'Only connect', famously said EM Forster. His pithy phrase should remind us not to ignore context or settle for half-baked concepts. Michael Piggott's analysis of a government policy document, Revive, shows how it misses some obvious connections to matters of interest to Defending Country. DC
Michael Piggott*
Recently, Perth independent publisher Upswell released Anne-Marie Condé's new book, The Prime Minister's Potato and Other Essays, an anthology of beautifully written histories and speculations, most based on a single object, document or place. Occasionally, Condé calls them ‘unquiet’ stories. Which reminds me …
Few in the new Albanese Government will be busier than Tony Burke – Minister for Home Affairs, for Immigration and Citizenship, for Cyber Security and for ‘the Arts’. He has five ministers assisting, a ‘Special Envoy for the Arts’ (one of those make-work roles of no legal standing) and an Office for the Arts in the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts.
If Burke has a spare minute, he’ll be looking to complete implementation of Labor’s arts and cultural policy, Revive. Launched in January 2023 to run for five years, it has produced several new pieces of legislation and new bodies and councils, but is still not fully realised.
Anticipating a fresh review, arts and culture think tank A New Approach has released a report full of ideas, as is the Griffith Review’s latest issue ‘Culture vultures’.
Next time, will the government repeat the action item ‘Implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full’? Will it have absorbed the message in Justin O’Connor’s Culture is Not an Industry: Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common Good (2024)?
Responses to Revive naturally included criticism from the then Shadow Arts minister, Paul Fletcher, and praise from beneficiaries and interests. The Australian Society of Authors was happy, for instance, looking forward to the appointment of a Poet Laureate.
Academics including Justin O’Connor, Josephine Caust and Catherine Strong have not been uniformly impressed. Robert Macklin in the 2 June 2025 issue of Pearls and Irritations ridiculed Revive as something ‘written either by a gibbering bureaucrat or the AI equivalent’. Others will wonder about the commendable statements in an arts policy valuing Indigenous culture and cultural heritage in the face of compromised government decisions made under mining and environment policies.
My own concerns - aside from feeling the policy was written to fit over funding and other decisions inherited and already planned - are twofold.
Narrow policy scope
The first is Revive’s minimal interest in national cultural institutions. Discussed under ‘cultural infrastructure’, institutions are divided simplistically into those mainly about display and ‘storytelling’ and those essentially focussed on collection building. Proposed actions read like afterthoughts and the government's efficiency dividend is ignored. Equally disappointing, the policy and the Office for the Arts only relate to institutions like the National Library and National Gallery, ignoring the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). The Memorial has been within the Veterans Affairs portfolio for many decades, while AIATSIS is under the Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio.
Revive included strong acknowledgement of Indigenous cultural expression, as well as several initiatives, symbolised by a foreword by the then Indigenous Affairs Minister, Linda Burney. But its only mention of AIATSIS was via its new Centre in Alice Springs, which was an initiative of the Morrison government.
The Memorial’s absence - and the briefest reference to war - is truly strange. Putting aside the inflated claims by former Director Brendan Nelson – ‘the soul of the nation’ no less – the Memorial and our participation in wars are regrettably but undeniably a significant part of the national self-image.
Revive did vaguely mention ‘the entire national cultural collection’. More curiously, it ignored the second-order collections managed by Commonwealth agencies such as the Australian National University, CSIRO, the Royal Australian Mint, Geoscience Australia, the ABC and the Australian Defence Force.
Revive also ignored ideas such as the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World’s documenting Australian society initiative. The previous Albanese government did reestablish meetings of Commonwealth, state and territory cultural ministers plus local government representation, but we still have no ‘single mind’ approach to Commonwealth collections and no simple gateway to enable access to them.
Culture does not equal stories
Revive’s anchoring idea is story (and stories and storytelling), hence the document’s subtitle ‘A place for every story, a story for every place’. The terms are repeated ad nauseam. An occasional reminder that culture is not just stories belies the overall text. Its naïve message mirrors the ‘all graffiti is street art’ line. No story should be silenced; all ‘voices’ must be heard and preserved. They are never indulgent boring rambles, never intended to spread disinformation or undermine other stories.
Conveniently, story allows Revive to unify Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural expressions, including multicultural. Seems we’ve all got our Dreaming and Country now. It might comfort some to think the stories of Black and White Australians are linked, but too often they’re contested across a contact zone rather than exchanged in a happy valley: thus, the booing during a Bunurong Elder's welcome at the annual Anzac Day Aussie Rules game between Collingwood and Essendon.
It is no accident Revive adopted story. In 2022, in Seduced by Story, Peter Brooks observed that a ‘pervasive narrativism dominates our culture’ – the ‘storification of reality’ evident since late last century. It has long dominated commercial and political messaging, and been the default marketing trope of cultural heritage institutions, as I explained in 2015.
A cultural policy should know what it means by ‘culture’; Revive used it as often as ‘arts and culture’. Where, asked Wilfred Prest, does art and culture end and something else (video games, coding, cricket, advertising) begin? A society’s culture is expressed in a million ways (much of them happening regardless of government policy and funding). The Matildas, a community brass band, a ute muster, a Sikhs’ community kitchen and the annual Garma Festival barely begin the list.
What links them? I’d want to include the diversity and distinctiveness of community and language, but yes, sometimes storytelling – from the calculated story-lying puffery of political media and marketing influencers and samples of ephemeral ‘look at my cat’ social media content to the ‘unquiet’ accounts given, heard, retold and preserved in context by memory institutions, Royal Commission coronial and Makarrata truth-telling, citizen journalism and the rest.
*Michael Piggott is a retired archivist based in Canberra. His post-retirement appointments have included President, Friends of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU (2013-17) and Chair, Territory Records Advisory Council (2018-20). He was made an AM in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2017. He is one of the distinguished Supporters of the Defending Country campaign. For other work by him, use the Honest History Search engine and see this article on the Defending Country site. His most recent technical writing includes 'Archivists’ positionality: Australian-US comparisons & the Series System’s Third Developer' (2025).
Picture credit: detail of cover of Anne-Marie Condé's The Prime Minister's Potato and Other Essays.
More from
General
category
