Sandra Krempl

I'd like to dare, challenge, some of your concepts of CCD, if I may. You talk about process and if you talk about process in the world context, people might link it with processed green peas or something. It means nothing. You talk about community cultural development, people's mouths will just hang down and say, "What on earth are you going on about?"

You talk about community arts, even in Australia people think, "Oh, those people who do face painting." I think we've really got to get a grip on what we are about and give it some more depth. How do we do that? I really firmly believe that CCD, Community Cultural Development process, I prefer to call it Community Culture and when I say Community Culture to other parts of the world, people understand because they understand community and they understand culture together and it makes more sense and they see it in their own context.

I believe that community culture, what we practise has got a lot of benefit and in fact it would help Australia's good will and reputation abroad if we started to get more active overseas to show our true community culture here.

I'm just going to start off by giving you a hit-list of a few contacts, if you like. Three I'm just going to give you as contacts if you want to start to move into the international arena. ACFOA is the first that I would suggest. ACFOA is the Australian Council For Overseas Aid and they have a membership of some hundred or maybe more organisations that take part in aid for overseas countries

Then there's AusAid and there's all kinds of funding through AusAid and it doesn't have to happen for culture alone. You can pig-a-back, if you like, on health or education or agriculture programs and bring in a cultural component, be part of a team going overseas. Aid missions from other countries play that game. Australia seems to be very weak on attaching a cultural component on to its aid packages. Then of course there's the Overseas Service Bureau. So those three would be the starting point that I'd like to just mention now before I get on with some points.

What I'd like to suggest is for us to consider, does our CCD theory and practice isolate us or limit us to working only in Australia? My answer to that would be, we've got to work at our jargon, that's one point in many. Has our CCD artwork as the potential to work in Asia or the Pacific, Africa, Latin America, etcetera, etcetera, and if we have the potential are we ready now or is there further work that has to be done? Those are just points for consideration.

Community Arts Network WA has been in contact with the Indian Ocean, with Asia, the Pacific. We have opportunities to link up with those people and when I ask them what they know of community culture in Australia, this is the general response. They respect, there is a lot of support and they know a lot about the Aboriginal communities here but as for the rest Australia is seen as an urban structure. We're very good at our urban structures, Community Culture they don't know what else we do.

What happens in working in overseas situations a lot is, when you work there you can work two ways. From my experience the people who work overseas and look out for the differences, they have a lot of problems. You've got to find differences, of course, but for those who go and find some commonalities there is usually a very good way of working. My way of finding commonalities, I like to look at different cultures in these two systems and in fact we just refer back to the comment about the reflection of what the perception is of community cultures and how strong the Aboriginal culture is. You will notice that this is a really powerful means of communication right around the globe.

What I call the third person is based on the written word. This is our urban structure. It's what constitutions, policies, curriculum, that whole shebang is based on. We need it, we know, it emphasis formal writing and speaking skills and it's very much a detached process. We are well trained in detachment. Think in the third person, write in the third person, arms-length management. We are very good at that but if these processes are not balanced with first person processes, we have a very weak system, if you like, and what's the first person processes? Based on oral traditions, listening, memory, intuition, observation skills, identifying and knowing that we are human, we have feelings.

Community culture, the link structures, values and the list goes on. Trust and respect and what makes those things, visions, the creative sides. This is just a skeleton. These areas can go really deep and I feel that we have to - what we call our CCD method places a lot on this and we have to know that world cultures outside, what we call the third world, have got these very, very strong processes. They want this, they want some of this, but we seem to have too much of this and too little of that. I'm talking about mainstream Australia, if you like. That's what I find as commonality, if you like, from working in different parts of the world, those structures occur.

When I was working in the Pacific we had a lot of money coming from Australia in the form of aid. Part of the contract was to come back to Australia to employ professionals from here. I had no idea of the CCD sector, no idea at all. We come through Foreign Affairs and places like that and we get put straight to the universities and what would often happen is, these people would come without knowing how to work developmentally, come in, put a top-down system and then it crashes, it doesn't work because they haven't catered for the strengths that are already there.

So what would happen, we would go to countries like the UK, the US, to Canada, Japan, Germany, quite a few others to employ people who can work developmentally. Number one, they have qualifications in community arts type work. You can do post-graduate degrees in the UK in community dance with your relations to social anthropology and things like that. In other countries you can have social anthropology with a music major so there is a link between oral traditions and fine arts practice, if you like.

These people have a track-record of working internationally, a lot of which has started off by working with volunteer programs. In our overseas service bureau, arts and culture are not advertised as an option that other countries can ask for and I'm on a mission to say why don't we include it? If those countries don't know we have these art workers, as I didn't before I came here, how are we going to have those opportunities? You get those advertised in the UK and the US, etcetera, so we go straight there. So these things need to improve to improve our opportunities as well.

