Well the floods changed our budget and our time lines for this year substantially, not just for our household but for the various Australian governments as well. We had planned on going 100% solar, travelling to New Zealand together for Ross’ international art collaboration, and having the pottery fully up and running by now, as well as a concert or two. But the floods required a reassessment.

So, what did we cut back on? The new Mudlark Pottery, managed by Anika, remains usable but unfinished; the fine woodwork (along with its income) came to a standstill while we dug drains and cleaned and sorted, and concerts were rained out. Below the house – strawbale guest house, orchard, and outdoor stage – are no go zones, full of neglect. But above the house, the new gravel, landscaping, and many extra drains are progressing well. We are still waiting for the insurer’s final go-ahead in repairing around the house and driveway and replacing built-in water damaged cupboards and repairing walls, but we know it will happen.

Unlike our esteemed governments, we decided the 100% renewable energy was non-negotiable. So we have spent all our remaining savings on solar panels to cover our energy use. We hope it is the right decision, as now I am working for council for six weeks as an art advisor in their masterplanning, so we can also pay the rates and put some food on the table. Ross went to New Zealand alone (having borrowed money to get there, but as an invited artist, he will be reimbursed), and the pottery still misses its veranda and sink.

Hopefully Ross will return to less expenses and drains (ha ha) on money and time, so he can get back to making his many commissions and doing his design PhD. Hopefully the Council money will stretch to finishing the pottery as well as covering life. And then, there’s the next project: the teaching studio and library along with rediscovery of the areas down the hill below the house - replanting garden and replacing trees that died in all that water, repairing the straw bale, and finding the paths. We even need to weed the stage!

But the sunshine has returned. And the place remains beautiful, if still a little muddy. And we are living the life we’d like to see the whole world live. We like to think that we are working towards Juliet Shlor’s advice on the four principles for plentitude: "Work and spend less. Create and connect more. Emit and degrade less. Enjoy and thrive more." (Plentitude: The Economics of True Wealth).

We are surrounded by animal life here: two chooks, two dogs, an uninvited billy goat gruff, hopping mice, possums, birds, frogs, and insects. We are as much a part of their world as they are of ours. And from this creative natural place emerges the strength and love to go on well in the world. We have plentitude and great richness along with a gentle happiness that is not dependent upon who we are or how much money we make. We weather the ups and downs with resilience and calm, wearing smiles on our faces (most of the time anyway). And we hope that our personal decisions and lifestyle might reflect all our futures… J

Sustaining place and community through the felt lives of objects: vibrant materialism in small cultural institutions

The slides for the powerpoint presentation Tamsin gave at the conference can be found here

The poet Rumi says everything drawn from its source longs to go back. How might we reanimate objects using their source? Their place of making, of association, of use, of collection, and of desire offers the object both a material and cultural sense of identity. Objects need more than the keeping places of museums or galleries to become animate, engaging, and vibrant. They need to be returned to their places of origin, the places in which they lived their active lives, so as to both engage and become engaged. Perhaps they travel an object trail returning to nearby small museums, perhaps they visit local festivals reconnecting with community, perhaps they are remade and recreated by descendents of the original makers, like the possum skin cloaks of southern Australia found in the National Museum. Or perhaps they live on in their original place, still in use, like the revived school desks full of student graffiti that Nest architects have built into a new canteen. Or perhaps the making of new objects invokes old memories and rituals: like the lake firings of cone shaped kilns over the waters of Lake Cootharaba that have become part of the environmental art festival of Floating Land; or the former Cobb&Co trading route in southwest New South Wales that brings together artists, museums, heritage and landscape with sculptures and artworks; or Murray Arts, who select an object and re-engage it and the community through making a three minute video. In all these cases, the object needs more than story; it needs place.

Drumming and Dancing up place

Land-guage?

Our more-than-human landscape's drumming the wild

Memory linked with ceremonial metaphor.

We, country's human counterparts, attempt transliteration.
Do hosts read country for their guests?
Or does the land read every footprint and teach its own lessons?
What or who embodies its voice?

