Regional // Regional Gimuy (Cairns) Gathering

Regional // Regional (R // R) is a historic opportunity for international and domestic collegiality across all festival fronts and more; at its heart (and the hearts of cohort members) is ‘relationships’. Since 2022, R // R has been enacting a soft-power ‘cultural diplomacy’ effort unlike any other formalised approach reaching across Australia, Asia and the Pacific. As a thirty-strong cohort of arts workers and creatives alike from nine countries, they engage with hundreds of other stakeholders wherever they meet in Australia (recently in Gimuy/Cairns, Queensland and so far in Garramilla/Darwin, Northern Territory and Lutruwita/Tasmania). A ‘think tank’, if you will, the R // R cohort champions changes to ethos, ethical mindsets and visionary outlooks within practical, showcase arts settings. They posit to the creative arts industry globally that centring human experiences and exchanges must become crucial to arts funding and investment approaches, beyond narrow views of ‘economic return’ as being the sole outcome, and where engagement becomes reduced to statistics. Their emphasis is on cultural exchange and collaborative, creative processes as being fundamental to forging deeper social equity and stronger and re-emboldened cultural connection. 

The cohort comes together to collaborate in self-informed, co-designed ways, aligning themselves on more philosophical grounds when it comes to mutual Cultural Maintenance endeavours. They do so across arts and cultural practices and via complementary famils, through discrete programming more directly, as well as in troubleshooting common challenges and exploring new approaches. R // R couldn’t have convened over a more uncertain time for festivals domestically and globally. As such, it must continue. 

A reality of polarising trends is taking hold across and throughout the festivals and events space in Australia. Emerging festivals are struggling to find support in a paradigm of disparity between lucrative funding solutions seemingly available to larger or older events. Still, even the ‘big’ festivals are also facing crises of downturn in both audiences and skilled workers to pull off such operations. Simultaneously many festivals are closing or postponing their events at rate—while others can’t even get off the ground. Festivals and festivals are a many varied thing, too. How does a major music festival relate to a smaller-scale multi-arts cultural festival? Are there convergences that can be leveraged for equity in sustainability? Then there are the tourism and visitation drivers also placed unto such events (particularly in Queensland and the Northern Territory of Australia), thus broadening their Key Performance Indicators beyond achievability and somewhat more removed from the core purposes of such events. Overarchingly, ‘connectivity’ and ‘community’ remain core values for all. Simultaneously, aspirations to bring together ‘cultural’ emphases across Asia and the  Pacific and other global neighbourhoods is strong and taking up as key positions within Cultural Diplomacy efforts by diplomatic corps. Communal comings-together in the festival space (the most visible and accessible of ‘arts’ for communities to engage with) are the only ways the above can be addressed with any altruism. 

R // R is an initiative of Asialink Arts and Culture and its thirty-five-year legacy, at the University of Melbourne. It’s an initiative supported by major partners, The Yulgibar Foundation, Circle 5 Foundation, and Konfir Kabo and Monica Lim. R // R celebrated its third and penultimate gathering of its three-year cycle (that is, if further funding cannot be obtained) in tropical Gimuy/Cairns, Queensland from 14-18 October, 2024. Held upon the homelands of the Gimuy Walubarra Yidinji peoples, R // R’s ‘Gimuy Gathering’ was delivered in partnership with NorthSite Contemporary Arts, by support from Cairns Regional Council. It brought with it great winds of hope and tidings of achievable arts and cultural collaborations, to a city which dons itself the moniker of being the ‘arts and cultural capital of regional Australia’ and which is presently struggling to elevate its arts projects, events and festivals to the heyday of mid-2000s-2010s engagement and recognition. Locally, the production costs of large-scale acts and activations reduce how far north/regional touring can occur, and neither is helped by Gimuy/Cairns still not having an all-purpose, all-weather entertainment facility. Still, there are mighty champions galore for the arts across Tropical North Queensland, and there are still more festivals and arts events than can be counted. Due to the foundational reputation Gimuy/Cairns enjoys as a destination and for the arts, growing calls for the city to reach out into the Asia Pacific as a ‘gateway’ resound. 

The R // R cohort came to Gimuy/Cairns surprisingly unshackled by the woes of statistics. Being independent, their outlook is different as a collective, than focused debilitatingly on what no doubt encroaches on their individual practices—R // R isn’t a coming-together of commiseration or panic. R // R is a coming-together of a group of arts and cultural leaders, of creative practitioners and professionals, who have visions and dreams for new and cross-cultural ‘songlines’ of connectivity between the hearts of the kindred amongst them. Their brief is simple: Let’s work to change or introduce new systems to the ones not working for us. They rightly look inwards instead of outwards to funding matters, acknowledging that the very nexus of all arts and cultural pursuits (and enterprises) are human and relationships based. Positing that there can be no way forward without brokering intellectual and philosophical “trade” amongst creatives at a mutually cultural intersection, than the ‘bricks and mortar’ type talk ad infinitum.

This shouldn’t suggest that the ‘bricks and mortar’ of things isn’t where invaluable conversations must also take shape, but that a new type of listening be pronounced. Can greater funding and less ‘red tape’ for festivals and public-facing arts and cultural events make things better? Yes. Will such investment—with more accessible and diversified funding options under international touring—be returned in great yield for the economy? Naturally. But what will move us to this space, where funding opportunities are there for collaborative practices, where the point is the process and not the dividends? Why, the case studies of R // R of course! These critical thirteen projects supported by Asialink, demonstrates a return to thriving cultural ecosystems, of practice and strengthened relationships across a near-feudal global neighbourhood, ever tormented by Climate Change and Expansionism.

It's important to remember that the Cohort of R // R is specifically made up of representation from festivals and events which occur in regional areas. The dynamics for event delivery and audience participation/community engagement is very different in a regional sense, than to metropolitan showcases where the arts is more readily and routinely accessible. The challenges are unique in terms ‘bricks and mortar’; there aren’t the number of arts workers and technically trained production crews who are locally based in as many numbers as in cities. As aforementioned, infrastructure is a limitation, more so its moveability to regional areas (e.g. staging and site-build equipment). In a more intangible sense, infrastructure around societal impacts of cost-of-living has led to a global trend of ‘de-regionalisation’ in terms of population numbers. As such, cultural practices suffer in terms of their maintenance/participation. The Cohort’s festivals and events are of a comparatively smaller scale that the more vocal and visible players—they’re not fiscally empowered to be able to weather the storms should they continue to swell. Their collaborations are about survival and banding together in an emerging international community. They’re laying the groundwork for new ‘systems’ for a reenvisaged sustainability which is centred at the core of ‘exchange’ (of ideas, of resources… of collectively re-emboldened passion).

Only the Regional // Regional cohort—nay, family—can learn from one another on matters of audience and cultural practice (re)engagement, economic sustainability and economisation, and conceptual brilliance etcetera. Only with greater support can they be positioned as a more intrinsic force in the (re)education of domestic systems and funding bodies in a new wave; literally from the very grassroots experiences of peers across Australia, Asia and the Pacific. The work of this seminal network—which connects us all internationally through ancient and emerging kinships, migration and trade routes and songlines—is nowhere near finished. Australian can be seen by our cousins and neighbours as being more than a product of sheer genocide, Stolen Generations and convict trauma, ‘White Australia Policies’, of Blackbirding and slavery; not just as a middle-power with a growing domestic sense of Nationalism. Given the chance, this cohort has the unlimited potential to establish Australia as a cultural powerhouse—which can define more apt concepts of its role across Australia, Asia and the Pacific, of commonality and humanity, and of true multi-culturalism. 

Article written by Jack Wilke- Jans