Aboriginal Advisory Group leading Cultural Awareness Day. Photo: Michelle Troop. Courtesy of Community Arts Network.
We talk with venerable arts consultant June Moorhouse about the lessons she’s learned working with small arts organisations.
June Moorhouse has over 40 years of experience in the arts. Her work as a consultant during this time has granted her a deep understanding of the challenges faced by arts organisations. She has had a long-standing involvement in the Community Arts Network, played a key role in the transition from the founding director at Fremantle Arts Centre and is now chair of the WA Chamber of Arts and Culture. Her experience helps us understand the challenges faced by membership-based organisations in particular.
Making Time panel – James Boyd, Natalie Scholtz, Josh ‘Flewnt’ Eggington and June Moorhouse with moderator Shenali Perera. Photo: Edwin Sitt. Courtesy of Community Arts Network.
A key goal for June Moorhouse has always been inclusion.
I’ve always thought about the arts through a community lens. No matter whether I was managing Fremantle Arts Centre, the WA opera company or working with a voluntary organisation, I’m always thinking about: how are we engaging with the broadest spectrum of people in our community and enlivening that sense of opportunity that comes with creative expression?
She attributes this commitment to her childhood.
I grew up in a 1950s and 60s war service housing estate area in Manning, Western Australia. It was a community where people with not a lot looked out for each other and built that community together. And I watched both my parents being major contributors to them in various ways. My father was on a war service pension, and he did things like teaching war widows to drive because he believed that women needed their independence and should have their licenses. And he was at home caring for us. Meanwhile, our mother was very engaged as a community nurse and local volunteer.
To build a career in WA, she first sought out an education in the East.
I eventually found my way to drama school at the VCA in Melbourne, and that was in the early 80s. At that time, it was the hotbed for creating professional community theatre companies like Hot House Theatre. There was a focus on how to use the arts to engage and animate communities.
She returned to Fremantle where opportunities quickly emerged.
I’d moved to Fremantle while I was a student during my first degree and felt passionately about the place. I had been lobbying with others for a performing arts centre in Fremantle. On return, I took on the local festival for the council and delivered that. Within a pretty short period of time I was the surprise appointment as director of the Fremantle Arts Centre.
The centre had one founding director for 18 years. He was visionary in the way he set it up. In the early 70s, there were no other art centres like that around the country. But it’s a real trap as a leader to become seduced by your own successes and believe that everything that you think and do is working.
I took over an organisation that had lost its clear direction and dynamism, where people were either devotees of the leader or people who were sufficiently fearful in the way they worked that they were never going to question it.
Access and excellence are not mutually exclusive.
A key challenge was the elitism that had become embedded in the organisation.
Access and excellence are not mutually exclusive. Why do we imagine that creating “esteemed houses of art” is the way to engage people? Why do we imagine that the more obscure something is, the more people will be impressed? Actually, the great bulk of people just feel intimidated, humiliated and walk away. Whereas, if you present challenging work in an environment that feels like home, people can relax and not feel judged and take in what is being presented to them by artists.
I dropped the hierarchies. I left the huge plush office that was there for me, turned it into a gallery and moved upstairs. Council had also dropped the wage for my position, which was okay by me. I still don’t believe in organisations where the CEO is on some highly inflated wage, and the rest of the staff are operating at sub-optimal levels.
By the end, the Mayor said to me, “You gave the Arts Centre back to Fremantle”.
After Fremantle Arts Centre, June began a career consulting with arts organisations.
Most of my consulting work has been with small to medium organisations because they’re the ones I love. They’re the most flexible ones, and for me, they are the powerhouse of creative development. I’d also assist organisations through transition in leadership. For example, I was the general manager at the WA Opera for six months.
During this time, she came across a common challenge with membership.
A lot of membership-based organisations were starting to struggle at the beginning of this century, particularly with the new funding demands. When you are serving members, it’s very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day matters, responding to members’ needs. You have to balance that with maintaining the business itself, keeping the organisation sustainable and being able to do that larger advocacy and networking that is an essential part of maintaining an organisation. There are increasing demands on organisations, especially incorporated associations, across the board. These include matters of compliance, transparency, and good governance. A lot of membership organisations were suffering with those changes.
