sock it to em
Geoffrey Atherden is a quiet national treasure, an unassuming man who started writing on Auntie Jack, wrote Mother and Son and created Grass Roots. He has been prominent as an advocate for writers – he was president of the Australian Writers Guild from 1994 to 1998. Here is a crystalline piece of his keynote address at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards dinner last May.
“I’d like to end on a final note of gloom. I was at a round-table discussion on the film industry at Macquarie Bank last year, and the last speaker said that he’d like to see an end to all forms of support and subsidy for the film industry, because subsidy only leads to mediocrity.
I have a one-word response to that argument. Sport.
Australia gives more support to our athletes per country than any other country in the world, and that is why we do so outstandingly well in the Olympics. Australia has an enviable international reputation in sport. Imagine if we kept all of that sporting reputation … but imagine if as well as that, we were known for being intelligent, creative, informed, interesting and thoughtful; for being world leaders in innovation and the creative industries.
People would want to get to know us, they’d want to visit us, they’d want to do business with us. Imagine if we had an environment of artistic and cultural activity here that was so stimulating and exciting that people would want to come and work here, and all those talented young Australians would come flooding back …”
There is a lot more about Geoffrey in a long character piece here.
Cited by Peter FitzSimons in the sports section of the SMH.
January 13th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
The unnamed speaker at the Mac Bank roundtable who lacerated film industry support was probably that cretin Berg from the Institution of Public (sic) Affairs.
Vide the Age 30 September.
This is the same functionary who opined that Christmas as a highpoint of the capitalist ethos was the moral pinnacle of the social calendar.
Vide the Age 23 December.
Australian film has been persistently undermined by US cultural imperialism since the talkies era began. Look at the control of the major cinema chains (a letter writer from Sydney’s outer suburban Baulkham Hills wrote recently that he was interested to note that all the films on which praise was lavished at the recent AFI awards could have been from Mars because none of his local cinemas had shown any of them).
The spokesperson at Mac Bank was thus one of an endless series of cultural Quislings. The French had and have it right.
January 13th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
More than cultural quislings – the Macquarie money machine has a staggering range of screen industry assets, which includes such tasties as the British transmission system, and the privatised SBS translation service.
I’ve put an article in above which descants on this question, a bit.
January 15th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
[...] Barista quotes Geoffrey Atherden on the importance of subsidising elite performers in all walks, not just sport. [...]
January 25th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Barista:
Anyone who had anything to do with “Aunty Jack”, “Mother And Son” and Grass Roots can’t possibly have a bad bone in his body.
I would hate to see Non-Gladiatorial Sport and The Arts fighting each other over crumbs. Rather, I would like to see them ganging up on the bludger industries over REAL money.