current projects
Art and Working Life
Art and Working Life is a central focus of my research. Introduced in 1982 through a partnership between the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Art and Working Life was a national program that supported collaborations between trade unions and community artists. Over more than a decade, it brought art into workplaces and working-class communities, reflecting and responding to the changing conditions of labour, culture, and political power.
I approach Art and Working Life not just as a policy initiative, but as a window into a pivotal transformation in Australia’s cultural and industrial landscape. The program's lifespan captures the historic decline of trade unionism and what this has meant for Australian culture. It reveals how artistic labour, class identity, and public funding intersected during a volatile period in which the ambitions of cultural democracy collided with the restructuring forces of neoliberalism.
This ongoing project asks:
What are the cultural effects of neoliberal restructuring?
How have trade unions historically supported the arts, and what has their decline meant for the Australian arts sector?
What does Art and Working Life reveal about the limits of state-funded cultural democracy?
I have researched and published on Art and Working Life extensively, as the primary case study of my doctoral thesis, The Subsidy Question: Community Theatre and the Integral State (University of Sydney, 2025), in academic journals Australasian Drama Studies (2025) and Amfiteater (forthcoming 2025), and for wider audiences through The Conversation.
It now forms the foundation of my first book project, which uses Art and Working Life to reframe the politics of cultural policy in late twentieth-century Australia.
Art and Working Life funding model (1987). Poster issued by the Australia Council for the Arts, courtesy of the National Library of Australia.
Actors Equity: A Militant Union
Actors Equity of Australia was the key trade union representing performers from its founding in 1920 through to its amalgamation with the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance in 1993. My research investigates the industrial campaigns, institutional development, and political aspirations of Equity across the twentieth century——particularly its role in shaping the labour conditions of Australia’s performing arts sector——to trace how its decline enabled the precarious industrial relations of the arts sector today.
While unions are often peripheral to studies of Australian theatre or cultural policy, this project recentres the labour movement as a driving force in the historical organisation of the arts sector. Positioning Equity as both an industrial and cultural actor, it asks:
How did Equity shape the industrial organisation of the arts?
How did its strategies evolve in response to changes in labour policy and arts governance?
What does Equity’s history reveal about the broader relationship between culture, labour, and the state?
Through archival research and policy analysis, the project seeks to develop a critical timeline of Australian performers’ industrial protections and their erosion throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, this research contributes to growing interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of industrial relations and cultural policy. It also opens up broader questions about the governance of artistic work, the legacy of industrial unionism, and the changing conditions of creative labour under state restructuring.
Actors Equity SA Division banner (1986). Photo: Cathy Brooks courtesy of the State Library of South Australia.