A creative gift economy: pre-pandemic creative systems examined through a study of regional creative industries in Australia

Abstract

Australia’s creative industries and the impact COVID-19 had on cultural, employment and economic outputs is examined through the themes creative systems, creative migration, cultural volunteering and cultural tourism. Using a Creative System/Ecosystem theoretical framework, this research takes a retrospective view through data collected during the ‘old normal’ that was pre-pandemic Australia and presents findings on creative and cultural activities occurring in seven statistically determined creative hotspots. These findings are reviewed against the COVID-19 economic stimulus packages created by Australian Federal and State Governments. The research takes a deep dive into the precarious nature of creative employment and migration, cultural volunteering and tourism, through an investigation of Australia’s regional creative economies and points to the existence of a gift economy that sustains many activities that are essential to the Creative Industries.

Keywords:

• Creative ecosystems
• creative migration
• cultural volunteering
• cultural tourism
• australian creative industries

Introduction

The impact COVID-19 had on the cultural and creative sectors was unprecedented with the Australian Bureau of Statistics finding that 94% of businesses operating in Arts and Recreational Services were adversely affected by the first wave of lock downs, compared to 53% of businesses as a whole (Flew and Kirkwood 2020, 16–17). In 2020, creative employment and earnings plummeted as COVID-19 shut down many creative sectors, triggering governments to put in place support packages to maintain key creative and economic markets .

To really understand what these rescue packages mean and their potential effectiveness, it is necessary to understand what ‘normal’ levels of creative and cultural activity looked like in Australia and how these creative ecosystems operated pre-pandemic. Prior to COVID, Australian scholars investigated the activities of creative and cultural corporations, entrepreneurs, small to media businesses, micro businesses and creative agents (Flew 2012; Taylor and Luckman 2020; Gibson et al. 2017). What is visible in this creative industries’ research is the rise of a neoliberal agenda in the politics that have dominated western economies (Davies and Sigthorsson 2013, 47). This agenda has fuelled policy changes for governments wanting to enable change within ‘organisational structures, mainly through the privatization of state-owned institutions and businesses and the relaxation of state-control through deregulation’ (Davies and Sigthorsson 2013, 47). The effect of these changes, running parallel with global policy shifts, has been the emergence of a creative economy ecology that supports vertical disintegration resulting in an increasingly and acutely visible highly casualised workforce (Dawson and Holmes 2012; Deuze 2007; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011). These changes, which are evident in the creative industries, as elsewhere, are noted in reports presenting international, national and regional perspectives on the creative industries (Cox 2005; CIIC 2013; Gibson et al. 2017; Lea et al. 2009; Lhermitte, Blanc, and Perrin 2015; McIntyre et al. 2023a; McIntyre et al. 2023b; NESTA 2006). Scholarship that focuses on employment opportunities for creative workers has also shown that freelancing and self-employment are increasingly dominant (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011; Taylor and Luckman 2020) with the precarious nature of employment and job insecurity (Deuze 2007) making working conditions detrimental to creative outcomes (Dawson and Holmes 2012). Changes in working conditions over the last decade have enabled the rise of a creative gift economy where creatives volunteer their time, in lieu of renumeration, in order to produce creative outputs to maintain an active and dynamic creative ecosystem (McIntyre et al. 2023a, McIntyre et al. 2023b). The research presented here was conducted pre-pandemic in the Australian regions and takes a deep dive into the precarious nature of creative employment and creative migration, cultural volunteering and cultural tourism through an investigation of Australia’s regional creative economies.

Pre-pandemic statistics valued the economic contribution of Australia’s creative industries at $111.7 billion, 6.4% of Australia’s gross domestic product (Bureau of Communications and Arts and Regional Research 2020, 2). The 2016 Australia Census identified 593,830 workers earning their primary income from creative activities, with employment in the creative industries growing at an average of 5.5% per annum, nearly twice the rate of the rest of the Australian workforce (Cunningham and McCutcheon 2018). These creative industries were seen as generators of new and potentially valuable content that create potential for wealth and job creation through the exploitation of intellectual property, encompassing all the subcategories of the arts, design, media and information software sectors (Davies and Sigthorsson 2013, 4; Flew 2012, 84).

