I did my post-graduate Arts Management studies at what was the South Australian Institute of Technology (now the University of South Australia). At that point in the early 1980s it was the only course of its type in Australia. The Director of the program, based in the Elton Mayor School of Management, was Peter Brokensha. Peter passed away on 24 June and I felt the need to acknowledge the importance of his work as the Director of that early arts management program and the impact on my life in opening a range of opportunities and challenges that enabled me to become an arts manager.

Peter was a fascinating person. He had an eclectic set of interests and life experiences that contributed richly to our learning process. He’d started his career as an engineer working for Caltex first in Adelaide and then working his way to the top as Managing Director of Operations at the Head Office in Sydney. Still only in his early 40s and one of Australia’s first sea changers, he resigned from the corporate world and conceived and developed the Argyle Arts Centre in the historic Rocks area in Sydney. Peter’s life-long passion for social justice and culture then led him back to University to complete a Masters in Anthropology which involved long periods in the central desert in the NW of South Australia living with and doing research on the art and craft of the Pitjantjara people. If you’re interested in this work from 1975, the book he published as a result, The Pitjanjatjara and their Crafts,  is still available via book sellers such as http://www.abebooks.com/ 

All these experiences informed his passion for art as an integral part of life as well as the desire to produce good managers who could help in the creation of art and culture.

That passion fed through into his family life with his children all involved in the arts when I knew them. Peter had by then  Randells Mill, a 19th century abandoned butter factory in the Adelaide Hills converted into a home and art gallery that he shared with his wife Elizabeth, a  house full of paintings, pottery, sculpture, hospitality and conversations.

Peter also bought a set of intellectual and analytical skills to the work of an arts management teacher and researcher and together we created a cultural statistics framework for the Australia Council and the Australian Bureau of Statistics as well as undertaking cultural economic studies on the Adelaide Festival and the arts industry in South Australia.

Peter was a great example to his students, combining care for art and culture with worldly experience as a manager and leader. His autobiography is called Getting to Wisdom Slowly and is still available: http://www.holisticpage.com.au/

If you haven’t already joined the Australian Arts Party then you should. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing that instead of having someone from the Motorists Enthusiast Party in the Senate we had an artist…or two or three?

As a founding member of the Arts Party, I’ve just received some good old fashioned car stickers through the mail and I’m going to proudly mount the one that says: “I support Art and Creativity and I vote www.artsparty.org”

Even if you’re a member of the Labor, Liberal or Greens parties, I don’t see why you also couldn’t join the Arts Party and spread your vote around. After all we have a preferential voting system so you get the chance to have and exercise a complex set of views about politics.

The vision of Australia’s newest political party is to help create a more unified, more creative and economically more prosperous Australia, built on vibrant and diverse communities, which will benefit us all. The aim is to get more support for Australia’s artistic and cultural practice and organisations so that all the reasons that we love and work in the arts can be experienced by more artists, arts workers, audiences and Australians.

I’m back from my travels full of wonderful memories of people, buildings, water, animals (up close and friendly with the odd elephant), food, wine and of course the thing that drives our desire to explore other worlds: culture. Sometimes it was actual art – the 18^th century painted ceiling in my room in Umbria and the 21^st century fresco in my hotel in Singapore. Sometimes it was seeing traditional dances recreated by energetic young people in Molyvos and Kandy. Sometimes it was exploring the extraordinary Bronze Age and Hellenic sites in Turkey and Greece. Sometimes it was seeing craftspeople at work – the old man making Kolombi beads in Nafplio and the young woman selling her brooches off an umbrella in Athens. Sometimes it was wading through the puddles to explore Corinth and climbing up the endless stairs to reach the Lion Rock Fortress in Sigiriya.

Admittedly, some of the explorations I chose to make had art and culture at their heart – the archaeological tour of the Aegean coast of Turkey; the photography tour of Sardinia; the watercolour tour of Greece. But in every town, every moment of every adventure was touched by the art and culture of that community. Yes, I lounged around the odd beach and did a lot of floating in the Mediterranean but each day contained a new vista on the world through the prism of art or design or music or architecture or storytelling.

