Want to Make Art? You Better Be Rich.
HOW AUSTRALIAN CULTURE LOCKED OUT THE WORKING CLASS.
Wages are low, work insecure and funding has been gutted. Amid a cost-of-living crisis and a pandemic, are we about to lose a swathe of artists to obscurity?
Growing up in central Queensland in the 1980s, Ruth Clare didn’t even know a career in the arts was a possibility. Rockhampton was a “beef town”, she says, full of cowboys and miners, where there was nothing to do but drink. Her stay-at-home mum became depressed after her dad, a Vietnam war veteran, left. Even after a stint on a major TV soap and with a published memoir to her name, Clare says she still grapples with the sense that she doesn’t belong in the industry.
“No one wants to hear this story,” she tells me. “It’s not a nice story.”
PUBLISHED BY THE GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA, 16 MAY 2022