Only Castles Burning (Don’t Let It Bring You Down)

Thank you Aunty B and Rocky for that wonderful welcome to country. Kevin for the introduction. Thank you to the Larrakia for their continued custodianship of country and APAX for allowing me to return to speak to you all today.

I am Erica McCalman, a recovering producer and arts advocate. A very long time ago I was a stage and production manager. And these days I am a creative director, speaker and facilitator. 

But right now, I am your provocateur.

I am a Ballardong Noongar woman, with pale skin. I’m about six feet tall, and I am wearing dark pants, over a navy T-shirt, with some simple imitation gold jewellery. 

My necklace depicts the Tarot Card ‘The Sun’. It reminds me to seek places where there is warmth, support and clarity. 

I have medium brown hair and I’m letting the greys grow in. Because I’ve earned them. I am also neurodivergent.

As a preface, this provocation has been a nightmare to pin down. It’s drawn from two decades of interrogating systems, cultures, economies, and many years of red wine summits with colleagues.

I have to boil down into 25 minutes highly abstract but real concepts and marry it with a metaphor you can carry with you because I believe we need a new narrative. Change is occurring rapidly and our model to comprehend where we have been and where we are going is in need of a refresh, so we can take the next steps with wisdom and courage. 

My ancestors come from the area in WA now known as the wheatbelt. I was born and raised on Wurundjeri Country in Narrm where I reside now. Darwin is a very special place. For me it became a haven in cascading a crisises and a place of transformation. Connecting me to myself, family and nature between 2019 and 2023. 

For that I will always be grateful to the land and the communities in this incredible territory. 

A lot of these ideas had their beginnings under a pandanus tree, swimming in a spring or sinking some tinnies by a campfire. 

I was involved in my first event at 16. My first paid gig came at the age of 21. I’m 42 now, so for at least half my life I've legitimately been involved in the arts. 

My upbringing was in the suburbs, my family saw the arts as a hobby. It was never considered a real career, and even if any of us wanted to, the amount of labour we performed was directly related to whether or not we had a roof over our heads, or health care or food or… options. 

People in the real world did useful things like being a teacher, or a nurse or an engineer.

So when I embarked on a career in the arts I was the first one - the black sheep who ran away and joined the Drag Queens. 

My career has always been precarious. Like a lot of people here I've followed a feast and famine cycle, beckoned by the bright lights, egged on by stories of people who have taken a chance and found success. My labour has always been performed with an element of hope. 

I grew up in Melbourne at a time when the independent theatre art and culture in general was ascendent. The city leapt from a grey dull, uninspired bluestone jungle into a glittering metropolis dotted with laneway bars, cafes and festivals. 

My first love has always been festivals. To me have always been a gateway drug to alternative realities, a sure fire way to mix different people together and lure them into seeing something that opens up their perspective. The challenge of blowing people’s minds in balance with perfect logistical execution is magic. 

Over a 20 year career I have had a lot of wins and a lot of devastating smack downs. I’ve had to put my pieces back together over and over again, reinventing myself. This has taught me about my own strength, how to trust my instincts, sit with fear and uncertainty and hold others with compassion. You never know what’s really happening under the glitter and the smiles.

My second love is hacking the industry. Cracking its codes, reworking old methods, remind barriers and unlearning what we have all been taught so we all can be liberated, and the arts can be inclusive. 

The industry is tough. Brutal. But doubly so if you are flying without a family safety net, don’t know the rules or what you have to offer doesn’t look like the standard definition of excellent.

However, all of us have been experiencing turbulence for a long time now. 

Talking to artists, producers, executives and board members about the sector still takes up the bulk of my time. Just from Facebook alone I have over 900 comments from provocations I posted to the sector between 2017 and 2023.

Artists who are running out of options and resentful toward institutions who they see as refusing to service their needs. 

Producers who struggle with feelings of failure as they try to meet the needs of the artists I know they are dedicated to but are overwhelmed by the demands of time, space, volume, energy and time. 

Institutions that are fighting to stay alive, grappling with political pressure from donors, funding bodies in peril, KPIs that don’t line up with reality and an accelerating turnover of staff and executives.

And let's not forget the production crews who bear a lot of the brunt of the chaos but have to remain polite and professional at all times. 

I know we are have seen emerging are those of exhaustion, sorrow, grief, deep cognitive dissonance and an arrival at a feeling of futility. 

We talk about the arts as an ecosystem. In the past the vague model in people’s heads has always kind of been that web of interconnected relationships with resources travelling to different nodes on the network. 

The underlying assumption of what drives it has been the pursuit of an upward trajectory - growth. 

• The Artist working toward their ‘big break’. 

• The arts workers hopping from gig to gig quietly hoping to find that steady job. 

• The competition between the institutions for audiences and the next heart rending work of staggering genius so they can hit their KPI’s.

How do we define, protect and navigate an ecosystem that has been slowly starved of resources? We are all shooting for the stars but not receiving the uplift needed to reach them. 

