From the AMPAG archive — restored from a 2014 Major Matters blog entry on the major performing arts companies’ work with First Nations children in remote and regional communities.
One of the most consistent threads through AMPAG’s policy advocacy and the Major Matters blog series was the work that the major performing arts companies were undertaking in First Nations remote and regional communities. The 2014 piece on this subject — written for AMPAG by a contributor with first-hand knowledge of the education and outreach programmes — set out the substantive scale of the engagement and the policy case for sustained federal support.
The piece focused particularly on the work of Bangarra Dance Theatre, whose Knowledge Ground education and outreach programme has been running in First Nations remote communities since the 1990s and is the most extensive sustained First Nations cultural engagement programme run by any Australian performing arts organisation. The piece also covered the work of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra‘s Music in Communities programme, the Australian Ballet‘s touring children’s programmes, and the Musica Viva Australia in Schools programme that reaches close to a million Australian primary-school children annually.
The policy case
The piece’s argument was that the major performing arts companies’ First Nations and remote-community work was not a sidebar to their mainstage programming but an integral part of how the companies justified their public funding. The federal funding framework for the major performing arts sector required the companies to demonstrate community-reach, education-reach and First Nations engagement as part of the conditions of base funding — which produced a structural alignment between the companies’ artistic ambitions and their public-engagement obligations.
The piece also identified the funding gaps that constrained the work — particularly the shortage of dedicated touring infrastructure for remote-community work, which the major companies had been advocating for through the federal Office for the Arts.
Why this matters in the longer arc
The First Nations engagement strand of the major performing arts companies’ work has remained a consistent thread through the 2010s and into the 2020s. The 2023 launch of Revive — A Place for Every Story, A Story for Every Place formalised the First Nations strand of the federal cultural policy framework, with First Nations leadership and First Story positioned as foundational pillars of the policy. Bangarra’s transition from Stephen Page (artistic director 1991–2023) to Frances Rings (from 2023) consolidated First Nations artistic leadership at the apex of the major performing arts sector. The 2014 Major Matters piece sits as an early articulation of the work that became foundational to the sector’s identity through the rest of the decade.
Original release: AMPAG Major Matters blog (2014), “Working with Indigenous children in remote communities”. Restored from the AMPAG site Wayback Machine archive.
