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Julian Meyrick

For at least the first half of the twentieth century, Australian playwrights were not held in high regard by their compatriots. Popular opinion was summed up by fictional theatre manager M.J. Field in Frank A. Russell’s novel The Ashes of Achievement (1920).

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What Matters?: Talking value in Australian Culture by Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian, and Tully Barnett

by
November 2018, no. 406

As I sat down to write this review, a media release popped into my email inbox with the excited news that more than 400,000 people had visited the National Gallery of Victoria’s MoMA exhibition over its four-month duration, making it the NGV’s ‘second most attended ticketed exhibition on record ...

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To estimate the amount of waffle in a cultural policy document, try this patented test: (i) identify a given sentence or section; (ii) highlight the key terms; (iii) swap the key terms around. If it still makes as much sense, it’s waffle. Another way of saying this is that there are always two people responsible for cultural policy. The first is reasonable, knowledgeable, historically aware. The second is a nutbag, droning on about specious targets and unprovable effects. The first writes things like ‘government’s role in supporting culture is most visible in the major cultural organisations it funds’ (Creative Australia, p. 32) and ‘there is a need to nurture the most gifted and talented while providing for those who want to take pleasure from arts and culture’ (CA, 69). The second writes baloney like ‘the benefits of our cultural and creative assets must be maximised. Innovation across all industry sectors is essential to driving productivity growth, maintaining high standards of living and growing competitiveness in the global economy’ (CA, 92). Why can’t we just have the first person? Why does someone who sounds as if he has swallowed a Treasury manual with the words in the wrong order thwart the sense of all government intervention in the cultural sector?

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It is snatching some kind of victory out of defeat, I suppose, to write a Ph.D. thesis about the rise and fall of a theatre company, and Julian Meyrick has successfully transformed thesis into book. This has been achieved mainly through very good writing; lively, intelligent and uncluttered by jargon. The formal paraphernalia of the thesis – notes, appendices, statistics, bibliography and index – are not only useful in themselves, but crucial evidence for the argument.

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