Why don’t we invest more in Australian arts and culture in order to ensure that our community is rich in colour and movement and sound?

From 28 August 2013, I won’t be available for anything serious for the next couple of months. I’m taking what I call my Melbourne Theatre Company Long Service Leave. After an unexpectedly long time at MTC, I decided to have a break before I went searching for the next challenge. For the last 7 months that break has including some personal time but a surprising amount of work. The University of Melbourne has kindly offered me a part time research fellowship; I’ve done some consulting and teaching about arts philanthropy; I’ve taught a post-graduate arts management course; I’ve co-presented a paper on arts leadership; I’ve been on an Arts Victoria advisory panel; and I’ve had lots of mentoring-type conversations with arts managers. Which has all been rewarding but not quite what I had planned for this year! So now I am departing Australia’s shores and heading towards the Mediterranean. I will be checking emails…but not regularly and not over-eagerly. The next couple of months are about exploring the history and culture, the art and food, the people and landscape of Turkey, Italy, Malta and Greece.

I don’t have a specific return date at this point. It depends on the impact of the ongoing slump of the Australian dollar on budget; it depends on how long I’m prepared to live out of a 20 kilo suitcase and wear the same five t-shirts; it depends how much I miss family and friends and the comfort of my own bed.

So if you have a fabulous opportunity to offer me, by all means send me a message…but you might have to wait. I can’t imagine that I’ll sacrifice the white limestone of Malta or the blue grottos of Capri for just another job.

If one more person asks me how retirement is going….

I haven’t retired. I don’t want to retire. I can’t afford to retire. All I did was leave MTC. Perhaps its the grey hair. Perhaps it’s the fact that people offer me a seat on the tram. But the truth is that I’m trying to have some of the holidays that I didn’t have for all those years at MTC before I look for the next job. And as my holiday plan was Europe, I wanted to wait until the summer was over but before the snow set in. I leave on 28 August 2013 and will be back sometime before the end of the year.

In the meantime, I have been busy. Honest. The University of Melbourne has very generously offered me a part time Research Fellow position which is giving me the chance to see if I have a book on arts management in me. I taught an Advanced Arts Management course in tthe University’s school of Culture and Communication in first semester. The RE Ross Trust, a generous Melbourne-based philanthropic trust, asked me to review their Scriptwriting Awad. I’ve been on three Helpmann Award committees as well as an advisory panel for Arts Victoria. I have lots of informally mentoring conversations with people about arts management. And as you know from other posts, I have taught in Vietnam and presented in Colombia.

There isn’t nearly enough time to relax, read a book, get fit, go to the movies, catch up with friends. But I’m doing my best to squeeze some of those activities in as well.

In June, I had the pleasure of visiting Colombia for AMAIC 2003, the International Conference on Arts and Cultural Management. I confess that Colombia has never been on my “must see” list partly because it’s so far away (32 hours travel time from Melbourne to Bogota) and partly because of its history of political and drug-related violence. But I’m glad I made the effort. To recover from the long flight I had a weekend in the warm, colourful, historic town of Cartagena on the Caribbean Sea.

It’s both the classic tourist town, full of churches and museums, forts and restaurants, but also a town that felt as if it still belonged to the people who lived there rather than peripatetic visitors like me.

Whilst Bogota shared some of the historic buildings and colour, in La Candelaria, the old town, it’s a large (8 million people) sprawling metropolis and not a wildly attractive one. It’s full of graffiti and men with guns. Not a combination that appeals to me. But the hospitality of the staff and students at the Universidad de los Andes and the local people who attended the conference was warm, even towards incompetents like me with not a word of Spanish. The conference traditionally provides a strong cultural programme and this year as well as some great galleries, the highlight was music. You’d be surprised at how many meek cultural academics have a salsa soul.

