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by Craig McGregor
For over a century now Australia has been trying to set
up metropolitan centres outside the cities, from artists'
colonies like Eltham (outside Melbourne) and Springwood (in
the Blue Mountains) to the deliberate attempts at decentralisation
in places like Albury/Wodonga and Bathurst/Orange.
They worked...sort of.
But the artists' colonies were too small and too self-conscious
to become real alternative centres, and the places chosen
in the Whitlam era to become rural centres have remained what
they've always been: big country towns.
So the dream of a metropolitan culture outside the metropolises
has, in Australia, stayed just that: a dream. And, then strolling
along the Pass a while ago, watching the tiny windblown summer
waves flopping onto the sand, I suddenly thought: hey, Carmel.
Monterey. The Californian initiative. That's what happened
there: little coastal towns which started off as fishing-and-farming
hamlets, and got discovered by surfers, and the artists, and
then the tourists, and then the celebrities, and the next
thing you know your Steinbeck's down-and-out Cannery Row has
been turned into the Monterey Jazz Festival and Carmel has
become one of the most famous enclaves on the West Coast.
Now, perhaps, the same sort of thing is happening to Byron
Bay. Carmel has Clint Eastwood, Byron has Paul Hogan, and
the transformation of the old surf-and-dairying community
into a genuinely metropolitan culture is under way.
We hope.
I think we hope.
This sort of process is really uncontrollable. Places like
Carmel and Monterey and Byron, in fact most human centres,
have a habit of developing their own character despite any
attempts by town councils or planning authorities or other
institutions to stamp their desires on the place.
I think this is happening to Byron Bay. Some of us might
have liked it to have remained as it was in the' sixties or
the 'seventies; we might have liked its provinciality, or
its working class ambience, or its alternative culture; but
in the 'eighties and 'nineties, once the film makers and artists
and writers and journalists and actors and architects and
designers and craftspeople began to arrive, the town developed
a creative energy which just possibly may turn Byron, in time,
into the nation's first experiment in non-city urban culture.
I wouldn't want to make too much of this. But the other day,
writing the script for Michael Murray's film on the surf lifesaving
movement, and then driving over to Mullumbimby for the editing
at Wollumbin Studios, I was struck by how much Byron has developed
into a film making centre and how it now has an established
infrastructure for precisely this.
It's one reason directors such as John Cornell, John Weiley,
David Bradbury and Michael Murray and a host of younger film
makers have been able to locate themselves here.
Interestingly, they are often documentary film makers. John
Weiley, who moved his Heliograph film enterprise from Sydney
to Broken Head a couple of years ago, is one of the world's
foremost IMAX and widescreen film makers. His Antarctica won
the world's most prestigious wide-screen prize in Paris and
has been seen by an estimated 40 million people; he is now
working on a spectacular IMAX film on the sun.
David Bradbury has established himself as Australia's leading
documentary film maker, with over 14 titles to his credit;
his latest, Jabiluka and Loggerheads, have brought crucial
environmental issues to TV audiences.
And Michael Murray, who lives and works in Byron, has achieved
a popular international audience with films such as Sacred
Sex, Going Tribal and Bronzed Aussie Gods.
These are just some of the filmic community. The progenitor,
of course, is John Cornell, of Crocodile Dundee fame, whose
Beach Hotel hosted the wildly successful BUZZ short film festival
in November, 1998. When John Weiley decided to hold an informal
get-together of film people on the North Coast he was astonished
to find over 80 people---directors, editors, producers, writers,
critics---turned up. There is a significant wave of younger
women film makers who find the area conducive to good work.
In 1999 the Bay is due to get its own cinema complex.
It was Marshall McLuhan, the US media guru, who years ago
predicted that the first wave of urban refugees to desert
the city for the country would be professionals who could
use the new communication technology (these days, the internet/fax/phone/e-mail/computer)
to keep in contact with urban centres without actually living
there.
Byron Bay's history has partly proved him right. The film
makers are just an example of the migration of arts professionals
into the area which has occurred. The success of the recent
Writer's Festivals points up the same phenomenon. So does
the expanding spectrum of theatre companies, arts venues,
music events (such as the Blues Festival) crafts galleries,
etc. Hell, even the industrial estate has become the grandiosely
titled Arts & Industry Estate!
It's too early to say how successful, and how richly grounded,
this transformation will be. Australian history is littered
with failed experiments in arts communities.
But if this is a response to a genuine need and an organic
development in Australian culture what we may be witnessing
is, for the first time, the crystallisation of a sophisticated
metropolitan culture outside the cities which have for so
long dominated our experience.
We'll see.
Craig McGregor
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