Looking for cultural value: critiques of Australian cultural policy

This paper brings together critiques of contemporary Australian cultural policy from three sources: academic research, arts leaders and public intellectuals. It discusses the discursive shift in cultural policy towards an instrumentalist framework, and reviews academic research on this shift and its implications. It then looks at critiques of policy shifts by public intellectuals and leaders within the arts sector to identify parallels and persistent themes across academic scholarship and public thinking on cultural policy. In particular, it identifies and examines the theme of absence of a place for cultural value and production in policy-making and looks at arguments that call for a reinstatement of policy driven by cultural value.

What is Chinese about Chinese businesses? Locating the 'rise of China' in global production networks

There is an implicit but commonly held assumption that Chinese businesses are distinctively Chinese. Casting them in unitary and national terms, this assumption has often provided the underpinnings for the conception of the strength of Chinese businesses as signs of an emerging China threat. Drawing on a global production networks (GPN) approach, this paper aims to question the assumption by arguing that many Chinese businesses, embedded in the expanding global and regional production networks, have taken on important transnational characteristics. Given these transnational connections, Chinese business networks in both 'Greater China' and China proper are characterized more by diversity and fragmentation than by cultural coherence and homogeneity. This analysis of the transnationalization and fragmentation of contemporary Chinese businesses helps better understand and respond to the complex challenge posed by the economic dynamism in China.

Integrating agriculture and food policy to achieve sustainable peri-urban fruit and vegetable production in Victoria, Australia

Efforts to increase fruit and vegetable consump­tion are a significant aspect of national approaches to preventive health. However, policy frameworks for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption rarely take an integrated food-systems approach that includes a focus on production. In this policy analysis and commentary we examine fruit and vegetable production in peri-urban areas of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia, and highlight the significance of emerging environmental and eco­nomic pressures on fruit and vegetable production. This examination will be of interest to other locations around the world also experiencing pressure on their peri-urban agriculture. These pressures suggest that the availability and afforda­bility of fruit and vegetable supplies cannot be taken for granted, and that future initiatives to increase fruit and vegetable consumption should include a focus on sustainable production. Threats to production that include environmental pressures, together with the loss and cost of peri-urban agri­cultural land and a cost-price squeeze due to rising input costs and low farm-gate prices, act in combi­nation to threaten the viability of the Victorian fruit and vegetable industries. We pro­pose that policy initiatives to increase fruit and vegetable consumption should include measures to address the pressures facing production, and that the most effective policy responses are likely to be integrated approaches that aim to increase fruit and vegetable availability and affordability through innovative solutions to problems of production and distribu­tion. Some brief examples of potential integrated policy solutions are identified to illu­strate the possibilities and stimulate discussion.

Exploring the global and local networks of national information system integration initiatives : a case study of national cultural collection integration from an actor-network perspective

Australian Museums Online (AMOL) was the earliest attempt to make Australia’s distributed cultural collections accessible from a single online resource. Despite early successes, significant achievements and the considerable value it offered certain groups, the project ran into operational difficulties and was eventually discontinued. By using Actor-Network Theory and analysing the global and local actor-networks, it is revealed that although the project originated from large, state museums, buy-in was restricted to individuals, rather than institutions and the most significant value was for smaller, regional institutions. Furthermore, although the global networks that governed the project could translate their visions through the local production networks, because the network’s underlying weaknesses were never addressed, over time this destablised the global networks. This case study offers advice for projects attempting to consolidate data sources from disparate sources, and highlights the importance of individual actors in championing the project.

Environmental and cultural change on the Mt Eccles lava-flow landscapes of southwest Victoria, Australia

The Gunditjmara people developed a socio-economic system based on the modification of wetland ecosystems associated with the Mt Eccles lava flow primarily for sustainable production and management of the highly nutritious shortfin eel (Anguilla australis). This paper examines the environmental history of these landscapes since their inception about 30 000 years ago, through palaeoecological analysis of sediment cores from associated lakes and swamps, in order to contribute to an understanding of the causes and timing of cultural transformation. Two records cover the whole of the 30 000 year history of the landscape while two others provide evidence of change within the Holocene. A great deal of variation within the landscape is revealed, both temporally and spatially, with opportunities for human exploitation through the whole recorded period. Although most features of the records can be explained by natural landscape development and climate change, some human modification can be suggested from around the Pleistocene—Holocene transition while more obvious indications of management relating to eel aquaculture are evident from about 4000 cal. yr BP that appear to include adaptations to the onset of a drier and more variable climate. The study has implications for the explanation of intensification of settlement in Australia more generally within the mid to late Holocene.

The films of John Hughes: a history of independent screen production in Australia

ABSTRACTIn The Films of John Hughes: A history of independent screen production in Australia filmmaker and academic John Cumming tells the ongoing story of Hughes’ work illustrating the delicate balance of individual, collective and corporate agendas that many contemporary artists need to negotiate. This story begins in the 1960s with a generation of intelligent, socially engaged young people who challenge established power structures, conventions and stereotypes in art, politics and the media. Experiments were being made with grassroots democracy, with new social formations and new ways of seeing and communicating. The book also pays attention to earlier periods of cultural and political activism that captured Hughes’ imagination in the 1970s and became the subject of a number of his films over a period of nearly forty years. Through these films Cumming traces the outline of post-war film culture and production in Melbourne from the 1940s and sets this history within the context of international trends in independent filmmaking throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st.The work of an independent filmmaker has always included a great deal more than directing films. Working in an artisanal mode, he or she often performs, or has a hand in, every aspect of craft at the same time as engaging in discussion and organisation around the wider sphere of screen culture and industry. In addition to having proficiency as a producer, photographer, sound recordist, editor, distributor and exhibitor of films, there is research, organisation, lobbying, entrepreneurship and mentoring to be done. As an independent producer-director, John Hughes has engaged in all of these activities – often simultaneously. He is also a scholar, writer, organiser, activist and teacher. As a television bureaucrat he was both eminent and innovative, and through his filmmaking he has become a leading historian of Australian documentary cinema. ‘… that view – that art and politics are inherently at odds – is still lurking around. It is at the heart of cultural conservatism; and John Hughes’s film-making, from the 1970s to the present, confounds its proponents. His cinema is at once crowded, detailed, elegant and absolutely lucid; at the same time, it is shot through with political and historical understandings.’ Sylvia Lawson, ‘Such a Bloody Wonderful Place’, Inside Story, 28 April 2013.

Production of solidarities in YouTube: a visual study of Uyghur nationalism

The uprising in Tibet, which gained the attention of the global media during the preparation for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and the ethnic riots in Xinjiang in 2009 showed Western audiences the extent of the ethnic conflict between China’s Han ethnic majority and its ethnic minority groups, the Uyghurs being one of them. In the late twentieth century, Uyghur diaspora communities formed their own cultural and political associations in Central Asia, Russia, Turkey, Europe, and North America, while Uyghur political activists have been increasingly using the Internet for spreading political messages promoting Uyghur national ideas. Among their efforts, different Uyghur organizations and individuals have created YouTube channels in order to generate interest in the Uyghur question, to internationalize Xinjiang issues, and to seek support from a variety of audiences. The aim of this research is to examine the structure of political communication about the Han–Uyghur conflict on YouTube, taking into consideration the contents of the videos and available information about authors and audiences. This study combines quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis and offers insights into how the Internet is used by dispersed political actors within a framework of a single nationalist movement. It also provides a unique window into ethnic relations in Xinjiang and elucidates on how ethnic minority and transnational activist networks search for discourses that could serve as the basis for ethnic mobilization.