I co-presented a paper on Co-Leadership in the Performing Arts (email me if you’d like a copy) with my partners-in-crime from previous years, Kate Macneill from the University of Melbourne and Sarah Reynolds who is now the Performing Arts Co-ordinator at the Burnie Arts Centre. Kate and Sarah had done most of the hard work in terms of the academic content of the paper so I just provided the colour and movement. Whilst I enjoy the AIMAC conferences, I always feel that they look back rather than forward, analysing what companies and artists have been doing. I’d love to find a way of bring practitioners and cultural researchers together to choose topics of exploration that could inform the future.

In addition to the wonderful people that I met and the conference itself, my favourite moments in Colombia were:

• Wandering the history laden streets of Cartagena
• Swimming in the warm Caribbean waters
• Museums such as Museo del Ora, Museo del Santa Rosa and the Museo Nacional
• Art graffiti (as opposed to the endless depressing tagging and paint balling)
• Looking out over Bogota during day and night from Montserrat peak
• The Salt Cathedral in Zipaquira.

A short stay but a rewarding one.

In March I had the privilege of working with Jo Caust, Jane Haley and Thuy Do to co-present workshops on Income Generation in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The workshops, jointly funded by the Vietnam Institute for Cultural and Arts Studies and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, were designed to give practical tools as well as inspirational stories on all sorts of ways of raising income including audience development, business partnerships, philanthropy and fundraising activities.

The audience was made up of cultural managers, artists, academics and government officials. They were amazing in their concentration and their interest. As you can imagine, it wasn’t easy  – giving up 3 days’ work to spend hours in a room listening to presentations in translation. Their responsibilities and interests included theatre and circus, public and private museums, cultural centres and arts management programs. One of the most wonderful parts of the seminars in both cities was when the participants would perform – sometimes it was to provide some inspiration on the day, sometimes to illustrate a case study, sometimes to thank us and sometimes just for fun. I haven’t been to any other training programs where art was such an integral part of the process.

 Presenters, translators and Ho Chi Minh

The challenge for Vietnamese Arts Managers is that in difficult economic times, the government is pushing them to become more self-sufficient but the policy and taxation framework isn’t yet there. One thinks of Australia 20 years ago, before Abaf, before the Cultural Register, before Prescribed Private Funds, where the culture of giving to arts and cultural organisations existed but wasn’t wide spread. And of course each country will have its own traditions when it comes to donations. In Vietnam, people clearly donate to temples and churches but they also have to provide financial support for the health and education of family members. So one suspects that cultural giving will be low on the list in the current economic climate.

We met some inspirational people during our time in Vietnam but I just want to mention two in case you are going to Vietnam and have a chance to visit their museums. The first was the director of the War Remnants Musuem in HCMC, Huỳnh Ngọc Vân, and the second, Vu Duc Hieu, established the first private cultural museum in Vietnam, focusing on the art of the Muong people.

http://warremnantsmuseum.com/

http://muongvill.com/home

And if you happen to be in Hanoi and don’t think that the Water Puppets are quite your thing, try the Tuong Theatre in the Old Quarter. It combines live music, dance, story telling and comedy and is a great way to spend an hour before dinner.

http://www.vietnamtuongtheatre.com/Default.aspx

Other cultural experiences that are worth exploring include:

Women’s Museum, Hanoi: http://www.womenmuseum.org.vn/en.html

Temple of Literature (and antique shop), Hanoi

Cultural Village Tour, Hanoi e.g. through Intrepid’s Urban Adventures

Fine Art Museum plus all the small art galleries that are on the same site, HCMC

Mekong Delta for village life, homestays, markets, food manufacturing e.g. Asia Trip Advisor: http://www.asiatouradvisor.com/

The last week has had two momentous moments for me and they have only come about due to the generosity and thoughtfulness of others. And both have been acknowledging my work which again, has only been successful because of others.

The neon sign over the 1^st floor bar in the Southbank Theatre has been turned on. It’s a beautiful turquoise sign and I love it. I’m slightly embarrassed by it but I’m also amazed at the number of people who are jealous and would trade their AOs and AMs for one. So thank you to Derek Young and Brett Sheehy who made it happen.