Another important fact is, in a lot of the third world they have very rich cultures but they need to translate those into the new environment, into the urban environment and a lot of that is to work with enterprise. Somebody else today talked about enterprise originating from France. The entrepreneur is a French word which an artist dared to go to different situations. I often say, why are we not daring to be business people too? Communities were the world's first traders and we can't forget that. The other thing is, here we are. Australia does not promote its community cultural development sector internationally and I think we have got to get proactive about that.

I'm just going to talk briefly about some of the - why is it so important to work developmentally or as a community? Social cultural benefits: I'm going to give you a reverse rather than talk about a benefit, talk about if you didn't have a person who worked developmentally, what happens? I was asked to do a review of the international school systems in Papua-New Guinea, in Port Moresby and there was one school that I worked with which really scared me.

In the international school systems there, which were originally for expatriate kids, but at this time already there was about 40, 50 per cent of local people who were attending these schools, their kids were attending these schools. In their provincial schools, community schools where they had their own local teachers, etcetera, and you asked these people to sing, they'll sing in harmony naturally. You ask them to play a rhythm and the rhythms would be there and counter-rhythms and the whole lot.

In this international school where they had imported music teachers, specialists teaching them, do you know what the case was? These 40 to 50 per cent of Papua-New Guinean kids in that school could now no longer hold a tune, they could no longer play in time. What had happened? Culture had been completely eroded because an imported system had been superseded and theirs was completely not included. This I've seen happen in so many developing nations that it's not funny any more.

I think our tertiary training sectors should start to include working developmentally as part of their processes because this is what can happen, but if you get the blend of the both you will find those rich cultures will really aspire. You bring the best in the world to those places and they reach the best in the world standard much quicker than we in our traditional societies here can because they've got such a wealth of oral tradition skills.

Economic benefits, if you want to talk economic rationalist strategies, if you are establishing on the ground in those countries, good will, you are in fact establishing the purchasing channels, whether it's purchasing of systems, whether it's purchasing of curriculum or whatever it is, you are establishing those links and they have to have a flow-back to the country of your origin which in this case we hope is Australia.

I'm just going to go straight now to play a couple of recordings, if you like, from - who here knew Glen Muchanini? Do you remember Glen Muchanini anybody? There's a hand up in the back there. Glen Muchanini is a black South African who lived in Australia for a long time and when Nelson Mandela came in he went back home and he's quite high up there in culture. Glen has a lot of good things to say about the CCD process but that's not the point here. We want to do a critique and I've asked Glen to give me an answer on what the differences are. This first one he talks about is the difference between how they are inclusive of high arts and things in that place.

"Actually what I would say, the practice of what one has been able to do here is to take the Community Cultural Development philosophy and inject it in your equivalent of your Sydney Opera institution ... and train that institution to become a community cultural orientated institution, while still practising professionally all those particular artforms."

This is the link and in South Africa their opera works through CCD methods. Their opera company go out, get the issues, come back in and the whole company works together. In fact the Metropolitan Opera in New York also established some of those processes when they were in a bind and had to create new markets, but it shows a great link between high arts and community culture that happens in a number of world cultures, if you like.

I asked Glen to the difference in methodology from his experience between South Africa and Australia.

"The relationship between the practitioners and what you'd classify as a 'community' is much more narrow. Sometimes I have felt when I saw artists working in a communities arts cultural field in Australia..." Question: "what do you mean by narrow?" ... "I'm saying, it's not like a field, 'we are doing this for the community', the community is actually doing it! We are humbled by actually getting into a community that is doing the work. All we are doing is enhancing it. So it is not feeling like a professional coming and doing something for us, its more, we are part of and parcel of what the community is doing, all that you have as an advantage probably, is certain skills that are much more advanced relatively speaking. But technically there are dance groups here that have actually never stood in front of a theatre, have never been choreographed by any of our professional dancers, but once you put them on stage they blow your mind....they blow your mind. So it humbles you. It is unlikely in Australia, it is I mean, what the community cultural development methodology studies is addressing, where you had, 'these were practitioners, this is the community'. The gap is still a little more than is my experience over here, I think its a field. So I think the experience in South Africa is just to see also a community that is active in its culture."

I apologise for the quality. I was using just a speaker phone but I just had to let you listen to that and with that comment you can see, despite our years of community cultural development process which is the integrating thing, here's somebody who has worked here. We are still very separated. Are we concentrating too much on process? Is process something we have to be let loose of and become more part of things? I'm just putting that forward. I asked Glen also what can South Africa teach Australia.

"We have this traditional separation of performers from the audience... while they are performing, while they are doing something, you actually find the audience are performing with you, they are singing with you. And, so, people are alot more freer to participate and I don't know whether that can teach anything in Australia, but I think it can indicate that different methods that have to be adopted under different situations and different circumstances."