Australian Government support for COVID affected creatives industries

Australian governments provided support packages administered via a broad range of sector organisations. In 2021, the Federal Government released the ‘Creative Economy JobMaker Package’ of $250 million as extra funding for the arts and entertainment sectors. In 2023, the Australian Government released Revive a comprehensive policy to rebuild the arts, entertainment and cultural landscape over five years, injecting $286 million into the Art sector (Australian Government 2023). Other arts and entertainment economic support packages ranged from $2.5 million to $200 million, with guidelines and applications for grants administered by sector bodies like the Australia Council, Screen Australia, Australian Museums and Galleries Associations, Support Act Charity, and the Relief and Recovery (RRF) funding for the Indigenous Visual Arts Industry. High profile initiatives like RISE – Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand Fund – have received $200 million. The Screen Production sector received economic incentives of $540 million from 2018 which were increased during COVID to attract large budget international film and television productions to Australia up until 2027 (Australian Government 2022).

Regional Australia have been specifically supported with a regional arts tourism package of $5 million for competitive grants and $2.4 million for regional festivals. Indigenous art centres and art fairs received $8.5 million in a Relief and Recovery fund. The Australian Museums and Galleries Associations, which will administer the Cultural, Heritage and Arts Regional Tourism (CHART) program, received $3 million. Performing arts touring in regional and remote Australian communities received $5 million through the Playing Australia Regional Recovery Investment fund administered by the Australia Council. All of these support packages benefit those earning a living in specific sectors of the creative industries.

Measuring Australia’s creative economies

The creative economy captured in these research projects was assessed through the economic value for all creative work conducted across the creative and non-creative industries. We argue that creative work can be both paid and unpaid work as long as the work is produced through ‘a combination of individual creativity and the mass-production of symbolic cultural goods’ (Davies and Sigthorsson 2013, 4). The theoretical and methodological foundation applied in this study was drawn from a pilot project which found that a regional creative industry functioned as a dynamic and diverse creative system in action (See Figure 1). This creative system was both complex and scaled and its activities strived ‘toward a dynamic equilibrium of inflows and outflows …. It is dependent on an active relationship being in place between choice making agents, domains of knowledge and an arena of social contestation called a field – this is how the creative system in the Hunter works’ (McIntyre et al. 2019b, 219)

Figure 1. The creative system, or ecosystem, at work, initially published in creativity and cultural production in the hunter final report (McIntyre et al. 2019a).

Both Australian research projects, the Hunter pilot (McIntyre et al. 2023b) and the national study of creative hotspots (Cunningham et al. 2021), drew on data sources from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) as well as figures calculating Gross Regional Product and Gross Domestic Product. When combined, these provided a comprehensive account of the prosperity of creative economies in regional Australia.

The quantitative statistical approach used the creative trident methodology (Higgs and Lennon 2014) as it provided a framework to understand creative employment with three creative worker classifications: specialist, embedded and support workers. Specialists are employed as creative workers in the creative industries, embedded workers are employed as creative workers in non-creative industries, and support workers are those who are employed in other occupations that support the creative industries like HR, payroll or administrators (Higgs and Lennon 2014). The creative trident draws on employment classifications administered by the ABS and drills down to the level of creative services, that is, architecture and design, advertising and marketing, and software and digital content, and cultural production occupations, that is, in music, visual and performing arts, film, television and radio, and publishing.

These quantitative statistical approaches provided a solid foundation to examine business activities and employment data but, to effectively capture secondary incomes or unpaid creative work, a qualitative approach that examined the multi-faceted and complex ecosystems of a creative economy that are geographically located in the Australian regions was also applied. The following, therefore, is a statistical analysis of the creative hotspots before moving to a discussion on the ethnographic findings of the research that contributes to the existence of a creative gift economy.

