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Title: The art of government: Khoa Do’s The Finished People and the policy reform of
Community Cultural Development
Abstract: This article considers the production of the independent feature The Finished
People (Dir. Khoa Do, 2003) in terms of a key factor reviewers and critics chose to play
down: namely, that the director sought to capture public interest in Cabramatta (a suburb
in Sydney’s south west promoted as Australia’s ‘most multicultural suburb’) in order to lift
a Community Cultural Development (CCD) project out of the suburbs and deliver it to
audiences of Art House cinema. While the film’s representational strategies clearly
reflect a tradition of independent Asian Australian cinema that critically negotiates the
identity politics of State-sponsored multiculturalism, the film’s mode of production had
less to do with the avant-garde agendas reviewers compared it with, and more to do with
an enduring governmental regime of pastoral pedagogy dedicated to the correction of ‘at
risk’ subjects. Furthermore, the project strongly anticipated recent policy reforms to CCD
initiated by the Australia Council for the Arts in 2004. Under the flexible rubric ‘Creative
Communities’ these reforms seek to steer CCD workers away from cultural development
as a narrow target of government intervention, and towards a more open and flexible
range of policy goals and objectives. A close reading of the film’s context of production
reveals how such a policy shift might be expected to increase opportunities for local
content to move between fields of cultural production, even as it multiplies dilemmas of
formal accountability and aesthetic evaluation.
Keywords: Asian Australian cinema: Cabramatta: Community Cultural Development:
‘Creative Communities’ (policy): Khoa Do: The Finished People.
Scott Brook
The University of Melbourne
VIC 3010
Scott Brook is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of
Melbourne. Current chapters and articles appear in Locating Asian Australian
Cultures, ed Tseen Khoo (Routledge 2008), and Journal of Australian Studies
(forthcoming).
Accounting for The Finished People
The success of the independent Australian feature The Finished People (2003)
was by all accounts spectacular. An ‘ultra low budget’ film by a first time director,
Khoa Do, The Finished People evolved from a series of video-making workshops
the director was employed to take in Cabramatta, a suburb in Sydney’s south-
west. Cabramatta has a substantial national profile due to regular moral panics in
Sydney media concerning drugs, gangs and ‘ethnic ghettos’, (Dreher, 2002; Teo,
2001), as well as vigorous cultural tourism campaigns by local government that
have sought to counter such media attention. The video workshops were with a
group of clients of Open Family, a not-for-profit outreach service for homeless
and drug addicted youth. Do was a former volunteer at the centre and aspiring
film-maker, having received acclaim for the short screenplay Delivery Day
(2000). The script of The Finished People was developed through a process of
collaboration and improvisation in these workshops, and it’s realisation as a
feature film involved a cast of non-professional actors consisting of clients and
social workers from Open Family, family and friends of the director as well as
respondents to a call-for-interest in a local newspaper. The film was shot on a
mini-DV camera by colleagues who were film students at the time. Early
recognition came when the film was selected for the 2003 Montreal Film Festival,
after which it attracted funding from the New South Wales Film and Television
Office for a 35mm print, and a brief release through Dendy cinemas in Sydney,
Melbourne and Brisbane. Upon release The Finished People was a critical
success, scoring 4.5 stars from both reviewers on Australia’s premier TV film
review, The Movie Show, with broadsheet reviewers praising the film’s blurring of
boundaries between documentary and drama (Hawker 2003; Byrnes 2003), and
referencing Italian Neo-realism, cinéma-vérité, and Dogma (Edwards 2004;
Moses 2003). Industry recognition came in 2004 when the film was nominated for
and/or received a number of awards from the Australian Film Institute, the
Australian Writers Guild, and the Film Critics Circle of Australia, as well as
picked-up for DVD release by a local distributor. The following year, the 25 year
old director would receive the Commonwealth Government’s award for Young
Australian of the Year.
As this brief synopsis of the film’s trajectory suggests, a key element in the
success of The Finished People was its capacity to translate a community-based
project into a symbolically and financially viable product for the film industry. This
resulted in the film’s value being constituted in quite different domains of
subsidized cultural production. While reviewers would praise the film’s digital
format as an example of how the accessibility of digital technology might
reinvigorate Australia’s film industry from below (Edwards 2004), a report for the
Victorian Health Promotion Foundation would hail The Finished People for its use
of digital technology in promoting the social inclusion and citizenship of young
people (Wyn and Cuervo 2005). Meanwhile, the director would be interviewed by
the Marketing Unit of the Australian Film Commission for an article on the AFC’s
website that puts forward The Finished People as ‘a marketing case study for
independent filmmakers’ (AFC 2005). The film’s focus on themes of youth
homelessness, drug addiction and family breakdown in the strongly ethnically
diverse milieux of Cabramatta were widely applauded as a socially progressive
contribution to Australian film culture at a time when Australian cinema appeared
to lack the courage to take on the ‘big issues’ (Byrnes 2003; Edwards 2004), with
critics foregrounding the deleterious effects of the Howard government on
Australian public culture, suggesting The Finished People provided a counter-
vision to the ‘Australian imagined community that has been anxiously
reconfigured by assertions of a singular, homogenising national identity
threatened by the different and the unassimilated.’ (Smaill 2007: 43).