Travelling words lose their roots, reading replaces monstrous awe,
Maps poor substitutes for memory's metaphors.
Written waymarks replace the loss of the oral
(their placedness retains but remnant power).
Perhaps a sense of country remains?
Embedding us in this site's place and its long history and dreaming...
Our human/nature relationships exposed and celebrated.
Our oral culture remains in music's improvisation;
The land's tempo dimly reflected in our contrived percussions.
Can our arts transcribe this nature?

Method for creativity

Still Breath

Breathe
and practice what you love
You don't have to plan to achieve
You don't have to achieve to succeed
But you might be surprised by what becomes...

Jay Dee Dearness is an artist and printmaker who came for a residency over August/ September 2010. She came bustling with ideas and plans. Perhaps we slowed her down, introduced her to place, reminded her to breathe. Yet, by the end of the first day she had set up the studio, taken pinhole digital camera images, and was already printing. She was inspired: by a beautiful curved open prickly crows ash seed that we gave her, by the evening sunsets that we watched from our outside stage, and by her small straw bale guest house, made of re-used materials borrowed from no longer wanted places.

After a decade or more of living here, I’ve been thinking about the differences between city and country, urban and rural. And I think this is no artificial division. But please forgive the stereotypes for the sake of the argument.

There is a slower pace of life here, more filled with the natural world. Those visitors new from the city show a little fear: are there snakes here, how can you live with all those ants, but it’s so quiet... Our world is full of the non-human: the land breathes into our life, small creatures share our house willingly, the climate and the daylight matters, weeds and ‘useful’ plants intertwine both in our gardens and in our minds.

Culture is the fundamental building block and the basis for every successful society. Culture is not an optional add-on; the arts are not merely creative illustration to the seriousness of life. Flourishing societies have done without science or economics, but none have done without art. Art and culture keep communities alive.

Why do the arts matter most? The arts - writing, painting, music, sculpture, dance, drama, craft, film, and story – not only reflect the type of world we live in, they also direct how we perceive and relate to our environment. Art constructs and celebrates the world.

In contrast, science and political economy dissect the world, reducing it to its component parts, and in this depressing process, we rationalise the environment into a passive resource waiting to be consumed. Art offers us a way to be informed, but not oppressed, by this science of doom.

Art admits complexity, emotion, and narrative so as to reanimate the places we inhabit. We again live within the environment, embedded in our locale. We are no longer separate consumers but immersed participants.

And we live in this irreducible complexity by crafting our lives in the local. By celebrating that which surrounds us, by valuing our neighbours, and by listening to all comers and to all stories; by developing all our local resources, we build better relationships and places.

We live in a more-than-human world. We live with animal, plant, stone, river, and mythology. Each has stories to tell. Our western approach has been to reduce these stories to their component parts, leaving little but dust in our collective wake.

Art allows us to imagine the thick, humid, stories of this biodiversity. We play the host to our ecoregion. The bunyip booms out a warning against wrongdoers, those that misuse the environment will be consumed.

With my partner, Ross Annels, we decided to not only live more simply and lightly upon this earth, but to do so with joy and creativity. We set up the Cooroora Institute to bring together art and environment, to celebrate our local culture and nature.

We hold performances on our outdoor stage and run artist-in-residencies and workshops for and by locals. The Cooroora Institute coordinates and documents environmental art celebrations, community festivals, and art events, including components of Floating Land, as well as facilitating new projects. By celebrating local culture, local experts and local heroes, we reduce the footprint of the cultural cringe and create cultural self-sustainability.

Writers, poets, and storytellers weave up country along with musicians, dancers and environmental sculptors, based upon long indigenous traditions of using art to keep a whole community’s culture strong.

Our work and our lives are intertwined; our family and our food gardens are as much a part of our lives as is our crafting of story and furniture. We celebrate this place and its local people, plant, animal, land. And we hope to model a better story that inspires and illuminates, by using the arts and crafts to celebrate this wonderful world.

This then is our goal: to live lightly and joyously upon this earth. And to do that, we need the arts to build strong local culture.

A short speech by Dr Tamsin Kerr at the launch of the Sunshine Coast Regional Council's creative communities discussion paper, 11 Feb 2010.