The Australian Cultural and Creative Activity: a population and hotspot analysis study

The nationally focused research conducted on creative hotspots (Australian Cultural and Creative Activity: A Population and Hotspot Analysis) presents ‘pre-COVID normal’ levels of creative industries business and employment activities, breaking down each Australian state and regional area in terms of employment and wages with comparative ratios providing the details of a prosperous creative economy (Cunningham et al. 2021).

Detailed reports describe research results from creative hotspots across five Australian states: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. This paper highlights the research findings from NSW and Victorian regions drawing on seven sites selected by the state government agencies Create NSW and Creative Victoria. These sites were selected against four measures (employment and intensity for creative services and cultural production sectors). Creative and general economic indicators for each of these hotspots is presented in Table 1, including creative employment and intensity, total workforce, business registrations, gross regional product estimates and demographic data.

Table 1. Statistical comparison NSW and Victoria.

Comparison NSW and Victoria	Greater Geelong & Surf Coast LGAs	Ballarat LGA	Greater Bendigo LGA	Albury & Wodonga LGAs	Coffs Harbour & Bellingen LGAs	Marrickville & Sydenham SA2s	Wollongong LGA
ASGS remoteness category, Australia	Inner regional	Inner regional	Inner regional	Inner regional	Inner regional	Major cities	Inner regional
RAI region type	Regional city/Connected lifestyle region	Regional city	Regional city	Regional city/Industry & service hub	Regional city	Major metropolitan	Regional city
Resident population, 2016^a	262,828	101,689	110,479	90,427	85,612	34,380	203,630
Average annual growth 2011–2016	2.1%	1.7%	1.9%	1.6%	1.1%	1.6%	1.1%
Employed persons, 2016^b	103,752	45,794	45,051	43,915	32,495	19,030	79,222
Average annual growth 2011–2016	3.8%	3.3%	3.5%	3.0%	2.7%	5.4%	1.8%
Total creative employment, 2016 ^b	4,316	2,137	1,367	1,113	915	1,496	3,217
Average annual growth 2011–2016	5.7%	2.0%	2.9%	0.3%	2.1%	6.8%	2.6%
Total earnings from creative employment, 2016 ^b	$260.2m	$119.1m	$77.0m	$64.1m	$46.9m	$89.5m	$208.1m
Average annual growth 2011–2016	4.8%	4.4%	4.7%	3.8%	3.9%	6.3%	2.6%
CI Employment Intensity	4.2%	4.7%	3%	2.5%	2.8%	7.9%	4.1%
Total businesses, 2016	66,897	23,499	22,709	21,361	22,064	12,576	44,083
Average annual growth 2011–2016	2.3%	2.9%	1.7%	1.0%	0.8%	1.4%	2.1%
Total creative businesses, 2016	5,060	1,668	1,444	1,125	1,484	2,428	4,100
Average annual growth 2011–2016	4.7%	4.1%	3.0%	2.9%	1.4%	5.1%	4.3%
Proportion of all businesses registered for GST, 2016	49.4%	52.0%	51.2%	51.4%	49.7%	49.9%	45.9%
Proportion of creative businesses registered for GST, 2016	38.0%	40.5%	38.0%	39.9%	39.2%	34.9%	33.4%
Regional domestic product, 2017–18	$13,852m	$5,632m	$5,305m	$5,192m	$3,857m	$1,929m^c	$11,012m
Average annual growth	5.0%	8.4%	0.8%	0.1%
Mean age ^a	40.1	39.0	39.5	38.7	42.4	38.1	39.6
Unemployment rate^a	6.5%	7.6%	6.8%	6.9%	7.3%	5.6%	7.7%
Youth unemployment rate^a	13.2%	15.0%	14.0%	13.3%	15.3%	11.4%	16.3%
Youth unemployment ratio^a	45.3%	46.7%	44.8%	45.3%	48.0%	43.4%	48.5%
Indigenous^a	2.6%	1.5%	1.7%	2.6%	4.8%	1.7%	2.6%
Volunteer^a	17.4%	17.8%	18.7%	17.3%	17.1%	14.2%	15.2%

Note a.These statistics are provided by place of residence, and b. are by place of work c. RDP for Marrickville/Sydenham is estimated by multiplying RDP for the Inner West LGA by the proportion of employed persons located in Marrickville/Sydenham. Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016), ABR (2019), .idcommunity (2019), Regional Australia Institute (2014), REMPLAN (2019).