Significantly, however, not all reviewers were willing to humour the film’s blurring
of genres (documentary and drama) through its production methodology — one
critic describing the film as ‘amateurish’ (Wilson 2004a), and elsewhere as ‘a
worthwhile community project (getting young homeless people to improvise
vignettes based on their lives) that never finds much of a dramatic focus’ (Wilson
2004b).
This article focuses on how The Finished People translated the
disciplinary rationales and practices of Community Arts (predominantly known in
Australia since 1989 as ‘Community Cultural Development’ (CCD), but still
referred to as Community Arts in the UK) into a viable product for the Australian
film industry. As the final section of this article will demonstrate, in this the film
anticipated policy reforms initiated by the Australia Council in 2004 designed to
increase the visibility and status of Community Cultural Development by
encouraging innovative partnerships between community-based projects and
broader arts economies. If the film’s production methodology could be valued (or
dismissed) according to widely differing rationales constituted within different
fields of subsidised cultural production, then this is exemplary of the kind of
‘convergence’ and ‘flexibility’ national policy reforms to CCD are designed to
encourage. This, however, raises questions concerning the different roles of
‘community’ in such a convergence. For while the film’s origins in community-
based video workshops was always part of its promotion, the public success of
the film also rested on the capacity of reviewers and critics to separate the
rhetorically suasive ‘authenticity effects’ of ‘community’ from attention to the
norms of CCD as a tool and field of governmental action. Overwhelmingly
reviewers recuperated the film’s look in the language of avant-garde aesthetics
(cinéma-vérité) and its mode of production in what we might call the ‘auteurist
ethos’ of independent cinema (ie. a singular project whose realisation depends
on the charismatic agency of a strongly invested director/writer/producer and
their personal networks). In this reviewers avoided associating the film’s
production with an institutionalised form of supervised pedagogy, and the film’s
aesthetic with the didactic dialogue, plot-lines and formal awkwardness of
community theatre, or what Gay Hawkins’ describes in her history of Community
Arts as ‘an aesthetics of affirmation’. By this Hawkins refers to an aesthetic that
seeks to produce affirmative images of ‘the marginalised’, ‘giving the power to
represent to those who were underrepresented or negatively represented in
public culture’, and ‘privilege[s] notions of the self-esteem of the participants.’
(Hawkins 1993; 137). In the next section I will follow-up what I mean by
describing community in terms of ‘a tool and field of governmental action’ by
drawing on Hawkins’ history of Australian Community Arts in order to consider it,
after Foucault, as a form of governmentality.
In developing a more critical account of ‘community’, I don’t want to
suggest reviewers misread the film, or were merely being polite when confronted
by such a worthwhile project. Crucial to its reception was the film’s canny use of
documentary techniques that might encourage just such a response: the use of
hand-held digital camera, confessional Voice Overs, natural lighting and a
strongly desaturated colour palette all began the work of recuperating the low-
budget production for a cinema audience, as did the director’s statements about
the film’s stylistic influences (Topp 2004). These formal properties were crucial to
film’s ability to translate the material effects of one mode of art practice into the
symbolic registers of another. In the fourth section of the article I will consider the
significance of the public profile of Cabramatta, and how the film both plays with
and plays to the kinds of familiar media panics about the suburb which not only
informed the film’s style (lo-fi exposé) and subject (‘problem youth’) but also
enabled it to find a sympathetic, if concerned, audience.
However, I do want to suggest that in the process by which the film was
hailed as a socially progressive contribution to Australian film culture, celebratory
accounts of the film’s origins became somewhat fuzzy in assuming the self-
evident status of community as the film’s implicit theme and, to a lesser extent,
agent, one that might underwrite the film’s authenticity.1 As a Marketing
Executive from the film’s distributor noted, ‘In an age of "reality" TV, this story of
Cabramatta youth that used documentary stylings to tell a fictional story seemed
like a report direct from the street; despite the inexperience of the actors, it
seemed utterly uncontrived.’ (AFC 2005). There is of course a form of blank irony
in this last sentence (inexperienced actors were crucial to the film appearing
‘uncontrived’). While noting the film’s authenticity effects vis-à-vis reality TV alerts
us to the film’s contemporary appeal, it also suggests such realism may rely on
forgetting the film’s principal actors were also subjects of a youth outreach
program aimed at their rehabilitation. A consideration of the film’s origins in a
cultural development project would not only enable critics to consider the film’s
‘aesthetics of affirmation’ affirmatively—in terms of a set of rationales and
procedures that have evolved in a separate domain of government subsidised art
to those of the film industry—but would also permit a more sober account of the
instrumental basis of ‘community’ in correcting the behaviours of at-risk subjects,
as well as those structured forms of pedagogy which enabled relations of
collaboration between the film’s director and his actors/co-writers. Not least of all,
it would make it possible to begin to consider what the effects on CCD programs
might be when their outcomes can include content for film and television. This
would appear significant given not only the willingness of the Australian film
industry to welcome this kind of production, but also the current policy reforms
alluded to. As the last section of the article will demonstrate, under the rubric
‘Creative Communities’ these reforms seek to reduce the scope of CCD work
specifically even as they seek to stretch the term ‘community’ so that it might
gain currency in an even wider range of arts policies and programs, including
municipal Cultural Planning with its increased emphasis on nurturing emergent
creative economies.
