Cultural industry production in remote places

Abstract

This chapter discusses cultural production in Australia, focusing on a case study of Indigenous popular music in remote parts of Australia. It is partly intended as a counterpoint to the thrust of much research on the geography of cultural industries, which focuses on agglomerations or clusters of activity in districts of major western cities. It is concerned with cultural production in some of the most remote parts of the world, and in circumstances of extreme socio-economic disadvantage. The chapter therefore seeks to examine the structure of cultural production in scattered, distant places that are vastly different from the conventional urban clusters, and explore how recent technological and political changes provide opportunities for more dispersed or decentralized activities. Cultural industries are usually most successful when production agglomerates in urban areas, particularly major metropolitan centers (Connell and Gibson, 2003), yet the creative activities (music making, writing, painting, etc.) upon which cultural industries rely take place across much wider distances and often dispersed contexts that are far from being hubs of capital and investment. The extent to which cultural activities in such locations may be transformed into export-earning industries is the focus of this chapter. It draws together earlier research projects on Indigenous production of popular music (Gibson, 1998; Connell, 1999; Dunbar-Hall and Gibson, 2004). These projects involved interviews with producers, managers, promoters and musicians, and analysis of production, employment and business location data. Insights drawn from this case study shed light on both the policy implications of cultural production by Indigenous groups in other countries (for example, in Canada and the United States), and the theoretical implications of creative workers being physically and economically distant from recognized centers of cultural production.