|
A speech delivered at South Coast Arts AGM, 10 June 2026
Thank you for tonight. This is by far the best AGM I’ve ever been to — who knew you could make one fun? Who knew you could infuse it with music, performance and art? To everyone who put tonight together: you’ve turned an annual administrative formality into something enjoyable, thought-provoking and enriching. That’s quite an achievement, but perhaps not surprising given South Coast Arts is in the business of creativity.
So in that spirit, stick with me while I try a creative experiment of my own.
Imagine an AGM were a town. A staid, beige, procedure-led town. Designed by committee. Running strictly to agenda. Streets named Clause 4B and Resolution 7. Welcome to AGM Town — where nothing surprising has ever happened, and nothing interesting is permitted to happen. It has no colour, no passion, no inspiration. It’s like living in a 3D model of a Council ordinance map.
What AGM Town desperately needs is the arts.
Because it’s the arts that turn a place into somewhere worth living. That’s what South Coast Arts exists to do — to help the arts flourish in the communities where we actually spend our days. And the existence of an organisation like South Coast Arts is itself a statement: we don’t want to live our lives like we’re in a meeting. We want more than that.
Tonight I want to talk about what South Coast Arts does — and what all the Regional Arts Development Organisations, the RADOs, do right across NSW. They are one of this state’s great creative success stories, and one of its most overlooked assets. I want to talk about why that matters — and what we stand to lose if that network starts to fracture.
Spoiler alert: it looks a lot like AGM Town.
But I want to start by talking about the beautiful creative regions South Coast Arts represents.
I was at an event last week, where time was helpfully left for every creative’s least favourite activity: networking. Someone approached me and said, “Where are you from?” I wondered briefly what she meant. She might have meant, “What company do you work for?” Or she might have meant “Where do you live?” (Mighty Port Kembla, by the way, may it forever remain submarine-free).
But actually, where I’m from is here—the Shoalhaven, AKA Yuin Country. I grew up in Nowra, went to school here, my family is here, so I spend a lot of time here. It’s where my love of arts and culture was first ignited.
Here’s my favourite story about Nowra. When I finished my undergraduate degree (at the Mighty University of Wollongong, may it emerge from ICAC cleansed), I went to one of the computer labs to write my resume, ready to enter the job market. For the young amongst us, a “computer lab” was a thing universities used to have. They were windowless rooms crowded with desktop computers lined up like poker machines, where you could come to finish an assignment or surf the internet in all its dial-up glory.
Anyway, on my resume I’d decided to use my parents’ address. But the long-departed ancestor of Microsoft Office I was using couldn’t comprehend the word “Nowra”. It put a squiggly red line underneath the word to highlight what it thought was a typo. When I right-clicked to see the suggested correction, it offered just one word: nowhere.
Even in the 1990s, I thought that was a bit harsh. It wasn’t nowhere. But it genuinely was a place where it was difficult to picture what a career in the arts might look like. Imagine asking your career adviser about wanting to pursue film, performing arts, visual arts, music? They might have stared at you like you’d asked a question in the wrong language.
Now imagine what an organisation like South Coast Arts could have meant at that moment — a place to go for advice, for small-scale funding, for connections, for the knowledge that a creative life was actually possible from within the Shoalhaven, or Kiama or Shellharbour. The pathways existed, but they were few, narrow, and almost entirely invisible. What you’d need is a guide to that world.
Of course, the need for such organisations in 2026 hasn’t gone away. But the reason they’re needed has completely changed.
Thirty years ago, the problem was that pathways into a creative career were scarce and obscure. Today, technology has thrown the doors open — you don’t need anyone’s permission to make a film, record an album, launch a fashion line. But that creates its own paralysis. The question isn’t “is this possible?” anymore. The question is: where do you even start?
That’s where Regional Arts Development Organisations come in. South Coast Arts, and the RADO network across NSW, are part of the cultural infrastructure of a region — as fundamental to creative life as physical institutions like galleries, theatres, concert halls and festivals. Without that infrastructure, the creative industries don’t just struggle. They wither.
So, what is a RADO? At its simplest, a RADO is a small, locally-based arts organisation — usually two to five people — whose job is to make the arts happen in the regions where they live and work. They support local artists, run projects, offer small grants, connect people to funding, and build programs that respond to their specific communities.
And RADOs are unique to NSW. What makes the model work — and I’d argue it’s the world’s best-practice model — is that it is not a hub-and-spoke system. There is no head office in Sydney calling the shots. Instead, there are 15 independent organisations, each rooted in its own community, yet connected and capable of collaborating on projects larger than any one of them could manage alone.