According to the 2016 Census, across Australia 74% of creative employment is in the creative services sectors, with a quarter of the creative workforce employed as embedded creatives in other industries. Cultural production organisations employ 26% of the creative workforce, with most being employed as creative specialists within the creative industries (Cunningham and McCutcheon 2018, 2). For the creative hotspots examined here (Table 1), the fastest growing site in terms of creative businesses was Geelong and the Surf Coast, in Victoria, while in New South Wales it was Marrickville. The creative intensity is defined as the ratio of creative employment to the total workforce and is useful as a point of comparison between hotspots (See Table 1) with Marrickville showing the highest creative intensity and the lowest in Albury Wodonga.

In 2016, the mean income for creative occupations across Australia was $76,100, with embedded creatives employed in creative services occupations reporting the highest incomes, averaging $82,800, while the lowest were for embedded cultural production workers at $54,500 (Cunningham and McCutcheon 2018, 2).

These statistics were shared with research participants during the field work. Many were surprised by the data, especially Local and State Government organisations that were not aware of the number of regional people earning an income from creative occupations. However, while the statistical data provides extremely valuable insights about each hotspot, the Census only records employment in jobs that are the primary source of income for each worker; any creative person earning a secondary income, through a modest freelance stream or part-time work was not captured. This was a critical factor in conducting the ethnographic field work which used qualitative observational and interview techniques as its basis.

Using the creative trident to stratify sampling, the interviews were set up for each regional hotspot with active creative agents from all the creative services and cultural production sub-sectors as well as with embedded creatives working in other industries and government support workers. The fieldwork found that instead of having one income stream from a single form of employment, these active agents frequently used a wide set of approaches to create an income from their creative and cultural activities. The exact nature of these activities is summarised in each hotspot report, along with an economic overview and how the three tiers of government support cultural and creative activities for each hotspot. The hotspot locations were Albury-Wodonga (McIntyre, Kerrigan, and McCutcheon 2020b), Bendigo (Kerrigan, McIntyre, & and McCutcheon 2020a), Ballarat (Kerrigan, McIntyre, and McCutcheon 2020c), Geelong and Surf Coast (Kerrigan, McIntyre, and McCutcheon 2020b), Coffs Harbour (McIntyre, Kerrigan, and McCutcheon 2021a), Wollongong (McIntyre, Kerrigan, and McCutcheon 2020a) and Marrickville (McIntyre, Kerrigan, and McCutcheon 2021b).

The NSW and Victorian fieldwork secured 275 interviews coupled with observations across the seven regional creative hotspots, ethics approval was granted through Queensland University of Technology [QUT Ethics Approval Number 1800000066]. Conducting fieldwork within each hotspot allowed the researchers to understand how each creative agent’s contribution and experiences of earning an income or volunteering inside the specific creative sectors occurred on the ground. Employment in the creative industries is often precarious and, as entry level jobs are usually casual, part-time or based on freelance rates, frequently this type of ‘gig’ related employment is not counted by Australian census data contributing as it often does to a secondary income stream for the worker. The field research was able to discern exactly how creative workers manage precarious employment opportunities and also revealed that many creative workers may volunteer their services in order to initiate access to paid work, or to continue to an activity as a volunteer because it was part of their lifestyle and belief systems.

The interview participant sample was broken down across the creative services and cultural production, and government organisers (Figure 2) and the gender breakdown of interviewees was balanced.

Figure 2. Participants by sector for NSW and VIC.

Cultural and creative industries themes

An analysis of these cultural and creative activities produced a series of themes for discussion: creative migration, volunteer and tourism contributions, and creative systems. These themes form part of the criteria that contribute to the creative gift economy.

