Literature is especially endangered right now: the arts have been underfunded by successive governments, and literature has always received, in the words of Stephen Murray-Smith, the least ‘superphosphate’.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with matching funds. Looked at upside-down, however, matching funds looks less like government largesse and more like a new condition imposed on funding applicants. That $5.3m was once administered by Australia Council peers and, whatever the faults in that process, it’s apparently now the free market that decides where it goes.

This year I have harshly come to the realisation that our government doesn’t care about art, well, not unless you’re Tim Winton, Nicole Kidman or the Australian orchestra. To them, emerging artists are just the people on the sidelines who should get their act together and get a real job. We are the annoying buskers […]

Ben Eltham’s article from Overland 200, ‘Culture is bigger than the arts’, has spurred considerable discussion. Here, we publish a response from cultural policy researcher and analyst Christopher Madden. Madden argues: Eltham also suggests that ‘[a]s online, networked and digital forms of culture continue to grow and proliferate, the Australia Council’s policy ambit becomes correspondingly […]

In Overland 200, Ben Eltham makes a provocative argument about the future of the Australia Council. Here’s a snippet. The Australia Council has lost its way …  It has failed to meaningfully engage with the arts practices of everyday Australian artists and no longer enjoys the support of many of those who create art in […]