Platform Papers > Issue 11: A Regional State of Mind

A Regional State of Mind:
Making Art Outside Metropolitan Australia

by Lyndon Terracini

Read the first three pages (PDF).

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Paperback. $13.95 rrp. Publication January 2007

ISBN 978-0-9757301-9-5, Series ISSN 1449-583-X

What is the culture of our place, of our backyard? Lyndon Terracini, who spent thirty years in the opera houses of Europe before settling in the NSW town of Lismore, reveals the rich diversity of Australia’s country-town culture and makes a strong plea for their right to the same respect as metropolitan culture. With the rapid demographic changes presently taking place, he writes, our European traditions are fast becoming irrelevant. Preservation of our stories is as essential to our survival as our flora and fauna.

Terracini was director of the Queensland Music Festival 2000–2005 and spent many months in outback areas and small towns, building huge collaborative performance works in which whole districts participated. He describes the commissioning of music and texts, the mixing of star practitioners with local workers, and the way the communities took ownership. A creative culture, he argues, should be a pyramid, based in the stories of our backyard and the culture of place. From that grows innovation, skill and professional art practice and at the summit the kind of work that can be life-changing

LYNDON TERRACINI is a distinguished operatic baritone with a special interest in new music. In the 1990s he established the Northern Rivers Performing Arts, then the Queensland Music Festival. In 2006 he was CEO of the Brisbane Festival. He holds two honorary doctorates and in 2005 received the Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Cultural Leadership Award from the Australian Business Arts Foundation.

This issue also includes responses to Stuart Cunningham and Jonathon Biggins.

Platform Papers invites considered responses to Lyndon Terracini for publication in the April edition.