Artists and policy: a case study of the creative industries in north-eastern Australia

Artists play a major role in the cultural fabric of society. They operate within the creative industries, a sector of activity widely accepted as significant to developed and developing economies. While there is a substantive body of literature relevant to the nature of policy-making as applied to the arts, research that explores the views of practitioners at the grass roots level is limited, and particularly so in regional north-eastern Australia, an area with significant challenges caused by isolation and distance. This article contextualises the issues of relevance in relation to artists’ engagement with policy, after which it presents survey and interview data obtained from those working in the field. The findings reveal the influence of isolation in north-eastern Australia, not only in a geographic sense, but in terms of the number of artists who see themselves as disconnected from policy, arts and cultural strategy.