1998: Feature article on Australian Government education and arts funding.

The Federal Government announcement of $1 million in grants to help universities save their arts and humanities courses has stirred the Opposition. 

"If Dr Kemp really cared about the future of non-vocational courses in Australia's universities he would end the commercialisation of the sector and reverse the 1996 funding cuts.  Grants of $1 million are no more than a drop in the bucket" according to Mark Latham, Shadow Minister for Education and Youth Affairs.  Not to be too negative, of course, "The release of Labor's education policy in the forthcoming campaign will contain a series of initiatives designed to end the commercialisation of education in Australia and restore the viability of the arts and humanities in our universities."

    We seem to be in tall-order territory.  Not the Northern Territory, where according to Mr Latham, ceramics, sculpture and cartography courses have been cut and the English Department closed.  Nor at the University of NSW with cuts in sport and leisure studies, applied arts and performing arts and "the closure of an entire campus" covering teacher education.  The story is similar across Australia, including our own ANU losing Russian and "downsizing of philosophy, history, linguistics and sociology".

    So what's the real story?  And what should a good government be doing about the arts in universities?

    Professor Chris Healey, Dean of Arts at the Northern Territory University explains.  An English Literature Major is no longer offered in Darwin, beyond a part time tutor to assist some students using correspondence courses.  Ceramics, sculpture and cartography have gone.  How?  Because Federal Government funding is tied so closely to student numbers that the administration finds itself forced into making cuts in areas with few enrolments which can't immediately justify the cost of staff.  There is no room for cross-subsidising less popular subjects from funds generated by more popular areas.

    The issue is more complex - and this is where the politics comes in.  Tight government funding in itself is not the cause of the arts missing out.  Because potential students have been imbued with the belief that they should not take intrinsically interesting courses, but only those that are seen as employment related, the enrolments in arts areas are reduced - and the funding follows the enrolment pattern.  The cuts in the arts become inevitable - and once they are made, reversal is unlikely, since potential students' attitudes seem to be confirmed by the cuts.  A very vicious circle indeed.

    Will $1 million do the trick?  Our man in Darwin, pointing out that the universities have not yet received official notice of the grants, thought that little would be left for the far-flung regions after the great eight universities have had their share - and $1 million divided by eight is not going to make any real difference even to them.

    But even many millions of dollars might not help unless the political culture changes.  Professor John Niland, Vice-Chancellor of University of NSW, speaking at the National University of Singapore in June, on The Challenge of Building World Class Universities in the Asian Region, began with "universities, where, as the Irish poet and educator W. B. Yeats so famously observed, the process of educating young minds is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a bucket".  "The Spirit of Inquiry," he said, "as with the Olympic Flame, passes from one generation to the next."

    Professor Niland praised Singapore for fostering original, indigenous research so that it can become a science and technology producer, rather than merely consuming knowledge created elsewhere.  "That is also what we mean by the idea of Australia becoming the clever country (not just the lucky country)".  It is rather ironic that a poet, no longer available for study in Darwin, should begin Niland's speech about knowledge which appears to be defined as science and technology.  It is also relevant to note that his academic colleague Donald Horne used the title "The Lucky Country" in a satirical sense in an era when "she'll be right" was the common philosophy.

   
    As President of the Australian Vice-Chancellor's Committee, Professor Niland needs, it seems to me, to be more careful that the correct political message is sent to potential students.  And indeed he made a point of the value of his university's College of Fine Arts, which sends a large team of students and staff to the Singapore International Design Forum and, in defining a world-class university, he continued the Olympic analogy by saying universities are "decathletes - a competition run over 10 events, not one - but for university reputation building the distances are set at the level of a marathon - many marathons in fact!"

    So the ALP is right that $1 million will not dent the losses to the arts in universities and the commercial employment-fodder philosophy of the Government is an additional cause of the narrowing of universities which will prevent them from being world-class.  All we need to know now is how the ALP proposes to solve both the financial and attudinal problems which are beginning to look intractable.  And we do need to know now, rather than later, before too many demoralised staff have been lost and the arts traditions sink forever.
   