Lately, I’ve been paying attention to the grassroots organisations that underpinned arts engagement in WA for so many years. They grew out of the old Arts Council models that were particularly strong in agricultural and suburban communities. Some are still struggling on as Incorporated Associations with ageing and declining membership and less volunteers.
They are fading away, unless they are supported by their local governments. They are completely invisible in the state and federal policy and funding frameworks and not well represented or not represented at all in larger sector forums. Again, this points to the bizarre silos and hierarchies that exist in our sector which are still a hangover of colonialism in my mind.
…they chase funding, and in that process, they lose purpose.
Her current role as Chair of the WA Chamber of Arts and Culture has highlighted the delicate balance in board management.
You’ve got to have people on board who can offer critique and feedback around your curatorial arc, your programming and your creative thinking. You can structure that in a way where you have advisory committees that are keeping the board informed.
One of the challenges for many organisations, particularly in our sector, is they chase funding, and in that process, they lose purpose, or they water down purpose.
Working in such a large state as Western Australia presents its own problems.
In WA, we don’t have large traditional arts audiences to tap into. This means that collaborating and being able to work together becomes more important for critical mass.
The resource environment is a huge and all-pervasive part of the West Australian mindset. For me, that leads to a kind of mentality that’s all about big things. It’s about extraction and infrastructure. How good we are at creating big holes in the ground, driving big trucks, managing big projects, remarkable software and innovating in order to do things on a grand scale. That’s at the heart of a lot of the thinking that happens in this state and extends to the expectations of the arts. People look for big numbers, big profile and big noise. But where does that leave room for nuance and subtlety and slow development and making an intimate work and intimate connection through work, so much of which is at the heart of craft?
Artist Sharyn Egan leading a women’s workshop for Alwatan to Home. Photo: Michelle Troop. Courtesy of Community Arts Network.
She hopes that the Chamber will fill the skill gap in community organisations.
I hope the chamber can kind of become a place where those smaller grassroots come into the tent and share in the discussions about federal policy and thinking, if they want to. But there are many barriers to that, which goes back to the hierarchies and siloing that happens in the arts.
Local government support is critical for sustaining many of these smaller craft groups.
There’s a group of spinners and weavers who meet at Atwell House in Melville. 15 women meet there. They’re aging but not all are old. All they want is to know that they can keep meeting in that space one day a week, and maintain their friendship group, their craft group.
June is motivated by the call for decolonising the arts.
The conversations from many younger artists now tell me they do not want to fit into existing structures. They’re focused on decolonised ways of working. I take that as a vital challenge for us all. It means examining who is at the table, and who’s excluded. What are the steps to creating genuinely inclusive organisations? That fuels a strong resistance to locking into formal structures and an insistence that new ways of working are respected and realised. For some, that means eschewing funding and problematic funding structures
For June, arts advocacy is about a shared culture.
If we keep talking about “the arts” as some rarefied thing that “we” own and are generous enough to provide to others, we’re stuffed. We should stop arguing for the arts and start pointing to its presence in our lives and our community.
So, yeah, I’m nearly 70 and I’m sure some people would say I’m still “naive”; but I’ve never seen a single “argument” that’s changed things enough to be worth the pain of arguing. Let’s just demonstrate it and keep people coming to that shared table.
Celebrating the outcomes of Palestinian Threads and Stitches. Photo: Michelle Troop. Courtesy of Community Arts Network.
About June Moorhouse
June Moorhouse has over 40 years of professional experience in the arts, all motivated by the knowledge that the arts play a profound role in supporting human creativity, self-expression and wellbeing, and fuel opportunities for positive social change. June’s posts have included inaugural Executive Officer of the Community Arts Network, Victoria, Director of Fremantle Arts Centre, General Manager of West Australian Opera and Manager of Culture for the City of Fremantle and director CAN (Community Arts Network). June is currently chair of the Chamber of Arts and Culture WA Inc.