The goal of re-reading this example of community film in terms of ‘the art
of government’ is neither to invalidate the film’s authenticity effects, nor to critique
the disciplinary functions of cultural development programs. Still less is it to
defend the rationales of CCD from being attached to those of particular cultural
industries. Rather, the goal of this description is to relate these events to an
account of the specific policy conditions in which it has become possible for
cultural products to move across different fields of subsidised cultural production;
from the local outreach work of NGO’s to the circuits of a national film industry,
and from a program in participant-based cultural development to audience-
focused entertainment. In the context of a radical convergence in agendas and
levels of cultural policy in Australia, it becomes important to develop a critical
language based on cases studies that might describe and evaluate these
changes.
Governing through Communities
Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set
of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative
set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all
other terms of organization (state, nation, society, etc) it seems never to
be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or
distinguishing term. (From Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society. Williams 1976: 76).
If it was once possible to claim the concept of community had worked as an
arché for the discipline of Cultural Studies, an ‘organic and unifying origin’
assumed to lie at the source of culture (Frow 1995: 143), the recent publication of
New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Bennett,
Grossberg and Morris 2005) suggests a less benign vision. George Yúdice’s
entry for this term reads:
It comes as no surprise that by the mid-1980’s, in a context of market-
driven economic and political liberalization, the collapse of communism,
and the rise of new forms of global governance and new forms of
mobilization on the basis of cultural rights, the discourse of community is
used to legitimate conservative private assistance and self-help projects
and liberal public-private partnerships that “empower” communities to
govern and even police themselves. (Bennett, Grossberg and Morris
2005: 53)
Yúdice’s entry cites a US account of Community Arts as ‘[suffusing the arts]
throughout the civic structure […] from youth programs and crime prevention to
job training and race relations (Larson, qtd in Bennett, Grossberg and Morris
2005: 53). If this presents a rather bleak account of the global rise of ‘community’
as a strategy of neo-liberal government, then Christine Everingham’s history of
community in Australian social policy would concur. Everingham suggests that
the socially progressive agendas signaled by the Whitlam Labor government’s
(1972-75) introduction of the term ‘community’ into Australian social policy—in
short, an attempt to democratize, de-centralize and expand the welfare system
through enlisting the agency of the population—was derailed under successive
governments, with the term community being gradually detached from social
justice claims and their associated popular movements, and inserted into a
radically new agenda for social policy heralded by the rhetorics (and theory) of
‘social inclusion’ (Everingham 2003). Here, social inequalities were no longer
understood as the consequences of the reproduction of macro-level structures
that can be redressed by Nation-States through policies of redistribution, so
much as symptoms of the failings of specific sections of the population who lack
the capacity to compete in the new economy and are therefore in need of more
intense forms of contract-based management and behavioral correction. The
shift from a ‘rights’ model of welfare provision to that of the economic
management of ‘unproductive’ sectors of the population is described by
Everingham as a transition from ‘welfare’ to ‘workfare’. ‘The new social policy
agenda aims to include the marginalized through various workfare programs
which have as their main aim the shaping of the character of the unemployed.’
(Everingham 2003: 14; original emphasis). Where Yúdice connects the rise of
community programs in the US to the ascendancy of the Right, Everingham’s
narrative focuses on the decline of the traditional politics and values of the
Australian Left. Where they perhaps differ is in Everingham’s suggestion that
claims for ‘social rights’ by new social movements in Australia were the positive
means by which an earlier welfare agenda would be carried out, rather than a
symptom of its demise. For Everingham, this process has left ‘community’ as a
terrain of political contestation, one in which Conservative parties appeal
nostalgically to a lost moral community that might be restored through (in
Australia, for instance) the introduction of ‘values education’ in schools and
citizenship tests for migrants, while the New Left seeks to capture the electoral
middle ground by emphasising an otherwise bi-partisan social inclusion agenda
that seeks to build up the trust, confidence and ‘social capital’ of the excluded.2
It would be tempting to read the history of CCD in Australia, with its origins
in what is popularly referred to as the Community Arts movement of the 1970’s,
in terms of the narratives Everingham and Yúdice suggest. It is true Community
Arts appeared on the horizon of Australian Cultural Policy under the Whitlam
government, and was at that time associated with high level government
rhetorics about ‘cultural rights’ and strongly ‘anti-elitist’ critiques of the unequal
distribution of cultural resources (Hawkins 1993: 29-45). If we were to follow
through with this reading, the circulation of notions of ‘community’ around a film
like The Finished People would reflect an ideological cover for contemporary
neo-liberal reform, one that conceals the loss of agency of an earlier generation
of community activists whose successes in translating cultural rights discourses
into government programs were slowly appropriated in the post-Whitlam era for
‘community training’.
