Up Front

with the Editor

Whatever anybody might think about Gough Whitlam’s Australian Government, it would be hard to criticise it for the lift it has given the arts in Australia. Literature, theatre, art are all getting generous injections of government money, and in the midst of a business depression cul ture is booming! And now the Islands of the South Pacific are about to get their share of Mr Whitlam’s culture money.

We’ve given on p 23 a list of organisations that has already been promised about $40,000 in grants, but this is hardly even the beginning.

Australia has promised $1 million over the next four years, $250,000 a year between this coming July and June 30, 1979. The current handout is meant only to be a goodwill sample.

How the million dollars will be spent is the subject of a detailed, confidential report which in Feb ruary was presented to the Australian Government by two Australians, Jim Specht and Robert Langdon. The government sent these two men on a tour of the Islands at the end of last year so they could make re commendations.

They visited New Caledonia, New Hebrides, the Solomons, Fiji, West ern Samoa and Tonga, and were interested in all manner of cultural things that could benefit from some financial help—the development of a cultural centre, for example, or the establishment of archives, the promotion of festivals, sponsorship of art, the equipping of libraries, subsidies for writing and theatre.

Everything cultural, so long as it benefits Pacific Islanders.

How all this aid will be adminis tered I don’t pretend to know, but the report can be expected to suggest priorities for expenditure and suggest methods of distribution. The Aust ralian Government will make the final decision.

Australia’s largesse has come at the right time. Islanders’ interest in their own cultural life has been grow ing steadily in recent years, but it needs support and encouragement at

just this point. The establishment of universities in recent years has helped develop interest. So too has the first South Pacific Arts Festival, held in Suva in 1972, Various magazines of creative writing have begun to ap pear in the Islands, and painters and writers are becoming more promi nent. (As I write this, a review copy of Albert Wendt’s new book of short stories, Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree, has just landed on my desk).

We on PIM take a little credit for the growing interest in creative writ ing because of the Mana section which we’ve now run in PIM for two years, edited by Cook Islander Marjorie Crocombe. Some of our readers regard it as rubbish; fortun ately others don’t, and there is cer tainly no doubt that PIM has given many Island writers and poets their first opportunity to compare them selves.

Mention of the Fiji Arts Festival reminds me that a workshop con ference has just been completed in Noumea during which it was decided to establish a South Pacific Arts Festival Council and to hold the Second South Pacific Arts Festival in Rotorua, NZ in February 1976.

The workshop was attended by delegates from NZ, Tonga, Fiji, Niue, New Caledonia, Guam, the Solo mons, Micronesia, New Hebrides and the GEIC (with apologies from the Cooks, American Samoa and PNG, whose delegates couldn’t get there on time). Representing Australia was Victor Carell, director of the success ful 1972 festival, and his wife Beth Dean.

The conference decided that in future each festival will have a par ticular theme. For Roturua it will be the visual arts (painting, sculpture, etc), but song and dance will be in cluded in this as well as all future festivals whatever the theme.

Myself, I hope that Australia’s action will be followed by gifts from other countries, and that one day the Islands will have interest and money enough even to begin buying back their art from the rest of the world.

'-Stuart Inder.