Creative migration

The activity of creative agents, their movement from capital cities to regional areas, and their capacity to initiate employment as well as their ability to draw on a wide set of income streams to survive, are the first points for discussion. Creative migration was visible in all studied hotspots in NSW and Victoria with mapping visualisations showing demographic movement. This internal migration is commonly known as the ‘sea change’ and/or ‘tree change’ phenomena. At the structural level, the decentralisation push that began in the early Seventies appears to have continued to play out and is still having an effect, especially on those regional centres furthest from the metropolitan hubs of Sydney and Melbourne. An example of such a ‘sea changer’ is David Horsley in Coffs Harbour. He runs Screenwave, a film and screen company that delivers the Screenwave International Film Festival (SWIFF). Horsley pointed out the possibilities of living regionally when he stated that ‘everybody here who’s really serious in their industry, their arts industry, does their work out of town … we all make our money out of town and live here because it’s beautiful’ (Horsley iv, 29th August 2019). In other regional centres like Geelong and Wollongong, there was a pattern of younger players returning to the regions after upskilling in national and international settings and then bringing their expertise home. Another group of internal migrants who are mid-career was observed coming into Ballarat, Geelong and the Surf Coast. These creatives were raised in an urban environment and are moving to the regions as a viable option to develop creative careers and lifestyle. An example of this was Ashmore Arts, on the Surf Coast, an innovative commercial hub housing 28 active artists and crafts businesses with a turnover of approximately $2.9 million a year. These mid-career creative migrants are driven by the affordability of housing, liveability, and the community focus of the regions and, with the right digital infrastructure in place, they have the expectation they will be able to continue their work in the global domain while raising families regionally. Creative migration inside Victoria is self-evident. As a relatively small state, the regional centres of Bendigo, Ballarat and Geelong are all well connected to each other and also to Melbourne with efficient transport networks that allow creative businesses to be sustained within these regional commuter belts. In NSW, some localities, like Marrickville, exhibited what could be called intra-urban migratory patterns where inner-city creative industries’ operatives moved further and further into the suburbs until they were forced further afield into the regions while, at times, commuting back to the metro centres for work. The proximity of rail and air transport, and the increase in speed of each, has assisted these movements and has benefitted the commuter belt cities of Geelong, Ballarat and Wollongong. It has also helped, in some cases, to bring increased metropolitan audiences to the regions.

For creative migration into hotspots to be effective, incoming practitioners need to be active and highly skilled, deeply immersed in the creative sub-sectors where they pursue work. This is highly beneficial for regional players as these sets of energetic and highly active decision-making agents, that is, choice making individuals who stimulate activity and also act as crucial social node points, conveyors of industry knowledge and high-level skills, arrive in the regions with much needed ‘can-do’ attitudes. They also motivate entire communities, operating within what are deeply interconnected regional creative industries ecosystems. Pace Creative is such an example. It is a long-term full-service design agency employing 15 creatives and also offers code development as part of its wide range of design services with local, national and international clients. Another example of this activity includes the creation of the Geelong Arts and Culture Trails app designed by Codeacious, a newly formed creative software studio. While many practitioners, SMEs and larger corporations act within a series of structural affordances, what was striking about each of these examples from these regional hotspots was the deep appreciation of in-bound skilled workers held by their colleagues.

Cultural volunteering

Given the visibility of only primary income earners within the Census data, the ethnographic fieldwork helped identify part-time workers and volunteers who generate income for others and who do other work to earn a primary income. Festival volunteers found in Bellingen and Bendigo present key examples. Colin Thompson is the Festival Director of the Bendigo Blues and Roots Music Festival. Despite running the festival for nine years, he ‘is still not being paid’ (Kerrigan, McIntyre, and McCutcheon 2020a, 21). This is despite the prosperity of the festival which generates $4.6 million for the local economy and creates 22 full-time ongoing positions. Similarly, on the mid-north coast of NSW, while the creative hotspot of Bellingen calls itself ‘The Festival Shire’, attracting 210,000 visitors a year who spend $58.9 million in the shire giving the local artists, craftspeople, writers, and musicians who operate micro or small creative industries businesses valuable external income sources, many of these festivals and events only occur because of the enormous number of volunteers. Bellingen’s volunteering rate of 22.5% is not only higher than Coffs Harbour’s rate of 16%, it is one of the highest observed in the study (See Table 1). While volunteering can be seen to be good for creative economies, it should also ‘be seen to limit professional career opportunities’ (McIntyre, Kerrigan, and McCutcheon 2021a, 6).