The focus on individual regions is important, because Nowra is not Narromine. Kiama is not Cobar. Shellharbour is not Coffs Harbour. A centrally-designed, one-size-fits-all program would miss what makes each place distinctive. What the RADO model does is embed expertise locally, and trust it.
The South Coast had a RADO for only a few years. For a long time, this region was the gap in the map — the network ran to 14, not 15, and the Shoalhaven was not in it. South Coast Arts had to be lobbied for, argued for, and fought for. Its existence is the result of that advocacy.
Each RADO is funded through state government support via Create NSW and contributions from the local council areas it serves. That’s the model, and it’s been amazingly successful. Award-winning projects, national and international collaborations, deep First Nations engagement. It’s a shared funding model which matches state-level support with local expertise. It’s also incredibly cheap. If you added up the annual turnover of all 15 RADOs, it’s about $7M. The new Powerhouse museum at Parramatta is going to cost eighteen times that each year: $127M.
So, the shared state/local funding model is a strength, but also a house of cards. Take away any one funding source and the whole operation becomes precarious. These organisations run lean; their core funding has not kept pace with inflation, so the squeeze is real. Each RADO has managed its finances with considerable prudence — they have cut their suits to fit the cloth. But there is only so much cloth.
A couple of years ago I was in Broken Hill, working on projects for the council-run gallery. And Council’s finance director said: “I just think the gallery needs to generate enough money to cover its operating costs.” And I said, “That’s interesting. Do you think the council football fields need to pay their own way too?”
She was briefly stopped in her tracks by an idea she hadn’t fully considered: that arts organisations can be public amenities, just like sporting grounds and swimming pools. That they contribute to the public good in ways that are real and measurable. That they might be more than an enclave for the privileged and the pretentious.
It’s no secret that South Coast Arts is currently having difficulty securing financial contributions from its local councils. And it’s no secret that local governments across NSW are under financial pressure, scrutinising every line of expenditure. That scrutiny is understandable, and it’s appropriate. Arts organisations should be able to demonstrate their value. RADOs around the state would welcome – and be used to – that question.
But there’s a version of that question that is fair, and another that isn’t.
It’s fair to ask funded organisations to demonstrate their value. It’s not fair to ask about return on investment while ignoring the full picture of what a RADO delivers to its community. And it’s not reasonable to evaluate a single organisation without understanding that it sits within a statewide network — one that amplifies what any individual RADO can do.
So funding uncertainty means fewer creative experiences for local communities, and fewer opportunities for local artists. But here’s the kicker – it also means less money flowing into the regions, because local funding unlocks state and federal funding.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re sitting on a funding panel at Create NSW or Creative Australia, comparing two grant applications from artists with genuinely strong projects. They’re evenly matched. But one of them comes from a region whose local councils have backed the application – financially and otherwise – demonstrating a real commitment to the work, and confidence in the artists making it. They have skin in the game. The other comes from a region where the council has stepped back from a commitment to arts and culture. Which application would you fund?
When that application is declined, the money doesn’t disappear. It moves to a region which has demonstrated its support for the arts. Perhaps it moves to a region where a RADO has helped plan that project and craft an application that inspires support among those decision-making panels. You can think of RADO funding as buying a region its own arts expert — a specialist in grant writing, project management and cultural planning that most councils can’t afford to employ directly. It gives local artists somewhere to go for help. And it buys arts experiences that happen here, and that keeps the flow-on expenditure generated in local businesses.
I want to finish by acknowledging some important people in this room: the artists. You are here because you make things, and because you care about the place where you live. You understand that a place without creativity is a hollow place — the difference between Nowra and Nowhere.
Through your work and your presence here tonight, you are saying that a regional life should be as culturally rich as anywhere else. The RADO network exists because enough people, in enough places, said exactly that — and kept saying it, even when funding was uncertain, even when the case had to be made again and again to people who hadn’t yet connected the dots between a budget line and a community’s heartbeat. What South Coast Arts does, what all fifteen RADOs do, matters.
So, thank you for making this — get ready for the pun — a truly extraordinary general meeting. Keep disrupting the dull, the procedural and the bureaucratic with art, music, passion and conviction. Keep finding ways to embed the arts into the life of this region. That is the core business of Mighty South Coast Arts; may it be sustained and thrive for years to come.
|