A lot of us are stagnating, stuck in a negative feedback loop of dwindling energy and resources without the momentum to break free. 

On a bad day, the past five years has honestly felt like a slow death by papercuts. 

The ones who drop out don’t say goodbye -  they fade out quietly. 

I know they feel grief but also shame - a hangover from a time when we told ourselves the ones who drop out simply couldn’t hack it. 

I avoided for the longest time facing a fundamental truth about any ecosystem. Yes they operate as complex networks but they also go through cycles. Not just yearly ones, grand cycles of death and rebirth, flourishing and decay. Longer than a funding cycle, a career or a lifetime. 

That thought had always bothered me. And it sat spider-like in the back of my head. I had invested so much of myself and sacrificed so much. I was fearful of looking too close and finding something I didn’t want to know, and couldn’t cope with. 

But the pandemic, and the much slower pace of life up here had given me distance and time from the hamster wheel I had been running on. Having the workahol cut off forced me to get something resembling a life. Perspective.

My narrative of an upward trajectory started to be replaced by something akin to a crossfade. An old world was dying and a new one was being born. But there would be a time of friction, confusion and adjustment to endure first. 

We needed to figure out how to dance to the next tune. 

I couldn’t see what was coming, but I knew that old upward trajectory couldn’t be in whatever comes next. 

I could see it now. It was an extractive model. We had been draining each other’s energy, time, money and hope in the pursuit of our art. 

And pointing fingers of blame at each other when our expectations and needs went unfulfilled.

Close your eyes. Or find your drishti point.

Imagine a forest. Lush, moist fertile earth, concealing mycelium networks, earthworms, microbes, mulched leaves and bones. 

Above that, an undergrowth of ferns and shrubbery, cris-crossed with tracks formed by kangaroos going about their business. Echidna form trains through the cool shade of the leaves, and a babbling creek provides fresh water, home for rakali, fish and amphibians. 

Fallen logs gather moss and slowly rot, functioning as shelter and releasing nutrients into the earth.

And the trees, tall eucalyptus regnans reaching up to the sunlight. Resident Koalas munch leaves, smaller creatures migrate up and down the trunks. Possums, birds and sugar gliders fly and swing across the canopy.

In case you aren’t picking up the metaphor: 

• The sunlight and the water are funding and resources, 

• The undergrowth is the independent sector, 

• The rich soil is broader society including the educational sector, 

• Those tall trees are the major funding companies and festivals, 

• The kangaroos are touring parties,

• And the mycelium - well that’s the Experimental Sector, cos they’re kind everywhere and key to everything and when they come up from underground they are kind of cool and weird.

But the grand cycle of ecosystems is not common knowledge. It’s bigger than us, and makes it sometimes difficult to see.

There are four major stages. 

Exploitation/Growth (r):
This initial phase is characterized by rapid growth and resource acquisition, where a system expands and utilizes available resources. 

Picture a forest flourishing - an explosion of vegetation growth, bringing the animals and insects, the perfect amount of sunlight, water, wind and rain fuels expansion and rich diversity.

Conservation (K):
In this phase, resources are accumulated and stored, leading to increased organization and stability.

In this phase the growth slows down, as the forest finds equilibrium. Trees and plant species stabilise, the animals and their population level off and find a calm, comfortable balance. Rhythms become predictable, dependable and while innovation and change still occur, it’s more tweaking and tightening up gaps. 

Release (Ω):
A period of decline or collapse, where the system loses structure and resources are released back into the environment.

This is the bushfire that sweeps through the forest. Some species flee or perish, the rich soil is scorched. The undergrowth is the worst hit, which is why after a bushfire the landscape looks more like a moonscape. That incredible diversity is gone and it leaves the ash and soot on the bare earth exposed to the external elements. Some of the big tall eucalypts may have sustained some pretty big damage, but they are there, and will be able to withstand the ordeal, with time. 

Reorganization (α):
The system reorganizes itself, potentially leading to a new cycle of growth and change.

I’ve been told of heavy rains after a bushfire that has sent torrents of pitch black water down into townships causing a secondary flood. Environments need time to figure out what’s next and there is a lot of trying and failing. 

Green shoots happen from seeds hiding underground, but they might have a few false starts with no undergrowth to protect them. New animals will pass through the area but the conditions might take a while to be ready for them to take up residence. 

This is a long, experimental process. And the forest won’t grow back exactly how it was. It will be a new forest. And this is the period where the ecosystem starts figuring out what that might look like.

This cycle is not linear; it can be nested within larger cycles and influenced by various factors, including human activities and climate change. Understanding the adaptive cycle is crucial for managing and promoting resilience in both ecological and social systems. 

Because resilience isn’t the ability to endure harsh circumstances. It's the ability to understand them, strategise, make preparations and act. 

So how does this literally apply to our circumstances? Good question. Last year I had a bash at sketching it out. 

When was the last ‘bushfire’ in our forest? I’m not an academic and this is not an exhaustive history - but I think a safe bet is probably World War 2.

