Stepping out of the Shadows of Neglect: Towards an Understanding of Socially Applied Community Art in Australia

Often considered a distant and poor relative of 'authentic' arts practices in Australia, community arts have experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. However, this has not been acknowledged in arts funding policies and so community arts projects and practitioners continue to be poorly resourced. Working in collaboration with Australia's most innovative health promotion agency, VicHealth, the Globalism Institute at RMIT University in Melbourne has recently completed a three-year study of the role of the arts in community development strategies across four diverse local communities. The selected communities ranged from inner-urban St Kilda in Melbourne to the rural/regional centre of Hamilton in western Victoria that has experienced the negative impacts of rural economic restructuring. We concentrated on analyzing the work of a wide range of highly experienced community arts practitioners, working within a range of media, in order to better understand what it takes to become successful in the field. More broadly, the study focused on how community arts can help local communities negotiate the impacts of globalization and this paper will present arguments for increasing the public investment in community arts in the context of accelerating global change.