Platform Papers 50: The Restless Giant

Opera, theatre and festival director Lindy Hume, a longtime convert to country living, puts the case for better understanding between arts practitioners and authorities in the metropolitan and regional centres. Artists in the regions, she says, are seen in the city as 'poor cousins'; but this view is badly mistaken and a lost opportunity. Through colourful portraits of artistic innovation in small towns and communities, Hume traces the rise of a more assertive, even radical state of mind. She discards the cosy qualities of backyard creativity described in Lyndon Terracini's 2007 Platform Paper, A Regional State of Mind, seeing instead the stirrings of a restless giant: a rebellious counter-urban movement ready to make a profound impact on the national culture. As an artist living in regional NSW, she finds it an ideal place to develop new performance work, and argues that more flow and greater integration between the regional and metropolitan arts ecosystems could, over time, reshape Australia's cultural identity.