I am one of the people involved in the current rush of letters, emails and circular discussions regarding the issue of funding to Crafts Australia. I have been a state and national president with the Crafts Council network and became the Honorary Secretary for the World Crafts Council as a direct result. I hope that members and employees of the Australia Council for the Arts consider my contribution to the discussion.

One needs to contextualize this current decision within an understanding of the long-term modus operandi of the Australia Council and its Boards and to look to an outcome that, if not preferable for Craft Australia and Australian craftspeople, is at least possible. So central to the discussion is an understanding of how organizational dynamics forge cultures within the organizations in question, create bureaucracies, and enact policy. Importantly, I don’t use bureaucracy as a negative, but as a neutral noun for organizational constructs.

I remember many discussions and missives coming from the Australia Council, the Visual Arts/Crafts Board, and the Visual Arts Board over the years the background to which was essentially the question: who and what was to be the cultural gatekeeper for the nation. Successive Councils and Boards have baulked at only being an ‘arms length’ funding conduit of government and have wanted to drive policy directly. I used to think if only we could get them to see how well we were doing at Craft Australia; the Board would recognize our good work and give us support. Eventually I came to see the opposite was true, organizations that managed to become gatekeepers themselves were seen at best as duplication, at worst as a threat. This is not to say that a dastardly plot was being hatched at any time, I’m sure each wave of individuals, as they became involved with the Boards did their duty to the best of their ability within the policy snapshot of the time they were involved. However the organizational dynamic that creates and re-creates hierarchies was always at play with the result that client organizations were (and continue to be) periodically reigned in.

I will admit to being pessimistic in this case - I have long experience of the Australia Council and the Boards in their many evolutionary stages and I don’t remember when our protests ever prevailed. The Australia Council is one of those organizations, the culture of which forces a continual cycle of revision – what I have previously named the “culture of the new” - which unfortunately drives not only desirable change for the better, but also change as a value in itself.

However it is incumbent on those of us in the field to send periodic reminders to whomever is currently passing through the Council/Board sphere of influence that there is a constituency out there that is not voiceless and that all of us have responsibilities that go beyond those evident to any internalized group involved in whatever hothouse of policy revision is currently manifest.

So can any good come from protest even when it appears decisions are not likely to change? Well to begin with, everyone who makes policy and enacts process owns a responsibility to understand how that is received by the people they affect, and to learn from that experience. It will be a good thing if current and incoming staff and committee members at the Board are acutely aware, before they put any flesh on a ‘new craft strategy’, that a not insignificant force of professionals is watching closely because (a) they have a long-term commitment to the field and (b) they are the ones left to deal with the long-term outcomes of decisions made. People like me, and many more with much greater commitment to full-time practice than me, are still here piecing together their lives and careers in the wake of some good, and many poor decisions made by people (and within policy objectives) now long forgotten.

What is that core message that we need policy makers to get their heads around? Firstly, we need to keep reminding the Council and its Visual Arts Board of the flaw in the dichotomy that keeps being promulgated between funding for individuals and that for organizations in the crafts. That issue keeps tripping us up because the core, powerful, values of individualism that underpin the 20th century western art movement easily lead panels into a space for promoting funding for practitioners. Who, on the face of it, can argue against that? The Catch 22 is that we know that once craftspeople are placed in that space, they are then disadvantaged by being measured according to the criteria of that form of practice – so we go around in circles. The question for me is: will funding for individuals, projects, or enabling organizations lead to the best outcomes for the field and for the country?

Whatever the ‘new craft strategy’ turns out to be, I hope the Council and Board will at least consider the essentially communal aspects of much of crafts practice, the need for cultural and organizational memory, and the piecing together of the national estate that is threatened by periodically throwing the baby out with the bath water.

What now?

I believe that at the very least the Council and the Board really do owe Craft Australia the one-year notice period that has been common procedure previously. So much of our combined blood and sweat has been voluntarily poured into this precious national resource over so many years that this quickie wind-up, even with the pusillanimous extension that has been begged back, is not only disrespectful to the organization in its current form – a form, by the way, forced on it by the Visual Arts Board – but to the whole continuum of practitioners, administrators and educators that wove its fabric. I ask them to consider doing at least this much.