However, in the case of Australian Community Arts such an account is
unsustainable. As Gay Hawkins’ excavation of the governmental rationales
behind the creation of Community Arts suggests, beneath the major changes to
the structures of arts policy that accompanied the creation of the original
Community Arts Committee of the Australia Council in 1973 lay profound
continuities with traditionally ‘reformist’ rationales for arts funding; that is,
rationales that seek to deploy the arts in reforming the conduct and capacities of
citizens. Hawkins notes that the problem Community Arts addressed, and which
made its rationale distinctive, was the uneven participation of the population in
the arts (Hawkins 1993: 35). However articulating this ‘problem’ involved the
construction of a specific constituency Community Arts might address; the
‘culturally disadvantaged’. This category was composed of those groups who
lacked access to culture, where ‘culture’ was understood in its Arnoldian sense
as those Western creative arts valued for their civilizing effect.
These groups were culturally disadvantaged because they were either
unaware of or uninterested in the arts. For them, strategies focused not
simply on education about the arts but on access to art as a form of
therapy or recreation. The right to culture was based on the right to be
helped through art.’ (Hawkins 1993: 44; emphasis added).
Significant would be Hawkins’ point that the constituency of the ‘culturally
disadvantaged’ wasn’t addressed as an audience whose tastes had been
ignored by elitist forms of arts subsidy, so much as a disparate range of groups
whose cultural disadvantage could be redressed through exposure to the
improving effects of participation. ‘Prisoners, children, the aged et cetera were
denied this status [that of an audience]. Their cultural lack meant that for them art
was primarily a form of therapy, a hands-on activity, an aid to self-expression and
identity.’ (Hawkins 1993: 37)
It is here that we can locate beneath a ‘rights’ discourse a much older
rationale for arts subsidy; one for which ‘art’ is not a substantive goal of funding,
or even a means of promoting the status of a locality through showcasing its
achievements, but rather an instrument for reforming the behaviors and
developing the capacities of ‘problem’ sectors of the population. It is in this
context that we can understand the priorities of the original Community Arts
Committee as revealed by the budget for the year 1974/75, where the funding
category of ‘Children, Youth and Multi-Arts Workshops’ accounted for 57% of the
committee’s expenditure compared to only 0.2% for the funding category of
‘Senior Citizens’ (Hawkins 1993: 42). While an account focused on the success
of a cultural rights discourse couldn’t explain why older Australians were so
underrepresented, an account that emphasized the governmental role of the arts
in training the productive capacities of the population can readily appreciate why
such a program would actively target funding at children and young people —
just as it can account for why the committee possessed a specific funding
category for projects targeting the populations of ‘Institutions and Prisons’ (1.4%
of funding in 1974/’75; Hawkins 1993: 42).
In focusing on the centrality of those normative governmental rationales
for Community Arts, I don’t want to suggest that the emergence of Community
Arts programs had nothing to do with social movements (new or old), community-
based politics, or ‘cultural activism’ (which Stephen Muecke usefully defines as
the strategic use of culture by agents pursuing political agendas; Muecke 1998).
Such a claim would itself be itself unsustainable. However, the virtue of Hawkins’
account is that it lets us read the rationales for Community Arts in Australia as
deeply reformist and normative, even as we can appreciate how any particular
Community Arts project or program might facilitate symbolic challenges from the
position of emergent, disadvantaged and/or marginalised constituencies, and that
this ‘resistant ethos’ might even come to be central to the self-understandings of
the sector. The point is that while Community Arts might be used to express such
‘cultural rights’, it cannot be accused of having abandoned such goals under neo-
liberalism as such ‘rights’ were always marginal to the policy rationales by which,
in Australia at least, Community Arts was developed as a tool of government.
The shift in Australia in 1989 to the term ‘Community Cultural
Development’ broadened the focus from ‘arts’ to ‘culture’ to encompass a greater
diversity of practices as part of its remit (‘popular arts’, ‘ethnic arts’), even as the
addition of the term ‘development’ more narrowly focused on the key policy
priority embedded in its origins. ‘Community’ had always been an important term
in administering the Community Arts program as it articulated with the mission
statements of those institutions already dispersed throughout the relevant
geographies and through which the Australia Council might reach the ‘culturally
disadvantaged’. Community Cultural Development can hence be described as a
practice; an ensemble of techniques and rationalities that are held together by
the common principle that ‘culture’ can assist in the development of those
sections of the population who are to be located and organised by the term
‘community’. However, it can also be described as a sector composed of a
network of personnel scattered across an archipelago of local government and
non-government agencies, from the Cultural Planning departments of municipal
government to the outreach workers of philanthropic organisations, NGO’s, and
service providers, as well as the purpose-built community arts centres located in
those regions in which the target populations are found; typically areas with
working class populations facing high unemployment and significant numbers of
migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds.
Creative pedagogies
Figure 1. Sara (Mylinh Dinh) and Tommy (Jason McGoldrick), The Finished
People (2003). Image courtesy of the director.