If I’m right, the last reorganisation period was the era between 1950 and 1975, where Melbourne Theatre Company, Nimrod, the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, Adelaide Festival, Perth Festival, Circus Oz and many other institutions emerge in their nascent form along with a LOT of experimentation both recorded and lost to the winds of history.

National Black Theatre in Redfern, Nindethana and The Pram Factory in Melbourne come to mind as orgs that rose and fell here during this period. La Mama appears, arguably highly experimental, they weren't just doing performances in the venue they were also putting shows on in people’s backyards.

Toward the end of this time Adelaide Festival Centre and the Sydney Opera House open, this period isn’t a barren landscape, plenty is happening and some things stick. This is the justification for the establishment of the Australia Council for the Arts which kick off a period of verdant…

Growth and expansion/exploitation - Sunshine and rain from OZCO descend, festivals go off like a rocket at this time - including Darwin Festival which is originally called the Bogainvillea Festival and so do small to medium arts organisations.

Melbourne Fringe, Next Wave, Performance Space, and Vitalstatistix are all elder millennials emerging in the early to mid 80’s. As we progress into the 90’s the music festival scene explodes and more performing arts companies are established like Zen Zen Zo. Belvoir Street and Playbox Theatres emerge out of the husks of Nimrod and Hoopla, Black Swan opens in WA, Wendy Blacklock opens Performing Lines and ILBIJERRI emerges in Victoria. T

he first APAM was held in 1994, opening up pathways to international touring on our terms. A lot of your performing arts centres are built in this era. As the Sydney Olympics and the millennium approaches the Major Performing Arts enquiry recommends the establishment of an MPA framework to ensure the ongoing growth and viability of the Major Performing Arts companies. 49 years after that first sapling, the eucalypts are mature trees. 

Conservation - Begins in 2000. A lot happens in this period and there are still examples of spectacular innovation. But then I think of this period I think of initiatives like The Go See fund, JUMP Mentoring or Art Start for emerging practitioner.

Next Wave enters a golden age partnering with the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne on the cultural program. Michael Kantor takes the helm at the Playbox Theatre and says - this is clearly a Malthouse. The diversity and stability in the rest of the sector gives him the room to focus his programming on new work and innovation. Refining. Finding the gaps and improving.

Theatre Network Australia is established to look after the small to medium and independents. The undergrowth now has a Park Ranger. Mooghalin theatre is established in Redfern. Yellamundie Festival comes later. Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton are appointed joint Artistic Directors of Sydney Theatre Company. Theatre Blogger Kevin Jackson refers to them as Fluffy and Glitter forevermore. Speaking of Theatre blogs Alison Croggon establishes Theatre Notes in Melbourne. Wesley Enoch becomes the head of Queensland Theatre, meanwhile a First Nations renaissance has been steadily picking up speed. The experimental sector is robust and touring is supported by initiatives like Mobile States. 

Release - The Brandis Bushfire. The loss of $108 Million from the Australia Council in 2015, largely accepted as an act of retaliation by the then Arts Minister hits the sector like sledgehammer. While we get it back, the damage had already been done, and a rift between the small to medium and mainstage sectors opens up.

Over the ensuing years, no one in the industry is untouched from the consequences including Australia Council staff, and a generation of rising artists and leaders who have have their upward trajectories cut short or truncated. Including me. And this is how I end up fleeing to Darwin.

In 2016, 65 key small to medium arts organisations lose their operational funding, a trend repeated in the 2020 and 2024 funding rounds funding small and independedent orgs. The COVID-19 pandemic serves another blow, the sector bleeding out over 70% of its financial, people and spiritual resources of past decade. 

A dragon keeps threatening to swallow our sun. State territory and local governments do their best to pick up the slack but with the increasing global pressures we money, but we need a new plan.

So what now? What a perfct place to start this discussion.

For the Majority of the people in this room, our world view, our aspirations, skills, vision for who we wanted to be when we grew up were formed in those growth and conservation cycles. 

For the past 10 years ‘save the arts’ has been part of many of our personal mission statements. And in our heads that meant returning to those growth and conservation periods. 

But if I am right, we can’t go backwards. Only forwards. And we are staring down the barrel of a 25 year period of trying things out to see what sticks. 

Creativity is a 200 thousand year plus conversation across generations. Art doesn’t need saving, we do this innately as humans. 

This isn’t the end. Just the next chapter. 

And now that you have been liberated from saving the arts, what is this moment calling you to do? 

Our task is to keep tending the vegetation and the animals, learn how to let go of things that can’t stay.

Build the fertile soil for the next generation to sprout in. And think beyond the next funding cycle, the next election cycle, or the trajectory of our own career. 

We have to think multigenerationally. Beyond ourselves. 

Integrity is the act of making the right decisions when no one is watching. Doing it even though there is no applause or reward. 

What will you do when no one is watching? 

What motivates you when there is no cookie?  

What legacy do you want to hand over to the young producers we have here today? 

What will you let go? And what will you embrace?

Thank you.