Volunteer contributions to local creative economies are largely invisible in the statistics and economic data. The field work indicated that for each income earner that is represented in the census, there is an estimate of at least four times that number, quite possibly higher, of people on the ground earning a minor income in each sector they are working in. Many are simply gifting their time and expertise to the sector by working voluntarily with others benefitting economically from their efforts. Every creative hotspot held a writer’s festival, which was typically organised by a part-time worker, and each festival survived because of volunteers (see Wollongong, Geelong and Bellingen reports for detailed examples). These volunteers thus provide an invisible creative workforce making up the gift economy but are nonetheless making a very significant contribution in terms of their personal time and multiple skills to each particular creative sector. This gift economy operates through a social and cultural currency and, while there are small economic returns, those financial contributions appear to lack overt acknowledgement for these workers through the current revenue and economic collections frameworks.

Cultural tourism

The interrelationships of the creative industries with the rest of the regional economy can be seen through the increasing importance of creative industries to the success of cultural tourism. The effect this has had on the ability of regional centres is to allow these regions to weather negative economic cycles while demonstrating the resilience that solid mixed economies provide. Some regional hotspots, because of their geographical location, have a greater or lesser ability to exploit cultural tourism through festivals and events. Already mentioned above was Bellingen’s reputation as The Festival Shire drawing cultural tourists. The Surf Coast is another prime example with festivals contributing ‘$105 million to the region and reaching global audiences of 32 million’ (Kerrigan, McIntyre, and McCutcheon 2020b, 33).¹ Bendigo Art Gallery offers very successful exhibitions and, in 2016, the Marilyn Munroe exhibition brought in $13.2 million to the local economy (Kerrigan, McIntyre, and McCutcheon 2020a, 2). We observed and noted that in each of these regions that the creative industries, cultural volunteering and cultural tourism are highly linked. Often these three are hard to separate and confirm the existence of a dynamic creative system in action.

Creative systems

Creative systems and the effects of ecosystems become visible when the analysis shifts from creative workers as active agents to the structural business relationships. The research found significant evidence of a creative ecosystem at work (see Figure 1) for all creative hotspots. There were interconnected creative businesses across all creative sectors that were networked within and between each other and exhibited complementary activity at all scales ranging from the individual practitioners to SMEs and to larger corporate players (McIntyre et al. 2023b). This creative industries’ ecosystem is also interconnected with other industries across the private and public sectors. Examples of this were highly visible in Marrickville among the businesses that make up the creative manufacturing precinct there. The Carrington Road and Addi Road cultural production ecosystems were thriving (Gibson et al. 2017); Addi Road was home to 43 creative agents ranging from artists, performers and theatre troupes to mental health services and community organisations (McIntyre, Kerrigan, and McCutcheon 2021b, 21). These organisations showcase how a creative ecosystem can provide support to communities and develop entrepreneurial, innovative business ideas, in this case in partnership with philanthropic and state cultural agencies (Kerrigan, McIntyre, and McCutcheon 2020b). These vibrant and productive creative ecosystems are leveraging many local creative industries businesses enabling digital content to be created and giving support to local festivals that are globally competitive.

There were also ecosystem opportunities for start-ups and entrepreneurs. One example of this was in Ballarat where games developers were working alongside and within an innovation culture that was fed by strong educational and career pathways for games development offered from Ballarat Tech School, Federation University and Runway Ballarat. Gaming entrepreneur Matt Hall, who built the successful Crossy Road game, resides in Ballarat and confirms that the city nurtures gaming through its infrastructure and peer support.