The Finished People centres on the lives of three young male characters, each of
whom were played by students from the original Open Family workshops. The
three character’s stories never intersect, but through the careful interlacing of
their stories with scenes of Cabramatta’s street-life, the film documents the
ambient exchange between people and place in a way that suggests the film’s
real concern is with a geographically specific milieu, rather than character or plot.
Before discussing how the film mediates public struggles around its location and
facilitates the forms of symbolic resistance often associated community arts
projects, I want to focus on the storylines of the film’s three male leads in order to
consider how the various forms of ‘character development’ that occur here reflect
a form of supervised, but ultimately self-propelled, pedagogy for the actors
themselves. Such a close reading of the film’s narratives may seem superficial,
but by paying attention to this narrative surface—one that is written and
performed by the subjects of cultural development themselves—it becomes
possible to appreciate the means by which the creative capacities of the group
have been enlisted in a project that makes problematic individual behaviors both
visible and amenable to reform.
The key motivating factor in the development of the film’s three male
characters is their sympathetic bonds to three young women whose involvement
in their lives becomes, in one way or another, an occasion to confront the effects
of their own choices. Van (Joe Le) sleeps in a rooftop carpark above a market
where he spends his days alone, before he is befriended by Carla (Daniela
Italiano) after he steals a shirt from her clothesline. Des (Rodney Anderson) is
living on the streets with his pregnant girlfriend Sophie (Sarah Vongmany),
before he decides to work for a local crime boss in order to make some money
so they can get off the street. Tommy (Jason McGoldrick), an intermittent heroin
user since the age of 13, is trying to get straight, and get a job. With the help of
his old school friend Sara (Mylinh Dinh), Tommy starts attending job interviews in
which wary employers ask what he does with his time in Cabramatta. As this
brief synopsis shows, the film is a highly gendered text where women play
supporting roles in the narrative trajectories of the film’s three male leads (Smaill,
2007). Significantly, these three actors (Italiano, Vongmany and Dinh) were not
clients of Open Family or participants in the original video classes, but were
recruited for the production at a later stage.
In the case of Tommy the forms of ‘pedagogy’ enabled by his sympathetic
relation to Sara are quite literal. Tommy develops a crush on Sara who begins to
encourage him to get his life together, including teaching him how to present
himself in job interviews (Sara is a hairdresser). The film still above is from a
scene in which this romantic attachment is skilfully manipulated by Sara to help
Tommy overcome his addiction to heroin. Frustrated by his constant lapses, Sara
demands Tommy give her a hit, knowing that in refusing her request Tommy will
be forced to confront the destructive effects of his own addiction. In the case of
Van, a homeless Vietnamese Australian whose family fled Vietnam as refugees,
it is through his evolving friendship with Carla that he is able to talk about his
difficult relationship with an overbearing father who was a veteran of the Vietnam
war and wants his son to join the army. It is through this friendship that Van
‘opens up’ and tries to contact his family, eventually returning home. In the case
of Des the pedagogy is more subtle and convoluted, and has a less decisive
outcome, yet is abundantly clear in the scene where Des is forced by the crime
boss to choose between his own life and the physical well-being of his pregnant
girlfriend. While the impossible decision Des’ employer offers makes for high
drama, the moral point of the situation could hardly be clearer. Des’ bad choice of
social networks will inevitably hurt those around him. In this, the crime boss
functions like a range of secondary characters—social workers, parents, friends,
potential employers—whose involvement contributes to an unrelenting form of
supervised ‘self-realisation’ that operates through the sympathetic bonds of the
film’s three principle characters.
In these formulaic narratives we can perceive traces of a form of ‘pastoral
pedagogy’ that organises the CCD project as a form of group work through which
commitments to a shared project, and the sympathetic relations required to
realise this project, are purposively cultivated by the CCD worker as a means of
building-up the ethical capacities of participants; capacities such as trust,
reliability, initiative, patience, communication, cooperation, and so on. I borrow
the term ‘pastoral pedagogy’ from the historian of education Ian Hunter who uses
it to describe a relatively unchanged mode of student-pupil relation in the
Western popular school in which teachers encourage their students’ own forms
of ‘self-expression’ in a process of ongoing ethical problematisation and
correction, and whose ultimate objective is ‘to form the capacities for individuals
to conduct themselves as self-reflective and self-governing persons’ (Hunter
1996: 160).3 CCD work, especially in the context of clients recruited through an
outreach program, involves ‘duties of care’ well beyond those associated with
school teaching. In interviews for The Finished People the director reveals that
during production he was often driving one cast member to meet their parole
officer each afternoon, and that shooting had to begin late each morning as
another cast member had to visit a methadone clinic (Moses 2003; Topp 2004).