Another honour came because of Pam Kleemann’s kindness of spirit. Pam’s an art photographer and friend who, amongst other things, has taken MTC rehearsal photos for years. If you want to know more about her work, see:

http://photo.tokolonga.com.au/

She nominated me for the Victorian Honour Roll of Women and I was inducted into that list last night (12 March 2013). I had a university lecture to give that night so Pam represented me at Parliament House. I presume that the website will be updated with the 2103 list of inspirational women from all works of live but here’s where to find previous lists:

http://www.dhs.vic.gov.au/about-the-department/news-and-events/news/general-news/victorian-honour-roll-of-women-2013

It’s a great idea and if you have any Victorian women who you think should be nominated, go for it. Whilst there is a great collection of scientists and health workers and people working in the social sciences, there seem to be few if any artists/arts workers.

I’ve been having far too many farewells in the last week. All I seem to do is blush because people are being overly generous with their words and deeds because ultimately, I’ve been the lucky one. As I said in response to some kind words last week:

I love going to theatre. Always have. And suddenly, I had the opportunity of getting a job where someone paid me to go. Can’t get much better than that.

Over the next week, I’ll find a way of thanking you all individually, because I can only do my job if you do yours. Put simply, I wouldn’t have stayed at MTC if it hadn’t been for you. Whether artist or artisan, whether from finance or marketing, whether front or house or back of house, you make this a wonderful place to work.

Years ago, one our volunteers came up to me and told this story. She’d been in the workplace from leaving school to when she retired but, she said, she’d never been in a workplace like MTC. I asked her what made it different – and she said because there was laughter in the building.

Can you imagine working somewhere with no laughter? Admittedly, sometimes the laughter is hysterical. And sometimes it’s in relief at the end of a long day. But it’s never at some else’s expense. Because you look after each other.

So I want you to take that spirit forward in the years to come. Look after Brett and Virginia and Sam and Leticia and Chris, the new guys on the block. Look after the actors and directors and designers that make our great theatre. And look after yourselves and your families.

And that really has been why I stayed at MTC so long – the art and the people.

It’s been a month since I finished at Melbourne Theatre Company.

People keep asking how it feels and the answer is – I can’t tell because  I’m on a summer holiday. The first two weeks were spent in Perth or rather Fremantle with the hottest run of temperatures since 1942, averaging about 39 degrees for 6 or 7 days in a row. That sort of heat is bearable if you:

(1)    Are close to a beach

(2)    Have air-conditioning

(3)    Have access to a pool

(4)    Don’t do very much apart from lounge around, catch up with friends and have lots of cool refreshing drinks.

Which we did.

Port Beach, Fremantle

On returning to Melbourne, the third week was spent sorting out all those boxes that I’d bought home from MTC and undertaking various Ikea projects in order to fit in the management books and the leadership research papers plus the ghastly task of trying to ensure that all the computer bits matched and worked. The biggest challenge was trying to transfer my mobile phone to a personal account with Optus. Whilst the people were all individually very helpful and pleasant, the process took over 6 weeks.

Anyway, apart from the irritating Apple Store message that pops up erratically on my iPhone and iPad using my old email and which no-one in Apple Customer Service seems to be able to remove, I am in contact with the world.

The fourth week felt slightly more bizarre. I was taking my niece, Katerina, to a music camp at the Victorian College of the Arts so every day I drove the route I would normally take to work and every afternoon I picked her up outside the Southbank Theatre. But I resisted all temptation to visit either building (yet).

Now it’s time to be slightly more focussed about how to fill my days. Projects so far include:

• Seeing some shows in the Perth and Adelaide Festivals for the Helpmann Awards
• Teaching Advanced Arts Management at the University of Melbourne
• Developing a training program for Arts Managers in Vietnam with Jo Caust and Jane Haley
• Giving presentations at various conferences
• Trying my hand at writing an arts management text book.

So if you have any interesting short term work that you’d like me to do, I do have some time (excluding mid-March to mid-April) between now and September when I plan to head north to explore the Mediterranean.