Regional Arts Australia's Artlands '23 gathering embodied a profound systems change and flipped the script on how to bring people together for hard and important conversations. The experience was captured in the newly released C R E A T I N G S P A C E documentary, exploring what is possible when a conference is curated around care and wellbeing. This new five-part podcast series continues the conversation, sharing some of the fuller interviews and diving deeper into the idea that “The future is regional. The future is creative.” 

MEET: ROS ABERCROMBIE

To close this series, we speak to Ros Abercrombie, Executive Director of Regional Arts Australia about the thought process behind Artlands 2023. 

This conversation doesn’t shy away from the truth of co-designing a new way to gather, of navigating how to create a space that is culturally safe and appropriate for the different participants that we would be inviting, the challenges that we didn’t see coming, the successes that we all achieved through the process. 

There’s a lot to cover so we’ve broken it into two episodes:
PART 1: focuses on the lead-up, the why behind doing something different and some of the challenges and successes of working with three co-facilitators.  

PART 2: carries on from last episode, where Ros was told we would need healers at the event, and just what that meant from a cultural knowledge perspective.  And then we speak about the final act, Act 5, on the final day of Artlands 2023. We’ve heard the participants speak about a specific moment when one of the participants spoke during this time. We’re now going to hear Ros’ experience of that moment, and what we would do differently if we were to gather people together again in this way. 

Ros Abercrombie: We started to float ideas of things that we were thinking about changing. And overwhelmingly there was an excitement and a positivity. There was also generally a sort of wry smile saying, Are you crazy? Like, do you not just want to do things as normal, would be a whole lot simpler? 

And there's no two ways about it. Change is harder. But we were really conscious that as an organisation we pride ourselves on listening to what our colleagues and what the sector was saying, and they were saying they felt that it was time for change. 

Artlands ‘23 brought 80 purposefully selected participants together at the National Gallery Australia on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country (in Canberra), for three days, five acts, tackling the challenges and opportunities presented by the provocation: The Future of Regional Australia is Fundamentally Creative. 

Artlands ‘23 is supported by the Regional Arts Fund and delivered by Regional Arts Australia. The Regional Arts Fund is an Australian Government program that supports sustainable cultural development in regional and remote communities in Australia. 

'The future is regional. The future is creative' is a registered trademark of Regional Arts Australia.  

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Regional Arts Australia.