Filming Cabramatta
If, from the point of view of cultural policy, the term ‘community’ can be
understood as an administrative rubric that enables the organising of a target
population for cultural development, then in the case of The Finished People it
was also a key rhetorical effect that enabled the film’s writers, director and
cinematographers to bundle together a wide range of issues associated with the
production and location of the film (youth homelessness, drug addiction, ethnic
diversity, refugee heritage, tabloid news media) and address them to a broader
audience. While the film’s origins in a CCD project underscored the credibility of
the film’s director to address these issues, equally crucial was the location itself
which has a substantial public profile in Australia due to both regular moral
panics in the media as well as long-standing tourist promotion projects by local
government. Kevin Dunn notes how from the late 1980’s Cabramatta tourism
was perceived by local authorities as a way of combining a positive image
campaign with economic development, as well as a form of ‘place-making’ that
would have significance for local migrant communities (Dunn 1998). In this it was
hoped that the prolific negative news media associating the area with
unemployment, ‘ethnic ghettos’ and drugs (which Cabramatta locals, reportedly,
regarded as causing the drug trade to increase in the late 1990s through
attracting users (Kremmer 2005)) would be replaced by tourists and shoppers.
These tourism campaigns which have flagged Cabramatta as ‘Sydney’s day-trip
to Asia’, and currently go by the title ‘Cabramatta: a taste of Asia’, have
generated a substantial cosmopolitan profile for the area, largely centered
around the Vietnamese restaurants and gift shops of Cabramatta’s CBD and
main shopping mall, Freedom Plaza (Hage 1997). While strongly modelled on
inner-city Chinatowns, the ornamental gateway and stone sculptures in Freedom
Plaza are perhaps unique for foregrounding the refugee backgrounds of many of
Cabramatta’s residents, community groups and traders. Freedom Plaza now
incorporates multiple functions, including street beautification, heritage
development, counter-media/positive image campaign and, most recently, CCTV
surveillance (Dunn 1993; Dunn 1998; Dunn 2003).
The Finished People has an ambivalent relationship to the urban
developments it is set amongst, as it partly shares their function in terms of
responding to negative media-hype through ‘re-imaging’ Cabramatta for both a
local and non-local audience, yet it does this by showing those images of street
life—heroin use, gang violence, petty crime—which these developments were
designed to replace (as exportable images) and deter (through open-plan design,
community ownership of public space, and surveillance). In this, it follows Dai
Le’s Taking Charge of Cabramatta (1999); a short TV documentary about the
intense community politics that enveloped the staging of a promotional ‘Flower
Festival’ in Freedom Plaza, and which contains revealing cut-away shots of
young people being searched by police. Unsurprisingly, the making of The
Finished People was a locally ambivalent process. In several interviews the
director notes the high level of community support they received from local
traders, as well as occasions when the crew were harassed by shopkeepers who
mistakenly thought they were from A Current Affair (a primetime tabloid news
program known for its ‘moral panic’ stories) (Topp 2004).
Cabramatta’s urban developments provided not only the freely available
sets in which the film’s action unfolds, but also enabled the film’s many
architectural segues to display the symbolic work of refugee place-making in both
everyday and historical contexts. This engagement with local heritage provides
an ambiguous background for the story of the Vietnamese Australian character
Van who now sleeps in the car-park above Cabramatta’s Freedom Market. The
film includes some pointed juxtaposing of the word ‘Freedom’ at both Freedom
Plaza and Freedom Market with scenes of the everyday constraints and
unconventional freedoms that come with Van’s experience of social
marginalisation. This referencing of Vietnamese Australian historicity is
underscored by the refugee background of the film’s Vietnamese Australian
director, as well as the fact the production company he and his brother (Sydney-
based actor Anh Do) founded for the project was named ‘Post-’75 Productions’.
This title references the period after the Vietnam war ended in 1975, a year that
is commemorated by Vietnamese media and community organisations as The
Fall of Saigon and a genesis-moment for a Vietnamese diaspora. The
confrontation between Tommy and Sara referred to above takes place at the foot
of Cabramatta’s Vietnam War memorial, a unique heritage development
sponsored by local organisations that commemorates the Australia-South
Vietnam alliance. The memorial is a larger than life bronze sculpture of two rather
depressed looking soldiers—one representing Australia, the other the ill-fated
Republic of (South) Vietnam. On the director’s audio dub for the film’s DVD, the
director states
There’s a statue of two soldiers there. And when we made this film a lot of
people asked how come we didn’t use these two soldiers in Van’s story,
because Van has a war component to him. I always thought that was a
little too obvious. I kind of think that Tommy’s story and the war which he
is fighting, the war against drugs, is probably for our world today just as
strong a war as any. (Do 2003).
The rhetoric of the Nixon administration’s ‘war on drugs’ is significant here.