© Frank McKone, Canberra

1998: Feature article on Bren Weatherstone

Bren Weatherstone is the ACT's representative in the National Association for Drama in Education, and recently attended the International Drama/Theatre Education Association's Congress in Kenya representing Australia.

She is, of course, not merely a peripatetic representative but is a teacher of Drama at Hawker College, where she has established a reputation since 1995 for intense, stage-wise student productions. 

Drama is not only theatre, but is a vehicle for learning social skills and artistic understanding.  Many Drama students never perform in public but gain confidence and appreciation of theatre from "workshop" classes.  Bren Weatherstone does it all.

So why did she go to Africa?  And how did she get there?  And what really happened?

Addiction to cross-fertilisation is Bren's first concern.  Working "in a dark room with students all day" causes professional stimulus deprivation.  Meeting a core group of drama education professionals each year, as she has done regularly for the last 10, stops sterility which even academic reading can't do.  One special experience was learning how to put the theories of Augustus Boal into practice.  Learning the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed, Bren's students have identified oppression in Belconnen.  Usually they feel stymied by such problems, but have worked out alternatives and voluntarily followed up with 2 days' workshops with Community Aid Abroad.

At the Congress in Kenya, Bren was able to follow this theme further, meeting French clown Alberto and a Dalit, Nicholas Chinnapan, who use Boal's methods with Untouchables in India. And so the educational process circles around from theatre practitioners across the world through teachers like Bren Weatherstone to students in our schools.

Going to an education focussed conference was not enough for Bren, however.  A friend had left South Africa when she was 18 and wanted to retrace her early steps from Cape Town through Botswana to Zimbabwe.  Bren's archaeologist husband, Geoff Hope, wanted to study the latrines of the rock hyrax in the Drakensberg Mountains (hyraxes poo in the same place for millenia: digging in poo is a great dating technique for archaeologists, or so Geoff claims).

So after camping out with wild animals which, for some reason incomprehensible to Bren do not invade people's tents at night, the party wended their way to Grahamstown, a university centre some 40 kms inland from Port Elizabeth, for 9 days of theatre at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival (e-mail: sbnaf@foundation.intekom.com).

Here was white theatre for whites, like King Lear which mainly Afrikaans people attended, and ballet which even Bren's Afrikaans hosts found almost too expensive.  Here too was white theatre about white on black experience, like Athol Fugard's The Island, reflecting on the past and future of Robben Island, directed by Jerry Pooe for the North West Arts Drama Company.

Most significantly for Bren Weatherstone, drama teacher, black theatre for blacks provided the most powerful examples of theatre as part of changing understanding inside one's own culture.  From the townships and villages came works like Market Theatre's Koze Kuse Bash, conceived and directed by widely respected actor/director Sello Maake ka-Ncube.  "It is as if the schizophrenia and madness of the township has taken human form" wrote Anton Burggraaf, guest writer at the Festival.  "It is a horrifying indictment of a society that proclaims its freedom in so many ways, but that is trapped in a never-ending cycle of abuse."

It's certainly Bren's approach to teaching drama that her students should, like the African performers at Grahamstown, show the reality of their lives in theatrical form for their own understanding and for others to reflect upon.

What goes around comes around, always to the benefit of her students.  But what doesn't go around is funding.  Teachers, like so many of the artists Bren met, have to rely on almost no financial help for their own professional development.  Hawker College has done its bit, providing $200 towards the Congress registration of $US400 and the ACT Drama Association will help.  But when it comes to reality, delegates from developing countries need all the assistance the first world can give, so IDEA maintains a fund for this purpose, even though there are considerable difficulties about equitable distribution of the money. 

Even using her long service leave and her school vacation, and some claim on tax, it's an expensive business obtaining such intensive PD. Well into thousands of dollars.  At the very least we should appreciate the people, teachers and artists, who put so much into all our cultural development.  At best, we should look forward to a society which provides the support these people deserve.

Yet, I suspect, Bren Weatherstone would also point out that a large proportion of the performers and teachers she saw in Kenya and South Africa need the greatest support - including, as she noted about one teacher from Sudan, the basic human right to teach according to personal integrity without fear of arrest and torture.  At least she has that right in oppressed Belconnen.

© Frank McKone, Canberra