Conclusion

The keywords that describe pre-pandemic creative industries are creative systems, creative migration, cultural volunteering and cultural tourism which all form part of the creative gift economy. These are drawn from the research summaries of more prosperous times where statistical and ethnographic benchmarks provide a detailed understanding of creative employment, businesses and economy activities. This baseline data presents levels of normal economic activity for the creative industries and is vital to use as a benchmark to assess the volume and speed of a post-pandemic recovery.

In summary, the interactions within the creative systems that generated income from creative services and cultural production were dependent on demographic movements and ecosystem interdependence across the sectors of creative services and cultural production. Traditional offerings like events, markets and festivals are just as important to the prosperity of the creative and cultural industries as the innovative start-up practices that are occurring because of the digitisation of cultures.

Creative migration occurring within capital cities, as intra-urban movements and then from capital cities to regional areas, has become part of Australia’s creative economic growth cycle. Motivated active creative agents are always looking for alternative ways to generate an income and keep costs down, both of which can allow them to keep focused on their creative endeavours 100% of the time. Reducing overheads on real estate that is well situated inside a creative ecosystem is a key factor. Creative agents do not need much encouragement to seek their sea-change or tree-change, but the gentrification of suburbs forces creative agents to migrate and, in some cases, it erodes production and manufacturing opportunities for these creative ecosystems.

The creative industries have certainly benefited from, and been constrained by, policy developments. Educating enablers that the creative industries are much broader than just arts and culture is imperative. This is particularly important during the post-COVID recovery, as limited understanding around what and how creative industries actually contribute to gross regional product, and subsequently gross domestic product, must be fully appreciated. Without this understanding, sectors inside the creative ecosystem will fail to thrive and be completely overlooked in terms of recovery support. In some senses, this might be visible already given the length of time it took for the live music festival sector’s request for support to be heard. There is strong evidence presented here that pinpoints the increasing importance of creative industries to the success of cultural tourism, and government policies should act as drivers to see the regional creative economy in Australia recover from the effects of COVID-19. The regional communities, the creative workforce and the creative industries are poised to exploit such post-pandemic opportunities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Kerrigan

Professor Susan Kerrigan is Department Chair, Film, Games and Animation at Swinburne University of Technology, Victoria. She is a mixed methods researcher and was Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Grant investigating the creative industries with Create NSW and Creative Victoria. Susan worked at the University of Newcastle for nearly two decades teaching and researching Screen Production and has worked professionally in the Australian Screen Industry and has produced and directed Australian television programs, including Play School.

Phillip McIntyre

Professor Phillip McIntyre worked for a number of years in the music industry as a songwriter, performer, producer, engineer, music journalist and video maker before moving into academia. He researches creativity and creative industries at the University of Newcastle NSW where he also teaches sound production and media theory. He is the author of five books including Creativity and Cultural Production: Issues for Media Practice (2012) and Paul McCartney and his Creative Practice: The Beatles and Beyond (2021). He has been chief investigator on ARC Grants including Creativity and Cultural Production: An Applied Ethnographic Study of New Entrepreneurial Systems in the Creative Industries of the Hunter Valley NSW, as well as Cultural and Creative Activity: A Population and Hotspot Analysis. For more detail see: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/phillip-mcintyre

Marion McCutcheon

Dr Marion McCutcheon is a communications economist, with industry standing and experience in policy-focussed research and advice in the federal government’s Department of Communications and broadcasting regulator and as an academic focussing on media industries and creative industries research. Her research interests include the role of the creative industries in economic systems, and how society benefits from the production and use of cultural products. Dr McCutcheon holds positions as Senior Research Associate, Digital Media Research Centre, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong’s C3P Research Centre for Creative Critical Practice in the School of the Arts, English and Media.

Notes

1 Surf Coast festivals are Falls Festival, Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, Amy’s Gran Fondo, Bells Beach Rip Curl Pro, Surf Coast Century and the Great Ocean & Otway Classic Ride.