Tommy’s ‘war which he is fighting’ articulates both his struggle to give up heroin
and reinvent himself socially, as well as the State’s ‘zero tolerance’ approach to
drug users; that is, people like Tommy. In the years immediately prior to the film’s
production Cabramatta had been subject to several police ‘crackdowns’. In 2000-
2001 a research collaboration between Law and Health researchers on the
effects of these interventions interviewed 123 young Indochinese Australians
who were involved in using and/or distributing heroin in the area. This research
concluded that interactions between these young people and police were
conducted in a ‘climate of fear, racism and hostility’, that there was strong
evidence recent police practices were routinely unlawful, as well as perceived by
their interviewees as intentionally degrading and legally dubious. (Dixon and
Maher 2002)4
So, in the context of a very real ‘war on drugs’, Tommy’s story is set at the
site where Van’s would have been. But there is another role reversal here which
avoids ‘the obvious’. As the subject of the film’s only heroin-related narrative, it is
significant Tommy is a white Australian who lives in Cabramatta. This not only
responds to the strongly racialised media reports on Cabramatta’s drug trade
(Teo 2000) but is congruent with the film’s broader representational strategies in
relation to cultural diversity which might be usefully described as a form of ‘post-
ethnic’ cinema. The concept of ‘post-ethnic cinema’ has been used to describe
the representational strategies of a number of Asian Australian filmmakers
adopted during an era of strong State support for policies of multiculturalism (the
1980’s and early 90’s) which seek to circumvent the framing of their identities as
‘ethnic filmmakers’ (Yue 2000). Although Audrey Yue describes post-ethnicity as
a strategy for negotiating the kinds of patronising discourses on ethnic others
Ghassan Hage would describe (in his critique of Labor-era multiculturalism) as
‘cosmopolitan-multiculturalism’ (Hage 1997), in the context of the Howard
government’s withdrawal of support for multiculturalism and nods to populist
attacks on minorities as having ‘too much power’, The Finished People’s muted
engagement with Vietnamese Australian history seems intended to present
cultural diversity as an historical given of public culture, thereby heading-off any
perception of the film as a function of ‘minority interest’.
This last observation draws attention to the way in which the translation of
a CCD project into a feature film required its makers to dis-embed its content
from a local context. For its 2003 cinema release, the film’s epigram described
Cabramatta as ‘the drug and crime capital of Australia’ (attributed to a Federal
MP). However this was replaced on the 2004 DVD release with a quotation
(political gaffe and subsequent media sound-byte) from a former Labor Prime
Minister, Robert J. Hawke (1983-1991), that infamously suggested in 1987 that
‘by 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty’. Here the function of the
epigram shifts from a local reaction to the linking of a national problem to a
specific suburb (drugs, Cabramatta), to a local response to a national problem
(youth poverty) that has been politically reneged on. In the shift from addressing
Art House audiences and film reviewers to a national release for video stores,
broadcast television and the collections of schools, universities and public
libraries, the film’s address hence changes from a response to Cabramatta being
made an example of in terms of bad citizenship, to a would-be exemplary
engagement with a national problem. While the rhetorics of what Meaghan Morris
would describe as the ‘activism of the toured’ are thereby muted in the DVD cut
of the film (it’s hard not to feel the dated epigram highlights the film’s made-for-
TV intimacy effects, a temper which is ultimately sentimental and nostalgic) it’s
easy to appreciate the film’s turn to a popular idiom to carry its concerns (Morris
1998: 41).
‘Creative Communities’
Following an internal review of its structures, the Australia Council announced in
December 2004 a series of wide-sweeping changes, including the dissolution of
the Community Cultural Development Board, the peak funding body for the CCD
sector (Australia Council 2005). It proposed that future CCD policy and project
funding would be handled by a new section called ‘Community Partnerships’
located within the newly renamed ‘Community Partnerships and Market
Development Division’ (previously known as the Audience and Market
Development Division). The Community Partnerships section would have a broad
range of responsibilities, centrally including CCD but not being restricted to this
particular practice. (Australia Council 2005). Through this new model the
Australia Council sought to ‘capitalise on CCD and other community partnership
opportunities’ and ‘increase non-arts support for the arts in community from
government, non-government and private sources’ (Australia Council 2006).
Following the announcements, a Community Partnerships Scoping Study was
commissioned which conducted nation-wide consultations with the CCD sector,
delivering its ‘Creative Communities’ report in June 2006. Although it is too early
to know how the implementation of the report’s 16 recommendations will effect
the future shape of Australia Council funding for CCD, and the extent to which
these policies will effect changes within the sector (which possesses a broad and
institutionally diverse funding base already), the recommendations and emergent
themes in the Scoping Study’s discussion papers and reports provide general
indications of the directions for future Australia Council support for what the
study’s terms of reference describe as ‘art in and with communities’ (Community
Partnerships Scoping Study Reference Group (CPSSRG) 2006: 34).
Significantly, the key term Creative Communities, defined as ‘the broad
spectrum of arts and cultural development activity in and with communities’ (Mills
2006: 11), in place of Community Cultural Development substantially broadens
the field of reference. The Scoping Study Reference Group noted that the term
Community Cultural Development was regarded by many in the sector as having
been too narrowly interpreted by the previous Board as a practice that is
exclusively focused on disadvantaged groups and which produced outcomes that
were regarded as inferior to other fields of cultural activity (Mills 2006: 11).
Central problems the final report sought to redress through its recommendations
were the low symbolic status of CCD work and its outcomes (CPSSRG 2006: 7,
18-19), the sector’s low public visibility and ‘marginalisation from the broader arts
and cultural industry’ (CPSSRG 2006; 7) and the falling incomes of CCD artists
(at a time when the average artist’s income increased; CPSSRG 2006: 7).
