This thesis adopts a Cultural Industries framework to examine how Queensland's artscouncil network has, through the provision of arts products and services, contributedto the vitality, health and sustainability of Queensland's regional communities. Itcharts the history of the network, its configuration and impact since 1961, withparticular focus on the years 2001 - 2004, envisages future trends, and provides ananalysis of key issues which may be used to guide future policies and programs.Analysis is guided by a Cultural Industries understanding of the arts embedded ineveryday life, and views the arts as a range of activities which, by virtue of theiraesthetic and symbolic dimensions, enhance human existence through their impacton both the quality and style of human life. Benefits include enhanced leisure andentertainment options, and educational, social, health, personal growth, andeconomic outcomes, and other indirect benefits which enrich environment andlifestyle.Queensland Arts Council (QAC) and its network of branches has been a dominantfactor in the evolution of Queensland's cultural environment since the middle of the20th century. Across the state, branches became the public face of the arts, drovecultural agendas, initiated and managed activities, advised governments, wrotecultural policies, lobbied, raised funds and laboured to realise cultural facilities andinfrastructure.In the early years of the 21st century, QAC operates within a complex, competitiveand rapidly changing environment in which orthodox views of development,oriented in terms of a left / right, or bottom up / top down dichotomy, are breakingdown, and new convergent models emerge. These new models recognise synergiesbetween artistic, social, economic and political agendas, and unite and energise themin the realm of civil society. QAC is responding by refocusing policies and programsto embrace these new models and by developing new modes of communityengagement and arts facilitation.In 1999, a major restructure of the arts council network saw suffragan branchesbecome autonomous Local Arts Councils (LACs), analogous to local CulturalIndustry support organisations. The resulting network of affiliated LACs provides apotentially highly effective mechanism for the delivery of arts related products andservices, the decentralisation of cultural production, and the nurturing across the stateof Creative Community Cultures which equip communities, more than any othersingle asset, to survive and prosper through an era of unsettling and relentlesschange.Historical, demographic, behavioural (participation), and attitudinal data arecombined to provide a picture of arts councils in seven case study sites, and acrossthe network. Typical arts council members are characterised as omnivorous culturalconsumers and members of a knowledge class, and the leadership of dedicatedcommunity minded people is identified as the single most critical factor determiningthe extent of an LAC's activities and its impact on community.Analysis of key issues leads to formulation of eight observations, discussed withreference to QAC and LACs, which might guide navigation in the regional arts field.These observations are then reformulated as Eight Principles Of Effective RegionalArts Facilitation, which provide a framework against which we might evaluate artspolicy and practice.
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