). Over this time four universities, four local governments, and peak regional, state and federal agencies sought to develop knowledge that would enable better informed planning for arts and cultural development in rural and regional communities. Over the course of the project, it became evident that rural-regional local government staff and cultural decision makers need better place-specific data and are keen to learn from the experiences of other local governments to inform their own planning. This book is CAMRA’s response to that need and includes 17 case studies on good practice in (1) Cultural Mapping and Data Collection and (2) Cultural Planning. The case studies have been written with the aim of making ideas and processes transferrable for any regional local authority - with the resource implications made clear – and are ordered using Australian Standard Geographical Classification-Remoteness Areas for local government area.