Although this is not the place for a detailed reading of this report, it is clear
that the reform of CCD is being achieved by de-specifying its content. After a
keyword summary of the rationales for investing in community arts and culture
(‘inclusiveness’, ‘belonging’, ‘community building’, ‘identity’, ‘diversity’ and
‘dialogue’) a key finding of the report positions ‘community arts and cultural
practices’ as a ‘vital link’ between ‘the arts and cultural sector’ on the one hand,
and ‘the everyday lives of the broader community’ on the other. What this link
between a ‘cultural sector’ and ‘everyday life’ does is ‘deliver a wide range of
arts, cultural, social and economic benefits’ (CPSSRG 2006: 3). In drawing such
a broad range of loosely articulated policy goals together, the Creative
Communities strategy follows recent developments in the field of Cultural
Planning, a municipal and state level government sector which currently
balances a wide array of rationales for arts support (everything from ‘social
inclusion’ through urban place making to ‘creative economies’) and with which
the Creative Communities report seeks to establish stronger links with
(Stevenson 2004).
In describing The Finished People as anticipating the direction of these
reforms, I don’t want to suggest that it anticipates the kinds of CCD projects (let
alone films) that might be produced in future. Clearly the unique combination of
the film’s location, director and participants, and political timing were crucial
factors in its capacity to command public attention. In making the methodologies
of CCD central to a community project that was capable of gaining traction within
a completely different domain of arts policy and set of industry partners, involving
much higher levels of public presentation and media visibility, the film
demonstrates one (albeit spectacular) permutation of the flexibility and
entrepreneurialism that Creative Communities policy appears to strive for. At
once cultural commodity, CCD outreach project, and critical intervention, The
Finished People is perhaps exemplary of how CCD workers may in future seek to
balance the mixed rationales and agendas they are expected to facilitate.
As the rationales and institutions engaged in cultural development are
linked to the policy objectives and networks of adjacent government and non-
government sectors, there will arise dilemmas of how such projects are
evaluated. Given this, it’s no surprise the report recommends funds for research
papers and a national publication for critical review and debate around projects
and practices, one which might include professional arts reviewers (CPSSRG,
2006: 29). More difficult than debates about the aesthetic value of community-
based productions, however, will be the questions of formal accountability that
attend the processes of evaluating projects that engage widely different
rationales and partners. How will projects that engage incommensurable
rationales be measured against each other in competitive grant allocations?
How will the value of ‘public success’ itself be assessed in the presence of other,
more mundane measures, such as improvements in the social capacities of
participants? Public visibility and the praise of arts reviewers do not in
themselves reform the behaviour of participants any more than the commercial
viability of a project does.
On the other hand, it’s easy to appreciate the possibilities such a
convergence might bring about; that ‘local communities’ might intervene in
symbolic struggles over contested geographies and identities and produce an
audience for this intervention. But we shouldn’t forget such expression of ‘cultural
rights’ is not guaranteed by the governmental rationales behind such projects,
rationales I have suggested are designed to build up more basic forms of
capacity that are, although less aesthetic, no less important. While The Finished
People may present a ‘happy coincidence’ of competing agendas, such a
coincidence is not assured by policy.
Gay Hawkins concluded her 1993 history of Community Arts in Australia
by suggesting the problem with the term ‘community’ was that it was used to
sustain a policy space in which ‘those uninterested in art were constituted as
lacking’, (Hawkins 1993: 167) and that its imprecision was an obstacle for
effective cultural policy. ‘[Community] functioned as an empty classificatory
space that could be filled in too many different ways by too many interests.
(Hawkins 1993: 159). It seems ironic that such flexibility could be interpreted as a
key reason for the renewed currency of ‘community’, and that this return signals
an attempt to reduce the extent to which a cultural development model might
dominate the field.
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1 Considered as an agent capable of effecting change, community would be an example of those
‘phantom agents’ Tony Bennett once argued (in a canonical essay) prevent Cultural Studies from
appreciating the technical operations of government. See Bennett (1992).
2 Everingham highlights that in the social inclusion model of services reform, social capital is read
after Robert Putnam (ie. not Bourdieu) as a measure of the population’s capacity to generate, and
draw on, its own resources (mutual trust, community organisation, et cetera) in facing higher
levels of exposure to risk—the type of exposure that might ensue, for instance, from drastically
reduced levels of government support for social services.
3 Hunter describes this pedagogic relation as ‘pastoral’ because it inherits the ethical disciplines
of Christian pastoral care that were incorporated into the Western school system via the ethically
exemplary persona of the sympathetic teacher. See Hunter (1996). Hunter’s work on the
instrumental basis of arts education has strongly influenced my reading of the history of
Australian community arts.
4 The two most common complaints in this regard were strip-searches of suspects in front of
officers of the opposite sex, and the confiscation of money from suspects without charges being
laid. (Dixon and Maher 2002: pp 98-101).