What I think Glen was alluding to there is the living culture situation which we obviously are still growing and we need to experience more of that and I do believe with cultural exchange and living in different contexts that this interaction is not we teach, we've also got to learn.

The next interview I did was in fact with somebody I consider my oral tradition mentor, originally from Papua-New Guinea, and I have to warn you that this recording is even slightly worse than the previous one because I was trying to chase Mali all over the world and caught up with him in Paris so he's going through a hotel exchange because he was at high level meetings at UNESCO at the time but Mali, as you can see, is the subregional cultural adviser for the Pacific member states of UNESCO and I ask you, is cultural action an invention of recent decades? Is community arts a recent invention? It's actually an ancient tradition. It's been going on for centuries. Those people who partake in oral tradition countries are true community artists. They work without questioning process or anything. It's belief and it's a way of working. I ask you to listen to Mali, think of that and just listen to Mali.

"What art does in the Pacific is ties up with the environment, with the belief systems, the total way of life. So art is just an integral part of the whole total way of life, and in relation to, particularly when you look at particular expressions of art in the form of, you know, paintings, that itself conveys something that often comes when your not able to tell people off, because of our intricate relations. So we express that in a form of a message, and when you know, people that relate with us read them and get the message and we thought in not saying it that they feel it and then work with it. Particularly if you actually come from a multicultural language or communities, like in Port Moresby when you have some experience there. People had certain barriers but they also had certain relationships which they put together, and so they didn't want to open their mouth and say something that might offend them. So the best way to do that is either act it out or you write it out in the form of stories, or you even do it in the story of what we call legends, or myths so that those stories that tell the story reflect the life of the community without having to confront people."

I often get asked, or people normally comment, those of any different background or working in those places, when they see a lot of the processes we use in community arts and community cultural development, I receive a lot of comments, "What do these people think, they invented it or what?" you know, and I'm sure it could also extend to our own indigenous communities here. I don't want to speak for them but I'm sure it's very ancient and a lot of our practitioners go into these communities like they are teaching them. That's one thing which we have to be very aware of. We are not teaching. As Glen said earlier we are there to enhance. We can provide the other supports. We've got to know where we can teach and where we can't teach, where we learn and where we teach and where we work together that way.

There has been a lot of talk about politics, I notice through this situation. When we're working in world markets we have to know the government systems and the constraints and those issues. Mali will just mention now a couple of things related to government and other issues that artists have to consider in the Pacific.

"Looking at our own sociology if you like for example in the Pacific, in the modern government system, see you have in the western system you have the government and then you have opposition, as soon as you have government and opposition you have what is called a confrontational system.

In the Pacific we are trying to look at the consensus system where you don't have a government and opposition, but you look at the topic and the issue and then you talk around it in terms of the problem, with the consensus rather than usually having a confrontational system.

In the western society you have guilt, in the Pacific we have shame. So we look at these values and for guilty - send people to jail and lock them away, whereas in shame, perhaps we should be looking at things like, if you shame the society you should basically apologise to the community, and basically do some serious community work before that society so that you are shameful, because when you lock people away your not solving the problem, you are actually complicating the problem. So we are trying to look at some of these values and try and recover them before we lose them all together."

To conclude my section, I asked Mali a very important question.

"How do you keep the oral tradition strong whilst we have to be so conscious of the commercial world that we live in, and we have to create economic markets that are viable and all of that. How do you, this is our big battle here, with growing community, how do you deal with it?"

Response: "Money makes money, money does not make human beings. I think if we look at it that way, that we need to firstly make human beings. In other words, humanise the cities in terms of economic policies, because all history starts with one common heritage.

You see, when a family sits down and starts talking about Uncle John or Uncle Tom, there is an external family system as well, then they go back to say, 'Oh, you know where our family came from?... Oh yes, your grandmother came from that tribe, your grandfather came from the other village.' That's how we try to get this back, we have what is called the horizontal oral history, as well as the vertical.

Horizontal is the relationship that people have migrated. And vertical is also, if you like what we call patrilineal system in my culture. So for those of us and throughout the Pacific, everybody has shared this migration. We all come in different waves, some came earlier, others came later and others are still coming.

And that's our, if you like our sharing things, and we have to look at the heritage of our own heritage and all stories which have to be built in the family. And if its not happening within the family, I'm not too sure how it will be retained, except that people will be walking around baseless."

I will leave it at that but I think our job is to humanise economic policy as well, since it's there. I think we have a major role to play and I think if the images of Australia that are going overseas through all other means and channels, I think we should start to dare to go overseas, to share the way we work and to show them that there is a sector here that can work with and share and integrate and learn to bring the world close. I'll leave it at that.

Back: Michelle Broun