The Hon Barry Cohen, former Arts Minister in the Hawke Labor Government, said he was surprised and proud to be asked to open this year’s National Folk Festival 2007 last Thursday. Thoroughly in keeping with Australian folk culture, and in tune with his many books of anecdotes such as What About the Workers?, The Almost Complete Gough and From Whitlam to Winston, humour of an unofficial kind was the keynote of his official opening speech.
For NFF Board President, John Taylor, there was good reason to celebrate the publication 20 years ago this year of the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia: Our Living Heritage, commissioned by Cohen. “It is a unique document with which any student of Australia’s rich and diverse cultural history should familiarise themselves … We have Barry to thank for having the vision to get this project started.”
Unfortunately one of his
revealing anecdotes, a bit less than humorous but nonetheless of the blunt
Australian kind, told in conversation with The Canberra Times, concerned later
Prime Minister Keating and Minister for Education John Dawkins.
Cohen had done his research,
personally observing the positive social impact of the Smithsonian Center for
Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington.
The famous and continuing Centre's interests and
practical work in cultural policy are “framed principally around local agency
and cultural democracy in grassroots communities, and collaborative projects
designed to foster self-representation.”
But
Keating “wouldn’t have a bar of it” as year after year Cohen tried in Cabinet
to implement the Inquiry’s recommendation to set up a Folklife Centre in
Canberra. Dawkins put in the boot in the
last budget before Keating’s fatal flaw election in 1996, using the favourite
politician’s ploy by going for an inquiry.
At this point in history a project delayed was a project as dead as a
bloated wombat on a country road.
Mention of
wombats introduces a different side of Barry Cohen, wildlife sanctuary
endangered species breeder until, in 2005, age crept into the picture and he
passed on this work to others.
Environmental issues are an important theme in this year’s National Folk
Festival with three interrelated themes.
Various
performers present songs, poems and even narrative dances about water, in its
many incarnations. But the flip side of
the issue is the presentation, headed by Social History and Folklore Collector
Rob Willis, of material from the National Library of Australia’s ongoing
project on drought. Among presenters is
Dr Graham Seal of Curtin University, WA, who had a major part to play in the
Folklife inquiry back in 1987. Another
is Sue Riley, a Centrelink Counsellor, addressing the human impact and social
cost of continued drought. Willis can be
contacted at rwillis@westserv.net.au
if you have stories to add to the collection.
Alongside
the NLA is the Climate Change Tent, where there are workshops, talks and films
by a wide range of experts and commentators including Professor Will Steffen,
director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU, the Fair Trade
Society, Australian Greens economics researcher Richard Dennis and Bob
Douglass, formerly head of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population
at ANU who leads a Forum on Nature and Society at 3.30pm tomorrow.
Everyone
can take part in the third aspect of cleaning up the National Folk Festival,
called No Ifs, No Butts. Clean Up
Australia says that 49% of rubbish around Australia consists of cigarette
butts, so this year there are specially designed bins all over the Festival
site, and special individual butt bins for smokers to carry with them, produced
in a new partnership with the Butt Littering Trust.
Smoking is
no joke, but jokes aside, the former Minister Cohen was clearly the right
person to open this year’s Festival. He
even had a very serious suggestion for how to set up a Folklife Centre for
Australia. Why not, he said, make it part
of the National Museum of Australia? Why
not, indeed.
Cohen is
nowadays deputy chair at Old Parliament House, and points out that the National
Portrait Gallery began life in a space shared with OPH. Its success has won it the fame and
consequent power to claim a new building in its own right. An Australian National Folklife Centre set up
in a space at the National Museum will surely have a parallel history in the
future, he says. Now that heritage and
history are the regular subject of debate, on all sides of politics, it’s time
for the move to be made.
Young
people and more recent migrants need an active centre to discover our folk
history, as happens in Washington, where the Smithsonian themes cover
indigenous life, working life, regional folklife, and recent migrants’
life. Like the National Folk Festival,
which Cohen calls Canberra’s best kept secret, the Smithsonian exhibits include
a Guest State each year, and even a Guest Country for comparison. With the National Museum’s visitor drawing power
based so strongly already on its cultural history and personal story exhibits,
a National Folklife Centre should be a natural fit, like a stockman on his
horse or a novelist from Brindabella writing My Brilliant Career.
National
Folk Festival runs until late on Monday April 9 at Exhibition Park. Information at www.folkfestival.asn.au
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